Archive for March, 2009:
An Overview of TaskList Filters
STATUS This filter can help you locate any applications that are no longer responding so that you can manually end them. eq, ne Running or Not Responding
IMAGENAME Use this filter to locate a particular application in the list based on its file name. eq, ne The executable file name
PID Use this filter to locate a particular instance of an application when there’s more than one copy of the application running. eq, ne, gt, lt, ge, le Program Identifier
SESSION Unless you’re using a sharing application such as Terminal Services, this filter is useless because every application running is for the current session. eq, ne, gt, lt, ge, le The session number
SESSIONNAME Unless you’re using a sharing application such as Terminal Services, this filter is useless because every application running is for the current session. eq, ne The name of the session
CPUTIME This filter can help you locate applications that have just started or have been running a long time. For example, you might notice a sudden drop in system performance and can use this filter to locate applications that have just started to help determine which application might have caused the performance problem. eq, ne, gt, lt, ge, le The amount of time that the application has used the CPU in hours, minutes, and seconds since the session has started
MEMUSAGE Sometimes you have more applications loaded than the system can comfortably support. This filter helps you locate applications that you can end or possible candidates for removal from the system.
eq, ne, gt, lt, ge, le The amount of memory the application uses in KB
USERNAME Use this filter to separate applications that the user starts from those the system starts. eq, ne The name of the user who started the application
SERVICES Use this filter to locate the application hosting a particular service on the system. eq, ne A service name
WINDOWTITLE This filter can help you locate a particular application based on the name it displays to the user. eq, ne The name the application displays to the user on the title bar
MODULES This filter can help you locate applications based on the modules they use. You can use this filter to help locate a variety of problems, including DLL conflicts (when two applications use the same DLL, but they each need a different DLL version). eq, ne The filenames of any modules that an application uses
Taken From : Microsoft Windows XP Power Optimization
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Jack’s story shows
Jack’s story shows that it is often difficult to determine the exact cause of memory loss, but that persistence sometimes pays off. A few guidelines can help pigeonhole the symptom of mild memory loss into one of the following broad categories:
1. Memory loss due to the aging process itself.
2. Potentially reversible memory loss caused by a specific abnormality (Jack Kaufman).
3. Dementia, where Alzheimer’s disease is the most common type.
If You’ve Developed Mild Memory Loss
If you are in your forties to fifties, you are likely to have an identifiable, reversible cause of memory loss.
If you are in your sixties to eighties, memory loss due to either the aging process or dementia is much more common.
If there is a relatively rapid onset (weeks to months) of symptoms, a potentially reversible cause of memory loss is more likely.
A fluctuating course of symptoms, with periods of clear memory and cognition intervening between episodes of confusion or memory loss, is more likely to be due to an identifiable, reversible cause.
A gradual dwindling in memory over many years, even decades, is characteristic of memory loss due to the aging process.
A steady decline with mild symptoms progressing to severe symptoms of memory loss within a few years suggests Alzheimer’s disease.
The Aging Process Worsens Reversible Causes of Memory Loss
Some people with chronic depression or low-level medication toxicity develop mild memory loss for the first time in their sixties and seventies. Many of these people chug along for years with minimal memory loss induced by a specific, reversible cause, like depression or medication toxicity, because it is too subtle to affect daily functioning. Then the process of agerelated memory loss, which has been progressing slowly but steadily in the meantime, catches up and adds an extra wallop that leads to clear-cut memory loss. In other words, the two types of memory loss may each be very mild, but when added together they cross the threshold above which most people recognize the presence of memory loss.
Clearly, it can be risky to assume that subtle memory loss is always due to the “normal” aging process. As Jack Kaufman’s story illustrates, medication toxicity is a common, often unrecognized cause of generalized cognitive decline, including memory loss. Medication toxicity is only one of the common causes of memory loss that can be reversed by early recognition and intervention. Another example is when older people cannot recall what was said, because they suffer from a hearing loss. In these situations, the solution is a hearing aid, not treatment with memory-enhancing medications.
Taken From: The Memory Program How to Prevent Memory Loss
and Enhance Memory Power
Using the Registry Editor
The Registry Editor displays the content of the registry. You can use it to explore the registry, as well as add, remove, and modify entries. The following sections describe the techniques you use to edit the
registry safely. These techniques include exploring the registry, and importing and exporting entries as needed. You also need to know about the data types (the kinds of data) that the registry can work
with. Although this section doesn’t provide an exhaustive registry reference, it does include enough information for beginning the optimization process.
Exploring the Registry Editor
Before you do anything else with the registry, you should explore it a little. It’s important to become familiar with the various components the registry contains and see how Microsoft constructed it.
In order to begin this process, you need some kind of viewer to see the registry, which is the Registry Editor. To start the Registry Editor, select the Start Run command. You’ll see the Run dialog
box. Type RegEdit in the Run field and click OK. Windows will start the Registry Editor shown in Figure 6.1.
This view shows several important registry features. All of the top-level entries that include an H in front of their name, such as
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT , are registry hives. Each hive contains a different kind of information that affects a particular part of the machine and can even appear in a different file from the rest of the registry. For example, the HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive appears in the
D:\Documents and Settings\ Your User Name folder as NTUSER.DAT
. However, for optimization purposes, it’s not very important to know the location of the data.
Each of the hives contains one or more keys. For example, look in Figure 6.1 and you’ll see that HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE has a key named HARDWARE . All of the non-hive entries in the left pane are keys and each represents a data storage container of some type (even if it’s only to store other keys).
When you select a key in the left pane, you see the values it stores in the right pane. A value consists of a name and value pair. The name of the value defines what kind of information the value contains. For example, in Figure 6.1 there’s a value named
SystemBiosDate with a value of 03/03/00 . This value tells you that the Basic Input/Ouput System (BIOS) chip for this system was originally manufactured on 3 March 2000. It doesn’t tell you about any updates to that chip, but at least you know when the manufacturer created the chip.
Figure 6.1
Use the Registry Editor to explore and to add, remove, or modify entries.
TIP
To keep track of registry sections that you visit frequently, use the options on the Favorites menu (not to be confused with Favorites in Internet Explorer). The Add to Favorites command displays a dialog box where you can add a new favorite to the list. The favorite will appear on the Favorites menu as an option you can select. When you find that you no longer need a favorite, select the Remove Favorite command to display Remove Favorites dialog box. Select the favorite you want to remove and click OK.
You’ll find a lot of interesting information about your system in the registry just by exploring the various keys. The “An Overview of Interesting Registry Sections” section of the chapter tells you
about areas that you’ll want to look at carefully for potential optimization needs. For now, however, try looking at the upper levels of the registry to get familiar with the kinds of data that each hive contains. Look especially in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive because that contains your personal settings.
Taken From : Microsoft Windows XP Power Optimization
When in doubt
When in doubt, I usually do a few things. First, I talk to my neurologist and psychiatrist colleagues to see if they can give me some interesting leads, come up with a new idea, maybe dig up the files of another patient who presented similar symptoms. This approach didn’t help me very much in Jack Kaufman’s case. Second, I read the latest books and medical literature to see if they might shed light on the matter. This strategy didn’t help me very much either. So I was beginning to consider my fallback position: recognize that I don’t have the answer, discuss the situation with the patient, and explain that longer term follow-up with a trial -and-error treatment approach might be necessary.
But my curious diagnostic mind wasn’t yet ready to accept defeat. Earlier, Jack had downplayed the impact of migraine headaches that occurred at a frequency of once or twice a month. On further investigation, he divulged the truth. Although the migraine attacks were not frequent, he often took painkillers as soon as he felt that an attack might be coming on. These included not only acetaminophen (regular Tylenol), but also Tylenol 3, which contains a small dose of codeine in
addition to acetaminophen. Codeine is a narcotic that belongs to the same chemical class of substances as morphine and heroin, though it is much weaker in its effects. For most people, the codeine dose in Tylenol 3 is too small to have any impact on memory, but Jack sometimes took up to four tablets in a single day when he sensed the “aura” of an impending migraine attack. On days when the attacks did occur, he sometimes exceeded this dose.
Jack was unable to identify a clear time relationship between taking Tylenol 3 and his loss of memory, because his medication intake was erratic and unpredictable, which is why he hadn’t reported it to me during the initial evaluation. I explained to him that there was a distinct possibility that the codeine in Tylenol 3 was having a subtle impact on his memory. Jack had obtained the prescription with multiple refills from an internist whom he saw barely once a year. Jack agreed with my recommendation to get an opinion from a headache specialist. The headache specialist stopped Tylenol 3 and switched him to sumatriptan (Imitrex), a powerful antimigraine medication that should
be taken only just before or during a migraine attack, because frequent use is potentially risky. Jack had to adjust his approach to this new reality, but the great advantage was that when he took sumatriptan at the start of an attack, the migraine literally disappeared. Over the next few months, his cognitive abilities steadily improved, and he had no further incidents or episodes of memory failure. On repeat neuropsychological testing conducted a year later, he performed significantly better than he had when he first came to see me. We were both delighted with the result, and Jack expressed his heartfelt gratitude to me. He was now confident that he wasn’t developing Alzheimer’s disease or at risk for a stroke, but being a realist, he also knew that there was no guarantee he would be shielded from these conditions for the rest of his life.
Taken From: The Memory Program How to Prevent Memory Loss
and Enhance Memory Power
Detecting Registry Leftovers
The registry is a special kind of database—it stores all of the settings for your system. For example, Windows consults the registry during startup so it knows which devices to install. Many of the applications that start automatically do so because of registry entries. The context menu you see when you right-click an item in Windows Explorer is the result of other registry entries. In short, editing the registry incorrectly can cause untold woe, but editing it correctly can make significant improvements to the way Windows works.
This chapter is all about discovering which areas of the registry you can edit and learning which areas to avoid. While you take your tour of the registry, you’ll also uncover new techniques for cleaning the registry and keeping it working right. A registry clogged with old and useless entries makes Windows slow and could cause stability problems. Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn’t provide much in the way of registry cleaning products, so to get out the last bit of dirt, you usually need to turn to a third party product.
Although optimization is a wonderful goal, the registry also serves another important purpose. Most applications store your personal settings in the registry. Consequently, when you want to optimize
your hard drive by temporarily removing an application, you should save those personal settings so you can easily restore them later. In most cases, restoring the settings in the registry, along with any special files the application requires, will return the application to the same state that it was in before you uninstalled it.
WARNING
Modifying the registry isn’t something you should do without making a backup of the section you plan to edit and knowing precisely what the change will do. Never modify the registry unless you know how to make the required backup and you understand how the registry section works. The “Exporting Data” section of the chapter tells you how to make the required backup. Many of the other areas of the chapter discuss safe edits you can make. When in doubt, however,
don’t edit the registry.
Taken From : Microsoft Windows XP Power Optimization
I was a little surprised
I was a little surprised to see someone like Jack in our Memory Disorders Center. The episodes that he described could have happened to anyone, and most people wouldn’t have rushed to seek help from a specialist. When I probed further, the source of his anxiety became clearer. His father had died of stroke, his mother from complications of Alzheimer’s disease, and both conditions were present in the extended family on both sides. Jack’s fears now made a little more sense.
Read more »
Let’s Start Cleaning
This chapter has discussed a number of file compression and archiving issues, most notably those involved with an increasing document resource, email. I’d love to tell you that there’s a secret bullet that makes the decision of what strategy to use for archiving both automatic and simple, but there isn’t. The best archiving strategy is the one that works for your particular needs. That might mean compressing your email and placing it on DVD for quick access later, but it also might mean freeing hard drive space from another resource so you can hold onto those email conversations a little long.
The point is that you need an archiving strategy of some kind.
Now you’re at the point where you need to do some work. The first step is to decide what to archive and consider how to archive it. You need to define the kind of archival you want to perform,
whether you’ll place the data in a ZIP file, and precisely how long you’ll keep that file. The next step is to consider a storage media. Although CDs are insanely cheap, you might not want to trust your
data to them when you plan to keep the information for several years. Sometimes storing the information to tape really is the best choice.
Chapter 6 opens a new vista into the inner workings of Windows—one that many people find quite scary, the registry. This chapter helps you discover that the registry is merely a database. Sure,
the registry is complex and a misstep can cause problems, but when you approach it correctly, the registry is quite manageable. The secret is to perform specific tasks—just the ones you know about,
and avoid changing anything you don’t understand. The focus of Chapter 5 is to remove some of the mystery from the registry so that you can optimize it with greater ease and with less danger of doing something you’ll regret later.
Taken From : Microsoft Windows XP Power Optimization
Age Does Matter
I strongly recommend the day-to-day memory aids and techniques described in this chapter, particularly if you are in your forties or fifties. Recent clinical studies have shown that if you’re in your sixties to eighties, you may still experience positive effects but to a lesser degree than younger people. Regardless of your age, the effects will not be immediate and will be seen only after several months of practice, sometimes even years. While these methods are not a cure for age-related memory loss, they do form an integral and important component of the Memory Program.
Read more »
Using Free Email Accounts
One of the ways to keep email from cluttering your system is not to store it on your system. For example, you could get a Hotmail, Yahoo!, or Google email account and store your data online. You’ll want to try out several of the online alternatives because not all of them offer the same features. In many cases, you can get the email account free so long as you’re willing to view a few ads and encounter a few limitations. All of the free email vendors have paid versions that include some nice to add features, but try the free version first to ensure the email will work for you.
You do have a few problems to overcome when working with online accounts. Sure, you’ve optimized hard drive usage more than any local application would allow, but now you have to consider the fact that your data is online—on someone else’s machine. It’s not a very secure environment for the most part. In fact, Google’s Gmail is going to search through your messages whether you want them to or not. Some of these privacy incursions should make you think twice about using free online accounts. You can read the full story on the Computerworld site at http://www.computerworld.com/
securitytopics/security/privacy/story/0,10801,92279,00.html?nas=PM-92279.
Even though you do optimize hard drive usage, you also trade one performance problem for another. Now instead of just downloading your messages from the Internet, you also have to download
all of the user interface elements. Consequently, viewing email online can be time consuming even with a high-speed connection. In addition, you can’t count on the availability of the online service,
so you might not have access to your email when you need to view it in a hurry.
All of these negatives aside, online email has proven very popular because it also has several advantages. For example, you can check your email from any location that has an Internet connection.
In addition, online email lets you maintain several accounts (for different purposes such as business and personal) without incurring additional fees from your ISP.
Taken From : Microsoft Windows XP Power Optimization