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Silkroad Consulting blogs
http://silkroad-consulting.com/blog
enPerformance Tuning Tips
http://silkroad-consulting.com/performance_tuning
You increase performance by eliminating bottlenecks in your system, starting with the slowest component, which is usually the hard drive.
<ul>
<li><h3>Install adequate RAM</h3>At least 1 GB for most people. This will allow the operating system to avoid using the hard drive as virtual memory.</li>
<li><h3>Install a faster hard drive</h3>At least 10,000 RPM for normal hard drives and 7,200 RPM for laptop hard drives. Or get a few hard drives and setup RAID. The fastest storage you can get is some form of flash memory or solid state drive. These usually have smaller capacity because they are very expensive. As a compromise, vendors have created hybrid drives, it is a regular hard drive with a relatively larger (e.g. 1 GB) non-volatile flash memory cache.</li>
<li><h3>Install adequate disk storage</h3>Don't allow your hard drive get too full or it will start to trash around looking for empty spaces.</li>
<li><h3>Defragment your hard drive regularly</h3>Some file systems like Windows NTFS need to be defragmented regularly to reclaim disk performance.</li>
<li><h3>Prune your list of programs that start automatically during boot time</h3>In Windows, there are three places where you can prune off unwanted programs:
<ol>
<li>The registry key <code>[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Thu, 28 Feb 2008 12:24:41 -0600E-mail Tips and Strategies
http://silkroad-consulting.com/email_strategies
<p>E-mail is a mission critical part of many businesses. There are different ways of setting up your e-mail system:</p>
<ul>
<li><h3>Webmail</h3>This is the fastest and easiest way to setup your e-mail. When you use webmail, all your e-mails are stored on the server and you access it through a website, for example, yourwebsite.com/webmail or gmail.com. This service is usually included in your hosting service. You just have to create e-mail accounts and you are ready to go, there is nothing to install or maintain.</li>
<li><h3>POP</h3>POP stands for Post Office Protocol (and also POP3). In POP, you use a mail client to download your e-mails from the POP mail server. You can use a local mail client (such as Thunderbird or Outlook) or a webmail client (such as Gmail).</li>
</ul>
<p>There are a few things you can do to make e-mail more reliable and flexible.</p>Thu, 14 Jun 2007 04:23:20 -0500Windows Productivity Tips
http://silkroad-consulting.com/windows_productivity_tips
<ul>
<li><h3>ALT-TAB fast switching between applications</h3>
If you are running many programs at once, you can quickly switch between them by holding down the ALT key, and then hitting the TAB key until you have selected the desired application. Use Shift-ALT-TAB to switch in the reverse direction.</li>
<li><h3>Tabbed web browsing</h3>
If you need to have many different web pages open at the same time, instead of going back and forth or launching many web browsers, try using tabbed browsing. Some web browsers such as <a href="http://mozilla.com">Firefox (mozilla.com)</a> or Internet Explorer 7 allow you to open many web pages all at the same time in different tabs. For example, pressing CTRL-T will open a new tab. If you click on a link using the middle mouse button, it will open the link in a new tab. (Clicking on a tab using the middle mouse button closes it) This makes web browsing much faster because you can:
<ol>
<li>Open many pages without going back and forth which causes you to wait for the pages to reload repeatedly</li>
<li>It allows you to "pre-load" many pages at the same time. Meaning, while you are reading one web page, you can open several others in other tabs and let them download in the background, thus they will be ready for you when you come back to read them.</li>
</ol>
</li>
<li><h3>Hibernate instead of shutting down</h3>
By hibernating instead of shutting down or rebooting, you can keep all your work-in-progress exactly as you left it. Booting from hibernation is also faster when you can avoid the normal process of loading a bunch of start-up programs. To enable, hibernation, you might need to turn off the "Fast user switching" feature using the control panel user manager. To be safe, always save your work even though you are using hibernation.
<img src="/images/hibernate.jpg" alt="Use hibernate" style="margin-top: 20px" /></li>
<li><h3>Use PureText to paste text without its formatting</h3>
If you need to copy and paste text without its formatting, you can try <a href="http://www.stevemiller.net/downloads/puretext20_x86.zip" alt="Download PureText">PureText</a> (free). PureText uses Win-V keys to paste plain text. This is equivalent to pasting and copying from Notepad or "Paste Special" in Microsoft Office, but much faster. You can put it in your Startup folder or just click on it to run it.
</li>
<li><h3>Add WordPad to your "Send to" menu</h3>
If you create a shortcut to WordPad in your "Send to" menu, you can open files quickly in Windows Explorer by right-clicking and selecting "Send to" WordPad. To set this up:
<ol>
<li>Copy the WordPad program</li>
<li>Right-click the "start" button, select "Explore"</li>
<li>Select the "Send to" folder and paste a shortcut of WordPad in the folder (make sure you use "Paste Shortcut" not "Paste")</li>
</ol>
You can do this with any other program that you frequently use to open files.
<br />
<img src="/images/send_to_WordPad.jpg" alt="Send to WordPad" style="margin-top: 20px; margin-left: 10%" /></li>
<li><h3>Enable the "Show Desktop" quick launch icon</h3>
You can use your Windows desktop just like a real desktop by keeping a lot of your work-in-progress easily accessible on your desktop. But when you have a lot of programs running, it can be hard to get to your desktop by minimizing all the open programs. To get to your desktop quickly, you can enable the "Quick launch" menu and you should see a "Show desktop" icon. If not, follow the instructions here: <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=190355">How to re-create the Show Desktop icon on the Quick Launch toolbar (microsoft.com)</a>. You can also press Windows key and D shortcut. Clicking the "Show desktop" icon again or pressing Windows-D again will restore your open programs.<br />
<img src="/images/desktop_quicklaunch.jpg" alt="Desktop quick launch" style="margin-top: 20px; margin-left: 10%" />.</li>
<li><h3>Windows File Explorer tips</h3>
<ul>
<li>Configure explorer to use single clicks instead of double clicks to let you work more efficiently. Open an explorer, on the top menu, click "Tools" then "Folder Options." Check the box for "Single-click to open an item (point to select)" and click "OK."
<img src="/images/single_click_explorer.jpg" alt="Single click in explorer" style="margin-top: 20px" /></li>
<li>You can open two file explorers and tile them side by side for convenience. To tile two explorers neatly side by side, click on one explorer in your task bar (at the bottom), hold the CTRL key, right click on the other explorer and select "Tile Vertically."
<img src="/images/tile_vertically.jpg" alt="Tile two explorers side by side" style="margin-top: 20px" /></li>
<li>You can use explorer as an FTP client. Just type in "ftp://username:password@website.com" in the address bar. If you tile two explorers side by side, you can drag and drop to FTP files conveniently.</li></ul>
</li>
<li><h3>Windows UI tips</h3>
<ul>
<li>Use Microsoft's <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx">TweakUI program</a> to tweak the Windows user interface.
</li><li>Configure the Windows "Start" menu to display instantly instead of the default 400 millisecond delay. Set registry key <code>[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\MenuShowDelay]</code> to zero. See <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/kb/216445">How to Control the Delay of the Start Menu Display</a>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><h3>Ergonomics tips</h3>
<ul>
<li>Buy a higher resolution LCD monitor, at least 1600 pixels wide. Higher resolution screens allow you to view more information on the screen and reduce scrolling.</li>
<li>Use a track point instead of a mouse. A track point is a little rubber stub that you push to control your cursor. This reduces your hand motion and reduces your hands moving to and from your keyboard. It is available on most IBM/Lenovo laptops or keyboards. (See Wikipedia for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_stick">more info</a>)</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Here are a few more Windows productivity tips:</p>Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:55:22 -0500How to save and print web pages reliably
http://silkroad-consulting.com/how_to_save_and_print_web_pages_reliably
<p>It is usually quite tricky to save web pages because of a few reasons:</p>
<ul>
<li>A web page is made up of multiple files, such as images, scripts and style sheets.</li>
<li>A web page might contain transient information, such as an online purchase receipt</li>
<li>Every web browser will save a web page in a different way, often due to the above reasons</li>
<li>Web browsers will often modify the saved web page so that it does not look the same later or it does not look the same in another web browser</li>
</ul>
<p>Printing web pages is another problem because what you see is often not what you print. The "Print Preview" function of most web browsers are not 100% accurate.</p>Wed, 09 May 2007 18:17:03 -0500How to practice safe computing
http://silkroad-consulting.com/how_to_practice_safe_computing
<p>Computers nowadays are a prime target of crime, from annoying virus infections to serious identity theft. We get so many computer service requests that we decided to compile a list of safe computing guidelines because an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.</p>
<a href="/safe">Read more about safe computing here...</a>Wed, 14 Jun 2006 04:12:49 -0500