OK.  So you’re running Windows and over time, you’ve started to notice things are starting to slow down extensively.  Boot up and log-in start to take minutes instead of seconds.  This tutorial will show you how to speed up your Windows install (and clean up a lot of the mess) over the life of the Windows installation.

For the purposes of this article, I’m going to refer to a Windows 7 install, although, the concepts are the same for most windows installs.

There are 2 main factors to increasing windows performance.  I’ll address both of them in this article; Hardware and Software.

Hardware Tweaks:

Add More RAM: Adding more RAM (Maxing out the RAM capabilities of your Hardware) is going to give you the most bang for your buck.  This reduces swapping on your machine and that is a big plus.  Expect an immediate improvement with 15 min. worth of work.  RAM is cheap these days.  I would recommend Maxing it out on your machine.

Install an SSD: Ahh, the panacea of serious performance.  Solid State Drives (SSD) are just incredible.  They move data at insane speeds.  Boot up your OS, open apps, documents, etc. at hundreds of Megabytes per second.  The other benefit?  You don’t have to be so gentle with your machine.  I throw my laptop on the table all the time without worry about bumps and bruises to the platters on a traditional mechanical drive.

Upgrade the CPU: This one is pretty important.  Go for not the newest, but the generation below the newest.  Get as many cores as you can.  If you have the RAM and the SSD, you’ll find that your bottleneck will either be IO to/from the disk or CPU.  I’m currently CPU and IO bound on windows.  I have a Macbook Pro with a Pegasus R6 drive running windows 7 x64.  My SSD doesn’t push data fast enough to the drive to make my backups consistently faster.  There is a way around that, but I’ll discuss that in the software section.  Reading from the Promise R6 is just insane.  Close to 1 GBps (That’s 1 GigaByte not gigabit).  Unfortunately, the CPU is what’s holding it up even with 8 cores of i7 sweetness.

For you Transcoder Geeks out there (Video / Audio), I would have to say GPU transcoding is the way to go.  If you’re doing average amateur transcoding and not pro transcoding, I would recommend an Nvidia CUDA accelerated card.  You don’t need to buy the top of the line, just the best you can afford that handles CUDA.  As for transcoding software, we’ll discuss that in the software section. I would recommend AMD, but there is very little that actually supports it out there now so for now, I’ll have to defer.

What about USB?  If you’re running a PC, I have to tell you that until Thunderbolt is officially available for all PCs, (unless you’re running Mac hardware  **snicker** see my last post about the promise), you’ll want to get USB 3.0 into the mix.  If you’re lucky enough to have the ports in your computer, you’re set.  If you have a laptop, get a USB 3.0 expansion card.  If you’re a desktop user a GOOD USB 3.0 card is very important.  Also, don’t skimp on the USB hub as well.  A crappy USB hub will slow you down more than it will speed you up.

I prefer and use the LaCie Hub4 USB 3.0 SuperSpeed Hub.  It’s a quality hub that does the job.  Photographers take note.  If you deal with Memory cards, get a good reader. I shoot Nikon and use CF cards so I bought the Lexar dual slot USB 3.0 reader.  Can I say it’s just absolutely amazing?  Fast as a rocket.

If you’re doing lots of encryption / decryption I’m going to recommend a good Encryption setup using a .  They’re not that expensive, but boy do they make a difference.

Software Tweaks that make a huge difference:

OK.  So let’s say the cash isn’t in your budget right now, because the economy just sucks and we know that the year before elections, everyone makes promises they have no intention of keeping.  So let’s just concentrate on the software tweaks that make a huge difference.

Clean up the Registry and DAT files:  You know those .DAT files in your user profile?  Notice how they just get bigger and bigger?  Well, those files have a habit of recording everything you do on your computer (hence their size).  This coupled with the registry bloat and you’ve got a complete and utter mess on your hands. Now we’ve all seen registry cleaners out there and half of them don’t work, but there is one that does.  It’s the Auslogics Registry Cleaner and The Auslogics registry Defragmenter (Both Part of the BoostSpeed Suite). They simply just work.  My dat files reduced themselves in size from over 700 MB to 40 MB.  Pretty serious difference, huh?  As for speed of the computer?  Let’s just say that It’s as fast as the day I installed the OS.

Defragment your drive:  This provides a significant increase in your drive response and faster load times.  Use the built in windows defragmenter.  While it will take hours to do, it makes a huge difference. DO NOT DO THIS IF YOU HAVE AN SSD DRIVE.  It doesn’t do anything on SSDs but wear the drive.

Lock the Windows Kernel into memory:  This makes a huge difference and is as easy as just simply editing a registry key.

As an administrator on your machine, start up regedit and go to the following location:

1.  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management

2. DisablePagingExecutive will be on the right.  Set it to value one by double-clicking on it. This keeps the kernel in RAM and speeds up the machine quite a bit. Less Paging=less thrashing=faster computer.

Uninstall unwanted programs:  There have been many times you’ve installed and uninstalled programs.  Use Revo Uninstaller to uninstall your unwanted programs.  Don’t use the windows uninstaller.  Use REVO.  It gets rid of excess registry entries and files.

Turn off items that automatically start up in your windows startup routine:  The best way to do it is to go to a command prompt as administrator and type msconfig and just uncheck the things you don’t need started up like update managers and the ilk. This makes a huge difference and can actually cut minutes off your windows start-up as well as reduce paging as well as make your computer “snappier”.  You’ll notice an immediate difference.

Update your Drivers: updated drivers do two things; reduce bugs and give you more functionality or better performance.  So update your drivers religiously.  Especially video drivers and storage drivers. NEVER use BETA drivers.

Clean out your hard drive:  I do this every week, but once every few months is fine too. The fewer files there are on your computer, the fewer index entries there are on your hard drive index table.  This means faster access.  Get yourself an Amazon S3 account and upload those files to an S3 Bucket.  It’s redundant and super cheap while allowing you to access those files when you need them.  In other words, archive it!  or just get an external hard drive and offload the data to the hard drive (although it doesn’t provide for data redundancy and protection).

Run Scandisk on your System Drive and All connected hard drives once a week:  This helps prevent any errors which filesystems are prone to have causing data corruption as well as performance decreases.  You’ll thank me for this one.. I promise.  How do you run scandisk?  open My Computer, right click on the drive and go to the tools tab.  If it’s the system drive it will ask you to schedule it for the next startup.  Click yes.  Keep in mind depending on the size of your drive, this could take a long time (upwards of an hour) so do this overnight.

For Specialty Users:

This is a section specially dedicated for what I call the specialty user or power user. You use your computer to it’s full potential or for specialty purposes.

Here is where I will address how to get even more out of your computer for your purpose.

For Video Editors and Transcoding: You’ll need more drives.  You shouldn’t be using a laptop, but a desktop workstation.  Get Xeon Processors and the best Nvidia graphics card you can afford that supports CUDA.  Use applications that support CUDA computational capabilities.  Just click on this link to see a few of them.

As for the Drives, you NEED RAID.  Get yourself a great hardware raid card.  Not an el-cheapo raid card that supports RAID in the driver, but actually on the card.  I recommend 3ware cards.  Best of breed in my book and all I ever use.  As for which level of RAID you should use, It depends.  I’m a power user who’s into performance + redundancy so I always do RAID 1+0  (not to be confused with RAID 0+1) which is a completely different and useless animal.

Read up on RAID here and decide which level of RAID you need.  The 3ware cards will most likely support it.  As for motherboards, I recommend SuperMicro Boards and Cases exclusively.  Why?  Check out the specs and how they’re built.  Better than anything I’ve seen on the planet.

Coupled with a 3ware raid card, some enterprise SAS ssds and the right processors and RAM, you can expect an insanely FAST and redundant system.

****NOTE / WARNING:   NEVER RUN RAID-0.  There is no redundancy and you will eventually come to regret it.  If you need the speed, RUN RAID-1+0.  That’s what I do exclusively.  While it costs an ARM and a LEG, I’ve had system uptimes of 5+ years with ZERO DATA LOSS****

Remember, chain is only as strong as it’s weakest link.  Buy Quality!!!!!!

Server Configurations:  While this is a tough one to deal with, it really depends on your server.  If running Microsoft, you’ll need to keep 2 things in mind.  RAM and Processor power.  XEON Processors with multiple cores and virtualization technology.  Trust me on this one.  A good motherboard with a proven solid chipset.  Do your research on the chipset!!!!  Do not use a low quality server board.  You will regret it in the future.  A good server board will be in the 500-1000.00 USD range.  Don’t skimp.  System Downtime costs more than that!

RAID:  Multiple drives with redundancy.  Hardware RAID only.  Again, see my page on RAID.

Here’s a common misconception and a mistake most NON-Enterprise Architects make.  RAID is NOT BACKUP.  So get yourself a good backup solution and make sure it works.  I recommend one off-site + one onsite.  You can never be too careful.  Unless you don’t care about your job.

Here are a couple of tips:

Database Servers: RAID 1+0 gives you redundancy + performance.  God Bless 3Ware.

Application / Media / Web Servers: Raid 1+0 or RAID-5.  If you’re serving up content, RAID-5 is fine.  If you’re writing as much as you are reading to the drives, add tons of memory, a fiber channel interface or use SSDs in a RAID configuration.  Then tune the crap out of it and use Amazon’s CDN to help reduce the load on your server.  It’s cheap, reliable, and extremely bulletproof.  Don’t make the mistake Netflix made by assuming one CDN choice from an unproven company is  a good solution.  Use someone else’s infrastructure whenever possible for Content Delivery.  It’s cheaper and will be better than anything you could possibly do on your own (budget wise).

Believe it or not, if you use linux (a proven server linux like Redhat or CentOS), your machines will run without hiccups once configured and tested thoroughly.

A properly configured linux server coupled with a good CDN will keep you running with very high uptime and reliability.  Don’t assume that just because you’re a Microsoft shop, you have to run Microsoft Solutions.  Linux and Microsoft are converging slowly.  Use the tools you can and you can save yourself an insane amount of money.

If you need help with a solution, I’m always available for consulting. Just check me out on linkedin and you’ll see I’ve got the qualifications.

Non-PC Hardware that makes a difference:

Network Switches and Cards: Get a good NIC card.  Intel Chipsets rock!  As for switches, get a non-blocking switch that handles Gigabit Ethernet.  I’m a power user so I’m using Used Cisco gear wherever possible.  You can pick it up for cheap and just buy the Service Warranty for it and you’re covered.  I love having 4 hour replacement gear in the middle of the night. Best warranty in the business.

Firewalls: Don’t even consider running a computer network or computer without a firewall.  It’s a disaster.  You will be hacked.  Read up on my Firewall post and save yourself some money and headache.

Important Note:  There is no such thing as set it and forget it.  You have to do maintenance on a computer to make run well.  If it’s your business, I suggest doing maintenance once a week or once a month at a minimum.  If you have a hard time finding a good sysadmin, contact me and I’ll happily work out a deal with you to work with your IT infrastructure. Don’t assume that the local PC guy you find on craigslist is going to be good.  Most of them have no enterprise experience and will use you as a learning experience.  NOT a good idea.  Find yourself someone who is multi-faceted with credentials.  You won’t be sorry.

I also have a post on recommended products for Linux, Windows, and Apple platforms. Click here to read it.

It will be constantly updated as long as I’m alive. So help me stay alive and donate to this site so I can afford to support my family.

Cheers.

If you find this post important and extremely useful, please donate.  Business has been slow and I have a family to support.  While I don’t like recommending amounts to donate, I’d love to see some $25.00 or more donations due to the fact that things haven’t really been shaping up for me lately, but every dollar counts.  Also, if you decide to buy something mentioned in this post, please use the links in this post, because I get a few pennies and right now, every penny counts.

Another way you could really help out is joining Childguard if you have an Android phone.  It’s free, ad-free and would really help to kickstart a business that could potentially give me some stability. 

I spend full time working on this blog and reviewing products (40 hours a week [my weekends])  Please help if you can.

Everybody has a list of things to do before they die (as in list of things they want to do), but how many of us actually think about things we need to do before we die? These are things that shouldn’t be waited on and definitely shouldn’t take more than a few hours. Here’s the list of mine (and yes, I’ve done them already).

1. Create a Will. Don’t assume your spouse or children will get everything when you die. This is definitely NOT the case. Make sure you do this ASAP. The state gets your belongings and your surviving family will have a hell of a time trying to get it sorted out. Just get it out of the way for them.
2. Create a Living Trust. Don’t assume that you your children will be taken care of. This is NOT the case. You can also explicitly list whether you want to be on life-support and live as your favorite vegetable or go see whatever higher being or plane of existence there is.
3. Buy life insurance. Take care of those you love when you’re no longer around. Make the trust the beneficiary and you won’t have bickering relatives to deal with.

There are two ways to do this.

1. Get a lawyer.
2. Do it yourself.

I’ve lost my family.. I’ve lost all that I love..  Maybe this year will be better.  One can only hope.

I don’t know about you, but I have a family. I have a little girl and she’s my world. So over the last 2 years, I’ve spent over 1M of my own money creating and building a service. It’s called Childguard. It has quite a few features that other “location apps” don’t have. Most importantly, it allows you to track your family via trips, safe places, and most importantly, if they’re in a hospital.

If you’re like me, you want to know when and where your children are.. (face it.. they like to lie). The most important thing is to see not only where they are, but whether or not they are in a dangerous situation. During the first 3 hours after an abduction, the chances of recovery are high, but after that, it becomes a very sad ordeal. Our system actually determines whether an abduction happens or is going on based on our proprietary and patented algorithms. You’re notified immediately.

You have the option of being part of a volunteer network that will help to recover the child or family member. I don’t know if it’s important to you, but to me, it’s very important. My little girl is my world.

So to make a long story short, while this blog provides information on various technical issues, it is one of those few things that matter to me in life. My family.

I urge you to try it out. Tell your friends about it and most importantly, give it a chance. I promise you won’t be sorry. It’s already notified me of 2 hospitalization events in the last year.

Give it a shot… and most importantly, it’s free. While it’s still called, “beta”, the reality is we’ve tested this for 1.5 years and fixed most of the problems we’ve come across.

Help us do some good in the world and save some lives.. why? Because it matters. Excuse the ugly-ass sign up form, we’re in the process of making it more “purty”. Check it out at http://myfamilyguard.com. Interestingly enough, if you have a family member with Alzheimer’s, it works equally well by simply signing up the Alzheimer’s ridden family member as a child.

Cheers.

Percy (yes.. I’ve finally divulged my name)

I decided I needed a good mail archiving solution and after looking long and hard, I found Mailarchiva. The community edition seemed promising, but after over 30 hours of troubleshooting, it’s pretty clear it doesn’t work.

Sigh. Save yourself the time and look elsewhere. This is definitely not the solution.

So many people talk about their big hit. Well, I’ve decided there’s no such thing. Just get a job, start a company, and make enough to survive. More in a bit.

The White House on Tuesday said in a statement that it “does not object” to extending the three Patriot Act provisions until December 2011 although it “would strongly prefer” an extension until December 2013, noting that the longer timeline “provides the necessary certainty and predictability” that law enforcement agencies require while at the same time ensuring congressional oversight by maintaining a sunset.

People believe this bullshit?

In the first place, it’s not a bug. Don’t you guys know that Steve has decided European time standards don’t apply to the iPhone? You don’t have a choice people. It’s what Steve wants. He just doesn’t think that European time matters. The only thing that matters here in the US is Cupertino time.

Remember people. With Apple devices, you don’t have a choice. The only choice is Steve’s. It’s a feature people.

1. You don’t get to pick what to watch on your iDevice. You want flash? Steve doesn’t. Who wins? Steve.

2. Antenna doesn’t work? It’s not an issue. Why? Because Steve says so.

3. Wanna watch Gay and Lesbian category on Netflix? No. It’s a feature, because Steve feels that being Gay or Lesbian makes you dirty and dirty isn’t allowed on iDevices.

4. Want to publish something on the Apple Store, but it’s a browser or works in competition with anything Apple wants to do? Not happening. Why? Because Steve says he thought of it first.

Don’t you get it yet? Steve doesn’t believe the time outside of Cupertino matters. Why? Because he said so.

So you have a shiny little device like an android, iphone, or ipad. You want to watch movies on it. The problem is, it just takes forever to encode the videos. That was always my problem, I hate encoding. It slows down your computer and pretty much renders it useless for other tasks and it also takes forever. So what’s a bored media-junky to do?

Well, I always knew GPUs had lots of horsepower and I’ve always wanted to harness those little ponies for the greater good of satisfying my boredom while on a plane or waiting for my wife to finish shopping.  I embarked on a quest for a CUDA powered transcoder.  Lo and Behold!!! I found one that works wonders!  The upside?  It’s free!

Mediacoder NT CUDA Edition.  If you have a relatively recent Nvidia graphics adapter in your machine, it’ll use your GPU to transcode your video into H.264 format suitable for viewing on your portable device.  Did I mention it was fast?  How fast?

Regular Video plays at 30 fps (in the US).  Media Coder encodes on my old 17″ Macbook Pro (early 2008 edition) at approximately 97 fps.  So basically in 1/3 the time of the video.  (20 minutes for a 1 hour show).  All this happens while my computer is still usable (not at all laggy).

Pretty cool, huh?  On a desktop or a newer Macbook Pro, I’m sure it’ll do it even faster!!  Eventually, when I get a PC, I’ll test it with a new graphics card, but in the meantime, it means transcoding 8 hours of video in a little over 2 hours.  Compare that to the 8 hours it would take the CPU to do the same job in while making the computer pretty much unusable.

Kudos to the Mediacoder Team!  You guys rock!

OK.  Let’s be realistic.  I applaud you MZ for donating to Newark, god knows they need a break.  You want to fix the education system; I get it. Let’s talk reality though.  Newark needs to fix more than it’s Schools.  Let’s start with the Police force and the rampant Gang and Drug warfare.

Donate it to the police?  Not a particularly good use of the money.  How about just simply paying for a privatized security force to be utilized by the police?  Probably a better use of the money.  For one thing, there would be accountability.  You can’t fix the educational system and schools if the drugs and gangs are still in the schools.

Hint.. Hint..