Windows 7

Prerequisite: Windows 7 Administrator rights

The following steps are required to change the number of cores a program can access:

- First press Strg Alt Entf to open the Task Manager

- Then select the Process Tab

- Right Click the corresponding process of the Program(ie. Firefox firefox.exe)

- Choose Processor Affinity and choose the cores

At least since Windows 7 you have the this option built-in.

• open Windows Explorer and navigate to the desired folder
• press and hold Shift key and right click at the folder
• select "Open a command window here"

1. Go to Computer, and note the name of the drive whose file system you wish to convert.

2. Click on Start.

3. Type cmd in the search bar if you use Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows Vista. If you use Windows XP, click on Run and then execute cmd. 

4. Execute "chkdsk h: /f " (without quotes) where H is the letter of the drive to undergo conversion. This checks the drive for errors and fixes them automatically.

5. Execute "Convert H: /FS:NTFS" (without quotes). H is again the letter of the drive to be converted.

6. The command prompt will start the conversion process and after a few minutes, CMD will say that conversion was successful.

7. You can check it in the properties of the drive through right click “Properties”.

OR

Click Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> System
In the dialog box System Properties, click the Hardware tab - > Device Manager
In Device Manager open Disk Drives/Devices, double-click to open the properties window of the external drive.
In Policy tab, click Optimize for performance -> OK;
close Device Manager, System Properties
open My Computer, right-click the icon of the external drive
from the shortcut menu, select Format ...
in the “Format” of Removable Disk file system option NTFS appeared ( instead of FAT);
format the drive to NTFS;
set Optimize for quick removal : My Computer -> Properties - > System -> Hardware -> device Manager - > disk Drives -> < Removable Disk > -> Properties - > Politics.

The windows sidebar gadgets are noting more than small HTML files that are added by the OS to the sidebar automatically. The interface between the file and the OS is a XML file that specifies some important facts and looks like this:<code><?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?><gadget>  <name>MyGadgetName</name>  <namespace>Namespace.Gadget</namespace>  <version>1.1</version>  <author name="tuwien.ac.at">    <logo src="images/logo.png" />    <info url="http://tuwien.ac.at" />  </author>  <copyright>&#169; Wien, 2009 </copyright>  <description>Newsgadget</description>  <icons>    <icon width="64" height="64" src="images/icon_64.png" />  </icons>  <hosts>    <host name="sidebar">      <base type="HTML" apiVersion="1.0.0" src="main.html" />      <permissions>Full</permissions>      <platform minPlatformVersion="1.0" />      <defaultImage src="images/bg_drag.png"/>    </host>  </hosts></gadget></code> The most important option is the base tag. It specifies the path to the entrypoint - in my example this is the main.html. There are some other options like logos, URLs or version numbers which can be figured out very easily. All that I had to do now was creating the main.html and writing some javascript code to parse the remote RSS feed:<code>function getRSS() {     try     {        var req = null;         if (window.ActiveXObject)        {            req  = new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLHTTP');         }        feedUrl = 'http://mydomain.com/myfeed.rss?'+Math.random();        req.open("GET", feedUrl , true);         req.setRequestHeader("Content-Type", "text/xml");         req.onreadystatechange = function()            {                if(req.readyState == 4)                {                    if(req.status == 200)                    {                        var rssXML = req.responseXML;   // assign the XML file to a var                        if (parseRSS(rssXML) === true) {                            /* YESSSS */                        } else {                            /* UUPS */                            connectionError();                        }                                        }                        else                        {                        alert("Error: returned status code " + req.status + " " + req.statusText);                        connectionError();                    }                }            };        req.send(null);     }    catch(err)    {        alert("General Error: " + err);        connectionError();    }}</code>What this function does is creating a connection to a given rss feed and fetching the data. If that is possible it sends the data to another function named parseRSS() which looks like that:<code>function parseRSS(rssXML) {    var rssItems = rssXML.getElementsByTagName("item");    feedItems =[];    var feedCount=0;    var feedDate;        feedDate = rssXML.getElementsByTagName("dc:date");    if(feedDate[0] !== null) {        feedDate = feedDate[0].firstChild.nodeValue;    } else {        feedDate ="";    }        for(i=0;i<rssItems.length;i++) {        try {                    var title = rssItems[i].getElementsByTagName("title");            var description = rssItems[i].getElementsByTagName("description");            var link = rssItems[i].getElementsByTagName("link");                        if(title[0] !== null && description[0] !== null && link[0] !== null) {                    var feedItem = [];                var relatedItems= [];                    feedItem[0]= title[0].firstChild.nodeValue;                feedItem[1]= description[0].firstChild.nodeValue;                feedItem[2]= link[0].firstChild.nodeValue;                                feedItems[feedCount]= feedItem;                feedCount++;            }                         } catch(err) {}    }    if(feedCount>0) {        return true;    } else {        return false;    }}</code>No I have an associative array named feedItems[] which contains all the fetched RSS data. This information can now be desplayed very easily using basic javascript functionality.Finally I zipped all my files (gadget.xml, main.html, javascript-files, images, etc.) and changed the file suffix from .zip to .gadget. On Windows Vista or Windows 7 system a simple doubleclick on this archive is enough and the gadget will be installed.