Windows Vista
Converting FAT32 to NTFS
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.
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Ways to make a Windows Vista PC faster
1.) In System Preferences > System > Advances Settings
- Turn off graphical gimmicks
- Set a manual, fixed size of virtual memory to a value of about 2 * size of RAM. This reduces disk fragmentation.
2.) In System Preferences > Power: configure the laptop for maximum performance
3.) In System Preferences > Graphics: Turn colors down to 16 bit to take load off video card.
4.) Leave the laptop turned on for a few hours without doing anything. It will download all the updates, once they are installed, it will leave you alone and run much smoother
5.) Start > Run > "msconfig", turn off startup programs that are not required (e.g. itunes, laptop-manufacturer-nagging-tools, java updater, etc.). Turn off services that are not required (hard too find!)
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Use Windows Sidbar Functionality and Ajax
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>© 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.
How to enable Administrator account in Windows Vista
Steps required to enable elevated administrator account in Vista
- Log into your regular account. go into Start Menu, click All Programs, then on Accessories, then right-click on Command Prompt, and click on Run as Administrator from the pop-up menu, and enter the required password, if you used one when Windows Vista was originally installed.
- The Command Prompt window will open. Now type, without the quotes, “net user administrator /active:yes”. You should then see the command completed successfully.
- You should now be able to log out of Windows, and see the built-in Administrator account alongside your regular account as an option to use.
