I am so psyched about this new toy of mine! Since I do the DragonFlyEye.Net thing as a primary website, and since I’ve recently seen the need for interviews (I have an interview with Ellie Phillips of Zellies setup, another one with Eric Massa potentially on the way, and Wednesday I go to meet with Elliot Spitzer where I might be able to grab a quick bit of audio), I decided that I really needed a DVR (Digital Voice Recorder). Well, in truth, I really just wanted one!

Still, what a sweet little toy I got in this Olympus job! I didn’t want to shell out a whole lot of money for the fancy ones since I only want to do a bit of dictation and some interview-audio capture, and anyway, the more expensive models really just had a bit more room or possibly a removable storage type like SD or SmartMedia. Neither of those really mattered when I saw this dillio.

The VN-480 holds a maximum of 8 hours of audio in as many as four different folders, not counting the ones dedicated to scheduled recording. “Scheduled recording?” you ask. Yes, it does that along with voice-activated recording so I can do like those guys on Ghost Hunters. I’m gonna catch me some ghosts, or at least capture my African Grey parrot saying some cool stuff when we’re not around.

The PC interface for this little devil is pretty sweet, also. Rather than adding in a bunch of features you won’t want, or shoving QuickTime or some other nonsense down your gullet, this is a nice clean interface that works well and looks great. I hate flashy: I bought a tool, not a toy, so just give me what I need. As you can see from the inserted graphic, Olympus has come up with something as staid and boring as I am:

So as you can see, there is very little fanfare for this tool, not even a very exiting splash screen, but everything you need is right there in front of your eyes. The one thing that is not in any of the documentation for this app that definitely should be is the “Transfer Date/Time” option under the “Transfer” menu. This allows you to synchronize the date and time of your DVR to what your system says. Nice touch for those times when you run out of batteries, eh?

The audio folder shown at the top of the left side-bar refers to a location in your My Documents folder. Here is at least one option I might have preferred the option to change. My Documents is OK, but I tend to prefer more specific locations for my transfers ~ for example, one that is with the rest of my web development stuff so it is regularly backed up ~ and so far, I have not found the option to do this. The “Transfer Options” window is surprisingly bare, and the Olympus website appears devoid of software updates for this application.

Still and all, this does not prevent the VN-480PC from being a nice little gadget to add to the arsenal of blogging/reporting tools at my disposal. I recommend it to anyone looking for a good balance of features and low-cost!

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Even though Windows is designed around the idea that anything you would wish to change about the Registry should be available in GUI form, this is not always not the case. There are a number of performance tweaks to be found within the Registry for which there are no controls within the Operating System, and it is these performance tweaks that this post is dedicated. Once again, this is by no means a complete list, but rather a guide to some pretty-darned good ones.

A word for the uninitiated: if you’ve never played around with the Registry, this is probably not the tutorial with which to start. In some cases, I suspect that these tweaks have no GUI eqivalent primarily because if anything goes wrong with them, you can render your OS inoperable. Always backup your Registry before beginning, and you might even want to consider backing up any files you need, because there are things with Windows Operating Systems that you cannot take back.

OK, so enough of this wool-gathering. Let’s get to the meat of the article. Due to the repetitious nature of Registry hacks, I will be abbreviating the names of the top hives from (for example) HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE to HKLM. Got it? Good, let’s get started:
Tweak #1: Shutdown Service Timeout

Ever notice how long Windows takes before it even starts to shut down? That is a setting in the Registry which you can hack. Open Regedit and navigate to: HKLM\\System\\CurrentControlSet\\Control and look for the variable WaitToKillServiceTimeout. It is currently set to 20000, which is 20 seconds. Set it to 0 and see what happens.

Tweak #2: Menu Delays

When you hover over a scrolling menu such as the Start menu items, “All Programs,” the system actually waits a predetermined amount of time before automatically expanding that menu. I find this annoying, how ’bout you? Open Regedit and navigate to HKCU\\Control Panel\\Desktop and look for the varible named MenuShowDelay. You can set this value to whatever your preference may be.

Tweak #3: Auto-Kill Programs at Shutdown

Nothing worse than having to wait for all those programs to shut themselves down before you restart the PC. Why not let Windows just kill the damned things and be done? One word of caution, though: make sure you’re in the habit of saving documents regularly, or you won’t have a chance to do so if you’ve forgotten it and shut the system down!!!! Open Regedit and navigate to HKCU\\Control Panel\\Desktop and then toggle the AutoEndTasks varible value to 1.

Tweak #4: Disabling Memory Paging

In normal use, Windows XP creates a page file from RAM onto the HDD. We can disable that function within the Registry, but note that only those with very large quantities of memory (above 256, and really, above 512 to be safe) will want to even consider doing this. Navigate to HKLM\\SYSTEM\\CurrentControlSet\\Control\\Session Manager\\Memory Management and toggle the DisablePagingExecutive variable from 0 to 1.

Tweak #5: Enabling Large System Cache

Enabling this setting pushes all but 4mb of system memory to the file system cache, which in other words means that the entire kernel is running in memory. Two caveats are associated with this tweak, the first being that (once again) only those with a significant amount of memory should even bother tryin this. Secondly, this consistutes a significant improvement in performance for the Operating System, but can actually degrade performance of memory-intensive applications. It’s probably best to make a decent benchmark of your most important applications first and then make the Reg switch and see if that makes your performance better or worse. Navigate to HKLM\\SYSTEM\\CurrentControlSet\\Control\\Session Manager\\Memory Management and then toggle the LargeSystemCache variable from 0 to 1.

Tweak #6: Improving I/O File Transfer

This one is only really available for those of you running servers, but will improve performance for large file transfer operations. In fact, the variable is not even present by default, and this will require you to create the key in most instances. In the HKLM\\SYSTEM\\CurrentControlSet\\Control\\Session Manager\\Memory Management hive, create a REG_DWORD value called IOPageLockLimit. On those systems for which this key is enabled by default, the default value is usually around 512k and is valued in bytes. Most people get improved performance in the 8 to 16mb range, you’ll have to play with the settings to see what works for you. Keep in mind that since this value is represented in bytes, you’ll need to do a bit of math to get to, say, 12mb. 12 * 1024 * 1024 = 12582912.

Tweak #7: Damn That File Sharing Wait!!!!

How many times have you smashed your head against the side of your cubicle waiting for the damned files on a network share to show up so you can work? Can you believe that this is intentional on Microsoft’s part? Indeed, the system checks the scheduled tasks on the remote computer before reading the directories, a task so useless, it’s breathtaking. This takes 30 seconds out of your day every single time you access a network share, and that adds up to constant annoyance as I’m sure I don’t need to tell a lot of you. Navigate to HKLM\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\Current Version\\Explorer\\RemoteComputer\\NameSpace and find a key called {D6277990-4C6A-11CF-8D87-00AA0060F5BF}. Just delete that mamma-jamma and after a restart, PRESTO! No wait time.

Whoopha!!  That’s a pretty good list for now, wouldn’t you say?  But it’s not the end, not by a long-shot, and in fact some of the best is yet to come, so stick around!

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Quite some time ago, on another board I was working, a friend of mine laid out a pretty long list of Windows XP tweaks for performance. I loved them (in fact, I have used them every single time I’ve reloaded my OS) and now that I’ve moved on from that board I do not want to lose them. So, as my first real contribution to the blogosphere on this new blog of mine, I present a list of Windows Services that can potentially be disabled from running:

Alerter
Clipbook
Computer Browser
Fast User Switching
Human Interface Access Devices
Indexing Service (Slows the hard drive down)
Messenger
Net Logon (unnecessary unless networked on a Domain)
Netmeeting Remote Desktop Sharing (disabled for extra security)
Remote Desktop Help Session Manager (disabled for extra security)
Remote Procedure Call Locator
Remote Registry (disabled for extra security)
Routing & Remote Access (disabled for extra security)
Server
SSDP Discovery Service (this is for the utterly pointless “Universal P’n'P”, & leaves TCP Port 5000 wide open)
TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper
Telnet (disabled for extra security)
Universal Plug and Play Device Host
Upload Manager
Windows Time
Wireless Zero Configuration (for wireless networks)
Workstation

You will notice that many of these Services will already be disabled in WinXP SP2 and above, since as noted, they are security vulnerabilities.

How to Disable Windows Services:

1. Go to “Start > (Settings) > Control Panel”
2. Double-Click “Administrative Tools,” and then again on “Services” (NOTE: not “Component Services)
3. Here you will find your list of Services in alphabetical order. Find the first Service you wish to disable and double-click it.
4. Half-way down the window that opens is the Service’s status and startup type.
5. If the status is “Running,” you will need to hit the “Stop” button and wait for the Service to be stopped before proceeding.
6. Under the Startup Type drop-down menu, select “Disabled” to prevent this Service from starting when Windows starts.
7. Click “Apply,” and then “OK,” and repeat steps 3 through 7 as necessary

Next up: Registry Hacks!!! Stay tuned!

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Just as I start this new blog, boom! There’s the latest WordPress release. It’s supposed to have a bunch of security holes patched along with a few other bugs fixed, but I haven’t had a chance to look at the update manifest yet. I’m hoping as always that they will fix the header errors when posting, but we shall see about that. Also, I get another header error when trying to delete draft posts, but I haven’t had a chance to look into that too deeply.

Over at the DFE development site, I’ve managed to make quite a bit of progress this week on the new site. It’s not looking like the site’s really going to be released before I leave for my honeymoon, but stranger things have happened. The big thing is: I finally have an RSS feed for the site not built by WP that actually validates. What a chore that was! In fact, there’s still a bit of griping from FeedValidator about illegal characters, but in truth, there is little I can do about that except moving forward with new articles.

Word to the wise, folks: MSWord might seem like a good option for writing your articles in, and indeed the spelling and grammar checks far surpass anything that’s available for web plugins, but freakin’ Microsoft has a habit of using odd characters that don’t fit into the UTF-8 character set. Those characters help make a Word document look more like a professionally printed paper document or book, so you can’t really blame MS for using them. At the same time, they don’t make it easy to get rid of them, either. There is an option to “Save as. . . ” a plain text document, but it is limited in it’s effectiveness.

So, I just need to make sure that any new articles I write from now on are saved as TXT files in UTF-8 encoding, and this problem will slowly disappear.

Other than that, the article viewer code is complete, the home page layout is complete and I only need to layout the sectional home pages and the RSS home page to complete the work. Come to think on it, I might actually be closer to done than I thought!

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