Random Blue Screen BSOD

Installed new hardware ? or Built a new computer but you keep getting random blue screens? Wether its Windows 7 or Windows XP BSOD Blue Screen of Death STOP: 0x000000F4 or something else, its worth a try. Here's one thing you should try which has worked for me numerous times.

Unplug the Computer, open up your case and remove the CMOS battery(round flat silver battery). Wait 3 seconds then put back in the battery and plug in your computer. Just as Windows sometimes has trouble detecting hardware, so does the BIOS. So you may need to set your date/time in your BIOS again, but at least no more blue screens.

Speed up XP

Here's a few ways to speed up Windows XP and save resources and hard drive space without installing any programs. This does work to speed up Windows7 and Vista, but these steps are for the XP platform.

1) Disable Thumbnail Cache
If you don't view a large database of photo's frequently, you can safely disable this. All it does is create a hidden Thumbs.db file that stores a cache of thumbnails for all pictures that was ever in that folder, regardless of if the image was deleted. So this file can grow large depending on how many images you have in that folder. These .db files are created in every folder that has images in them.

To disable go to My Computer, Click Tools->Folder Options, Click on "View" tab, Check the box that says "Do not cache thumbnails". Click Apply and OK.




2)Turn Off Indexing of your hard drive
Windows indexes all the files on your hard drive and stores it's location, so it waste's space by saving this information and resources by indexing when the computer is idle.

If you use that 'Search' function in Windows to find files or folders once or less a month then you can safely turn this off. You will still be able to use this search feature but it will take a little bit longer, which is worth it to me.

To turn it off go to My Computer, Right-Click on the C: Drive, Click Properties, Uncheck Allow Indexing and click OK, its ok to skip files(you will know if you get prompted)

Do this for each Hard Disk Drive(C:,D:,E:, etc.)

You can do even better by also disabling the Indexing service. Go to Start, Run, type services.msc, look for "Indexing Service" Right click on this service, Click Properties. Click Stop and change "Startup type" to Disabled. Click Apply and OK.



3) Disable System Restore
If you're smart enough to do a fresh install, you should disable this service. System restore creates restore points periodically and every-time you install or uninstall a application, that is a lot of wasted space. And uses a lot of resource's when its creating these points.

To disable system restore Right-Click on My Computer and Click Properties, Click on System Restore Tab, and check the box that says Turn Off System Restore on all drives.

Now these 3 steps wont make your computer super fast, but will free up some resources and hard drive space for you.

Windows No to All

Ok, so your copying a bunch of files to another folder and there are multiple duplicates. Now you see a "Yes to All" option but this will take longer since it has to copy every file where as if you click "No to All" it will only copy files that are not present in the destination directory saving the time of copying unneeded files.

Don't see a "No to All" option ? well there isn't a button for it, all you have to do is hold Shift on your keyboard and click No while holding this button, now windows will interpret this as "No to All" and continue copying your files while skipping files that already exists.

Linksys Wireless Routers Review

New Linksys Wireless Routers Suck. Plain and simple.

(Not one of the bad ones.)

I have tried many linksys routers and have noticed all the new products from linksys are the same, UNRELIABLE.

These new routers are slower, have less ram, cpu speed and flash. Not to mention the bad quality of materials  being used to make these products. The worst part of all is the internal antenna and crappy designs. Internal  antenna's greatly reduce throughput and range of your wireless as well as increase the amount of discarded packets.

External antennas are much better. Now I use to love Linksys, but now I will avoid them like you wouldn't believe.  I will continue to use Linksys routers but only the older models such as WRT100,WRT300N,WRT54*, etc. Even my Linksys home  router WRH54G outperforms newer linksys model's in speed and reliability, ive never had a Internet slowdown as  some people are complaining about with new models, all using Linksys firmware.

I hope CISCO/Linksys will realise this mistake and go back to making good products with external antenna's, and  useful products like their PAP2, PAP2T devices which they currently no longer make.

Tech people like us like to see sophisticated looking devices, devices that look like its Techy, we don't want linksys's new aesthetically  pleasing look that looks like a fancy dinner plate.

See Ya Linksys till you change your ways.