After I fixed a friends older Dell machine running XP Home I came across another friends older Dell that had a failed Hard Drive.  I decided to go with Vista with this machine and tweak it in a similar way I would tweak XP.  In short Vista running Service Pack 2 utlizing some basic performance tweaks really performs quite well.

Vista Tweaks:

1.  Turn off the Aero Desktop or disable Translucent effect (The machine I am using only has 1 gig of RAM and an older X300 video card)

2.  Switch to the Classic Start Menu (Right Click on the Start button – hit properties)

3.  Turn off indexing on main drive (Right Click Drive C in Computer and then uncheck indexing this drive)  – I opted to skip this only because I installed  new fast drive in this machine

4.  Turn off UAC (Universal Access Control – Annoying and slow)  – Go to Control Panel, Click on USERS,  then Click on User Accounts again, then click on User Access Control and Uncheck.

5.  Install Lastest Service Pack 2 helps with Speed

6.  Disable Security Center  (Click on Run then type services.msc – look for Security Center and click Disable)

7.  Disable Remote Assistance (Right Click onComputer,  click on Advanced System Settings, then click on the Remote and turn off Remote Assistance

8. Install free.avg.com  AVG free edition,  disable daily scan.

9. Install Spybot Search and Destroy – good at removing bad software and doesn’t hog system resources   (do not install Teatimer)

With these Basic Tweak applied the results were good.

Video of tweaked machine Running Half Life 2 in Vista at full speed (click on image to view video)

Video Tweaked machine Running Office 2007 and Desktop.

Recently I came across a friends older Dell Dimension Family PC.  This machine had 512 megs of RAM a pentium 4 clocked at 2.8 ghz and a older IDE hard drive at 80 gigs.  For fun I decided to clean and tweak the machine in an attempt to make it perform as fast and efficiently as their new IMAC (2.4 ghz Dual Core, 2 gigs of RAM).  I think I came close but will have to wait for them to get it back and use it for a while to see if I was successful.  Here are the basic steps I used to help bring this machine to maximum performance.

1.  Remove Unused and Potentially Harmful Programs, Dell Support, AOL, Limewire, The Weather Channel Toolbar (hard to remove – found it in registry), etc.

2.  Added additional gigabyte of older RAM I had laying around bringing the total amount of RAM up from 512 to 1.5 gigs.

3.  Removing Norton Total Internet Protection Suite -  This is probably the worst virus and firewall protection software around.  It is truly sad that a company as reputable as Norton has reached the bottom in the market,  under no circumstances install a Norton Antivirus product on your machine,  will probably slow machine down by 30%.  I instead opted for AVG free edition and disabled Daily scanning (performance).

4.  Downloaded CCleaner and Defraggler cleaning Hard Drive and registry with CCleaner.  Defragging with Defraggler – both products are free and work well.

5.  Downloaded Ace Utilities (www.acelogix.com)  This is another cleaner program that has a good menu option to remove startup items.  This program has a free 30 day trial so I use it to again clean the registry (better than CCleaner) and more importantly remove unwanted Startup Items  ( I try to narrow this list down to under 7 items).  Also used the Analyze Disk Option to free up more disk space.

6.  Disabled unused or system slowing resources   ( Turned of Indexing Service,  Turned off Remote Assistance, Turned off Alerter Service, Turned off Security Center Service, Turned off Network Location Service, etc.

7.  Turned Off System Restore Points – Free up HD space and free up memory resources.

8.  Removed XP themes (except default)

9.  Revert to Classic Start Menu

Machine performance was drastically improved.  The only weakspot in this machine is the older ATA style hard drive which has an 80 gig capacity.  With this drive 2/3 filled up there is a noticable delay compared to newer larger SATA drives, turning off indexing and defragging helped immensly but this still remains a weakspot.

Here are a couple of brief movies showing improved Performance

Running the Desktop and Office (Click on Image to Watch Video)

Running PSXe emulator using software only drives(Click on Image to Watch Video)

This summer all of the labs at the Middle School and each lab at all three elementary schools were replaced with new IMAC’s (2.0 Ghz 2 Gigs or RAM).  With the task of imaging around 150 machines, using PSX imaging (netboot on a mac) was the only real solution to getting this job done quickly.  In the past I have used NetRestore along with a Netboot server  when imaging large numbers of machines.   With NetRestore being officically retired I decided to give another free alternative a try DeployStudio.  In short this product is better than NetRestore and compares with Windows Deployment Services as a full featured PXE Network booting and imaging solution.

I setup two intel macbooks with server 10.4 and installed the Netboot server service  and installed the lastest stable version of Deploy Studio.  For best performance I installed two images onto an old Apple Server using the AFP protocol so that the images would be accessed seperately from the netboot startup image which is loaded from the laptop.  Earlier I tried to put both the machine images and the netboot images all on the macbook server only to find that the little 5400 RPM laptop hard drive could not keep up with more than 15 machines at a time.  Using an old XServe G4 in a RAID 5 configuration utilizing the AFP protocol, imaging over 30 machines was relatively quick at around 1 hour 30 minutes.

I would have to give this product 4.5 out of 5 stars.  Comparing this product to Windows Deployment Tools I would say that these products come close to a tie.  Given that this product is free and is not connected to Apple this is a definite program for any network administrator of an Apple lab environment.

http://www.deploystudio.com/Home.html  Home Page

Click Here to Download Stable Release http://www.deploystudio.com/Downloads/DeployStudioServer_v1.0rc12.dmg

Recently I got a new laptop the MacBook Pro with 2.66 dual core processor and 4GB of RAM with a 1066 mhz bus.  I was a little disappointed with these specs considering the older Macbook pro from 2 years ago sported very similar specs with a 2.5 ghz dual core processor and 800 mhz bus.  I have been reading a lot of good reviews on the new Intel X-25 Solid State drives and have based on benchmark tests this appears to be the best upgrade available for most users.  I put this to the test and installed a new 160 GB intel X25-M drive in the new Macbook Pro.

My intial impression is wow,  indeed this drive outperfroms any hard drive I have seen.  Not only does it outperform standard 5400 and 7200 RPM laptop drives but it also outperforms other Solid State drives currently on the market .  I compared boot times with my two new MacBook Pros, one with the Intel X-25 and one with the standard Hitatchi 320 gb 5400 RPM drive.  I have attached a small video of the experiment,  long story short Intel X25 machine booted in 26 seconds,  the standard MacBook pro booted in 41 seconds.  Everything thing in the OS feels faster with this drive, the only downside is the price is still a little steep.

Boot times with New Macbook Pro 2009

With Intel X-25M 160 Gig Drive = 26 seconds

With Standard Hitachi 320 gig 5400 RPM Drive = 42 seconds.

Click on the Image to Watch (Or Click Here to view my RSS of Tech Podcasts)

There were some initial concerns on the longevity of the drive but these fears have recently been put to rest by Intel.  Intel now offers a five year warranty of 100 gigs per day rate before the flash memory wears out.  For a laptop drive this is good news and completely acceptable, unfortunately at the server level this is still somewhat of a limitation making this drive ideal for workstations only.

I have been asked a few times how to make insert a picture into wordpress that when clicked on opens as a PDF, DOC, or some other type of file.  To answer this question I made a quick podcast on how I do it on a Mac running 10.5.7 leopard. The attached podcast uses a PDF but the concept could be applied to having a picture open as any type of file.  This tutorial is using a website running the wordpress template 2.7.1 but also works for older versions as well as the newer 2.8.

Click here or on the picture to download the podcast