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Try setting your paging/swap file size to 8191 in both boxes for a large fixed swap file. The increased size may results in faster program loads (because the swap file does not need to grow dynamically) and better response times until ram usage rises to between 70% and 80%, at which time things may start to slow down.

Have multiple tabs open in Firefox from a previous session? In the Options: General select “Don’t load tabs until selected”. I have The general option set for “When Firefox starts” set to “Show my windows and tabs from last time”. When Firefox gets sluggish I exit and restart. It might take a moment to reload the page when you click on the tab. Otherwise having a lot of tabs open at once can consume memory and kill response time.

You can also force Firefox to free some memory. Type “About:memory” [without the quotes] into the address bar. In the center of the page there will be a box titled “Free memory”, click on the “Minimize memory usage” tab.

You could also consider creating separate .pst files on a historical basis, for example “History 2014.pst” and then moving all the messages you want to keep from 2014 into there. Such .pst files will never get any bigger, and you can remove them from Outlook or restore them as necessary, using Data File Management. If concerned about space, you could also move such files to external storage.

I use the archive function to archive to a year’s pst file by changing the date to select the files. Note that if you have not done this before, start with the oldest year and archive through the end of that year, then do it again for each succeeding year. I keep about 6 months in the current .pst and archive older files, always starting with the oldest year first. If there is a lot of mail, you might consider doing 3 to 6 months at a time. Don’t do it during “prime” time, i.e. if you need access to your email or other operations as it will keep the system busy.

http://www.knoppix.org/%5B/url%5D

Knoppix has saved me many hours of recovery time.

If you use a CD/DVD to boot Knoppix, the hard drives are not modified unless you use a tool to do so: everything comes from the CD/DVD and a ram disk used for temporary system storage.

Before I start tinkering with recovery, I do a dd backup of the infected system to an ISO file so that at worst case I can go back to the initial condition. Other image backup tools can serve the same purpose.

In addition to running malware scans, I also use the “dd” command to make backups of entire partitions to a ISO file (usually placed on my external multiTB hard drive). If I need to “start from scratch” my “scratch” is restoring a previous backup of a configured working system, adding Windows and applications updates, and any new favorite software or updated files, and making an image copy for the starting point next time. One of the reasons for backing up the infected system before wiping it out is that you may find something that is not included in your backup routine.

If I remember correctly from once upon a time, an OS generally needs to be installed in a primary partition instead of a logical partition.

I recently had a high speed Verizon FIOS internet (30/x) with a Verizon supplied modem/router/WiFi. We also have a WD N900 router used for PS3, PS4 and android connections that was piggy backed to the Verizon router. Things generally worked better through the WD. The WD router had higher throughput specs than the Verizon router. My sons have a tendency (constantly) to play bandwidth intensive online games such as Call of Duty. I tried connecting my main desktop to either the Verizon or the WD routers (one router at a time) but found that internet browsing and other online activity would suffer greatly (Page loads were extremely slow or would timeout) if one or both of the PS3 and PS4 were on, especially if online games were being played. Apparently this combination of daisy chained routers was having trouble with internet collisions, packet loss, and/or other conflicts.

I now have a Time Warner Cable modem connected to the WD router. (I specifically asked for a modem instead of a router to avoid any daisy chained router problems.) Even though the modem specs are not nearly as fast as the FIOS modem/router was, the slow down observed from the desktop is either just a tad bit for some sites or not noticeable. However in the last few days there have been a number of apparently dropped packets – web pages would fail to completely come up, but a reload sometimes did the trick, sometimes not. A couple of days ago observed several times where the modem lights indicated that the downstream and upstream connections were in trouble (orange instead of green) and the online normally on light was off, resulting in no internet connection. Also when the lights were “normal”, pages would suddenly not load in browsers, sometimes complaining about unreachable servers or timeouts, and ping or tracert would return with unable to connect to server errors as if the DNS service was unreachable (I use OpenDNS, which was not reporting any problems). This had been going on for about 4 hours with random failures of at least several per hour lasting from a few minutes to over ten minutes. There were no service outages listed online.

Had an online chat with a rep where first off I mentioned that I had tried the reset procedures outlined online including power cycling equipment and verifying connections, and outlined the problems I was having. I expected him to do what many ISPs had done in the past and read a script asking me to power everything down and up, but he skipped that and did some looking around and found that my connection was reporting errors. (Apparently my tech talk about the problem convinced him that I might know what I was talking about, and I got lucky and got a tech that new how to do more than just read scripts.)

We will see what happens when a tech comes out Sunday afternoon (the first mutually available time). I suspect a corollary of Murphy’s law will probably apply – when trouble shooting, the failure will not show itself when the technician arrives until after the technician leaves, but once he does it will probably come back with a vengeance. Even though I had problems for several more hours that day, things are working much better now.

used to stop web robots, rawlers etc from searching your web pages generally for for indexing
See http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html

I have Office 2010 and 2007 in addition to 2003, but use Word and Excel 2003. I drive the 2003 and previous versions mostly with the keyboard, mousing only when necessary. I hate the ribbon and despite claims that many of the previous word keyboard shortcuts can still be used, I must be using a different set, because there are many that aren’t the same. Also I have as yet to find a few features in the newer versions that are easily menu selected with keyboard shortcuts in 2003, despite various help, forum and other references.

Unfortunately several places that I worked at had the newer versions, which made for slower editing.

I have upgraded to Outlook 2010 because “only one version of Outlook can be installed”, i.e. if you install a newer version of Outlook, the old one will not be usable.

BTW: There is still a bug in Word 2010 that has persisted since the days of Win 3.1 and possibly before: especially with revision tracking on [track changes] Word would eventually scramble a document such that page up/down would go in circular loops in the middle of the document, and other navigation might also be affected. I have had this happen in documents as small as 17 pages, but usually occurred with technical documents of 40 pages and up that usually included TOC, index and Header levels modified for MIL SPEC documentation. Because of this I always saved the document with a name that included yymmdd possibly with hh, hhm, or increasing alphabetic suffix after the date. That way when the document corruption was discovered, I could usually go back a version or two or more to recover the majority of the document. The worst case was having to go back several days with many edits. Many times I would have to select all, copy, and paste to a new document, and then set up the page header/footers and other formatting, and then recover or reenter the changes.

Don’t get me started on UIs. I use Vista’s Classic start menu which places my most used utilities a Windows key and letter or repeated letter away. Beats the newer UIs hands down.

Noticeably missing: Rich Copy, another unsupported Microsoft toy. Multiple file copy copies several directories and files at once, keeping the disk queue rather busy. Note that it is so busy on my system that it is difficult to do anything else when Rich Copy is running. Apparently allocates space before copying, because the copied files are normally not fragmented – unless your free space is badly fragmented.

[INDENT]”RichCopy can copy multiple files at a time with up to 8 times faster speed than the normal file copy and moving process. Surprisingly it copies and moves files even faster than RoboCopy tool and XCOPY command. Since the tool was being used by the developers, they made it pretty effective and stable.” [Quoted from site below][/INDENT]

See http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/33971726-eeb7-4452-bebf-02ed6518743e/microsoft-richcopy or search for microsoft richcopy.

Rich Copy can copy whole directory trees, even from the root directory (e.g. “c:”) (it also copies system volume and recycle bin files and directories unless filtered out). The number of directories to open, and the number of files to copy can be altered. Note that higher settings may make your computer unusable for anything else while copying.

You can also try booting a Linux disk and using the DD command. I suspect that Rich Copy (and probably Robo Copy) can copy faster than DD. I mostly used DD (either from cygwin or a Linux boot) when I want an ISO image of a disk or directory (mountable using an ISO tool, such as freeware MagicDisk from MagicISO) or to burn (ImgBurn). If booted from a Linux boot disk to use DD or other Linux tools, Windows file locking and protection will not get in your way. It also will not protect you from doing something stupid.

most zip programs will create a new file for the update operation, and then delete the old. If you are short on disk space then the update will fail. Some zip programs create the temporary file in the user’s temp directory, others may create it in the same directory as the original.

I made the mistake once of using my ISP’s email service. Then I moved and had to switch ISPs. I tried using a free email forwarding service that was “guaranteed for life”, but then it closed down when the domain was sold. My main email service is now Yahoo. Google was added about a year ago when one website used Google docs to provide some information updates until they could integrate it into their members only portion of their website.

I also have several email addresses from my domain registrar that are currently forwarded to my yahoo account. I am slowly updating my contact information with this truly portable address. If for some reason my domain registrar or the big email service folded I could use another service and the change would be transparent.

I have been using Weebly since Microsoft started charging more than $20/year when they changed their website hosting (with no preservation or transfer capabilities).

My target was lowest cost web hosting while retaining control over my existing domain name. Some other considerations were website storage space, data transfer limits, file upload limits, redundancy.

I researched many possibilities, but it seemed that most wanted me to get my domain name through them or had monthly hosting fees, fees for private domain registration and/or other fees, low storage, small upload file sizes, low bandwidth quotas, or limited options for email accounts or forwarding. A simple mention of a website online, such as Windows Secrets, can easily exhaust your bandwidth quota for the month, making your domain useless until the following month. The worst was a free plan where people could add subdomains to your domain.

To make a long story short, after a lot of research and several false starts I chose Weebly free web hosting, and 1&1 for the domain registration with forwarding of web page requests to Weebly, and email forwarding addresses to existing Yahoo and Gmail accounts. 1&1 also included private registration in the base cost that hides the domain ownership information without an additional fee. I could no longer use the Hotmail addresses linked to my domain, but found that after the domain transfer I could reuse the domain linked email addresses with forwarding to other existing Yahoo & Gmail addresses (or set up new email addresses) despite Microsoft’s claim that the email addresses could not be reassigned.

Since I was in the job market (and am again) with my resume available on my website, I first designed a Weebly web site. Then I reviewed the domain transfer process and started it on a Friday, knowing that my website would probably be “out of commission” during part of the domain transfer. I chose a time when I could frequently check emails and the progress of the transfer to minimize the time the domain name was “unlocked” or “out of commission”. There were some mandatory delays imposed by the old servicer, transfer emails to verify the transfer, and waiting for the new domain hosting information to be propagated to domain name servers. I don’t remember how long the process took, but it was several days of mostly waiting for the next step.

It has just been a little over a year since the change. 1&1’s introductory price is usually very reasonable (currently $0.99 for the 1st year of domain registration), however renewal prices are going up from $10.99 to $14.99 per year effective 7/1/13. I have two websites, one for myself and one for my wife, and just renewed them at the $10.99 price.

I have run into some of Weebly’s free website limitations and either found workarounds, or decided that it wasn’t important. My page header includes an image with relevant information (this would solve the complaint about “The title area proved difficult to reformat — I couldn’t add a line of smaller-font text below my name), and I live with the little Weebly tagline at the bottom of the page, just like I tolerated Microsoft’s.

There are plenty of resources for searching for good web hosts and domain registration providers.

If you decide to try 1&1 please use the link http://www.1and1.com/?k_id=177836292 so that I can get a referral credit.

If you are interested in a Weebly premium paid plan, you can get a $10 credit using the link http://www.weebly.com/link/gYhMki

Initial comments based upon 32 bit Vista and prior Windows versions. Some notes applicable to 64 bit versions follow.

Sometimes the disk thrashing is caused by not enough memory, and/or a swap file (virtual memory) that is too small. If you have a tendency to leave tasks open and switch from one to another (like I do), the usual swap file recommendation to use a swap file 1.5x installed memory never seemed to apply. I find that specifying a user managed swap file just under 4G for a 32 bit OS may help with the thrasing, and increasing installed memory to 4GB (no less than 2GB) will greatly improve performance.

You can use the system monitoring, task manager, or other functions to observe system activity. The easiest to start with might be task manager or the Windows Reliability and Performance Monitor. Look for lots of hard page faults, indicating that the system had to load data that had been swapped to disk. On a quiet system the hard page faults should be very low. If a fully loaded system has high page faulting, especially if the only thing you are doing is looking at the monitor page, then either your swap file or available memory, or both, are too small for the load, and you will probably hear the disk thrashing, i.e. the sound of many head seeks (unless you are using an SSD system disk).

I would recommend running autoruns from the Microsoft Sysinternals.com collection. It will show you everything that runs on startup. Look for add on utilities that have entries that load things that you do not use. Some of the entries may be for “pre loaders” that load code so that the applications starts up quicker – but if the application is not being used, the code is still loaded. You can turn off the preloading for many aftermarket utilities with out affecting the utility performance. One example is ITunes. Others might be for utilities that you tried, and decided not to use, but never uninstalled. Note that there are many services that are required for system operation listed here and I do not recommend tinkering with those.

To set up your swap file (and hopefully as one contiguous file), first set swap file to none, reboot, defrag, set swap file parms for user managed swap file to just under 4GB, reboot, and see if that helps. A system managed swap file allocates and frees disk space as necessary, leading to sluggish performance and more disk fragmentation.

If you have less than 4GB installed, see if you can increase memory to 4GB. There are plenty of deals available on the internet.

You may have a failing memory module. I suspected one at one time as the system sometimes stalled for unknown reasons, but none of the memory diagnostics found anything, then one day I enabled the full post in the BIOS boot and lo and behold, POST found failing memory in one of the original OEM modules. I pulled that associated module and no more problems for a while, before the other original OEM memory failed. Pulled that one bringing me down to 2GB of aftermarker memory, making the system run sluggish. Got 2 GB more memory installed (cheaper on the net) and things were back to normal. Note that after pulling defective memory I decided that I might not want to trust the system files so I saved current files and went back almost a year in my system backups to restore something that hopefully was before the memory defects, copied newer user files from the current backup copy and installed updates, and backed up again.

With regards to 64 bit Windows, you are not limited to 4 GB, so a larger swap file and additional memory might speed things up for those that tend to leave various windows open. Again, if pages are hard faulting, increase physical memory.

Depending upon your income level and other qualifications you might be able to file your taxes for free. Start at your states tax web site and see if there is a free file option that you qualify for (NY has it as do many other states). (Note that it is still to early to get information for this year in NY. E-File information whould be available by the end of January, and I usually don’t receive my W2 until the end of the month, although two of my kids already got one of two.) If not, you can go to the irs.gov website see if you qualify to free file your federal taxes.

If you purchase your tax software note that some states (including NY) prohibit charging additional fees for state e-filing with federal e-file purchases. This is a rather recent development (I don’t remember it from last year) so you might want to check your states tax site.

Although I try to match up Susan’s list with Windows Update, there are frequently a hand full of Windows Updates that don’t appear in Susan’s list. Would be nice if a cumulative list was available for browsing or download.

Running Vista Home Premium SP3 with Office 2010 and 2003 (Prefer Word 2003 and generally use Excel 2003 – both are easier to navigate from the keyboard. Also use Outlook 2010 and occasionally Word & Excel 2010 if that is where the document originated, but hate having to use the mouse a lot instead of the keyboard.

By the way, what happened to .net 2 recommendation to wait? I did not see it on the latest list so tried to install it, got errors (80242fff) and failed to install.

I tried Soluto after it was first mentioned in WS. At first I thought that the information and adjustments would be useful, but the Soluto recommendations were too aggressive and would have disabled some of the utilities that I have come to rely on. Tweaking it was time consuming and really did little to shave my login time. I also did not like the fact that it would roll back the changes if I went through the uninstall procedure. At the time it did not answer the question of what would happen if I installed other software after Soluto and then uninstalled Soluto. So I uninstalled it. I prefer to use Microsoft’s Sysinternals autoruns to monitor autoloads and make adjustments.