PaulSpoerry.com

Windows Vista includes a feature, “Receive Window Auto-Tuning,” that you’ve likely never seen mentioned on your desktop, but which can cause noticeable drag and even crashing when browsing certain web sites or using some routers or other network hardware. If you’re noticing browsing glitches that only occur in Vista, the Wise Bread blog has a tip, pulled from PC Magazine’s recent issue, that explains how to turn off auto-tuning and skip the spinning blue circle of death.

To determine you current settings launch a command prompt as an Administrator (type “cmd” into the Start box, right-click on Command Prompt and select “Run as Administrator), then enter the following line:

netsh interface tcp show global

If the line Receive Window Auto-Tuning Level does not say “disabled,” enter this command:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=restricted

If that doesn’t help the simplest way to turn off auto-tuning is to enter the following line:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disable

That should do it, and turning it off won’t likely have any adverse consequences. You should notice the difference in browsing speeds immediately. If you find otherwise, turn it back on with:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=normal

Wordpress.com hosted sites have a stats plugin that most people find instantly useful. One of the biggest complaints heard is that once you take Wordpress to your own host… you lose the stats system. There is of course Google Analytics, and Shortstats… each are good in their own right. One of the problems with these systems is that they can slow down your site because they’re writing to a database.

Automattic created its own stats system, to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface.

Installing this stats plugin is much like installing Akismet, all you need is to put in your API Key and the rest is automatic. You can find your API key on your Wordpress.com’s profile page.

Once it’s running it’ll begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page. Less is more.

Finally, because all of the processing and collection runs on our servers and not yours, it doesn’t cause any additional load on your hosting account. In fact, it’s one of the fastest stats system, hosted or not hosted, that you can use.

Download the Stats Plugin here.

System restore is never anything I found particularly useful… in fact I don’t know that I’ve ever even used it. However, I’ve always left it enabled just in case. In Windows XP you could configure the amount of drive space System Restore uses via a slider control. No such control exists in Windows Vista and by default the sucker is configured to use up to 15 percent of your available drive space! Ok… 15% for something I don’t think I’ve ever used… I don’t think so.

To store restore points, you need at least 300 megabytes (MB) of free space on each hard disk that has System Protection turned on. System Restore might use up to 15 percent of the space on each disk. As the amount of space fills up with restore points, System Restore will delete older restore points to make room for new ones.

My laptop currently has a 60g drive and it’s allocated 5.136g of space. Of course this isn’t visible via the interface but to find out you can open a command prompt. Click on the start menu (or the orb as it seems to be called nowadays) and in the searc box type ‘command’, right click on the Command Prompt icon and select Run as Administrator. You’ll then see a DOS command prompt open up… type the following to see the current settings:

vssadmin list shadowstorage

What you’ll see is something like the following:

The command to set the amount of space used follows this syntax:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=[drive]: /for=[drive]: /maxsize=[size]

So to configure your drive to only use 2 gigs of space on your C: drive you’d to the following:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=C: /for=C: /maxsize=2GB

That’s it! You’ve recovered some space. If you find system restore useful I’d recommend not touching this setting, or at least not reducing it too much. But if you’re somebody like me who’s never used it you can easily reclaim some space.