Add Defragment to a Drives Right-Click Menu

July 29, 2008 by Paul Spoerry Leave a Comment

Direct from HowToGeek comes instructions on adding a simple registry tweak that will allow you to add “Defragment” to the context menu on any drive when you right click it.

After manually applying or downloading the hack, you’ll have a new item on the right-click menu for your drivesâ€¦

Which will start up the command-line version of Disk Defragmenter (after accepting the UAC prompt)

Manual Registry Hack

Open up regedit.exe through the start menu search or run box, and then browse down to the following key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell

Create a new key under shell called “runas”, and then set the (Default) value to “Defragment”. If you want to hide this menu item behind the Shift key right-click menu, then add a new string called Extended with no value.

Next, you’ll need to create a key called “command” and set the default value to the following, which is the command to run defrag with the default options but show verbose output.

defrag %1 -v

You can alternately choose from one of the other defrag switches here if you’d like.

Downloadable Registry Hack

HowToGeek provides a downloadable registry hack to do all of this for you. Simply download, extract, and double-click on either AddDefragToDriveMenu.reg (for the regular menu) or AddDefragToExtendedDriveMenu.reg (to hide behind the Shift key). There’s also an included removal script that will remove either one.

Vista – reclaim space after Service Pack 1 install

July 16, 2008 by Paul Spoerry 1 Comment

When you install Windows Vista Service Pack 1 on your computer (or even if you install a copy of Vista that already has SP1 on it), the installer will not remove the older versions of Vista files from the hard drive. This is because the older files may be required in case you decide to uninstall SP1 later from the system.

SP1 added some needed tweaking and really helped stabilize Vista, why not reclaim some disk space by removing all the older Vista files?

There are no manual steps involved. Just open your Windows command prompt and type vsp1cln.exe (short for Vista SP1 Cleaner). It takes less than a minute to execute.

*vsp1cln.exe is added to your Windows Vista System folder after you install Vista SP1. The command window will display:

Would you like to continue? (Y/N): y

Performing Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Disk Clean-up…

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Desk Clean-up completed.

This will makeÂ Windows Vista Service Pack 1 permanent on this computer. All the older files are deleted now and your hard disk has tons of extra space for other important files like videos and photos.

You computer need not be connected to the Internet for running the Vista SP1 cleaner tool. And you wonâ€™t be able to remove Windows Vista Service Pack 1 later.

View Original Article Here

Disable Vista Auto Tuning to Prevent Browser Slow-Down

June 27, 2008 by Paul Spoerry Leave a Comment

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

Hide language updates on Vista (or hide optional updates)

May 9, 2007 by Paul Spoerry Leave a Comment

If you’re like me, you keep your system up to date and patched. It’s good practice, but a bit annoying under Vista (at least under Ultimate Edition) because even if you’ve applied all the updates you need you’re constantly shown that you have 14 optional updates. Turns out they’re all language packs… I’m pretty sureÂ I don’t need Chinese or Dutch language packs installed.

It turns out it’s pretty easy to hide them from view. Open Windows Update and click on View available updates. You’ll see something like this:

Notice all the languages that you’ll never have a need to use. All you have to do to hide these updates, is to right-click on an item in the list, and choose â€œHide updateâ€ from the menu.

Pretty easy eh? Now when you go to Windows Update you’ll see what you expect: “No new updates available…”. If you ever want them back thereâ€™s a â€œRestore hidden updatesâ€ link on the left-hand side of the screen that will let you put them back in the list.

How to access Administrative Shares on Windows 7 or Vista (C$)

May 9, 2007 by Paul Spoerry 5 Comments

I rarely use network shares on my computers. Ok, I have a few setup for the family to use if they need to copy something from one computer to another and a share for our network storage. Other than that I have always favored using admintrative shares. These don’t show up in network neighborhood, but can be accessed by using \computernameC$. The “$” at the end of a share name makes it invisible to network browsing, but otherwise it is a regular share. As the name implies, administrative shares are only available to those in the Local Administrators security group. This is turned off by default in Vista. Bummer, it’s so handy… I guess that’s part of the big security push. *shrug*

To enable administrative shares you gotta make a registry change. Click on the orb and in the search box type ‘regedit’ and hit enter. Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionPoliciesSystem. Add a new DWORDÂ called “LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy” and give it a value of 1. Reboot and yer done!