TechWhiz » Windows Vista

Partition Transcend external hard disk (Vista)

saurabh — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 17:45:25 +0000

Yesterday I bought a 320 GB Transcend portable hard disk. Well the actual storage space was roughly 300 GB. It came with a pre-installed software for managing the drive and had only one drive. The next thing to do was to partition the drive.

Preparatory Steps

Goto ‘Start–>Control Panel’.

Click on ‘Classic View’ in the left pan.

Open ‘Administrative Tools’ from the right pan.

Open ‘Computer Management’ from the right pan.

Windows Vista will prompt you to confirm. Click on ‘Continue’.

Double click on ‘Storage’ and then on ‘Disk Management (Local)’

You will be taken to ‘Computer Management’ screen. You can see the snapshot of your drives.

Delete Existing Partition

Right click on the drive and select ‘Delete Volume..’
You will be prompted for confirmation, click ‘Yes’
You will find the entire drive as Unallocated

Create New Volume from Unallocated Space

Right click on ‘Unallocated’ and select ‘New Simple Volume’.
You will be taken to ‘New Simple Volume Wizard’ window.
Enter volume size and click next to continue.
You can choose to select a drive letter for the newly created drive
Select the following options and click next to continue.
‘Format this volume with the following settings:’
File system as ‘NTFS’
Check ‘Perform a quick format’
Click finish to complete the process.
Repeat the process to create more drives

The required operation requires elevation

saurabh — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 14:57:22 +0000

I was trying to flush the dns cache on Windows Vista system, but I was getting an error.

This is a very common error when you try to execute commands requiring administrator privileges. The simplest solution is to run command prompt in administrator mode.

How to Run ‘command prompt’ in administrator mode?

Right Click on ‘command prompt’ and select ‘Run as administrator’
User Account Control will prompted for confirmation
Click on ‘continue’ and command prompt will start in administrator mode

Type ‘cmd’ in Windows Vista search bar
Press ‘Ctrl+Shift+Enter’
User Account Control will prompted for confirmation
Click on ‘continue’ and command prompt will start in administrator mode

Increase Virtual Memory in Windows

savio — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:40:41 +0000

You can easily increase virtual memory by following the steps below. Your virtual memory is important but before you alter your settings it’s best to find out more about virtual memory.

What is Virtual Memory?

Virtual memory is simulated RAM. When you have used up all your RAM, your computer will shift data to an empty space on the hard drive. The computer swaps data to the hard disk and back to your RAM as needed. When you increase your virtual memory you are increasing the empty space that is reserved for your RAM overflow.
Also having enough available space is absolutely necessary for your virtual memory and RAM to function properly. You can increase Virtual Memory performance automatically by freeing up resources in your registry. You may want to use a Registry Cleaner.

How to increase Virtual Memory?

In Windows XP

Click Start, and then click Control Panel.
Click Performance and Maintenance, and then click System.
On the Advanced tab, under Performance, click Settings.
On the Advanced tab, under Virtual memory, click Change.
Under Drive [Volume Label], click the drive that contains the paging file that you want to change.
Under Paging file size for selected drive, click to Custom size check box. You can enter the amount of memory you would like to reserve for Virtual memory by entering the initial and maximum size.
Click Set
When you are prompted to restart the computer, click Yes.

Note: To stop your CPU from constantly changing the paging file, set the initial and maximum size to the same value. For example, 500 and 500. The value should be at least 1.5 times more than your physical RAM. If your computer has 512MB of RAM increase the virtual memory paging file to 1.5*512= 768

In Vista

Click Start button Picture of the Start button
Click Control Panel
Choose System and Maintenance and then click System.
In the left pane, click Advanced system settings.
On the Advanced tab, under Performance, click Settings.
Click the Advanced tab, and then, under Virtual memory, choose Change.
Click Custom to change the Initial size (MB) and Maximum size.Same Note for Vista has to be followed.

Remember to choose the drive you would like to use to increase the virtual memory. In most cases it usually your C: Drive. You can set the initial size and maximum size after clicking the Custom size check box.Remember its better to keep the Virtual memory values the same.

Also having enough available space is absolutely necessary for your virtual memory and RAM to function properly.

Determine Windows uptime in Vista

saurabh — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 10:45:33 +0000

You might be interested in determining the amount of uptime that has accumulated since the last reboot of your pc.

Track uptime in GUI:

Open up ‘Task Manager’ by right clicking the ‘Taskbar’ and selecting ‘Task Manager’

Click on Performance tab and you will see the amount of uptime listed under the System section. Duration of uptime is shown as (h:mm:ss)

Track Uptime in cmd:

Enter ‘cmd’ into the search box in Windows Vista and hit ‘Enter’
Enter ‘systeminfo’ in the command prompt and hit ‘Enter’
It will show the date and time of the last system boot

For any query please send email to saurabh(at)techwhiz(dot)in

ReadyBoost comes to the Rescue

savio — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 10:12:03 +0000

ReadyBoost helps your computer by giving it more high-speed memory. If your computer is running low on RAM then it has to kick a lot of applications out of high-speed physical memory to the paging file on your hard drive.
This usually results in a big hit in performance and increased activity on your hard drive.ReadyBoost helps this situation by giving Windows an alternative to having to stick data into the slow paging file on your hard drive. Instead, ReadyBoost uses a USB storage device that is faster than a hard disk. This results in a performance boost because Windows will have a high speed alternative than using the slow paging file on your hard drive.

In order for ReadyBoost to work, it requires a USB storage device that meets minimum performance and space requirements:

1.The device must be at least 64 MB
2.The device must be USB 2.0
3.It has to be able to read at 3.5 MB/s
4.It has to be able to write at 2.5 MB/s

To get started using ReadyBoost, follow these steps:

1.Plug in USB storage device.
2.Go to Computer and right click on the removable storage device and select Properties.
3.If your device is compatible, you will see a ReadyBoost tab. Click on that.
4.Select Use this device and select the amount of space on it you want to dedicate for the ReadyBoost
system file.
5.Click OK and you are finished.

Note: This facility is available in Windows Vista and above