Use twitter? Use a command launcher app like SlickRun or Launchy? Well here’s a handy URL to make a command to quickly post an update.
If using SlickRun: http://twitter.com/home?status=$W$
$W$ means to put parameters URL encoded there. I’ve it mapped to a magicword of “tweet” so can send an update in SlickRun with: tweet wuzzup world!
See it in action:
Computer running slower than when you got it? Feels like it takes forever to boot up? Weird unexpected stuff happening? Feeling sluggish? Here’s how to safely get your computer feeling like new again.
This article is designed for computers running Windows 7 (or newer). If you’re still running Windows XP or Windows Vista, read below as to why it’s about time to upgrade.
Here’s what’s going on… to be productive you need a clean work environment with the tools you need at hand. It’s like having a clean office with a desk, chair, and the few tools you need, right? Right. Unfortunately, as you’ve been busy using the computer and having ‘visitors’ (aka programs) to your office, it is becoming more and more cluttered to the point it’s counter productive. Many of these these visitors are leaving behind a trail, their cousin Vinnie, to keep an eye on your business (aka startup apps or viruses). Most of the time you don’t even notice this happening like you would in a real-life office, instead they’re just piling up behind the scenes. Even fairly legitimate programs and websites will cause troubles if not protected against.
Many Most of the “Free PC Scan” or “Speed My PC” tools like maxmyspeed.com, stuff advertised on TV, websites that state they’ll disinfect your computer, and the such are outright scams. They prey on people’s fears and actually infect your computer with more viruses, malware, Trojans, and adware. Wired Magazine had a good article about two entrepreneurs that built a ‘successful business’ off this practice: How Two Scammers Built an Empire Hawking Sketchy Software
Generally a computer has slowed down because too much stuff has gotten into it. So you need to remove stuff to get it back to optimum performance. Just adding another “clean up” program isn’t going to help. In fact, your computer already has some good cleanup programs on it. You just need to take a few moments to use what’s already available. The second part is keeping your computer secure and protected from bad programs getting on it in the first place. Both are covered in this guide.
Is meant to be as comprehensive as possible with all the little tips and tricks I’ve learned over the last 20+ years helping friends, family, my own PC, and managing an IT department at work. It’s written in a style I hope helps an average computer user, like my uncles, but with some breadth in techniques that will hopefully provide a new angle or two to PC professionals.
While there are many things that can be done to help improve your computer’s speed, I’ve found just these two quick easy steps make the largest difference in most cases.
Beyond the above quick tips, here is the more compressive list of techniques to clean up the computer and protect against bad stuff from getting in.
![2012-04-28_2334[1]](http://noahcoad.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/2012-04-28_23341.png "2012-04-28_2334[1]")
Power Settings: High-Performance
Your computer isn’t going to get fast or stay fast if it isn’t protected from malware sneaking into the computer in the first place. Here are the essentials:
If you’re really looking for a more drastic change, improving your computer’s hardware of course helps. I’d certainly recommend applying the above before making hardware changes as if the computer isn’t clean already, just throwing more hardware at it may not make a difference. A computer has three main hardware components affecting speed:
Just by playing it safe from the start by using Windows 7 can keep the computer in a clean optimal state. The basics are: disable startup items, uninstalling crapware, have automatic updates turned on, install Microsoft Security Essentials, use a clean browser like Google Chrome, and be mindful of not letting questionable programs onto your computer. While there are more scams and viruses than ever before, good computer maintenance is also easier and keeps a computer in top shape better than ever.
Here are additional resources if you’d like to learn more…
If I’m missing anything or you have another favorite tweak, let me know in the comments.
I only use my laptop and am frequently traveling, suspending the laptop, or using a MiFi hotspot ($$$ over 5GB) and so don’t want to download torrents, or even run a torrent client, on my primary machine. Instead I’d prefer to be able to select torrents at anytime from my primary machine, and have a remote server downloads the files. My remote server is at home with a high-bandwidth fiber connection and is running 24/7. This way wherever I’m at, I can select torrents from my laptop and they’ll be downloaded fast at home.
There are a few very small helper apps I created for this. They use the Microsoft .NET 4 runtime, so please install that first if not already on your computer.
Download these supporting apps and source here: TorrentTools.7z
For .torrent files, the process is relatively simple with Dropbox, uTorrent and just a small tool.
Setup Instructions:
That’s it. Now when you click a .torrent file link in your browser the remote server will start downloading it. See it in action (opens an about one minute video as a link)…
Many torrent sites use the newer magnet uri scheme instead of .torrent files. This is a little trickier to offload than just the .torrent files, but another tool or two makes this easy. In this case we’ll use the same general technique above, but put the magnet links into files that Dropbox will move over and then have an app that opens the link files on the remote server.
Setup Instructions:
I’ve been using this technique for awhile now. I’d be very interested in learning if you’ve tried this or done something similar. Please leave a comment if so. thanks
Update (5/18/2012): Wil Wheaton shows another good example of the usefulness of bittorrent for entirely legal purposes
Microsoft recently updated their Team Foundation Server Power Tools to have a work item search box!
A few months back Brian Harry (MS Technical Fellow and Program Unit Manager of TFS) asked me if he could include my Search Work Items VS addin in the TFS Power Tools. It’s awesome seeing it here now!
A little back story… I originally created the addin while we were working on VS 2008. I had heard the passion our head of Team System at the time Andrew Kass talk about the need for providing some level of work item search. It wasn’t something our VSTS team was able implement in a more fully supported way at the time. So that evening in about two hours I coded up this little vs addin and put it up on MSDN. It was the #1 download for about a month and has continued to be popular. Thanks to the community on CodePlex others have kept it up to date.
Differences… now I will say that my addin does have a few differences
References
In conclusion, a big thanks goes out to the TFS team for asking me and putting the feature into the MS sponsored Power Tools package. I hope more TFS users are able to be more productive because of it. :)
Found this poster in a local restaurant, wow, this is my life creed! I immediately purchased one for my home office. Here’s the poster on allposters.com. #OCDftw
This is a new blog I’ve started as an outlet for political, religious, NSFW, and other random bits and bytes. If you’re interested in keeping tabs on the other half of my mind not suited for the mainstream, this is where it’ll be. » Zulu Hour
My laptop hard drive died yesterday, just before heading out of town on a business trip. When drives have died in the past it takes me about 20 hrs to recover up to 80% normal efficiency. This involves installing Windows on a new drive, downloading/installing drivers and >100 applications/tools, and recovering files (from the last file-copy backup). Then there’s the time to re-configuring the OS, apps, tools, dev env, etc. Not to mention the frustration of loosing files since the last backup.
But not so this time! I’ve been using Windows Home Server (WHS) which automatically backups my PC every night and recovery was a breeze! For the first time ever I was able to get back up and running in about just 1 hr. WHS does nightly ‘bare metal’ backups which it can restore the entire system to a new drive. This is the first time I can say in my 20+ yrs w computers that I’ve had a backup system fully restore my system perfectly. The time savings and frustration alone was well worth the cost.
What had turned me onto WHS in the first place was the file storage capabilities. The ability to add any number of drives to a single storage pool with redundancy and not requiring RAID (not in WHS 2011 I’m told). I didn’t expect the backup to work as advertised, but it sure did.
p.s. This post was written just after the HDD crash but was posted later. I now use Windows Home Server exclusively in a Hyper-V VM which is working out fantastically well.
Shouts go out to Scott Hanselman for turning me onto the HP MediaSmart Server and this post Virtualizing Windows Home Server On Hyper-V for the encouragement to move my WHS to a Hyper-V environment (highly recommended).
I find it particularly useful to be able to copy a file, folder, URL, or search term to the clipboard and then with one hotkey, open it up. Here is the script I use with AutoHotkey to assign Win+O to open whatever’s in the clipboard.
First it checks to see if the clipboard contains a file, folder, or program that exists on disk. If not, does is it appear to be a URL? And if still not, just Google the clipboard contents.
http://coad.net http://facebook.com http://noahcoad.com
Creating quick little instruction screen cast videos is so easy now these days, particularly with free awesome tools like Jing (click, record, publish to URL… easy). And they’re incredibly powerful in helping people out and recording bug repros. But it’s also so far too easy to make crappy bad videos that are confusing or boring. It just takes some conscious awareness of the process to make a great video.
Here are my tips after a few years of recording videos. My thanks goes out to the speaker training I received at Microsoft, to the many colleagues that have produced excellent videos, and for their providing feedback on my attempts.
These tips are for meant for short recordings of generally less than 5 min. Captures designed for single takes of relatively simple topics. I use Jing which is just super easy and free (upgrade to Pro for improved audio quality), but Camtasia works just as well (but is costly and far more complex). You can of course spend much time polishing in post-production using tools Camtasia’s zooming, annotations, editing, etc, but that’s not the point of these tips. They’re focused on making the recording itself.
Some examples:
The Basics
Advanced Tips
Once getting a grasp on the basics above, continue on with these…
Verbally tell the listener what to click on as you click. Even though it should be obvious because you’re doing it in the video, telling the user brings their attention to it. Like “We click on ‘File’, ‘Save As’, then type the name MyApp.config and hit enter.”I’m usually too distracted by other work to remember to kick-off some music in the background. Usually because it’d mean launching iTunes, waiting for it to load, finding a playlist to start, and kicking it off. So I’ve created a single global hotkey to instantly load iTunes and start playing music. Here’s how:
My full script: MediaKeys.ahk
Related posts: Hotkey to Play/Pause/Next iTunes Tracks, Hotkey to Rate an iTunes Track
p.s. Another option is to just launch Pandora with a hotkey.
If your keyboard doesn’t have media keys (like my MacBook or fav Dell keyboard), then its nice to have simple global hotkeys to play/pause a track, move to the next track, and maybe even increase/decrease volume.
Below is the script that will assign these keys:
AutoHotkey makes this real easy! Just add this to your .ahk AutoHotkey file:
; Media Keys AutoHotkey Script by Noah Coad, started in 2008, http://coad.net
; #=Win ^=Ctrl +=Shift !=Alt
; Volume Up & Down, Win+Alt+Up & Win+Alt+Down
#!Up:: send {Volume_Up}
#!Down:: send {Volume_Down}
; Media Pause/Play, Win+Alt+Space or Win+Alt+Left
#!Space::
#!Left::
Media_Play_Pause::
IfWinExist, iTunes ahk_class ITWindow
{
ControlSend ahk_parent, {shift}
sleep 100
ControlSend ahk_parent, ^{space}
}
else
{
Suspend On
SendPlay {Media_Play_Pause}
Suspend Off
}
return
; Media Next, Win+Alt+Right
#!Right::
Media_Next::
IfWinExist, iTunes ahk_class ITWindow
{
ControlSend ahk_parent, {shift}
sleep 100
ControlSend ahk_parent, ^{right}
}
else
{
Suspend On
SendInput {Media_Next}
Suspend Off
}
return
Here is my full script: MediaKeys.ahk
Related posts: Hotkey to Rate an iTunes Track, Hotkey to Instantly Play Music in iTunes
This evening I was playing around with creating some custom ringtones for my iPhone. Here are the dozen I made: ringtones.7z
Just download, unpack, and drag & drop the .m4r (AAC MP4 audio) files into iTunes and they’ll show up in the Library > Ringtones section and sync to your phone.
I used GoldWave to edit the sound to the right length and this PC World article for the tip on using iTunes to convert MP3 into AAC.
Do you rate your tracks in iTunes? Ever find it a slight pain to swap back over to iTunes while working on something important just to rate a playing track? Here’s how to set up global hotkeys to rate a track from anywhere (Windows XP or newer). Like Win+Alt+1 for one star, Win+Alt+2 for two, etc.
That’s it! Then with just one keystroke you can rate the current song from any app without switching over to iTunes.
My full script: MediaKeys.ahk
Related posts: Hotkey to Instantly Play Music in iTunes, Hotkey to Play/Pause/Next iTunes Tracks
It’s very handy to have a PowerShell script automatically load when PowerShell starts up to configure your environment, like an AutoExec.bat in the old DOS days. Here’s how I have mine set up.
That’s all there is to it. One of the reasons for putting this out there is so that I can now reference it from other posts too. :)
