Resize Vista Desktop Icon to Mimick XP

I had been using Vista in my notebook with screen resolution of 1440x900, at that size, the desktop icons are not as annoying as many claimed it to be. However, today is a different story, using a CRT with screen resolution of 1024x768 attached to my notebook, the desktop icons looks like giants! And yes back in good old XP, the icons were okay.

To make Vista icon look like that of XP, right click on a vacant space on the desktop, select VIEW and then CLASSIC ICON. That would make them small just like XP. Note that only the icon size is changed, the space allocated for a normal Vista still stay. So to change this, again right click on a vacant space, select PERSONALIZE, then WINDOW COLOR AND APPEARANCE, then click the ADVANCED button. Change the drop down item list to ICON and change the size to 16 (minimum). Click OK and APPLY the changes... TAH DAH!!!

More Tweaks for Vista...and XP and Win7 and Linux

My never ending search to make our PC work faster and faster lead me to this TweakHound. Aside from the normal tweaks, one can find vital info also like free software and OS feature that is not of much use. The site caters to Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 and Linux

Error: "xxxxxx has stopped working" in Vista

It all started when I can't access my Lenovo ThinkVantage Access Connections software. Everytime I start it, Vista will give me "Access Connections has stopped working" and doesn't show any reason why. I had called the Lenovo hotline and for more than 45mins of downloading, reinstalling and rebooting, still got the same problem. The lady support agent promise to call me back for update as she doesn't have any clue why it is so.

On my own, I tried doing Windows Update only to find out that .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 won't install. And the rest of the software updates I downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads also gave me "setup.exe has stopped working".

The .Net Framework is my only clue and after checking, it turn out that the Framework 3.0 that is part of Vista is not enabled. I might had disabled it when I was trying to "tweak" my vista. Now that I enabled it from the Windows Feature (Control Panel>Programs>Windows Feature), I was able to update .Net Framework 3.5 SP1. And best of all, the ThinkVantage Access Connections is now working.

PS: I had been searching for solution regarding Access Connections sudden "stop working" error and it seems that there are so many users having the same problem. I hope my find can help them.

Understanding Vista's ReadyBoost

I guess many heard of Vista's ReadyBoost feature, if you haven't I suggest you check out Wikipedia's entry. Yup I don't want to go into the pros and cons of it. For now, I would just like to share Windows Vista's registry on ReadyBoost which I had found here.

In summary, ReadyBoost user can tweak the registry via HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE>SOFTWARE>Microsoft>Windows NT>CurrentVersion>EMDMgmt

(copied) Here are a few important parameter values:

DeviceStatus
2=ReadyBoost ENABLED
4=ReadyBoost DISABLED

CacheSize
Maximum Cache Size is 4090.

DoRetest
0=NO (box checked)
1=YES (box un-checked)

Here's the example:

CacheSizeInMB ffa (4090)
CacheStatus 1
DeviceStatus 2
DoRetestDevice 0
HasSlowRegions 0
LastTestedTime 1c74d5fcc5dca36
(128156188249279030)
PhysicalDeviceSize 1ebf (7871)
ReadSpeedKBs 12df (4831)
RecommendedCacheSizeMB ffa (4090)
USBVersion 20000 (131072)
WriteSpeedKBs daf (3503)

Note: always remember that a reboot is needed for any changes to take effect.

Why are we not getting full 480Mbps with USB 2.0?

I was curious myself on why the High Speed USB2.0 claims to transfer data at 480Mbps (mega-bits per second). A search got me into this post which comes with a short and simple explanation:

Are you perhaps worried that you are not moving data around at the claimed 480 Mbps. If so, you would be right. 480 Mbps is the bit data rate of all the communication that occurs over the USB bus. Out of that has to come a certain amount of house keeping - this is the USB host controller actually controlling all the hubs and peripheral devices, deciding what can talk and when. Of greater impact is that USB is implemented as a single bus, thus communication can only take place in one direction at any one time. The 480Mbps therefore represents the total data rate in *both* directions [1]. The remaining significant bottleneck is that the USB host port requires considerable processor support and if the processor isn't ready to service it, then it has to wait.

Contrast Firewire, where although it is only rated at 400 Mbps (in the common IEE1394a incarnation) the actual practical data rate is significantly higher because, being a dual bus system, you get 400 Mbps in *each* direction. Equally significantly the Firewire ports are able to operate more or less autonomously without processor support and thus don't have to wait. The housekeeping requirements are largely similar buthere is no need
to hand over data direction. In practice, the differences are usage dependant, but a 33% increase in speed is the sort of minimum that you can expect from Firewire.

[1] USB1 had another drawback in that communication with slow peripherals (1.5 Mbps) operated at that speed from end to end which had a major impact on the faster (12 Mbps) communications. USB2 solved this problem by requiring USB2 hubs to buffer the data and then up convert it to 480 Mbps for transmission to the host, and similarly for reception from the host.

Vista Tweaks

Since the day I had my Lenovo ThinkPad notebook which comes with Vista Business Edition, I had been trying to tweak the OS to speed things up. I had to admit, Vista is a lot slower than XP. My friends who are Vista users also ask of possible tweaks to speed up their machines. There are plenty of tweaks found in the internet, but I come across this HowtoGeek site which groups a lot of fixes and tweaks that might be very useful one day.

There is this Fix It site from Microsoft that shows how to fix Windows issues as well.