Microsoft Configuration wizard is one tool you can use to improve your systems boot time. This tip utilizes the msconfig utility.

1. Go to Start»Run(WIN+R) and type “msconfig” , the Microsoft System Configuration Utility will pop up.

2. Select the “STARTUP” tab. This will show you a list of programs that will automatically start when your system boots and if the unnecessary ones are there your start up time is gonna increase a lot.

3. The trick here is to remove any unwanted entries from here.

Un-checking the programs is where you need to be cautious. Make sure that you don’t remove your systems sound driver, Graphics driver or other important programs. Almost all of the services can be removed actually. But if there are some programs provided by your graphics card, Sound card or your Laptop provider like DELL please make sure it won’t affect your systems working. You can easily figure out the other removed ones also by either looking at the name or the path. But here what stays checked is important. “igfxtray” can be removed (the tray icon for Intel graphic accelerator – present only for Intel boards with on-board graphics enabled) “igfxpers.exe” is related to graphics driver..

I have found that some programs are commonly present on most systems which can be removed from startup safely, they are

hkcmd : Intel hot key manager (it can be removed but Windows Hot Keys won’t work)
realsched : Real player’s memory resident service (some crap)
ctfmon : monitors the active windows and provides text input service support for speech recognition, handwriting recognition, keyboard, translation, and other alternative user input technologies
Yahoo***, Google***, Nero***, Acro*** are all tray icons which can be removed

After some experience you will be able to recognize viruses that add themselves to the startup list directly by seeing the name. For more on preventing viruses please read the Series .

Most of us browse through numerous web pages and save them if we find them interesting. When I am downloading the entire site I will use Winhttrack a very useful web archiving utility. But the problem with html pages is that the have an associated folder, even the mht files are not much of use also if you need to read the page later as an e-book. So what if we could save the web page as pdf

Thats exactly what PDFOnline offers. It has a plethora of options to choose from. they provide online conversion of doc, jpg, htm and many more files to pdf. But you need to signup inorder to put there convert to pdf widget on your blog, which enables a visitor to save your page as pdf to their system. Users are able to convert pages to pdf just by clicking a button as the one shown here.

If you need the page exactly as you saw it on the net than you may try saving the file in Microsoft Web Archive format.

**Tips :Although this is nice and convenient I am sad to say that the formatting is pretty much ugly. What you’ll get is almost a screen shot and then also some image including backgrounds are missing. So for now save the page as .mht **

The most functional and convenient tool in Vista is the instant Search Box. Here is how to get your own instant search box on for Windows XP. Launchy is a small software that provides XP with an instant search bar like Vista.

Launchy Indexes the folders you specify and hides itself in the background. When you press a hot key (The Hot Key can easily be configured) the search box is shown. As you type in the characters, the matching results are shown.

Pros :

Easy Searches, inbuilt Calculator, Web search enabled, Easy configurable Hot Key, Indexes all file types, Low on memory, cool looks, skins can be easily made

Cons :

Nothing yet noticed

Specifications :

Mem. Usage (RAM) : 7708 kb
(Virtual) : 45792 kb(may vary)

File formats supported:

Almost all

Price : Free

Download Launchy here

**Tips : The skins can be made by anybody, all you need to do is take the Skins folder and check out the ini file there. It explains how the background image of the skins behave. Also many search engines can be added to it. This can be read from the web site **

This is the simplest and slowest tip which will actually improve the boot time only by a small amount.

1 . Take Microsoft “System Configuration Utility” by typing “msconfig” in the RUN () dialogs (Start»Run).

2. Select “BOOT.ini” tab from General,SYSTEM.INI,WIN.INI,Services and Startup tabs. There will be a check box NOGUIBOOT enable it.

This will disable the Windows Splash Screen (an animated loading indicator with the windows logo on black background that appears just before the welcome screen) that appears every time you boot. This will improve the boot up time a little bit.

2. Goto Start»All Programs»Startup and delete all the programs that you don’t want at start up. (A powerful function is provided by msconfig but I’ll deal with in detail later.)So try this out today itself and tell me if you have any suggestions or doubts…

Warning
Enabling NOGUIBOOT will make the boot-time messages not to be shown. This means if an ERROR checking has been scheduled you will not see the dialogs that says “An error check has been scheduled press any key to cancel it:” also if you use third party tools to format your hard drive during boot time there can be a problem.

Watching your blog pass all the validations like html, xhtml, css etc. is actually satisfying for everybody. W3Schools validator tool is the most popular one used for the purpose. Many Blogger users should have found that however hard they try there will still be errors if the strict check is enabled, Why?

1. For Blogspot : If you know your page well and look at the errors shown you will come to the sad conclusion that you will NEVER be able to make your page valid..It’s because even if write your posts and template in valid xhtml the Blogger parts – Navbar, iFrames and attributes used with them are not properly xhtml formatted. You can do nothing about them.

There are some common errors among these especially if you come from an HTML background. Many of the attributes used in HTML are invalid if we use xhtml strict mode.

2. For all : If you are a blogger or a web page developer there can be errors in your document. Of course if you are only starting you may not be able to resolve many of this. So following are the main errors and the suggestions to rectify them.

General

Always use small letter for all tags and attributes. ie use <img src=” ” alt=” ” /> instead of <IMG arc=” ” ALT=” ” />

<META>

Use small letters as well as close the tags your meta tags should read
<meta name=”name” content=”content” />

<a href=”"></a>

Always use title attribute for <a tag <a href=”http://sample.com” title=”my title”>Link Text</a>

<img>

Empty tags are not allowed in XHTML. so you need to use <br /> for <br>, <hr /> for <hr>, <img /> for <img>

width=..,height=..,

It is always better to use <style=”width:xx px; …”> The usage is as follows
<img src=”PATH” width=”xx” border=”mm”>>. for this try using <img src=”PATH” style=”border: toppx rightpx bottompx leftpx; margin: toppx rightpx bottompx leftpx; width:xxpx;” alt=”Alternate text” /> (you can use negetive numbers for margin border etc.. and also px can be changed to cm centimeter, in inch etc..)

alt=”TEXT”

Never forget to put alternate text, the text shown in image disabled browsers. (always use some text that best describes you image)

<sctipt language=”JavaScript”>

Use <script type=”text/javascript(VBscript)“>

<style>

be sure you use <style type=”text/css”>

<u>

This tag for underlining can’t be used (it works still) use <font style=”text-decoration:underline;”>

Most common errors – from W3Schools site

not using </li> or other closing tags, usage of empty tags like <br>, not using alt in images etc…

So check your web page for errors and go care fully through the result page so that next time you edit your page the error wont repeat.

Video Lan Player (VLC) is a one of a kind Audio and video player. VideoLAN is a software project, which produces free software for video, released under the GNU General Public License. It has got everything one would ever want in a media player. It is free, supports a seemingly infinite formats of Audio and Video, has live streaming support and so on. It can act both as an http server as well as an http remote. You can read more about VLC at VLC documentation

The list of Media types supported by VLC could not be said in a paragraph, it is an exhaustive list. But you can see it here – which all Media formats are supported by VLC. From my experiments with VLC it has never once crashed, nor have I met with a file which I could not play on VLC. The team at VLC has done an amazing job and it will be nice if you could donate for this really nice project.

Pros :
Free ware under GNU License, almost all media types supported, can fix errors in Video streams and files, plays files including mkv and flv, plays DVD files on HDD with subtitles, plays mp4files with subtitles, a large database of help and support. VLC is available for almost all platforms
Cons :
has some problems dealing with Media Video wmv files during skips, skipping not possible for Flash video files flv.

Price : Free

You can downlod VLC media player for Windows from here, and VLC for MAC here. There are separate packages for different Linux flavors which are available here.