ReadyBoost comes to the Rescue

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

How to Kill processes from Command prompt(cmd)

I’m sure you are familiar with the traditional way to kill or end a process in Windowsusing Task Manager. This method is effective but not nearly as fun as killing a process in Command Prompt. Additionally, killing processes in Command Prompt provides much more control and the ability to end multiple processes at once.

All of this is possible with the TaskKill command. First, let’s cover the basics. You can kill a process by the process ID (PID) or by image name (EXE filename).

Open up an Administrative level Command Prompt and run tasklist to see all of the running processes:

C:\>tasklist

Image Name————PID——Session Name——Mem Usage

===========================================================

firefox.exe—————-26356——Console———-139,352 K

regedit.exe—————24244——Console————-9,768 K

cmd.exe——————18664——Console————-2,380 K

notepad.exe————–17364——Console————-7,892 K

notepad.exe————–24696——Console———–22,028 K

notepad.exe————–25304——Console————-5,852 K

explorer.exe—————2864——-Console———–72,232 K

In the example above you can see the image name and the PID for each process. If you want to kill the firefox process run:

C:\>Taskkill /IM firefox.exe /F

or

C:\>Taskkill /PID 26356 /F

The /f flag is kills the process forcefully. Failure to use the /F flag will result in nothing happening in some cases. One example is whenever I want to kill the explorer.exe process I have to use the /F flag or else the process just does not terminate.

If you have multiple instances of an image open such as multiple firefox.exe processes, running the taskkill

/IM firefox.exe command will kill all instances. When you specify the PID only the specific instane of firefox will be terminated.

The real power of taskkill are the filtering options that allow you to use the following variables and operators.

Variables:

STATUS

IMAGENAME

PID

SESSION

CPUTIME

MEMUSAGE

USERNAME

MODULES

SERVICES

WINDOWTITLE

Operators:

eq (equals)

ne (not equal)

gt (greater than)

lt (less than)

ge (greater than or equal)

le (less than or equal)

“*” is the wildcard.

You can use the variables and operators with the /FI filtering flag. For example, let’s say you want to end all processes that have a window title that starts with “Internet”:

C:\>taskkill /FI “WINDOWTITLE eq Internet*” /F

How about killing all processes running under the your username(savio) account:

C:\>taskkill /FI “USERNAME eq savio” /F

It is also possible to kill a process running on a remote computer with taskkill. Just run the following to kill notepad.exe on a remote computer called Savio:

C:\>taskkill /S Savio /U RemoteAccountName /P RemoteAccountPassword /IM notepad.exe /F

To learn more about taskkill run it with the /? command just like any other Windows command.

Installing Xp on a Dell Inspiron 1525

Every Dell Inspiron 1525 laptops that we get in the market comes with Windows Vista alone and few people find it difficult working around with Vista and they need Windows Xp to be installed desperately as i was. The main problem in migrating from a Vista to a Xp in Dell is that the XP cd that we have wont have the driver for the SATA hard disk.

There are 2 solutions to this.(Will tell you the hard one first).anyways before deciding to migrate to Windows Xp, better have a backup of all you r data and also download all the necessary drivers for Windows Xp from Dell’s support page

1.While downloading all the necessary drivers, dont forget to get the SATA driver for the hard disk,embed the SATA driver alone with a bootable XP disc and then burn it. You can use nLite to embed a data to the Bootable disc s data and then make a bootable disc.

I know this would confuse everyone.So let’s go with an easy one

2.People thos can play around with the BIOS can do this, press F2 while booting which takes you to the BIOS screen and you can find an option SATA in the menu.Change the SATA mode to ATA(previously it will be AHCI).Save the settings and ther you go . You can use an ordinary bootable Windows XP cd for installing XP in your machine

After installing Windows, Install all the drivers and keep in mind to install the bluetooth driver atlast.Some machines might not accept the bluetooth driver if installed first or in-between.

Please get back if you have any queries.

AT&T's iPhone 3G S pre-orders already sold out

Bad news for folks hoping a pre-order would save them from that yearly camp out in front of their local Apple Store: iPhone 3G S pre-orders have sold out, and folks who are making new pre-orders are being told that they'll have up to two weeks to get a phone. AT&T customers who do already have pre-orders in still have to line up at 7AM to nab a phone, but at least they've got a guaranteed slot if they show up, while the rest of the world will have to battle over remaining stock when Apple Stores open at 8AM and AT&T stores open to general customers at the same time. Looks like we might get a good riot or two out of this.

Apple to charge for redownloading apps from the App Store over the air

If you're on an iPhone right now and you see this picture here, you probably have an overwhelming feeling of doom in the pit of your stomach right about now -- or at least you should. Our tipster noticed that this message appeared while redownloading Google Mobile -- not the end of the world, since Google Mobile is free and all, but it's a strong hint that Apple will at least be giving devs the option of charging every time their app is redownloaded over the air, even to the same device from the same iTunes account. We've seen the message ourselves, only with free apps so far, but it's definitely something that could end up making the ownership experience a little more expensive in the future. Good thing for the 32GB iPhone 3G S, we guess, where you'll never have to delete a single app in your life if you don't want to -- but regardless, it's extraordinarily lame move on Apple's part if it ends up staying in there.

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ASUS: "Our goal is to provide products that are better than Apple's"

ASUS might have launched the netbook era with the original Eee PC and followed up on that with wave after wave of successfully more innovative designs like the Seashell, but that's not enough for vice chairman Jonathan Tsang, who says the company's goal is "to provide products that are better than Apple's." No pulling punches here! According to Tsang, ASUS spends very little on marketing, instead preferring to spend the majority of its budget in engineering products so innovative consumers are forced to take notice. We don't know if that strategy will actually work -- especially since true competition with Apple would have to involve software, not just hardware -- but we will say that it's clear ASUS is doing everything it can to drive the industry forward, not just lying back and copying rivals like MSI and Acer. That's all thought-provoking enough, but there's more: Tsang also says ASUS has a motion-controlled game console that provides better tracking than the Wii sitting on the shelf because content deals are "complicated." Same with an ebook reader. "We don't have the chicken, so cannot have the egg." Well damn -- and we really like eggs, too. Hit the read link for the full interview

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Find My iPhone is live, totally found our iPhone

We wouldn't really say we "have it together" when it comes to remembering where we put our keys / phone / small children, so Apple's announcement of the Find My iPhone service for MobileMe users came as quite a relief. The service just went live, and with a quick toggle of a preference pane in iPhone OS 3.0 the phone is fully prepared for all sorts of lost and found scenarios -- along with acting as an incredibly intuitive (if pricey) stalking mechanism. Find My iPhone works exactly as advertised, giving us a fairly good location estimate from within our lead-lined underground fortress, and sending annoying messages to the phone complete with sound, even when the handset is switched to silent, though unfortunately the sound is a sort of sonar ping that strikes us as incredibly difficult to locate, unless of course our phone is taken by whale. The only other problem is that both the location function and the message service took a couple minutes to track down our iPhone -- not a deal breaker, but we don't know what the hangup could be. After the device is pinged, a confirmation of the event was sent to our MobileMe email address. A live, enthralling video demonstration is after the break.

Researchers create nanotube memory that can store data for a billion years

Researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley have developed an ultra-dense memory chip that is capable of storing data for up to a billion years (besting silicon chips by roughly... a billion years). Consisting of a crystalline iron nanoparticle shuttle encased within a multiwalled carbon nanotube, the device can be written to and read from using conventional voltages already available in digital electronics today. The research was led by Alex Zettl, who notes that current digital storage methods are capable of storing mass amounts of data, but last just decades, while, say, some books have managed to last nearly a thousand years, though the amount of data they contain is quite small. The new method, called shuttle memory, is based on the iron nanoparticle which can move back and forth within the hollow nanotu. Zettl believes that, while shuttle memory is years away from practical application, it could have a lot of archival applications in the future. There's a video after the break, hit the read link for more tiny details.

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