Menekali  Just another IT Blog.

You may know that Windows XP is not the best operating system when it comes to memory management. People often resort to restarting the computer, in order to clear certain areas of the memory. This however is not necessary. With just a minutes worth of time, you can create a shortcut, that will save time, and headaches.

Simple follow the following instructions, and execute your new shortcut when you’re computer is feeling groggy on the memory side of things.

1. Right click on desktop, New -> Shortcut
2. Copy/paste this piece of code in the location box: %windir%\system32\rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks
3. Save the file

There you go! Whenever you feel there may be some memory issues with your computer, try clicking on your new shortcut.

Allow Windows XP to load the kernel, and drivers into memory!? Would have thought?! Oh yes.. .it’s possible. And this is how:

Guide:

1. Open the regedit tool (Start -> Run -> regedit.exe )
2. Use the navigation in the left and go to HKEY LOCAL MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management
3. Double click the DisablePagingExecutive attribute, and put 1 in the decimal value field
   This will make the drivers and the XP kernel run in memory.
4. Double click the LargeSystemCache attribute, and put 1 in the decimal value field
   This will improve performance of the kernel
5. Double click the IOPageLockLimit attribute. On some later versions of windows XP that doesn’t exists, so if this is the case you’re done. Otherwise you have to put to the hex value : 4000 for pcs with 128 mb ram, 10000 for 256 mb ram and if you have more put 40000. This value specifies how many bytes can be used for I/O operations in your system.

There you have it. Restart, and notice an improvement quickly in your computers speed.

This is a pretty widely known ‘trick’, but here it is for those of us who may not know. This trick will ‘hide’ a .rar (or any compressed file format for that matter) in a jpeg file. The file size of course will be relative to whatever the jpeg image originally is, plus the size of the compressed file. But it can be a cool trick to hide files on your own personal computer.

1. Get your .rar file and put it in the same directory as a jpeg picture (c:\hidden is a good place to put it)
2. Open up a command prompt by clicking Start/Run and typing “cmd” and click ok.
3. In the DOS window, type “cd c:\hidden” to navigate to the folder
4. Type “copy /b input.jpg + input.rar ouput.jpg
   (where input jpeg is the picture you want to show, input.rar is the file you want to hide and output.jpg will be the name of the new combined file)

That’s it! You can double click the new file and it will show it as a picture, BUT… if you open it with winrar, you will see the files contained.

☺ Some of you may prefer the ‘charmap‘ application in windows, but personally I enjoy using the alt commands when I want access to a specific alt character. Now of course you won’t memorize all of these, bu typically you can memorize quite a few, and utilize them whenever the need arises. Of course you utilize these by simply holding down on your alt button, and then corresponding code. Give it a try! ™

Codes just after the break.

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 The release candidate 1 for Microsoft Windows Vista has been release by Microsoft. Follow the links below. I personally prefer Windows XP Pro at the moment, and only interact with Windows Vista at work. I have however installed it on a machine at the office, and can say, it is so far stable, and there are a few interesting improvements. Removal of the search in the start menu was a bit of an odd one though. You be the judge.

Download: Microsoft Vista Service Pack 1 RC1

Chris Pirillos  Reaction: One, Two

Most peope believe that in order to upgrade Windows XP Home , to Windows XP Pro you need an upgrade disk to do so. Most often than not, people have a retail disk lying around, come upon a computer with Windows XP Home, and think they need to go out and buy an upgrade disk. This is not the case. You can turn a retail disk, into an upgrade disk that takes OEM keys.

This is how:

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Recently, a number of our Windows XP computers at the office (all of them actually) suddenly stopped sending out SMTP traffic, and stopped authenticating secure websites. This meant no one could log into Yahoo!, MySpace, Facebook, Ebay, Lexis Nexis , or any website for that matter that required SSL traffic or authentication.

It was really perplexing as it did not effect our Windows Vista computers. Now I had done all the research I could on the matter. I tried to dig the deepest depths of the internet and Google to find an answer.

Nothing I found worked. I cleared the cookies, checked our ciphers, reverted back to a date before it occurred, used firefox (we all used it anyway), made router tweaks… everything I could do, and everything everyone else had done just wouldn’t work.

In the few forums I had found information on this at, I noticed after a while people had given up, or just stopped responding. A lot of the times it was something simple like Nortons blocking the network traffic. I also checked my port 443 on our server, and double checked our UDP traffic. Nothing seemed to work! I was going crazy trying to figure this out!

Finally I fixed it though! And I think that this will work for many people who have sadly resorted to formatting their computers.

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 Microsoft has opened beta on a release canidate for Windows XP Service Pack 3. After promising the release in mid 2006, late 2007, and now first half of 2008 however, I  think we all deserve a little bit of informaton about the famed Windows XP Service Pack 3.

 If you’re interested in giving it a go, let me know what if any changes you do notice.