XPC Design » Tricks

Slow Windows Load Time

Ryan — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 17:03:07 +0000

I’m trying to solve a problem where my computer at work takes forever to become usable after logging onto windows.

Edit: For lazy people, the end result was mapped drives were slowing boot time significantly. The following tweaks helped only with the delay between logging in and seeing the taskbar.

First thing I tried was various performance tweaks from TweakXP.

What I’ve applied so far:

Related to the issue but wasn’t possible for me to use:

Speed-up log-in tremendously! (The field he said to remove was already cleared for me)

What I’ve done on my own that didn’t solve the issue:

Defrag
Registry Repair
Registry Defrag
Disabling unneeded startup apps with msconfig

End result:

I no longer have to wait so long staring at the wallpaper before windows starts to load. However I judge performance on how soon it takes to open firefox as soon as I can click on it, and it still seems pretty slow. I definately sped up the login process, but the opening firefox part is slower than it should be still. I have a feeling it has to do with my ATI drivers or something. I will try the bootvis tool that I heard about to see if that tells me what’s slowing things down.

Update:

Upon further investigation I noticed that mup.sys was using up the most boot time. I researched it and determine it’s related to mapped drives. There is one share that I have mapped to my PC and it connects to a computer that is always offline in the mornings when I turn on my computer. Bootvis has referenced that share specifically and told me that it was slowing the boot time down.

Also it said the Acrotray (Acrobat Speed Launcher I believe) took a chunk of time away from startup as well.

Useful hMailServer Tips & Tricks

Ryan — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 17:35:57 +0000

Tricks

Spam

Dealing with Problems

Very large mailbox crashes hmailserver

Work on sites before the DNS has rolled over (by editing the hosts file)

Ryan — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 21:48:04 +0000

Important: This does not work if you are behind a proxy, which includes antivirus firewalls and such.

Right click on the hosts file in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc
Go to properties, turn off “read-only“
Open the file using Notepad or any text editor
Add a line to the bottom of the file with the IP and domain
When you are done, don’t forget to turn read-only back on again

Ex.

200.200.200.200 thedomain.com

Use the IP of the new server and then the domain you want that IP to resolve to.

Now you can browse to that domain and it will resolve to the new IP even though the DNS hasn’t been updated yet.

Speed up Magento by ~235%

Ryan — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 19:10:50 +0000

What:
There’s a feature called “gzip” that’s installed by default on most web servers. Modifying your site to make use of it can really speed up the performance.

How much faster?
Try the quick and easy mod_gzip tester by WhatsMyIP.org. Just enter the URL and it will tell you how much faster it would be.

How to enable it for Magento

One of the drawbacks of Magento is currently its speed if default configuration is used. There are certain ways of making it run faster. The best one is to enable GZip compression by changing .htaccess file a little. You just need to uncomment part of the code. In my case, the speed increase was exactly 235%.

Find the following lines in your Magento .htaccess file and replace them with the following code.

(You just have to uncomment the lines so it looks like the following)

############################################
## enable apache served files compression
## http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#gzip

# Insert filter
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

# Netscape 4.x has some problems…
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html

# Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip

# MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# Don’t compress images
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary

# Make sure proxies don’t deliver the wrong content
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary

Source: inchoo.net

UPDATE: You need to uncomment the following as well:

############################################
## enable resulting html compression

php_flag zlib.output_compression on

Thanks to Reno for pointing this out! It made a huge difference for me!

Replacing your main hard drive is actually really easy

Ryan — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 00:08:08 +0000

I recently had to swap out a hard drive on a perfectly good computer here at work. I needed to do this quickly, so I found out about Acronis True Image. This program lets you make a bootable disc that lets you clone one hard drive to another (so you can then remove the old and leave the new in), or you can backup in windows and then restore via boot cd.

The boot cd restore process is quite nice. You can even browse your network to find the backup files on another computer! So if you were thinking of upgrading your Windows (or whatever) drive with a Raptor or something, this would make it extremely painless.

Easy Windows Explorer Tweak

Ryan — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 01:27:22 +0000

You can make Windows Explorer start in whatever folder or drive you want! I always found it really annoying how it would start in “My Documents”, which after a while has so many subfolders in it that you have to scroll and find My Computer, and the drive you want to get to, etc.

This is EASY.

Right click on the shortcut you use for Windows Explorer and go to properties.
In the “Target path:” field on the “Shortcut” tab, add the following to the end of whatever is there: /e,c:\

Your end result should look something like this:

%SystemRoot%\explorer.exe /e,c:\

Note: Change the c:\ to whatever path you want Windows Explorer to start at.

Backup solution with WinRAR and a batch file

Ryan — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 00:10:04 +0000

I wanted to make the perfect manual backup solution in a batch file, so here’s the code. Just make a file called backup.bat and paste this text into it. You might have to change a few of the file paths and stuff though.

What it does:
- Offers to make an exact copy of what files exist now, or lets you continue and add new files that aren’t in the backup archive yet (assuming it’s you’ve ran it before)
- Lets you pick a file name once at the top rather than having to type it in multiple places.
- Uses a password protected archive.
- Will make another copy the backup file to another location by default for added safety.

Note: I think I had to make a %path% variable (or whatever those are called) to the WinRAR folder, and I don’t exactly remember what I did. It was really easy though.

@ECHO off
SET varFileName=EnterFilenameHere

cls
:start
ECHO *********************************************************
ECHO *         Start a fresh backup? Press Y or N.           *
ECHO *                                                       *
ECHO *      You should do this every once and a while,       *
ECHO *                but not all the time.                  *
ECHO *********************************************************
ECHO.
set choice=
set /p choice=Choice:
if not ‘%choice%’==” set choice=%choice:~0,1%
if ‘%choice%’==’y’ goto yes
if ‘%choice%’==’n’ goto no
ECHO “%choice%” is not valid please try again
ECHO.
goto start

:yes
ECHO ******************** Fresh Backup ***********************
ECHO.
DEL D:\Backup\”%varFileName%”.rar
goto end

:no
ECHO *********************** Update **************************
goto end

:end
ECHO.
ECHO                Cougar Design Backup Wizard
ECHO.
ECHO *********************************************************
ECHO *                                                       *
ECHO *        Choose your password for the archive.          *
ECHO *                                                       *
ECHO *********************************************************
ECHO.
rar a -u -r -rr10 -rv20 -s -hp -m1 D:\Backup\”%varFileName%”.rar @C:\Backup\”%varFileName%”.lst
ECHO.
ECHO *********************************************************
ECHO *              Time to make a 2nd backup!               *
ECHO *********************************************************
ECHO.
xcopy D:\Backup\”%varFileName%”.rar E:\Backup\”%varFileName%”.rar /y /i
ECHO.
ECHO *********************************************************
ECHO *                       Complete!                       *
ECHO *        This will close when you press any key.        *
ECHO *********************************************************
ECHO.
PAUSE

Shorter nested IF statements in Excel

Ryan — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 20:31:37 +0000

This code checks to see if A1 equals the letters K, H or L.

Instead of using:

=IF(A1="K",TRUE,IF(A1="H",TRUE,IF(A1="L",TRUE,FALSE)))

You can use:

=IF(OR(A1="K",A1="H",A1="L"),TRUE,FALSE)

As you can see, it’s a lot shorter and makes a lot more sense. Especially if you need to add more to it in the future.

Easy stylesheets with basic PHP

Ryan — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 18:58:48 +0000

Create a file called stylesheet.php and link to it in you’re page. Then play with this code:

header(‘Content-type: text/css’);
// Colour scheme

$primary    = "#44749d";

$secondary  = "#c6d4e1";

$tertiary   = "#ffffff";

$quaternary = "#ebe7e0";

$quinary    = "#bdb8ad";

?>
BODY {

background:  echo $tertiary ?>;

color: #000000;

margin: 0px;

}