There is a way of clearing your system tray and getting a lot more resources: running msconfig.
To do this, click on Start, then choose Run, then type in msconfig. Click on the Startup tab. There you will see everything listed that could start up when the computer boots. Uncheck everything you don’t want to start. (If your system is anything like mine, you’ll be shocked & amazed at what’s in there.)
This worked like magic for me. I still have the tray up, but it has a lot fewer things in it, and my resources went way up.
Oh okay ! Now I understand the plan – thanks to you both CnoteChris and sailor.
Been eyeing that system tray for some time pantom. Thanks for that info, also.
BTW sailor – I might be getting my posters mixed up but was it you who suggested a procedure for editing the right click menu some while ago ?
It wasn’t me, but it’s easy to do. On mine, I have options for editing in Wordpad and in Notepad.
You have to edit the registry, so if you’re not comfortable doing that, don’t try.
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT is where all the context menu information is stored. It basically is telling windows how each file type is to be handled. You have to either edit a certain file type, or create a new one, then add the commands you want. What I did was to edit * which means my menus will apply to all file types:
[list=1][li]Double-click HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT followed by *****. You will see one key called Shellex. Ignore that. Make sure ***** is still highlighted then click Edit then New then Key. In the box that pops up, type shell. This tells windows that you’re giving that item a a shell command to perform on the file you use it on.[/li][li]Highlight shell, and create one key for each menu item you want to add. I added keys called notepad and wordpad.[/li][li]Under each new key, add one more new key called command.[/li][li]Now that you have the keys created, highlight the item you want to edit (my example will be wordpad). On the right side of the window, you’ll see (Default) and (value not set). Double-click (Default) and in the box that pops up, type Edit Using &Wordpad then press Enter or click OK.[/li]This gives the text you want on the menu, and the & tells Windows that the next letter should be underlined (defines a hotkey).
[li]Back to the left side of the window. Highlight the key called command that you created above. On the right hand side, double-click (Default) and type in “c:\program files\accessories\wordpad.exe” “%1” Quotation marks are required because of spaces in the names, and %1 should be in a separate set of quotation marks. Press Enter or click OK.[/li][li]Last thing: Find the key named Unknown. There is already a shell key there, so highlight it. On the right, double-click (Default) and type openas, then press Enter or click OK. This keeps your new menu options from being the default on unknown file types.[/list=1][/li]
When you’re done your new entries will look something like this (to the right, I put what you’ll see on the right hand side of the window as the (default) value when the item is highlighted:
**
+-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT
|
+-*
| +-shell
| |
| +-wordpad + Edit using &Wordpad
| | +
| -command + "c:\program files\accessories\wordpad" "%1"
|
+--*Lots of stuff not to touch*
|
+-Unknown
| |
| +-shell + openas
| | +
| +-openas +
| | +
| +-command + *Stuff not to touch*
|
+--*Lots more stuff not to touch*
**
Hope that helps.
Hi Joe, Well, your explanation was so clear I went into the Registry and had a good poke around (easy to do as I run Nortons Utilities) but then that phrase of yours kept coming back to me: “…if you’re not comfortable doing that, don’t try.”
It’s tempting to try but I just wouldn’t know what to do if it all went horribly wrong. I’m kind of surprised there isn’t a more idiot proof way to edit the menu given there’s so much drag and drop in Windows (but maybe there’s a good reason beyond my ken).
Anyways, sense prevailed. Thank you very much for your efforts to help.
If you’re going to go through all that trouble, why not partition the drive and give your swap file it’s own drive letter?
Mikah “one sentence posts are fun” W.
I mess with the register all the time and have never had serious problems but I know what I am doing. I am always amazed at the capacity of other people to mess up even the simplest things so I do not usually recommend others to hack the register.
Tangent: I told a friend he could do a minor repair to a cassette deck and you cannot imagine how he mangled the thing. He could not assemble the mechanical parts so he just forced them and bent them out of shape. The initial problem was nothing compared to what he did. I just do not understand having to explain “do not force the parts so you bend them completely out of shape or break them”.
Anyway, for opening files with different programs there’s a much simpler way which does not involve the registry. When you right-click on a file, choose “send to” and a bunch of programs appear. You can add programs there by putting the shortcut in the windows\send to folder. That way you can right click on a file and get different choices of what to open it with. This is safe as you do not touch the register.
i am reminded of a friend who deleted a whole bunch of system files just because he did not recognise the names. When I asked him why he would do something like that without knowing what he was doing he said: “Because you told me I could not do anything from the keyboard which would damage the computer”. Well, i know what I meant, but you can see people find infinite ways of doing damage. my advice now is “don’t do anything!”
Well, I tried to follow that advice about editing the right-click menu, but I skipped the part about assigning the actual commands, because I don’t want anything to really happen (unless someone can tell me how to make one of those little dialog boxes). I just want something in the menu that says “Blow up computer” just for laughs.
It didn’t work. I think I followed everything through step 4. Is that not good enough?
Wow. I can’t believe the level of help you can get on this board.
It should be enough. I just tried it and it worked.
I created HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT*\shell\blowup and set its default value to the name above, and it’s there.
Try something for me: Highlight the *\shell key and click Registry then Export Registry File, and post the contents of the file here. That way we can look at it.
Here’s mine:REGEDIT4
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT*\shell]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT*\shell\wordpad]
@=“Edit using &Wordpad”
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT*\shell\wordpad\command]
@="“c:\program files\accessories\wordpad.exe” “%1"”
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT*\shell
otepad]
@=“Edit using &Notepad”
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT*\shell
otepad\command]
@="“c:\windows
otepad.exe” “%1"”
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT*\shell\blowup]
@="&Blow Up The Computer"
For something fun and useless you can change the IE window title if you go to HKLM\software\microsoft\internet explorer\main\window title
I downloaded and installed Sisoft Sandra, but I just don’t know how to get it to show me what’s running on my cpu and how much memory it’s taking. I’ve gone to the Close Program box and ended almost everything that’s running, and right at this moment, with just two IE windows open, Rambooster says my cpu usage is over 80%.
I closed everything I can think of, and it’s still at 86%. What I really want I think is a report like Macs have, that tells you not only what’s running, but how much memory it’s using. Wouldn’t that also be some indicator of how much cpu time it might take?
Sisoft Sandra is a great program. I have an older version. Just click on “Processes Information” and it will tell you everything.
MSINFO32.EXE will also tell you a ton of stuff.
Make sure you are not confusing CPU usage with RAM usage. They are very different things.
Anothe great resource for diagnostics: go to http://www.pcpitstop.com and run their diagnostics. It tell you everything about your computer. In fact, in another thread, some time ago, the subject came up of IE not flushing the cache correctly and leaking disk space. I tried to find this place but for the life of me I could not find it. Now, by chance I went back. I just discovered about 90 MB of leaked disk space. I downloaded the script and cleaned it up. Also got a good tip on security for Outlook Express. PC world recommends it and so do I.
Hey sailor, that’s a great link ! Thanks for the intro to PCPitStop – I found it very useful. Cheers !
My pleasure. I went crazy looking for that link some months ago for another thread and couldn’t find it (I have many hundreds marked). Now I found it again by chance. I have saved in my disk the script to clean out the IE cache. If not, with my luck, the site will have disappeared next time I go looking for it.
What do you mean by “leaked disc space?” Thanks for the other tip.
>> What do you mean by “leaked disc space?”
Haven’t you ever noticed little puddles forming under your computer? That is disc space leaking our of the disc. If the leak is very small you may even not notice it as it evaporates within a day or two. Newer disks have better seals but certain brands are well known to leak disc space to the point where you can lose up to half of it in the course of a few months. I think it was Dusk who refused to acknowledge the problem in spite of it being common knowledge… 
Ok, time to get serious now. When a program uses RAM, it is supposed to release it when it terminates but some don’t and this RAM does not become available to other programs. This is called memory (or RAM) leak and the only way to release the RAM is to reboot. It could well be that this is the cause of your problem. A leaky program.
Similarly, Internet Explorer keeps a cache of internet files on disk. This is supposed to have a limiyt in size and IE deletes older files and releases the space. But IE has a well known and documented bug which does not release the space on disk even though the files are considered deleted. This means you have lost that space on disk as it is not freed for other programs. By running a corrective program you can release that space. I just freed about 90 MB on my hard disk. My IE cache is supposed to be something like 32 MB max.
Under System Properties you can change the role of the computer to a Network Server so it’ll run faster.
>> Under System Properties you can change the role of the computer to a Network Server so it’ll run faster
Handy, come on, you should know better than that. That setting controls strictly disk access and will not affect processing speed. My guess is you would not notice much difference unless your machine used disk access intensively. Details here. While it may help if the computer accesses disk intensively, it may hurt overall performance if the computer is used as a regular machine.
I do not think MS would just put something there which would enhance performance with no tradeoffs. In that case it would just always be set to that.
My advice is don’t touch that unless you know exactly what you are doing. My guess is you will not notice any difference in practical terms… Hmmm, in that case you might as well try it. OTOH, you might mess up something in the process. I wouldn’t touch it. OTOH, who knows … stranger things have happened…
After looking at some pages:
http://www.applica.com/support/kb/kb00041.htm
http://www.haddock.addr.com/role.htm
http://www.computechnet.org/TechPg1.htm
and the one I linked in the previous post, my guess is that if you have plenty of memory, it will not hurt (it uses a bit of memory) but I doubt it will help much to speed the computer as it just keeps some info of the last files you accessed on the disk. When Net surfing it should make no difference. If you keep going back to open the same files again and again, then you may see an improvement in disk access and even that would be minor.
Dave, you say your machine is extremely slow only when online? I am thinking in another direction now. Could it be a trojan or virus what is keeping the machine so busy? Is the connection slow? Maybe other stuff is being sent out that you are not aware of. Your machine could have been taken over. Do you know the basics for protecting yourself from this kind of stuff?
A great site to start is http://grc.com/default.htm I have mentioned them in the past. Their most interesting page Shields Up is down at the moment. (Hehe, I saved those pages to my disk so I still have them should I need them.) It seems they have suffered a Denial of Service attack (this page makes for interesting reading). Once Shields Up is on line again I recommend you check it out and do the tests and configuration. I have never had any problems with my computer being hacked. I do not run any antivirus and have never had a virus. Just common precaution.
I just checked and the first page of shields up! , where they test the ports of your computer, is down due to the attack but all the other pages with the info on how to correct it by configuring your computer are still there.
You can start at page 2: http://grc.com/su-explain.htm and at the bottom click to continue to the next page. The essential stuff is in page 5: http://grc.com/su-bondage.htm where it explains how to configure your network bindings. As I said, I have done it every time I have reinstalled Windows, and have never had a problem.