What did you do to customize Windows, and how did you do it? I’m thinking of things like removing those little arrows from shortcut icons (using TweakUI).
- fdisk
- delete primary dos partition
- save partition table and exit
- drop in RedHat 7.2 disc1
- answer a few questions
- let installer run
- insert RedHat 7.2 disc2
- let installer run
- answer a few more questions
- RUN LINUX
that is the ONLY good windows tweak… unless you want to talk about sawmill, kde, or gnome.
ok… I’m a dork
Redhat?
Worst distribution around. Real geeks use SUSE or Debian.
REAL geeks don’t use a distro.
<----- Owned.
I forgot to answer the OP. The only real tweak I use when I’m on my windows box is TweakUI to automatically clear my document, run etc. history lists. Also to make sure Windows never runs scandisk on boot. I’ll screw up my hard drive if I want to, dammit.
James
bah… I used to have distro loyalty, now just so long as it’s linux I’m pretty happy with it… they each have pros and cons, I’m currently running redhat because it’s just plain easy to install (I’m lazy… computer science is the art of constructive laziness afterall).
I use it as an example here for that specific reason, anyone could install it.
besides the kernel you’re running is more important than distro. and we all know you’re going to modify the hell out of it after the install
CPUPriority = 1
ConservativeSwapFileUsage = 1
Setting the swap file to a fixed size
But my MOST FAVORITE tweak is
Faster CPU + more memory
Using msconfig to disable startup items. It’s the first thing I do on a new computer.
Tclock…easy way to mod the task bar, start button, and clock…
hammer, chainsaw, fruitcake.
My favorite tweak was upgrading to WinXP. WOOO! Support for more than 256 MB RAM!!!
I got rid of window animations with TweakUI on my old computer - the thing where the window seems to grow out of the taskbar (or shrink into it if minimizing it). It annoys me, I like the window to instantly be where I want it.
I also got rid of the auto-scandisk. I run scandisk fairly regularly and on the rare occasions when I’m forced to shut down improperly I want to get back on ASAP in most cases.
So what does this do, and how would one go about doing it?
Fight my ignorance!
Naughtysig–
forgive my ignorance, but what are you talking about? I’d love to modify task bar, start button, clock, but please elaborate on “tclock”
CPUPriority: Basically, give the foreground application a few more CPU cycles per time slice. See here for more info and some other registry edits
ConservativeSwap: Windows 98 is designed to begin paging out memory to disk once the memory is about 40% used. If you’ve got 128MB or more, this is pretty inefficient. ConservativeSwap (set in the system.ini under the [386Enh] section, IIRC) changes it to a more win95 type of memory management, which uses more physical memory before paging out. Microsoft warns that you may experience a drop in “overall” system performance, but I’ve never known that to be the case. YMMV.
Lastly, if you right-click the “My Computer” icon, and select “Properties”, select the “Performance” tab, and hit the “Virtual Memory” button, you have two options:
-
Let Windows manage my virtual memory (Recommended) {or something to that effect}
-
Let me specify my own virtual memory settings
This is where you can specify the size and location of your swap space. If you let Windows do it, it’s constantly changing the size of the swap file, which eats up a lot of cycles accessing the disk, etc. Changing it to a fixed size cuts down on a lot of thrashing. I think I set mine to either 256MB or 512MB, I can’t remember which.