Data centres to off-centre opinion

The guys over at downloadsquad.com have a good list of free Windows utilities; here. They include, CD/DVD burners, network synchronisation, file transfer, image editing etc.

They’ve also posted a list of Systems Admin utilities here.

A friend recently complained about how long his computer took to boot each time he switched it on. When I showed him the Sleep and Hibernate modes he immediately changed the default settings so his computer hibernated when he pressed the power button instead of shutting down.

This is exactly what I do with my work laptop, and indeed is what I’ve been doing since 2001. I also use Sleep when I’m only going to be away from my computer a short time (e.g. lunch, or walking to a meeting with my lapotp).

Both sleep and hibernate save the state of the computer so that when you next turn it on (or “resume”), the computer carries on where it left off; no need to start everything from scratch.

Hibernate saves the state to disk then turns the computer off, so it uses no power. Sleep saves the state in RAM which needs some power to work, so a small amount of power is consumed.

These features work irrespective of what Operating System you’re running (Windows XP, Vista, 7, Linux [e.g. Ubuntu] and Apple OSX ). Some boot more quickly than others (OSX vs Vista for example) but none are as fast as resuming from sleep or hibernate.

The only word of warning: reboot the computer once in a while (for me, thats a couple of times/month) to clear out garbage left from crashed programs.

1. Clean, Partiton and Format the USB stick

Run CMD.EXE and type the following command. Note: This set of commands assumes that the USB flash drive is addressed as “disk 1″. Double check that by doing a list of the disks (type “list disk”) before cleaning it).

• diskpart
• select disk 1
• clean
• create partition primary
• select partition 1
• active
• format fs=fat32
• assign
• exit

2. Copy Windows DVD ROM content to the USB Stick

Type the following command to copy the Windows DVD content to the USB stick.

• xcopy d:\*.* /s/e/f e:\

3. Boot your computer from the USB stick & install Windows as normal

ChannelWeb are reporting that Microsoft has just released an update to Desktop Search. It will be made available on Windows Upate as a Recommended update sometime soon (recommended updates are downloaded and installed by default), but if you want to get it before, its available to download from the Microsoft download centre.

Desktop Search is builtin to Vista and is part of many MSN products (e.g. toolbar). You’ll know if you have it installed on XP becuase these will be an MSN butterfly search box on your toolbar as shown below;

You may not have realised, but the search functionality in Vista will find programs, internet favourites and more as well as documents. I typically launch programs like Word by clicking on the start pearl, typing Word and then hitting enter on the keyboard: much quicker than trying to find the icon in the start menu.