Software Archives

Home » Software » Page 10

How to move your temporary files to a ramdisk

Dave Farquhar Software, Windows March 20, 2012December 6, 2015ramdisk, TEMP, TMP

Moving the rest of your temporary files to a ramdisk provides a number of performance benefits. Program installations proceed noticeably faster, and fewer files written to your system disk means less fragmentation, less maintenance for an SSD, and, most likely, longer SSD life.

Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.

dfarq.homeip.net

A Firefox ramdisk profile in Windows

Dave Farquhar Software March 19, 2012April 22, 2017Click Finish, firefox, ramdisk, Task Manager

I’ve been using Dataram’s excellent free ramdisk program for several months now and highly recommend it. On some machines, I install Firefox to the ramdisk and move the profile there. But the biggest benefit comes from putting the profile (not just the browser cache) in the ramdisk. Storing the profile in a high-speed, near-zero-latency ramdisk solves virtually every Firefox performance issue. Here’s how to set up a Firefox ramdisk profile in Windows. Read more

Dave Farquhar

dfarq.homeip.net

How to make persistent headers in Excel

Dave Farquhar Office, Software March 13, 2012May 17, 2017excel, excel spreadsheet

My boss and I are compiling a huge Excel spreadsheet that summarizes everything our organization has ever done. It’s as big of a pain as it sounds. What makes it worse is having to scroll all the way back to the beginning to view the headers. The solution: make persistent headers in Excel.

The trick to making a persistent header that shows all the time, even after scrolling, hides in the View tab in Excel 2007.
Read more

Dave Farquhar

dfarq.homeip.net

Customize Firefox before it hits the ground on a new PC

Dave Farquhar Software March 5, 2012firefox, Keep Firefox, malware, Malware Domains, ramdisk, Vacuum Places

Here’s a nifty-looking program: Firefox Addon Maker, which allows you to create customized Firefox installer packages.

This is helpful if you install Firefox a lot, whether in corporate or home settings.
Read more

Dave Farquhar

dfarq.homeip.net

Libre Office grows up some more

Dave Farquhar Software February 21, 2012November 3, 2025firefox, Libre Office, Open Office, ramdisk

Libre Office 3.5 is out. I need to look at it. My big beef with Open Office all along was that it made current hardware, whatever it was, feel like Office 97 running on a 486. Or perhaps a Pentium-75.

They’re saying all the right things now. Lots of new eyes looking at the code, reviewing the code, dropping obsolete code, streamlining it and making general improvements. Netscape 4.5 was a bloated mess too, but once the Mozilla team got some fresh eyes looking at it, the situation improved. Eventually they had to break the browser out into what became Firefox, but they had the freedom to do that.

And in the meantime, I suppose if it’s too slow, you could throw hardware at the problem. 8 GB of RAM costs $40 or less right now. Carve out a ramdisk of 1-2 GB and install Libre Office in that, and it’ll load pretty fast. It’ll eliminate any I/O-bound bottlenecks.

Dave Farquhar

dfarq.homeip.net

Quick and dirty OCR, included with Office 2003 and 2007

Dave Farquhar Software February 20, 2012Microsoft Office, OCR

At work we have a document scanner that outputs files to PDF and e-mails it to us, but the PDFs are really just full-page images mashed together as a PDF because the scanner doesn’t have OCR capability.

Here’s how to extract the text using Microsoft Office 2003 or 2007. It’s imperfect, but here’s what you can do with the tools you already have.
Read more

Dave Farquhar

dfarq.homeip.net

Vacuum Firefox automatically

Dave Farquhar Software February 13, 2012November 22, 2016firefox, Keep Firefox, Vacuum Places

I’ve discussed vacuuming Firefox before to make it run like new, but it’s not something everyone is exactly comfortable doing. I found an extension called Vacuum Places Improved that allows you to vacuum Firefox automatically.

Most importantly, in the options for the add-on, you can make it run, say, every 50th time Firefox starts. That way, the vacuum process happens transparently–at the expense of every 50th load being slower, the database gains automatic maintenance. I’ll gladly trade occasional slower load times for improved performance.
Read more

Dave Farquhar

dfarq.homeip.net

An ode to Word macros

Dave Farquhar Office, Software January 31, 2012August 14, 2016john c dvorak

Last week, John C Dvorak wrote about technical duds. And it’s unfortunate about what happened to Word macros, because at times they can be extremely useful, and not terribly difficult to use, either.

Here’s my favorite macro–a method to join single lines. You’ll wonder why it never became a standard feature in Word. You won’t use it often, but when you need it, you need it badly.

Dave Farquhar

dfarq.homeip.net

Get Acronis for free

Dave Farquhar Software January 20, 2012

There isn’t much time left, and I apologize, but for the rest of the day, you can get the home version of Acronis for free. Details at the link. It’s not a bad idea to be familiar with Acronis, since it’s so widely used by businesses. Getting it and using it on your home PCs will get you some relevant experience. I’m not sure what the differences are between the home and business versions (I haven’t seen the home version yet myself), but using it will put you in position to figure it out. And you can’t beat the price, right?

Dave Farquhar

dfarq.homeip.net