Software

How to find out what add-ons are slowing down Firefox

Dave Farquhar Software , , ,

Here’s a site worth bookmarking. Add-ons are the big thing Firefox offers that the other browsers don’t, but it sometimes comes at the price of performance. And I guess Mozilla is tired of that, so now they’re testing add-on speed and publishing the results at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/performance/ .
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Taming Robocopy

Dave Farquhar Software, Windows

A prolific commenter mentioned yesterday how much he dislikes Robocopy. Perhaps worse than I dislike Windows 7. And the nightmare scenario he describes sounds plausible. I’ve trashed directories with errant copy and xcopy commands, and I know I’m not the only one. And those are comparatively very simple.

I suppose one could put training wheels on a tool like Robocopy, but to me, that defeats much of its purpose. When I play the Robocopy card, it’s generally because I have a copy task that potentially will take several hours–if not days–and it’s going to run into errors, and I want it to just do the best it can, without asking me any questions, so I can walk away and let it chew on the problem for however long it takes.

I won’t say Robocopy is one of those things that can make or break a career, but it’s certainly allowed me to swoop in and save the day on several occasions, and that’s always good. So here’s how.
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Spinrite 6: An overdue review

Dave Farquhar Software , , , , ,
Spinrite 6: An overdue review

Spinrite 5 is an old friend. It got me out of some jams in the late ’90s, but as new versions of Windows that defaulted to NTFS came into my life, Spinrite 5 ceased being an option, since it only worked on FAT-formatted drives.

I’ve had occasion now to use Spinrite 6, its successor, which still runs under old-fashioned MS-DOS but now understands a multitude of filesystems. Other than that, it hasn’t changed much: It’s an obsessively thorough repair and maintenance tool for hard drives.

SSDs will eventually make Spinrite unnecessary, but there are still a lot more conventional hard drives being shipped each year than SSDs. Read more

Ways to speed up an aging laptop

Dave Farquhar Hardware, Software, Windows , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Yesterday Lifehacker did a feature on laptop tweaks and upgrades, that basically came down to reinstalling the OS, adding memory, and upgrading to an SSD. All of those are good things to do of course, but there’s more you can do. I posted a response there; I’ll elaborate a bit here, where I have more room to do so.

There are tons of links here to previous content I’ve written; optimizing aging machines is a recurring theme for me. I’ve been writing on that topic for 11 years now.

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Google Chrome uses too much disk space

Dave Farquhar Software, Windows
Google Chrome uses too much disk space

Sometimes, Google Chrome uses too much disk space. There’s an easy explanation for it, and there’s also an easy fix to reduce Chrome’s disk usage. Here’s how.

When Chrome updates itself, it doesn’t always delete the previous version(s). If you have a 3 TB HDD, that doesn’t matter much, but if you have an SSD, it sure does. Especially if you have a 120 GB or smaller drive, which many inexpensive systems do.
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Fix host hijacks or host file hijacks for free

Dave Farquhar security, Software, Viruses, Windows , , , , , , ,

Sometimes your antivirus will tell you that you have host hijacks or host file hijacks, but not elaborate on how to fix them. Some people charge way too much to fix them. Here’s how to fix host hijacks or host file hijacks for free.

A former classmate’s computer suddenly stopped letting him get to search engines. Aside from that, his computer appeared to be normal.

Fortunately he had some antivirus and antispyware software installed, so he was able to run it and get a relatively clean bill of health, but he still couldn’t use Google or Bing or Yahoo.

One of the pieces of software he ran mentioned a host hijack or hosts file hijack, but didn’t offer to clean it up without ponying up some serious bucks.

That was enough to tell me how to clean it up though. You don’t have to buy anything. Read more

Increasing memory cache to improve Firefox performance

Dave Farquhar Software , , ,

I read today in Lifehacker about disabling Firefox’s disk cache and increasing the memory cache, as an alternative to putting the disk cache on a ramdisk. The trick can work, depending on the types of sites you visit. But the two aren’t quite interchangeable. The disk cache stores compressed images and (I believe) html. The memory cache stores uncompressed pictures for fast rendering, and no html. Content stored in one isn’t necessarily stored in the other. Read more

Um, no, software shouldn’t have kill switches or time bombs in it

Dave Farquhar Software, Windows , , , , , , , , , ,

So,  ZDNet is advocating that Microsoft use a kill switch to render existing Windows XP computers non-functional. Then he relented and said maybe an expiration date would be sufficient.

John C Dvorak is attacking the idea, with good reason. Dvorak is right.
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Fixing weird printing problems in MS Word

Dave Farquhar Office, Software ,

Some of my coworkers deal with long documents that give our printer fits. “Fits” meaning that 60-page documents take 30-45 minutes to print if they don’t abort in the middle with a printing error.

The documents in question contain a cover sheet, scanned in at high resolution, and usually have some large charts.

I devised a workaround. Read more

Outlook send button is gone? Here’s the fix.

Dave Farquhar Office, Software , , ,

“My Outlook send button is gone,” one of my coworkers told me. Microsoft wasn’t much help. The relevant knowledge base articles said the e-mail account not being configured causes that problem. Except it was. He could receive and read mail just fine, he just couldn’t send anything out.

Ultimately we ended up deleting his mail profile to fix the missing send button. Read more