Byte by Bite

Speed Up Windows XP

by Marv Dealy

An email tip provided a how-to and I decided why not, and turned off the “extra” visual effects and sure enough, my aging Toshiba Satellite now acts like an old dog on Rimadyl. As a bonus, my nice looking skins and buttons that came with WindowBlinds still work. You’ll find WindowBlinds at www.Stardock.com/products/windowblinds// by the way – it gives you many options to make your XP machine look, well, more Maclike or whateverlike you want.

To speed up your XP computer, first right click on My Computer, and choose Properties at the bottom of the popup menu. Choose the Advanced tab at the top right of the window that opens. Look for the “Performance” section, and click on Settings. The first tab that opens is called “Visual Effects.” The options are to let XP do what it wants, make adjustments to create the best appearance on your screen, adjust the computer for the best performance, or pick and choose which effects you want to keep and which to toss.

I chose the “Adjust for best performance” and enjoyed the new-found speed on the ‘ole Toshiba. Then I noted that the “common tasks” were missing from the folders, so I went back and turned that one back on (third from the bottom on the list).

The things you’re turning off include the ability for tool tips and menus to fade or slide into view; shadows to appear under the pointer, and menus; smoothing fonts on screen and more.

This suggestion comes from my dad’s cousin, Robert Dealy, who notes in his email that he left the last three boxes checked in the list. The point of this exercise is that you “lose” some of the eye candy that comes with XP, but I think the loss is minimal and the gain worthwhile.

Where’s the column?

Two recent emails ask pretty much the same question “how do I find your column online?”

First, from would-be reader Lee Isbell comes “I was trying to find your U-D column online. Is the column posted online, or just something from the links you wrote about?”

“If the column is there, please give a clue on how to find it.”

Second, from would-be reader faithful reader number (I forget) Jim Tuite comes a copy of an email he sent to this paper “Please consider adding a ‘Search by columnist or contributing author’ capability on your ‘Search this site’ page. Once again I've spent unnecessary time and frustration trying to find Marv Dealy's ‘Byte by Byte’ column. Each time I've tried this, by the time I DO find it I've clicked on so many possible links than I cannot remember the NEXT time how I found it THIS time.”

“From what I saw on the WesCom page, THEIR search capability looks simpler and may be more efficient than your ‘guess which category and click on any link on the left side’ approach.”

Faithful readers (now numbering in the dozens I hear) know that Jim’s reference to WesCom is to Western Communications, Inc., the owner of this newspaper. (www.BendBulletin.com)

Here’s how you find this column online: go to www.UnionDemocrat.com, click on the “Local” link to the left under “The News,” scroll down until you see the listing for Bite by Byte.

If the story isn’t listed (they go away after a few days) you can see it at www.Throck.com/articles.html within a week or two of the publication date. We're generally a little behind in getting these caught up.

And Jim, note that the column is called “Bite by Byte.” I’d suggested a slightly different version to Patty Fuller when we first met to talk about this column, but she opined that it wasn’t family friendly.

Jim also wrote with problems getting to a story to which I’d provided a link saying “I tried to get to the USB drive e-mail article you referred to in last Friday's [May 19th] column. I tried typing out the whole URL twice, then in frustration found your column online and copied and pasted it intact from ‘the source’ directly into my address bar. Every time, I got back the CNET response page below. Maybe it would help readers if your included the article title AND the URL so if one doesn't work the other would give some means of searching.”

The error page Jim got said we’re sorry but we can’t find what you’re looking for. I tried just now to use that same link and got part of the page to show up, but in the advertising banner at the top was a “server not found” message. I tried using CNET’s search feature to search for both the article title and the author, as Jim had suggested, and got error pages and “file not found” sort of responses. However CNET has their search feature set up, you can’t search the way we wanted here. I did see the page at the link mostly work, however, so on the off chance it dropped a letter in the editorial room, here it is again: http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-11319_7-6276187-1.html?tag=nav Note there is an underscore between the 9 and the 7. Might want to try an alternate browser to see if that works, too. In any event Jim, I’m emailing you the link in the hopes you can open that up.