Tricks for Living with Vista

[Djfurball]

Trick #1 - Stopping Stupid Search Indexing of Secondary Storage

I have a second disk drive that I only use for FRAPS recordings. Each one is 4gb and encoded in whatever AVI format FRAPS defaults to. Every stupid time I try to open my FRAPS drive, Vista tries to index it. This makes disk access on that drive friggin' crawl, so I can't just open any of the recordings to view them.

The fix: Hit Computer icon. Right-click on the drive (or folder) that you use for storing all this stuff. Click the "Customize" tab. Change it to "All Items" (mine was set to "Pictures and Videos"). Hit Ok.

Got any other tweaks for making Vista suck less?

[Thomphoolery]

Some things I did while FRAPSing on Vista...

1) Disable disk indexing entirely (can be done from the same 'Customize' menu)
2) Turn on write-through caching for my drive (might need some research to find that option...can't remember...)
3) Set the processor affinity on FRAPS.exe to '1' and the processor affinity on WoW/Ventrilo to '0'. WoW isn't very multithreaded anyway, and this cuts down on the L0 cache collisions when context switching.

Not very helpful, I know. hehe

-j

[Djfurball]

Trick #2 - "Everything Vista Came With is Shitty"

- Internet Explorer Really Sucks- Get Firefox (www.mozilla.com) or Google Chrome (www.google.com/chrome).
- Windows Media Player - The worst of all. Get VLC Media Player (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/) for playing videos and music from *any* format you find. For my actual media collection, I use iTunes (www.apple.com/itunes)
- Windows Explorer - I hate the builtin file manager. Anyone have suggestions? I'll even pay for one.
- Transferring Files between computers - I can never get the authentication and sharing to work across my LAN consistently. I use FileZilla (http://filezilla-project.org/) on the Vista machine to set up an FTP server locally that I can connect to without any issues at all.
- Windows Defrag - This one sucks too. Get MyDefrag (http://www.mydefrag.com/) and run Fast Optimize every few days.
- ZIP files - I use 7-zip (http://www.7-zip.org/) to open zip files because the builtin one stinks and Winzip/Winrar are too naggy about registration. Zip files aren't complicated!
- Notepad - Textpad (http://www.textpad.com/) is simple, but has a few extra features to make small text file tweaks far easier to handle.
- Other Stuff - I love Beyond Compare (http://www.scootersoftware.com/) because most of my backups are just lazy copies of folders or files. It quickly lets me see what I actually have stored everywhere.

[Djfurball]

2) Turn on write-through caching for my drive (might need some research to find that option...can't remember...)

Control Panel -> Device Manager -> Disk drives -> (Your drive) double click -> Policies -> "Optimize for Performance" and "Enable Write Caching". Not sure what the other option there does, but I don't have a UPS, so I probably wouldn't touch it.

[FizzyMyNizzy]

Windows 7 FTW

http://promotions.newegg.com/Microsoft/WS07/Features.html
 

[Djfurball]

Yeah, I got a free upgrade to it when I ordered my PC, but the discs won't even ship until November. So ... I'm stuck with Vista for awhile longer.