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How to Optimize USB Drives for Faster Performance

USB Drives are handy these days be it Thumb Drives or External Hard Disks. You can easily find a 4GB drive for less than $5. But the only thing that we really care for is, “speed”. If you are looking for a way to optimize speed for your USB Drives without actually upgrading to USB 3.0 (yes we now have USB 3.0 at 4.8 Gbps transfer rates). The best solutions available for this is to convert the File System to NTFS.

Though Windows Vista and Windows 7 allow you to format a drive with NTFS with ease, Windows XP only allows you to format with FAT and FAT32. However this simple trick you let can format with NTFS in Windows XP if you want to and access it at better speed (or probably compression too if you want).
Open Device manager (Right Click on My Computer Icon and Properties, Click on Hardware Tab and then device manager and open it.)

Search for Disk Drives in the Tree and Select your USB Drives Properties (Right Click, Do i need to say ?)

Under Policies Tab select Optimize for performance. Now this will allow you to format USB Drives with NTFS file system.

Now to format your USB drive, right-click the drive and select format. You will find the NTFS option there now.

There is a lot of advantage in using NTFS over FAT File System if you are using these drives for connecting them to computers. The drawback is other devices (mp3 players, DVD players) may or may not support.

How to protect your computer from autorun viruses

Autorun virus are widely seen these days here right in USB thumb drives, external hard disks, PCs and Laptops. People find it very difficult to remove autorun virus. Well I must admit that it is very difficult for a non IT person to work out for a solution for those viruses because they disable almost everything the task manager, registry, folder options and sometimes access to the internet as well. Before going into how to deal with these viruses, I would first like you guys to make sure your PC is well protected to avoid these viruses and malware.

Follow my guide and I can assure you that this will help you prevent autorun viruses to a great extent.

Update Your Protection Software

Well most of you use a paid antivirus I guess like Norton or McAfee. If yes them make sure that they are updated always. I see about atleast 20 viruses, spyware and malware definitions daily when I update so I recommend to keep things updated regularly. For those who can’t buy these we have many freebies for the rescue.

Disable Autorun for External Drives

External media like USB and CD/DVD Drives make use of autorun.inf file to start an application as soon as the drive is initiated. Most of the malware programs create a copy of this file to auto start themselves on the clients PC. And we never don’t need this feature do we? (Only if you are damn lazy to click your mouse)

To get to the configuration screen for this setting, go to Start Menu \ Run and type in:

gpedit.msc

In Group Policy window. You should select Administrative Templates \ System in the tree view:

You will see an item in the right side pane called “Turn off Autoplay”

Double click the item, and set the radio button to Enabled, and change the “Turn off Autoplay on” to All Drives.

Autorun Virus Removal Tools and Anti Spyware Tools

There are many Autorun Virus Removal Tools and malware removal tools available now for free. Personally I recommend these (based on their priority how much useful they are)

Super Anti Spyware (freeware)

Unhack Me (fully functional Evaluation)

Autorun Eater (Free)

Icons Arrangement

I arrange my icons by “Type” and then “sort them by groups” so I don’t click an application thinking it to be folder. Simple yet effective. Isn’t it ?

Right Click to Explore

Make it a habit to Right Click and Explore rather than double clicking the Drive Icon so that you don’t autorun a drive explicitly.

Search Through Files Quickly and Easily with Simple Search Replace

I always find the search inside files functionality in Windows XP very inconsistent and sluggish. And whenever I need to search for things in files I use this excellent freeware utility from RJL Softwares. Its called Simple Search-Replace. It is extremely fast and allows for the you to replace that text too .

Other features include backup support for changed files, command line support, case sensitivity, multiple file types, subdirectory support, result printing and saving etc. The software works great for all kinds of ASCII files like .txt, .html. .php or batch files or any text files in short. The software is just ~400KB compressed and around 4MB for a windows installer.

Click here to download Simple Search-Replace

Renaming Multiple Folders in Windows XP

Before you think any preassumption about this tutorial I would like to inform you that there can be no two folders having the same name in the same directory and If you want to rename Multiple Folders you need to put in same name for multiple folders now wht happens is the last folder is placed with the name provided by the user and the rest are renamed as name (1), name (2), etc but we can see the last folder does not have name followed by number that would be the only drawback in this tutoriall, now lets see the good side of this tutorial you don’t have to use any application to do this job which save your space 

Now lets take an example of few folders below

 

 

Select the Rename option 

 

Press Enter 

As you can see the only folder which is not been assigned a sequence number is the last folder of the selected items so this can be done manually.

How to Map a Drive Letter to a Local Folder in Windows XP

Almost all of us wants better accessibility to your documents or folders whatever. Though we try to keep our folder structure as much clean as possible but at times we need to have even quicker accessibility. Desktop Shortcuts are good to use but for those who want to keep their desktop clean (like me) then Mapping a drive letter to the folder is the best option.

Here we actually create a virtual drive with any letter that we want, that points to another location in any other drive. Quite Impressive right ? Yeah! Lets see..

Creating A Map Drive

Goto Start > Run > cmd.exe

Use the command subst <virtual drive name:> <local folder path> to map a new drive to the local folder. Here I have mapped the drive with the name X to a folder in my external hard drive.

subst x: j:\movies\

Removing A Map Drive

Use the command subst /d <virtual drive name:. The /d switch will delete the virtual mapped drive

subst /d x:

How to Change The Default Location Of My Documents Folder in Windows XP

This is one of the first task that I do when I install a fresh copy of Windows on My PC. I move the My Documents folder to another partition in order to keeps the main partition from running out of disk space and if I need to reinstall Windows without losing any personal data stored in the folder and no lengthy taks to create back ups.

Yes I use my back up drive as the default location to store My Documents.

How to Change The Default Location Of My Documents Folder in Windows XP

Okay so chainging the default location of the My Documents Folder in Windows XP is quite simple, all you got to do is follow this simple steps.. (more…)