Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

  Most people are blissfully unaware of all the absolute JUNK that gets run when Windows starts up, mostly due to registry entries installed by various programs, drivers, and what not. Much of this junk can be safely disabled. You can use Msconfig to do it. Here’s how: Hit the Windows Start button at the lower left side of your Taskbar. Click RUN, then enter “msconfig” and click OK. You’ll see four Tabs – the one you want is “Startup”. You can start disabling items by unchecking them. Some items will be automatically reinstalled on the next startup by windows or by necessary drivers. But you can disable a lot, and that means less memory usage and less resource-hogging. Here are the first two screens of mine:   You can see that I have most of it (from the first screen) and all of them (on the second screen) disabled, along with even more on the third screen (not shown). I could care less about Adobe Updater, Itunes, Zune and whatever. If I need to run Itun...

The list of “compatible” antivirus programs for Windows 7 is short – Norton, Kaspersky, Avira, and AVG. I tried Kaspersky 8 Beta first, but after a couple of weeks I’ve determined that it’s just too bulky and “obtrusive” and has some issues that I’m not happy about.  Recently I uninstalled this (thankfully, the uninstall was very clean and left no traces) and tried AVG Free. AVG free boasts some 80 million users, is MUCH more lightweight, and at this point this is the one I recommend for Windows 7. For a “free” version – this thing has way more features than you’d expect. Since my Avast! license recently expired on my main development machine that runs Windows Vista x64, I installed AVG Free on that too. It found and eliminated nearly half a dozen known threats that Avast! never was able to find.  The only option that is disabled that I could find on AVG Free was the rootkit scan. F-Secure has a free FSBL.EXE scanner to take care of that, so the “free” antivirus option i...

Windows 7 Beta build 7000 has a “Send Feedback” link at top right of every window title bar. That’s fine, I’m happy to send feedback, but the problem is I’ve found I have been accidentally clicking these links and it’s gotten to be a real annoyance. Here’s how to remove the little buggers:   1. Run regedit. 2. Navigate to the key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop . 3. Check to see if you already have a key (in the right pane) “FeedbackToolEnabled”. If so, set its value to 0. 3. If you do not have this key, then  right-click on the right pane and select New -> DWORD (32-bit) value . Name the new value FeedbackToolEnabled and set it's value to 0 . 4. Restart your machine. All of the "Send Feedback"  links will now be gone from the Windows 7 title bars.

“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”    - Jack London After doing quite a bit of reading to check up on various potential issues regarding the installation of the Windows 7 public Beta (build 7000),  and after having run it for a bit inside a VM,I decided it would be OK to do an upgrade over my notebook’s Windows Vista Ultimate installation. I use this machine often, but it is not my primary development box, so if things went south, it wouldn’t hurt me too much. The upgrade process was interrupted the first and second times by “incompatible software”. The first was Windows Powershell – which is installed by SQL Server 2008. There is no obvious way to uninstall this, so what I did was to rename the powershell folder under the Windows\System32 folder, and then search for the registry entries and set the installed key from “1” to “0”. That took care of the first offender. The next interruption came when Windows 7 told me Raxco Perf...