Tamer’s Tech Blog

As of late my Laptop has been taking forever to shutdown. Last night it took nearly 15 minutes to shutdown. Thus I decided to find a few article, tips and tricks to help me speed up my slow shutdown process.

I found this great article that showed me how to tweak my PC’s registry setting so that I can speed up the shutdown. http://www.cnet.com/8301-13880_1-9900788-68.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

The other thing I did besides the tweaks mentioned in the above article, is create a desktop shortcut to shutdown (instead of going through he start menu). This is how I did it:

1. Right-click on an empty area of your Desktop.
2. Roll-over your Pointer on New.
3. Select Shortcut from the menu which appears.
4. Type this code “shutdown -s”, without the quotes, in the field with the Caption Type the location of the item:.
5. Click on Next, and then Finish.
6. The code above, would shut down your Windows, as it does normally i.e. By closing each and every program, and then shutting down. But, if you want your Windows to shut down instantly, just by stopping every program, then use this code “shutdown -s -t 00″(00 is the number of seconds till shutdown, if you put 100 it will take 100 seconds),without the quotes in Step 4. Follow Step 5, to complete the creation of a Shutdown Shortcut.
7. If you would like a ‘Goodbye’ message, just add ” -c “TYPE MESSAGE HERE”" to the end of the code.
8. If you want to abort the shutdown got to start, click run and type “shutdown -a”(Note: you can only abort shutdown if you put the nuber of seconds after ” -t”, it won’t work without).

Lets say you are working on a word document, for example I am working on changing my resume. I opened the resume and made some changes to the document and saved and exited the document, but not before deleteting my opening paragraph because I did not like it. A few days later I decided I liked the opening paragraph and that I wanted to restore it back to my document. however I do not have a backup of my document. Well, what will I do? how do I get back the earlier version of my resume? Well, with Microsoft Vista you can restore earlier versions of a file.

To restore the file:

• Get to the file location in Windows explorer (on the hard drive).
• Right-click the file, and click Restore Previous Versions.
• Pick the earlier version you want to restore.
• You know have your old file.

This tip only works on only Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise, and Windows Vista Ultimate editions support previous versions of files.

Here are a few of my favorite free apps.

• Chatting: AIM, www.aim.com
• Browser: Firefox www.mozilla.com
• Audio Player: WinAmp, www.winamp.com
• Anti-virus (not free, thought) CA’s Anti-virus, http://home3.ca.com/Microsoft/
• Documents: Google Docs, docs.google.com
• Webmail: Gmail, www.Gmail.com
• Online Calender: Google Calender, calendar.google.com
• Online Backup: Mozy, www.mozy.com
• Sync files between drives: Microsoft SyncToy 2.0, www.microsoft.com/downloads
• FTP: FileZila, www.filezilla-project.org
• Virtual Machine: Microsoft Virtual Machine, http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtualpc
• Blogging: WordPress, www.wordpress.com
• Photo Manager: Picasa, www.getpaint.net
• Maps: Google Maps, maps.google.com

I will expand on each in the future as to why I love each one. Stay tuned…….