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).

So my brother just bought a new MacBook laptop. I was impressed with the sleek looking laptop. So he asked me to install Windows Vista on his MacBook. My experience can be described as”EASY”. The folks over at apple really made it easy to install a windows OS on the Intel based apple machines.

• I loaded Boot Camp in Leopard
• I partitioned the hard drive
• I rebooted the laptop
• Windows vista started
• Formatted the partition for NTFS
• Installed Vista

Overall the installation was pain less.

Here are the few hick up and issues that I ran into post installation.

• Keyboard: the MacBook, does not have a full keyboard, so the layout of the keyboard was slightly different, however there are no “insert, backspace, right click” keys to name a few. I had to go and look for a keyboard remapping software to remap some of the keys. that turned out to be a difficult task; since there a few easy to use programs. I used Sharp Keys software. it is free and pretty easy to use.
• The f1 to F12 keys are hardware keys, for example when you press F5 you are increasing the volume. SO I had to go and change that

On the pro side, Vista was flying and working very well on the instal-based mac hardware.

Overall if you are looking to pay for a laptop, then get the Macbook, as it gives you both apple and Microsoft windows OS.