Tips for a fast computing experience

To be conservative, and have maximum system performance, I suggest not running a screen saver. Switch your monitor off to save electricity.

Windows NT often installs itself to use 'smooth scrolling' – when you drag a scroll bar, the screen scrolls pixel row by pixel row, giving a pleasant but terribly slow scrolling effect. Personally, I hate this; also, while the system is busy scrolling, it isn't doing useful things. To speed up your work and improve system performance, disable this feature.

The easiest way is to install TweakUI, from Microsoft, part of the 'PowerToys' kit. (UI stands for user interface.) Once installed, you can choose Start → Settings → Control Panel → Tweak UI → General and turn off Smooth scrolling — and also turn off Window animation, another annoying decoration.

If you can't find TweakUI, run RegEdit instead. Choose Start → Run and type in regedit↵ (where ↵ stands for Enter). The smooth scrolling setting is in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\SmoothScroll, which is a DWORD value and should be 0 for 'off'. The window animation setting is in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics\MinAnimate, which is a string value, and should be '0' for off.

These tips won't have much of an impact on WhiskerServer performance, but might affect your client tasks' performance if you use the computer for other things (wordprocessing, analysis) at the same time. They also make for happier high-performance computer users.

•	Turn off all special effects. Under Windows 2000, choose Control Panel → Display → Effects. Turn off 'transition effects'; turn off 'show window contents while dragging'.

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Install Microsoft TweakUI. Then choose Control Panel → TweakUI → General. Turn off 'list box animation', 'menu animation', 'menu fading', 'menu selection fading', 'smooth scrolling' (an option particularly capable of crippling fast computers), 'tooltip fading', 'window animation'. (You may also like to turn on 'prevent applications stealing focus', which doesn't affect the computer's speed but may reduce your tension level.)

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Install plenty of memory. Under Windows NT/2000, 128 Mb gives comfortable performance with a fair number of applications running simultaneously; 256 Mb gives good performance. Many computer manufacturers install fast processors and little memory; for example, I recently used a Pentium-III, 750-Mhz machine with 64 Mb RAM, which was vastly inferior to an AMD K6 at 233 MHz with 256 Mb.

•	Defragment your hard disk occasionally. A minor point in comparison to everything else.

•	If you have a Windows key (labelled ÿ), remember that ÿ–E brings up Windows Explorer, ÿ–M minimizes all windows and ÿ alone brings up the Start menu. (There are other such shortcuts.)

•	Alt–Tab cycles through running programs; Alt–Escape cycles through open windows.

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Command Prompt Here — Windows NT 4. To be able to right-click a folder and pop up a command window in that folder, run Explorer / View / Options / File Types / File Folder [NB different from Folder] / Edit / Actions / Command Prompt Here / Edit. Then change d:\winnt\command.exe /k cd "%1" to d:\winnt\system32\cmd.exe /k cd "%1"

•	Command Prompt Here — Windows 2000. Paste the following text into a file and save it with a .REG extension:

Then double-click the file to import it into the registry. You should then be able to right-click any folder in Windows Explorer, and choose Command Prompt Here to open one at that location.