By now most people have likely already upgraded to Windows Vista Service Pack 1, but one of the smaller feature upgrades might have passed most people by: You can now configure automatic defragmenting for All drives, as well as defragment all of your drives at the same time.
Note: This article is courtesy of a conversation I had yesterday with my good friend Ross, who runs the excellent SimpleHelp blog that you should check out (and subscribe to).
Set Automatic Defrag Options
Launch Disk Defragmenter by typing dfrgui into the start menu search or run box (or you could just search for defrag in the start menu or control panel)
Once you are there, you will notice the new “Select volumes” button that wasn’t there before Service Pack 1:
This will launch a dialog where you can choose which drives should be automatically defragmented at the scheduled time:
Of course, you can also use this same new feature to manually defragment all your drives at once, instead of having to use a batch file.
There’s really not much to it, is there?
Note: Vista most likely already scheduled all your drives to be defragmented by default, or at least it did in my testing.
I thought I would take a break from Microsoft and cover the much talked about gOS. This is the Operating System included on Wal-Mart’s $199 PC’s. Although there are a lot of Google applications included, gOS is actually based on Ubuntu Linux and stands for GreenOS. This is a very light weight OS
I realize Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 has been reviewed on several locations on the net. However, I would not be doing our loyal reader’s justice without expressing our take on the new browser. So, wanna hear it? Here it go!
Have you ever had the context menus in Windows Explorer just completely disappear? There’s a simple registry hack that can turn the context menus off, which means you could also reverse that hack to re-enable the context menus.
So you’ve been going through Task Manager trying to figure out why so many services are running when you notice there’s two items for Windows Media Player in the list… but you don’t even use Media Player. What’s up with that?
Unhappy with the way the shortcut icons on your desktop look? Here is a quick way to change them to a different icon included in XP.
When you have a problem with your Windows computer, you’ll usually be told to insert the Windows cdrom and then start the Recovery Console in order to fix the issue. So where did you put that XP disc anyway? Why can’t we just install the recovery console to the hard drive?
Have you ever tried to unzip a file to the Program Files directory in Windows 7 or Vista? You’ll get all sorts of permission denied errors, and generally be unsuccessful. So how do we open up the zipfile as an administrator? For that matter, how do you open any file as administrator?
If you’ve ever tried to copy a file that is locked by another application, you’ve probably seen an error message similar to “The process cannot access the file because another process has locked a portion of the file”. So how do you copy it anyway?
Let me start by saying that I have no idea why anybody would want to do this, and it’s perhaps one of the most useless articles I’ve ever written. That said, if you’ve ever wondered how to remove the username from the Start menu in Windows XP, this article is for you.
I’ve got a Wacom drawing tablet hooked up to my computer, and ever since I installed Vista’s Tablet PC utilities, I’ve had this obnoxious onscreen keyboard on the welcome screen that just can’t seem to be turned off through any regular settings. So how do I get rid of it?
