When Windows detects that the user has been inactive for a certain time period, it will execute certain optimisation tasks whilst there is plenty of spare processing power available. One of these tasks is to create a background process that will defragment and optimise hard disk drives. Depending on the drive partition type, Windows will spawn either dfrgntfs or dfrgfat to handle the optimisation.

I've decided to disable this process for Windows under my OS X Parallels bootcamp installation. Every now and then I'll hear the hard drive spinning up and have a fair chunk of CPU get eaten away as the hard drive defragmentation process runs. It's a real pain when I'm in the middle of coding, web browsing or anything else. So I've decided to disable the optimisation process altogether, as I don't really care about my bootcamp install all that much. If it starts running really, really slowly, I'm happy to reinstall Windows.

How to disable drive optimisation:

1. Head over to the Microsoft Power Toys to download and install Tweak UI

2. Fire up Tweak UI and select the 'General' tree item from list of options

3. Uncheck 'Optimize hard disk when idle'

4. Apply the settings

I can't believe I never came across this before. I've wanted the nice smooth clear type font look in Windows XP for ages. I've seen it on various people's computer screens but never knew how they were doing it.

After installing IE7 at work recently, the browser prompted me to visit this page. You have the choice between installing an ActiveX control, or, downloading a plug-in for the Windows Control Panel, which will let you configure clear type fonts.

There are many reasons why you may want to change the default user agent string that Internet Explorer uses to identify itself. You can override the default user agent string by applying some modifications to the following Windows registry keys.

Start regedit and navigate through the tree to the following:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent

You may not have the User Agent key so create this as a child to the 5.0 key. Now create the following string values:

• Compatible = Not compatible
• Version = MyBrowser 1.0
• Platform = Windows 2003
• Default = Mozilla/5.0

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1;)

To:

Mozilla/5.0 (Not compatible; MyBrowser 1.0; Windows 2003;)

You'll need to close any open instances of IE and restart the browser before the settings take effect.

According to Symantec anyway, as they released their 11th internet security report.

There's a nice run down here . Needless to say it's caused its fair share of controversy. There's been some pretty intense flaming happening on a forum I belong to and the article has made its way onto Digg.

I'm just going to stay tight lipped and let everyone else fight it out :)

One thing I like about 'nix systems is that it's pretty easy to kill off specific or a list of processes via the command line using pipes and grep.

The Windows command line has the taskkill command:

So say you had multiple instances of notepad open. You could kill them all off using:

You can also use filters on things like image name, process ID and CPU time. For example, you could attempt to kill all process names that didn't equal notepad.exe:

Or kill all processes with id's greater than 1000:

Use the command sparingly and with caution of course ;-)