I am using Lenovo laptop with Windows Vista. The wifi access in this laptop is not much user friendly. It is not possible for a novice user to connect a wifi network without much hurdles. The lenovo laptops are packaged with a wireless management tool called Think Vandage. You can see the application when we start lenovo care application. The application is not at all user friendly. But my point of discussion is the process involved in connecting your lenovo system for point to point wifi access.

Where comes point to point wifi access?

This kind of wifi networking can be done with your system or laptop. The only requirement is your system / laptop does have wifi card. We don’t need a separate wifi router to serve content to other system(s). The connection is point to point, that is from one system to other system. You can even share internet connection to nearby device using point to point network.

The process involved in connecting to point to point network.

The first process involved is double click on the computer icon shown on your desktop toolbar.

On the new window which is “Access Connections” click on the Locations menu and select the menu item Create New Profile... New window will open which contain information needed to add new profile.

Enter a name of the location profile(which might be some dummy name like PtoP or Sythoos). Select the network connection type as Wireless LAN 802.11. Click on the next button. On the next window enter Network name (SSID), this is the name of the Point to Point network. Another way to find the SSID is to search network(Click on the Find network button). Select the connection type as Adhoc.

Click on the next button. The next window is the setting window. Click on the TCP/IP setting and add IP address of same class in the Point to Point network. If your network server is something like 192.168.0.1 then you can assign an address 192.168.0.2 to 192.168.0.255. Enter subnet mask as 255.255.255.0 and default gateway as the IP address of the system that serves internet / main system.

Check out the TCP/IP setting below. Don’t forget to add DNS Server as the system that serves internet.

I know the procedure is not much simple, although we can’t do anything rather than following the procedure. It’s Windows Vista we need to do a lot to configure even simple things.

You might be experiencing that your explorer is taking time for loading. One solution to minimize the loading time is to disable the thumbnail preview. The thumbnails are reduced size version of your content whether it is picture or videos. This thumbnail preview will help us to quickly find desired content from destination folder by the process of skimming.

The loading time of your explorer is due to the fact that the explorer application will scan the content and generate its thumbnails when we open the explorer or a particular folder. This ambit can be nullified by disabling the thumbnail preview generation. However some of the users like photoshop users, entertainment users, HTML developers are addicted by thumbnails because they really need it. They don’t need to bother about this post, because this process is not applicable for them.

Now I am going to explain the process of disabling thumbnail preview. Open up your windows explorer from your desktop or start menu or by hitting Windows + E button. Click on the menu organize on the top left of your explorer. From the menu select the menu item labeled Folder and Search Options. Check out the figure below.

After selecting the menu item another window will open which contain three tabs. On the Window click on the view tab and enable checkbox that is labeled Always shows icons, never thumbnails.

Restart your explorer, this time you can see magnificent difference in loading time.

In one of my previous post I described the workaround for installing Windows XP in your pre-installed Windows Vista computer and the process of partition drive in Windows Vista. But I forgot to mention about the bootloader for Vista. When we have multiple operating system installed in our system we need to choose the operating system to boot while booting your system. So we need to install a bootloader for this.

When we install an Linux or Ubuntu in our system then a bootloader will be installed with the installation process. So we can select which operating system to load during the booting process. But we are installing 2 operating systems, Windows Vista and Windows XP both are Windows. Since the primary operating system is Windows Vista we need to install a Vista booloader. Download and install VistaBootPro.

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During the installation of VistaBootPro it will force to install .NET framework 2.0. Open the bootloader application. Select the radio buttons as shown in the figure below.

To add Windows XP bootloader entry, click on the Diagnostics menu item and then choose Run Diagnostics from the menu. This will scan the and find if there is an Windows XP in your system. Click on the “Manage OS Entries” tab and then click in the textbox for Rename OS Entry, and name it something useful like “Windows XP” or “Your Favorite name”.

Click the button Apply Updates and reboot the system. On your next boot process you can see the bootloader with options viz Vista and the Windows XP.

Network attached storage is a concept in which storage is organized at file level on computer data storage attached to a computer network. NAS will provide data access to heterogeneous network clients, that means developer or a user who access data from a NAS storage is not be aware about the network client. Developer or user need to call the data, the NAS server will handle the storage clients issue(s).

The NAS unit is essentially a system with an operating system which is capable to handle NAS functionalities. The NAS can technically capable to handle all kind of computing task as it is a system, but we don’t use the system for computing instead we use it for file management in Network attached storage. The file management functions include data access, data storage etc.

The performance improvement can be done by adding RAID and clustering in NAS. My main aim is not to go in depth about network attached storage instead explain the concept of NAS and to set up a Network attached storage for my readers.

www.freenas.org is an open source Network attached storage which has a good operating system and web interface to configure the network clients.

Now a days new laptops are equipped with Pre-installed Windows Vista. The most annoying thing is that, as the operating system is pre-installed we are not able to install another operating system. The pre-installed operating system take up the entire disk. I use both Ubuntu and Windows now I am not able to install Ubuntu in my laptop. I will explain how to make partition(s) in Windows Vista first and later I will suggest the workaround to install another operating system in your laptop.

Right click on your My computer Icon, click on the Manage menu item. Select the Disk management item from the new Window. This will display disk information on the right side of the window.

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Now we can use the Shrink Volume tool for re-partition your drive. Right click on the Vista Preloaded drive displayed there. You can see a menu item called “Shrink Volume” which will assist you for the re-partition. On the next window enter the amount to be partitioned in MB. The amount entered will remain as free space. You can allocate the rest of the free space to one or more drive by creating new volume on the free space. We can assign the drive letters after that. While assigning make sure the drive letter assigned for CD-ROM will not be allocated to the new volume(s). The process of partitioning ends here.

I am going to explain how to install another operating system in this. You can use the same process I described above but after shrinking the drive make the rest of space as free. Reboot your system and make the CD-ROM as the primary bootable device. Insert your bootable Ubuntu or Windows XP CD in your drive and start installation. Select the free space for the new installation. Continue the rest of installation procedure, I guess you might be familiar with operating system installation already. Enjoy reading!!!

Windows Vista users are always looking for performance improvement due to its sluggish performance. Normally people add RAM to improve performance which is pretty costlier and there might be problem for upgrade, If there is no slot available it is not possible to upgrade.

Here is a solution to improve performance in Windows Vista called ReadyBoost. Virtual memory is also available with Windows Vista where it use Harddrive as additional RAM. The performance will be sluggish since it is using rotating device. But Microsoft added a new feature called Windows ReadyBoost, which uses Flash memory as RAM. All of us know that Flash memory is pretty faster than other rotating medium.

I will explain how to install ReadyBoost in your Windows Vista PC or laptop.

Step 1)

Plug the USB pendrive or Flash memory in high speed USB port of your PC or Laptop.

Step 2)

AutoPlay program will start. Click on the “Speed up my system” menu.

Step 3)

A program will start. Click the tab named “ReadyBoost” and select appropriately like in the figure below.

Your ReadyBoost is working now.

If you are using Windows Vista you might be experiencing performance issues. Microsoft recently released Windows Vista Service Pack 1 which contain a performance improvement pack called Hotfix.

Alternate way to install Hotfix, download it from the link provided below.

Vista 32-bit users

Vista 64-bit users

After installing Hotfix it will improve performance for layered functions like accessing menus and low response times etc. The performance improvement are about 2 to 4 times. I feel better performance improvement for my laptop now.

All are going into web based. Today I found an application which is a web based operating system eyeOS. We can sync our documents with eyeOS provided an account @ eyeOS. After syncing the documents we can use the operating system from any place we don’t need to carry our laptop or desktop. The concept is, you can sync your personal files in your PC to eyeOS thus you can access your file anywhere from the world.

The software used for synchronization is called eyeSync which allow us to synchronize different folders and files in your PC. The eyeSync is available for almost all popular operating systems, Mac OS X (Tiger/PPC and Leopard/Intel) and Linux (in deb and source/targz), Windows XP and Vista.

The concept

The main concept is to avoid carrying your own laptop or personal computer anywhere. Even without your PC you can access your personal files anywhere, what you need is just a browser and an account @ eyeOS.

Main features.

The eyeOS have almost all applications for our daily need. PIM applications, Word processor, notebook, file management, games, email client, system manager, desktop etc.

The eyeOS targets both user segment and also the developer segment.

Developer community can also develop applications for eyeOS, developers can develop web application, applications etc using eyeOS toolkit.

Lots of applications are available for eyeOS.

eyeOS 1.6 Gala Sync is the latest release of the operating system, the operating system is cool however there are couple of bugs, I believe the operating system is in its infant stage. eyeOS basic idea is to bring work and entertainment into a single place. The eyeOS is Open Source, licensed under the GNU Affero Public License version 3, So you can use it for free and even you can customize it according to your requirements but you need to publish the code to the community. Have a look @ my desktop image below.

Snipping tool is a cool software in Microsoft Vista for bloggers who are regularly taking screen shots to show software / tool demos in the blog, moreover it will have keen interest for bug reporters. Anyway I am regularly taking screen shots to show software demos in blogs.

The snipping tool can take different types of screen shots viz full screen, rectangular, any window or free form snips. In the free form snips you need to draw the shape with your pencil, it will be grabbed to the clipboard. Just search for “snipping” in the start menu’s search you will get the application. Here is the default interface.

As I mentioned that we can take different type of screen shots. All except Free-form are familiar I guess. So I am going to explain the operations to take a screen shot using Free-form snip. In the Free-form snip we need to highlight parts of the screen shot and draw on it with a free form pen of different colors, thickness and tip styles. Here is the screen shot that taken by using Free-form Snip.

I believe this is the best tool for taking screen shots.

Ho I need to wait for 5-6 minutes to make my laptop shutdown because I am using Microsoft Vista on my Laptop!!!. I googled about this and I found some information to avert this problem.

Edit some information in the Regedit can increase the speed of shutdown in Windows Vista.

Start Run (Windows Key +R) program and type regedit and hit enter.

Navigate through HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control

On the right pane Modify the WaitToKillServiceTimeout string by right clicking on the string. The value will be 20000, make it 5000 instead. This worked well for me.