Free Image Hosting

Sunday, January 27, 2008

Customize the Manufacturer Support Info

If you have a computer with pre-installed Windows Vista, most likely you'll notice the manufacturer's support information when you look in the system properties window. If you'd like to customize this information or use a picture of your own in this space, you can do so easily.

Right-click on Computer and choose Properties or use the Win+Break key combination to bring up the System properties screen:

If you have a computer with pre-installed Windows Vista, most likely you'll notice the manufacturer's support information when you look in the system properties window. If you'd like to customize this information or use a picture of your own in this space, you can do so easily.

Right-click on Computer and choose Properties or use the Win+Break key combination to bring up the System properties screen:

image

Close-up view:

image

To edit the information in this screen, you'll need to open up your registry editor and navigate down to the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OEMInformation

Note: If this key does not exist, you can download the following registry file, which you will want to edit before double-clicking to add into the registry.

image

You can modify the following fields and put any values you'd like into them, with the exception of the Logo key, which you probably shouldn't change.

  • Manufacturer
  • SupportHours
  • SupportPhone
  • SupportURL
  • Logo

The last important step is to either create or modify a bitmap file stored at the location specified in the Logo key, usually set to:

C:\Windows\System32\oemlogo.bmp

For best results, you'll want to use a small logo file, preferably somewhere around 100×100 height/width. Also note that copying the file to that folder will require administrative permissions.

Friday, January 25, 2008

Share Your Windows Vista Experience Index Score

ShareYourScore.com is a site where you can upload your Windows Vista Experience Index assessment and share it with the world. You can also take a look at other people's top scores, and even see average scores for a particular component. This site could be useful for troubleshooting, since you can see what other people with the same components scored. I'm hoping they expand the site's functionality in the future, but it's a good start.

If you are unfamiliar with the Windows Experience Index, just open Control Panel, and type in performance into the search box. You should already see your score, calculated when you installed Vista for the first time.

Once you've uploaded your score, they will even give you the html so that you can put the score as a badge on your own site:

Looks like my computer is really not too bad, I just need a faster processor. So how well did my video card stack up? Here's my performance information from Windows Vista:

And here's what ShareYourScore has to say for the average scores on my video card:

Looks like I'm in the same range, good stuff.

Speed up External USB Hard Drives in Windows Vista

If you have an external hard drive that is always plugged into your computer, you can enable write caching to speed up performance significantly when writing to the disk.

Write caching isn't enabled by default for external drives because removable devices could lose data if you unplug them too quickly, so take care when using this setting.

To change this setting, just type Device Manager into the start menu search box, and hit enter.

Browse down to the external hard drive that you wish to enable write caching on, and double click it to open up the properties screen.

Just change the setting to "Optimize for performance" and hit OK to continue. You'll have to reboot for the setting to take effect.