Tech Talk at ShieldsGroup

My SCH-i760 just doesn’t have the horsepower to carry the demand of WM 6.1 threaded threaded text messaging, so I turned it off by editing the registry.

Navigate to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Inbox\Settings\OEM\

Under the registry key, create a new DWORD value with value name as SMSInboxThreadingDisabled and set its value data to 1.

Seems to work well.

Man — I was at the end of my rope with Firefox this week.

It loaded so slowly that after clicking the Firefox icon, that I could click Opera and IE and both of them would load in advance of Firefox.

So I did some digging and found this from the good folks at PortableApps.com:
http://portableapps.com/support/firefox_portable#performance

The part I implemented was the Session Restore portion. The procedure reads as follows:

Disable Session Restore / Undo Close Tab – Firefox 2.0 introduced a new feature called session restore. It keeps track of all your open windows and tabs and can restore your session if Firefox should crash. While a handy feature, it does have the unfortunate side effect of writing to disk on every page load, which slows down Firefox Portable. In Firefox 3.0, this feature was enhanced to provide more features but at the cost of more disk writes (which is why Firefox Portable asks on first run if you’d like to disable it). There’s no option to disable it in the usual Tools – Options windows, but you can disable it manually.

1. In Firefox’s address bar, type in about:config and then hit enter
2. Right-click on any entry and select New – Boolean
3. For the name, enter browser.sessionstore.enabled and click OK
4. Select false and then click OK

When you restart Firefox, session restore (and undo close tab) will be disabled and you should notice an improvement in browsing speed.

Bang — Firefox is pretty fast at loading again. Almost as fast as Opera.

I may be sorry I did this because Firefox crashes on my Vista and XP machines at least daily. I use the session restore when it crashes. We’ll see how important it really is, I guess.

Thanks PortableApps.com!

I’ve been running a Dell laptop with 1GB of RAM since Vista first arrived. The extra money for the extra GB (this laptop maxes out at 2GB) was more than this Scotsman could take.

But RAM prices have dropped lots. I ran the scanner at www.crucial.com and picked up two 1GB chips online for a couple pennies under $24 — delivered. Man — if I knew how it would help performance, I may have done it when RAM was $75 for 2GB.

Outlook, QuickVerse, even FireFox load more quickly.

It’s time. Upgrade your RAM.