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X P/V I S T A
you need to overwrite your hard
drive seven times with random
data to make data unrecoverable
Conventional wisdom holds that you need to write and rewrite a hard drive
numerous times with garbage before it will be totally unrecoverable by foren-
sics experts. That’s not exactly the case: We overwrote a hard drive just once
with zeroes and asked the recovery gurus at DriveSavers if they could rescue it. The answer:
They couldn’t save a single bit. Now we don’t pretend to know about the hardcore resources
of groups like the NSA, so if you’re that paranoid about being branded a terrorist because of a
deleted PDF of The Anarchist’s Cookbook discovered on a used drive you bought on eBay, by all
means, spend a week wiping that drive. But if you’re just casually recycling a drive for resale or
donation, a single pass will do the trick and will save you literally days of time waiting for the
wipe to fi nish.
D O IT Run a program like KillDisk (www.killdisk.com) and select a single zeroes-only pass.V I S T Aturning on
multiple cores in
vista improves
boot time
You’ll fi nd an option within
Vista’s msconfi g utility that
cryptically lets you set the
“Number of processors” used during boot.
By default it is turned off (with the drop-
down set to 1). We tried upping the setting
to 2 on a dual-core system and, guess what,
no change in boot time whatsoever. Turns
out this is just a debug setting for coders
who want to test how programs load on
single-core machines without having to
physically go to a less-sophisticated PC.
It can be completely ignored. By default
Windows uses all your cores.
D O N’T D O ITX Pdisabling XP’s indexing service can
improve performance
You can almost ignore the question of whether XP’s Indexing Service slows down your
computer. The fact is it doesn’t do much good anyway. Indexing is supposed to help
Windows keep better tabs on fi les, but it does a terrible job of it and offers the user no
options for confi guring what gets indexed. It’s almost beside the point that it can slow your system—
sometimes only a little and sometimes to an outright crawl. Even Microsoft acknowledges that the
Indexing Service can cause hard drives to thrash and that it “uses lots of pagefi le space and lots of
CPU time”—in fact, Microsoft often recommends disabling it. Note, however, that Vista’s integrated
search and indexing system is considerably improved.
D O IT There are several ways to turn off XP’s Indexing Service. The most thorough is to open the
Control Panel, open Administrative Tools, then open Services. Scroll down to Indexing Service and
double-click it. Change the Startup type to “Disabled.”V I S T AV I S T Asuperfetch boosts superfetch boosts
performance
Superfetch is an update of the XP Prefetcher, designed
to more intelligently load applications into RAM based
on frequency of use. With Superfetch on, your PC
should theoretically get faster over time, particularly when loading
frequently used apps. You won’t see improvement in general perfor-
mance, like rendering Photoshop fi les, but Superfetch does tend to
make apps load 10 to 20 percent more quickly, depending on their size.
D O ITSuperfetch is on by default. To ensure that it’s active, go to
the Control Panel, open Administrative Tools, and select Services.
Scroll down to Superfetch and ensure that it is set to “Started”
and “Automatic.”You can almost ignore the question of whether XP’s Indexing Service slows down your
computer. The fact is it doesn’t do much good anyway. Indexing is supposed to help
Windows keep better tabs on fi les, but it does a terrible job of it and offers the user no
options for confi guring what gets indexed. It’s almost beside the point that it can slow your system—
sometimes only a little and sometimes to an outright crawl. Even Microsoft acknowledges that the
Indexing Service can cause hard drives to thrash and that it “uses lots of pagefi le space and lots of
CPU time”—in fact, Microsoft often recommends disabling it. Note, however, that Vista’s integrated
search and indexing system is considerably improved.
There are several ways to turn off XP’s Indexing Service. The most thorough is to open the
Control Panel, open Administrative Tools, then open Services. Scroll down to Indexing Service and
double-click it. Change the Startup type to “Disabled.”Superfetch is an update of the XP Prefetcher, designed
to more intelligently load applications into RAM basedfrequently used apps. You won’t see improvement in general perfor-
mance, like rendering Photoshop fi les, but Superfetch does tend to
make apps load 10 to 20 percent more quickly, depending on their size.
Superfetch is on by default. To ensure that it’s active, go to
the Control Panel, open Administrative Tools, and select Services.windows tips