• Press the Windows Logo Key + R, it brings up the RUN window.
• Type gpedit.msc and enter.
• go to user configuration > Administrative Templates > System >  Ctrl+Alt+Del Options
• double click Remove Task Manager.
• Choosing Enabled will disable the Task Manager. As explained in the description there; “If this setting is enabled and users try to start Task Manager, a message appears explaining that a policy prevents the action”.
• Click Apply/OK after that.
• Disabled option is to enable the Task Manager.

The administrator menu can be accessed by keying in *#5239870*#. After that, select option No. 4 Internals. It’ll prompt you for a Master Key. Key in *#7092463*#, and enter Confirm thereafter.

To check your memory status, select the no.2 option Debug settings > no.7 Memory state > no.1 Current memory state. You will see Total heap Mem, Total allocated mem, Allocated mem and Fragmentation level.

Here are some explanations:

• Total Heap Mem: Possibly the RAM size of Jet.  It was amount at 122MB. You are seeing it as 119,900K as it was in Kilobytes, converting (multiply by 1024) it to MB will be equal to 122MB.
• Total Allocated Mem: I still couldn’t figure out the meaning of this. This memory is static and wouldn’t change with any applications opened and closed. Possibly the memory allocated for the Samsung proprietary OS.
• Allocated Mem: The amount of memory that you are using right now. Done some test by opening few widgets and applications and this amount will be slowly increasing. I’ve done a test by opening a large heavy flash content website in the Dolphin web browser and switch to Current Memory State via the task switcher.  I can actually see the amount is increasing over time and finally it reaches 110K before giving me error on insufficient memory resources. Keep in mind that this figure doesn’t update in real time. You’ll have to click the back button and access that menu again to see the updated figure.
• Fragmentation level: No idea of this. Fragmentation means nothing for solid state memory. But anyway, this figure stay at 0% at all time.

There are 2 ways to download YouTube video to your computer.

• Bitcomet’s Media downloader plugin.

This is my most favourite method of downloading a YouTube video. It’s simple and all you have to do is to install Bitcomet and make sure you got the right browser for that, Firefox in this case.



Select base on the title of the YouTube video

You have to wait the video to load few seconds first. After that, right click and select Download Media Files. If you didn’t let your browser to load the video, you won’t be able to download it.

Bitcomet is not the only download manager able to download YouTube video. There are others out there, but my favourite is still Bitcomet as it’s my torrent downloader as well.

Few minor stuff which irked me about Bitcomet; it’s resource hungry and it can used up to 200MB of RAM anytime, Bitcomet runs on ads which is annoying and it doesn’t run in Firefox 3.5. Well, these can be ignored as Bitcomet downloads files really fast which is a big plus point.

• KeepVid.com

This is an alternative method which I seldom use. Well, this is simply because this method isn’t fast enough and I won’t able to resume downloads for those stopped half way. You can’t look for other mirrors to speed up your download (which Bitcomet can) as well.

Go to http://keepvid.com/, copy and paste the whole URL from the youtube video. Something like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zuKl7QiVSw

Click “DOWNLOAD” button after that. The page will refresh and it will generate a link for your video. Click the “Download” link and you’ll be able to download the video just like any other files.

Keep in mind that your default Windows Media Player is dumb enough for not being able to play the YouTube video which is in .flv format or .mp4 for high definition variant. You’ll need video players like Windows Media Classic or the multipurpose GOM player.

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Remember the last time you use a floppy disk to transfer files? Well, I certainly do, and it was troublesome. Having to swap disk one by one and encountered numerous times of data failure, floppy disk is very fragile. USB thumbdrive was introduced in the early of this decade, it was expensive back then. Fast forward to present time, you can get a 4GB at less than RM50(USD 14).

Having a bootable USB thumbdrive is convenient enough for me to do maintenance on my PC like formatting hard drive, restore a failed hard disk via CHKDSK command and flash the BIOS of my motherboard.

To create a bootable USB thumbdrive, you will need to download this HP USB Disk Storage Format and the MS-DOS startup files here.

Install the HP USB Disk Storage Format utility on your PC first. Then extract the MS-DOS startup files which is in a ZIP file named as win98boot.zip to a folder on your PC. The win98boot.zip contains all necessary boot files for your USB boot drive to work, you can actually use any other MS-DOS version as you like, a simple googling can yield few results of this.

Format a bootable USB drive using this utility is easy

Select the “Create a DOS startup disk” option and click the radio button “using DOS system files located at”. Browse to the location where you extracted the win98boot.zip files (or any other MS-DOS startup files variant). Click “Start” button to begin format. When you are done, you will get a pop up like the one below.

USB thumbdrive is in bootable format now

Restart your PC and make sure your motherboard supports booting from USB drive, select that option from your BIOS and you’ll be able to boot from your USB.

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• Disable page files clearing.Windows cleared the page files every time during shutdown, this is to ensure maximum security for your computer where sensitive information might end up in the page files. For most users, this is not an issue as your PC is sitting at your home. To do this, open up the Windows Registry editor, and go to this location HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE>SYSTEM>CurrentControlSet>Control>Session Manager>Memory Management  , double click “ClearPageFileAtShutdown” and set the value to zero like the picture below.

Disable page file clearing in Windows XP Registry

• Reduce waiting time for unresponsive programs and close background process faster. Go to this location in Registry editor, HKEY_CURRENT_USER>Control Panel>Desktop . Set the WaitToKillAppTimeout key to 1000. The value is in milliseconds, so the value here sets Windows to terminate unresponsive application in 1second. This setting is for the current user, to enable this tweak in all users, go to this location HKEY_USERS>.DEFAULT>Control Panel>Desktop. Same as previous setting, set the WaitToKillAppTimeout key to 1000.

waitToKillAppTimeout set to 1000.

• Auto end unresponsive task. By default, Windows XP waits for your action when there are unresponsive applications waiting to be ended. If you never click the “End” button, Windows will never shutdown. It’s a nuisance when you are in a hurry for a date or movie,  you let your PC to shutdown by clicking the shutdown button and later found out your PC still waiting for your response when you reached home from your date. Solve this by editing this key “AutoEndTasks” in the registry and set to 1 under  HKEY_CURRENT_USER>Control Panel>Desktop. The same applies for all user, go to this location “HKEY_USERS>.DEFAULT>Control Panel>Desktop” to change the AutoEndTasks.

Set the AutoEndTasks key to 1

To access Registry editor, go to the Start menu, click “Run” and type “regedit” without the quotes.

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Most phones and laptops battery came with Lithium-ion or better, Lithium-polymer battery. Lithium based batteries are more efficient and ‘smart’ compared to nickel methal or nickel cadmium batteries. How to identify a lithium battery? It was fairly easy, lithium batteries can be manufactured in various size and shape, while nickel batteries can’t. Every gadget and laptop marketed today equipped with a Lithium battery. Below are some advice and tips which you can follow to prolong the life of your laptop and phone battery.

Charging tips and advices:

• Never overcharged your battery. Doing so might cause your battery to overheat and explode. I used to overcharged my Nokia 6288′s BP6M battery for 7-9 hours everynight 2 years back. Though I never had my battery explode, but my phone’s battery became unusable. Why? I can no longer charge my battery fully, although the phone battery meter shows the battery was fully charged, I can only do some text messaging and 5minutes call only.
• Fully discharge and recharge should be done minimally. It’s harmful to the battery to be fully discharged. Any advice from phone seller or your friend to fully discharge your phone’s battery on the first usage and recharge it for full 8hours can be totally ignored.
• Never leave your phone or laptop in constant high temperature as Lithium battery doesn’t like heat. Their lifespan and charge capacity reduced for every rising of temperature. For laptops, it’s best to take our the battery once you plug in the power chord as laptop produces lots of heat.
• After few months of using your new phone or laptop, you might notice your battery meter doesn’t tell you accurately of your battery’s true state. This is when you need to fully discharge and recharge.




• Lithium based can be charged anytime as it doesn’t has any memory-effect. Memory-effect is a term for batteries unable to perform full capacity charge, this was due to frequent partial discharged that was being done on the battery. Therefore,  you don’t have to wait till your phone giving your warning indicator of battery low, you can charge your phone anytime you want.

If you do follow the tips and advices above, your Lithium battery might last as long as 2-3 years or around 300 charges, whichever comes first. 2-3 years are the typical lifespan of a Lithium battery, the battery charging capacity will drop greatly and then, it’s about time to get a new phone (if you’re a gadget freak like me!).

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One thing non-overclockers were right – overclock lessens the lifespan of hardware. True, but how much it lessen? I’ve got my Galaxy 7300GT DDR3 overclocked to 700MHz (500MHz default) core speed and 1640MHz (1400MHz default) memory frequency for a healthy 3 years and it’s still alive and kicking. And then, it’s about time to upgrade, it isn’t fast enough for all the latest games anymore. So, you get the idea here, your hardware obsolete a lot faster than it dies.

Hardware manufacturers are even making their chips to be overclocking friendly to win market share. Take the Intel Core 2 Duo example, enthusiasts favour these processors over those from AMD as they can overclocked better, but more importantly they performed faster clock for clock. Even overclocking are made as a feature into hardware these days. Nahalem Core i7, the new King of CPU with triple channel memory support, has a feature called Turbo Boost. It automatically overclocks on one core of the processor when the processor is below operating power and TDP limits; example – when you run a single thread application like SUPER PI.

An example of a safe overclock would be the budget 65nm Athlon X2 dual core processors from AMD and Intel’s Core 2 Duo processors overclocked to 3.0GHz. It was perfectly safe as many enthusiasts tested them with hours of stress test on these processors at 3.0GHz or more. Even better was, you don’t have to raise any voltage to the processor at 3.0GHz at all. Raising voltage is a way to stabilize the hardware in overclocked mode. If you managed to overclock a 65nm Ahtlon X2 or Intel Core 2 Duo to 3.2GHz or more without raising the core voltage, congrats as you got yourself a very good quality processor, finding these processors will be like searching a needle in a haystack.

CPUZ showing my overclocked AMD Athlon 64 x2 5200 at 3.0GHz,default was 2.7GHz.

As you can see above, I only raised the bus speed to 223MHz from the default 200MHz. The CPU speed can be calculated with this formula: CPU Multiplier X Bus speed = CPU Frequency In this case, my CPU Multiplier is 13.5 and my Bus speed is 223MHz, so the formula would be 13.5 X 223MHz = 3010MHz. More detail of overclock will be shown in upcoming article where I will talk about the hardware needed, steps in making sure a safe overclock, and how to make sure your overclock is stable.

The advantage? Well, I’ll describe in point form below for better clarification:

• Safe money, you get Extreme edition-like performance at the cost of a budget processor.
• Free performance boost at zero cost.
• The money can be use to purchase a bigger monitor or a faster graphic card or maybe a 2TB hard drive.

As for the disadvantage. None. Unless you do an insanely high overclocking with extreme temperature without proper cooling method.

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Under the start menu, click “Run” and type “regedit” (without the quotes) to enter the Registry Editor. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SOFTWARE > Microsoft > Windows > Explorer > RemoteComputer > and delete this key “{D6277990-4C6A-11CF-8D87-00AA0060F5BF}” under NameSpace like the printscreen below.

Delete this key and your network is speedier and responsive!

The result? Well, as far as internet browsing experience, it feels the same. But as far as the shared files are concern, it’s more responsive and it no longer loads perpetually.

*Caution. Messing with the registry key can be dangerous, you might damage your OS and you might need to reinstall the OS again. Therefore, only follow the intrustruction here and don’t mess with any other key.

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The page file or virtual memory, acts as a secondary memory repository for the currently opened programs or applications when the RAM in your system is not sufficiently available. In this scenario, the active programs will be given priority to use the RAM while minimized programs which idling in the background will be displaced to the virtual memory.

In the case of 4GB RAM, the above scenario is hardly realizable. If you’re not running your machine on heavy database, running multiple OS via virtual machine, or hosting your machine as email server, you probably wont need a big page file. I would recommend 1GB of page file for a 4GB RAM configuration. For others RAM configuration, please refer below:

• 1GB or less -> use the default 1.5X settings.
• 2GB -> 1.5GB page file size
• 3GB or more -> 1GB

You can’t disable the page file entirely, doing so might cause some applications failed to run. This is attributed to the fact that some programs were coded to take advantage of the page file. Therefore, it is best as a safe measure to have at least 1GB of page file for big RAM configuration.

For best page file performance, split the page file across to few hard disks. It is not wise to split page file to the same hard disk with different partition as you won’t get any performance benefit from it. There is an example of splitting page file at the last part of this article.

How to go to XP’s virtual memory settings.

Go to the Control Panel.

Double click System

Click on Settings under “Performance”

Under Advanced tab, click Change.

If you’ve got multiple hard disks in your machine, split the page file across them like the configuration as I have above(I’ve got 1.5GB RAM). Remember to click the Set button when you’ve done for each hard disk, click OK when you’ve finished setting the page file and restart Windows after that.

*As you can see, I didn’t set my page file in ranged value. This is to hinder the page file from fragment across your hard disk when Windows automatically re size it. Windows will re size your page file when you’re running out of memory(total memory including your page file as well). If your page file is in fixed value, Windows won’t re size it but you will still get the Virtual Memory resizing pop out on the task bar.

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