Optimizing RDP for casual use (Windows 7 SP1, RemoteFX)
I have worked over RDP since around 2000, and bandwidth is usually the bottleneck. Concrete tweaks for RDP on Windows 7 SP1 with RemoteFX to squeeze a smoother desktop out of a slow line.
5 articles in the notebook
Operating System.
Should I defrag my SSD?
"Yes!" and "No, never!" — both answers are right. SSDs don't care about fragmented reads, but NTFS does interesting things when free space gets fragmented. What actually matters, and what to do about it.
Disable Windows 7 Sound Card Jack Sensing
Windows kept detecting my X-Fi's plugs in and out at random, so the speakers did too. The fix is a registry key: EnableDynamicDevices = 0. Took me days to find, hope it saves you the trouble.
Optimizing virtual machines
We run a development VM per customer at work, so making them fast matters. A long list of concrete tweaks for Virtual PC, VirtualBox and VMware — from disk layout to services worth disabling.
Antivirus performance test
A good comparative performance test of antivirus products — some make a simple file copy take twice as long. Maybe disabling the antivirus now and then isn't such a bad idea.