Zxian

Hey - no fair... *sniff* hehe

I don't really think it's a good idea... its one thing to reshack .cpl and .dll files, its another to replace the bitmaps in ntoskrnl.exe. I've just had far too many bad experiences with it.

That's a really handy tip! Thanks prathapml.

Did you follow Shoshoni's guide to the letter? It works perfectly as far as I can tell. The only part that I did myself was take my standard_toolbar.ini file and place it in the defaults folder in the installer package. I just installed it in VMWare, and it works like a charm. If you've got your toolbars working, simply drop them into the installer directory and recompress the lot with WinRAR or 7-zip.

Dang! It's tied at 2 all!

Nope - I use StyleBuilder myself (the theme from my laptop is rebuilt there), but I don't use StyleXP. Just a good ol' patched UXTheme.dll. Also, shell32.dll is a good place to start looking, but be careful. If Windows doesn't reckognize the file after you've modified it, you won't be able to boot. I'd recommend getting a hold of a BartPE disk, or installing Recovery Console before messing with reshacking the system files.

Whoohoo!!!! Now... which to pick... Arg!!! I'd have to say desh.

Depends on how paranoid you are. I always recommend one regardless of the router, because of forwarded ports or *shudders* UPnP.

If you open Opera, and go to Help->About, it wil tell you the path to your profile. If you browse around there, you'll find your standard toolbar file. If you've got the right-click option to open in IE, then it should be there. If you copy this into the defaults directory in the installer, it should apply it to the default Opera profile.

Happy birthday!

Are you using any firewall software? Have you checked for updated drivers to your NIC or firmware for your modem?

Not always...I just remember lots of random stuff and I question just about everything when I first read/hear about it. My brain must have a few petabytes of storage space.

/defaults/standard_toolbar.ini I haven't tested it, but does that help maybe?

If you're going to tell people that they're wrong, you might as well back it up. And there is a point in agruing when the "tweak" that you've applied actually doesn't help performance at all. Let me explain it as simply as possible. The outer edges of the disk have higher continuous read/write speeds than the inner regions. For large files, you'll read and write them faster by having them placed on the edge of the disk. The pagefile is something that is usually does not experience continuous I/O, and the disk read/write head moves back and forth between it and other files quite often. By physically separating the pagefile from the rest of your files, you're causing the read/write head to travel much farther than it would otherwise need to. This back/forth movement of the read head takes time and can actually decrease the life of your hard drive. Like chilifrei64 said, if you have a separate disk, then you can experience a significant performance gain by placing a second pagefile on the other disk (provided that it's on a separate IDE channel than your system drive). This will allow your system to access your files as well as the pagefile at the same time. The benefits should be obvious. Quite simply, it's a "tweak" that's just wrong. You end up hurting your performance more than you help it. I've said it before elsewhere, but I'll repeat it: If you have one hard drive - Place the pagefile on the system partition. If you have more than one hard drive - Place one pagefile on the first partition of each drive that is on a separate IDE channel.

Most of the time it's because your temporary internet files cache is full. Tools->Internet Options->Delete Files (under Temporary Internet Files) If you look under the Advanced Tab, there's an option to delete the temporary internet files each time IE closes if you want that.

Thanks Takeshi. Extra notes added.

The problem with UPnP is that it allows for unwanted applications to access your computer very easily. You get a malicious program on your computer, it can open UPnP ports, and then whoever's on the other end can access your computer as they please. Without UPnP, they would need to know your network configuration in the first place. You're much more secure by disabling UPnP connections on your router, blocking them with your firewall, and manually forwarding the ports on your router. So the computer I described is from the stone age? It does the trick quite nicely for my parents and is a lot more stable than anything that it would have come with when it was first purchased. Low resource apps are also nice for me because they run quickly and unobtrusively. I can have uTorrent running in the background, and I would never notice the difference when I'm using VMware or Office or any other programs that I use. I definately can't say the same for Azureus. I said it before, if two programs do the same thing in the end, why use one that takes up more resources? It's simply a waste.

You don't need a floppy drive. Place your regtweaks file in the same directory as cmdlines.txt and then have the following in your file. [COMMANDS] "regedit /s regtweaks.reg" If you want to add a batch file to install programs or set up RunOnceEx, have the following: [COMMANDS] "SomeBatchFile.cmd" "regedit /s regtweaks.reg" This is how I've got it in my install. Just as an added bonus, any regtweaks that are listed under HKEY_Current_User will be applied to the default user profile, meaning that all users will have that tweak applied.

You really need to write and edit documents from BartPE... This sounds really cool. Thanks for the heads up.

Muahaha.... go terminal!

I'm wondering how well this will work... Microsoft Update is already buggy as it is with Office products.

I had a look at that program... it's basically just a nice front end for keyotime's guide (using Zip instead of 7zip). Doesn't really explain how the directory listing in the installer is different from Shoshoni's guide. As for the toolbar, look at the "standard toolbar.ini" file in the /profile/toolbar folder. Here's an example of my standard toolbar file. Opera Preferences version 2.0 ; Do not edit this file while Opera is running ; This file is stored in UTF-8 encoding [INFO] NAME=Opera Standard (Modified) [Pagebar.alignment] Alignment=4 Auto alignment=0 Old visible alignment=4 Collapse=1 [Personalbar.alignment] Alignment=0 Auto alignment=0 Old visible alignment=2 Collapse=1 [Status Toolbar.alignment] Alignment=0 Auto alignment=0 Old visible alignment=4 Collapse=1 [Site Navigation Toolbar.alignment] Alignment=0 Auto alignment=0 Old visible alignment=2 Collapse=1 [Document View Toolbar.alignment] Alignment=0 Auto alignment=0 Old visible alignment=2 Collapse=1 [Start toolbar.alignment] Alignment=0 Auto alignment=0 Old visible alignment=2 Collapse=1 [Customize Toolbar Custom.content] Button0, "Bookmarks list dropdown button"="Show popup menu, "Browser Bookmarks Menu", , "Bookmarks", "Go To Homepage"" [Document Toolbar.style] Button type=2 Button style=0 Large Images=0 Wrapping=0 Maximum Button Width=0 Grow To Fit=0 [Document Toolbar.content] Button0, 69240="Rewind + Show hidden popup menu, "Internal Rewind History"" Button1, 21209="Back + Show hidden popup menu, "Internal Back History"" Button2, 21235=Stop | Reload, , , 21210 Button3, 21211="Forward + Show hidden popup menu, "Internal Forward History"" Button4, 67675="Fast Forward + Show hidden popup menu, "Internal Fast Forward History"" Address5 [Browser Toolbar.content] Button0, 21204=Open document Button1, 21205=Save document Button2, 21206=Print document Button3, 21208=Find Button4, 21212=Go to homepage Button5, 69682="Set alignment, "hotlist", 6, , "Panels" | Set alignment, "hotlist", , , "Panels"" Button6, 21215=Tile vertically Button7, 21216=Cascade QuickButton8, 67676=Start listening | Stop listening, , , 67677 | Stop speaking, , , 67678 Button9, "Save as CHM"="Execute program, "savepage.exe", "%u", "Save" & Save document with images as, , , , "Save document as"" [Browser Toolbar.alignment] Alignment=0 Auto alignment=0 Old visible alignment=2 Collapse=1 [Hotlist Panel Selector.content] Bookmarks Transfers, 1 [Hotlist.alignment] Alignment=0 Auto alignment=0 Old visible alignment=1 Collapse=1 I think the key part to look at is Customize Toolbar Custom.content. You should be able to add your button there (or just copy/paste your current toolbar.ini file here).

UPnP is a horrible protocol and should be banished. It's for lazy people who don't want to take the time to properly configure their network. Any properly secured network would have UPnP blocked at the first entry to the network. Well... considering that one of my parent's computers is a PIII 700MHz with 128MB of RAM, having lightweight apps is a must. I couldn't even begin to imagine running Azureus on a machine with less than 256MB of RAM. It would most definately bring the system to a crawl. On my computer at home (1GB RAM), the difference in RAM usage between Azureus open and downloading 3 torrents (my internet maxes out at 140kbps) and closed is almost 400MB.

The comment wasn't meant to be flaming in any way. It's simply very difficult to read your posts. A little effort to clean up your posts would go a long way. As a first step - I've used Sygate on several computers without any problems, as well as Norton. What other programs do you have loading on startup? Also, are you testing this from a UA CD with any other modifications? UA Application installs? Are you using nLite? A bit of clarification on this note would help. Sorry if I offended. Hopefully you can understand that it's sometimes irritating and difficult to see a post that looks like rambling.

And proper capitalization...