Firefox Speed Tweaks

Yes, firefox is already pretty damn fast but did you know that you can tweak it and improve the speed even more?

That's the beauty of this program being open source.

Here's what you do:
In the URL bar, type “about:config” and press enter. This will bring up the configuration “menu” where you can change the parameters of Firefox.

Note that these are what I’ve found to REALLY speed up my Firefox significantly - and these settings seem to be common among everybody else as well. But these settings are optimized for broadband connections - I mean with as much concurrent requests we’re going to open up with pipelining… lol… you’d better have a big connection.

Double Click on the following settings and put in the numbers below - for the true / false Boolean - they’ll change when you double click.

Code:
browser.tabs.showSingleWindowModePrefs – true
network.http.max-connections – 48
network.http.max-connections-per-server – 16
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy – 8
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server – 4
network.http.pipelining – true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests – 100
network.http.proxy.pipelining – true
network.http.request.timeout – 300


One more thing… Right-click somewhere on that screen and add a NEW -> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0”. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives. Since you’re broadband - it shouldn’t have to wait.

Now you should notice you’re loading pages MUCH faster now!

Basic Find Stuff

Has this ever happened to you?

You're looking for something on a long web page with Internet Explorer or Netscape. You think it's there, but you're faced with seemingly insurmountable number of paragraphs, sentences, and words to hunt though.

Well, next time this happens to you, hit the Edit menu, Find (or CTRL-F for you shortcut lovers). You'll get a handy little "find" box that lets you type in a specific word. After you type in your search term, hit the Find Next button and Explorer will look for that word on the page. If it's successful, you'll be zapped right to it.

As if that wasn't cool enough, you can also use a variation of this tip in Windows Explorer. Next time you're looking for a file in Explorer, hit CRTL-F and you'll get a Find or Search box (depending on what flavor of Windows you're using).

If you are already in the area of your hard drive where you think the file is (say, My Documents), hit CTRL-F and your search will be set to look in the My Documents folder.

Enable Folder and Icon Refresh

This reg file Enables Folder and Icon Refresh.


1. Copy the following (everything in the box) into notepad.

QUOTE
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00


[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced]
"NoNetCrawling"=dword:00000000

2. Save the file as disablerefreshundo.reg
3. Double click the file to import into your registry.

NOTE:
If your anti-virus software warns you of a "malicious" script, this is normal if you have "Script Safe" or similar technology enabled.

Converting to NTFS

Your hard drive must be formatted with a file system such as FAT, FAT32 or NTFS so that Windows can be installed on to it. This system determines how files are named, organised and stored on the drive. If you’re not using it already, NTFS (New Technology File System) is recommended for Windows XP because of the additional functionality it offers. If your PC came with Windows XP pre-installed then there’s a chance that you’re already using NTFS. If you’ve upgraded from Windows 98 or Windows Me you may still be using FAT or FAT 32. The option to change over to NTFS would have been available during the upgrade process. Don’t worry if you skipped this as it’s possible to convert at any time from within Windows XP without losing any data.