Write Protect Your Pen Drive/USB Drive

Write protection was one of the most useful feature in floppies. It allowed prevented any data to be written on the disk's surface, just by sliding a small slider. USB drives have now replaced floppies but still write protection is not a standard feature in all USB drives. Sure, some pen drives do come with this nifty feature but most of them lack it.

Write protection allows the user to read from the drive but not write on it. It is the best way to stay away from viruses. So, if you have write protection on, you dont have to worry about viruses getting into your pendrive. 

There is a little nifty utility to write protect a pen drive. Its very tiny in size and offcourse its portable. Its available in multiple languages like English, German, French, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, etc. Its only 187 KB in size. Now even if your friends PC has a virus, then also you can insert your pen drive in it without thinking. Download it from here.

Enable network adaptor’s onboard processor

If you have a network card and it has got its own onboard processor, you can take off the load of network processing from your CPU. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters and create a new DWORD by right clicking on the right hand side pane of the registry editor and selecting new>DWORD. Name it as “DisableTaskOffload”. Set its value to 0 to enable offloading network processing onto the network card. You will have to restart Windows for this to take effect.

When Windows is unable to identify your hardware

Windows xp has a very sophisticated hardware driver management system. Whenever you plug in any new hardware device, it automatically detects it and proceeds with the driver installation. But sometimes, it fails to identify some devices. In such a case, you have to manually install the drivers for that particular hardware device.

Go to Start > Control Panel > Add Hardware, to start the add hardware wizard.

Click next and wait for wizard to search for any newly connected hardware.

If it fails to detect the hardware, select the option, ‘Yes, I have already connected the hardware’ and click on next.

Select your hardware device from the list in the next screen. If you don’t find your hardware there, select, ‘Add a new hardware device’ given as the last option in the list.

In the next screen, the wizard wants to know whether you want to search for and install the hardware automatically or install the driver manually. As windows did not find any attached hardware previously, select the second option.

In the next screen, the wizard comes up with a list of various hardware categories. Select the type of hardware you are trying to install and click next.

The wizard then shows a list of different manufacturers and models whose drivers are present in Windows xp driver database.

Select the exact model and click next to install the drivers.

If the model is not present in the list then you might consider downloading the drivers from the internet by visiting the manufacturer’s website. When you are done with that select the have disk option to install the downloaded drivers.

Get rid of dialup modem noise

If you use an external dialup modem to connect to internet, you would have probably experienced a noise coming out of the modem while it tries to connect to internet. This noise can be very annoying at times. Usually, the default volume of this sound is set to maximum. If you want to disable or reduce the sound, follow these steps.

Go to ‘start’ and open ‘control panel’.

Click on ‘network and internet connections’.

Click on ‘phone and modem’ option and then on ‘modems’ tab.

Select your modem and click on properties.

Drag the speaker volume to your desired level.

Click ok and close the network and internet connections window.

Use headphone jack in optical drive

Almost all of the optical drives come with a 3.5mm headphone jack. It is used to get analog audio output. What we get from the audio card is digital output. Windows xp sets digital music playback as default playback option, that is why you do not get the audio output when you insert the headphone cable in the optical drive jack as it is meant for analog output only. If you want to hear the analog audio directly from your CD-ROM drive, you will have to manually set the audio output as analog. To do this,

1. Right click on My Computer icon and click on properties.

2. Select the hardware tab and click on device manager.

3. In the device manager window, under 'DVD/CD-ROM Drives' locate your optical drive and double click it.

4. Go to properties and under the 'Digital CD Playback', deselect the 'enable digital audio from this cdrom drive' checkbox.

5. Restart your machine and you should be able to hear the audio through your headphones.

Extend the cable length of headphones and speakers

Headphones or Speakers usually come with a cable length of about 1m to 1.5m depending upon the brand. But for a lot of people, this length is not enough. It gets stretched whenever it is connected to pc. This ultimately leads to breaking of the cable and you have to buy a new one. You can prevent this by using a stereo audio extension cable. This cable has a 3.5mm stereo pin at one end and a 3.5mm jack at the other. All you have to do is plug your headphone to one end and the cable to your pc. These cables come in different lenghts. 

These links may help you:

worldofcables.com

amazon.com

rediff.com

Using iPod as a hard disk

For those who were unaware of this, you can use your iPod as an external hard disk. In disk mode, you can transfer your data and use your iPod as a portable hard disk! By pressing a special combination of buttons you can activate disk mode without using iTunes. To do this,

1. First of all, reset your ipod.

2. When you see the apple logo, press back and forward(for first to third generation) until the disk mode is displayed or press select and play(for fourth generation).

3. To get out of disk mode, perform a reset

Audio, Video files playing improperly

If your audio or videos files are playing as though the fast forwarding is on, causing improper audio or video output, there is a very good chance that your drivers are not properly installed. Such problems usually arise when the audio or video drivers are installed before the chipset the driver. So, to fix this problem, you need to uninstall all the drivers and reinstall them in the correct order. The correct method is to install the chipset driver first and any other driver such as audio or video later on.

When you are done with all this, reboot your system and check the audio/video files. They should play properly.

Prevent your drives from damaging

If you have to turn your computer off and back on immediately, wait for some time, say about 30 seconds before turning it back on. That gives the drive (or drives, if you have more than one) plenty of time to finish spinning and park their heads before they get the wake-up jolt. Otherwise the heads could damage the drive surface. This may lead to loss of data or replacement of your drive(s).

How to enhance your mouse's performance

You can make your mouse cursor’s movement more precise and smooth.
Open Control Panel
Double click on mouse icon
Select the hardware tab and click on properties

Select the advanced settings tab and increase the sample rate to its maximum value

Also increase the input buffer length to its maximum value

Click ok

Again click ok and finally restart your pc

You will notice the change in your mouse’s performance.

Other simple option is to change the pointer speed and check the enhance pointer precision.