How To Change The New Tab Behavior In Firefox

1.  Hide the thumbnails

• Click on the square icon to the upper right of that New Tab page – this hides the thumbnail pictures and your choice is supposed to be remembered even after you restart Firefox.

• Note that the square icon remains displayed – if you click it again the thumbnail pictures will reappear on New Tab pages.

2.  How to make a blank page on New Tab

You can do this by setting the New Tab page to just open a blank page instead:

• Open Firefox, in the address bar (URL) type about:config, press Enter.

• Click the “I’ll be careful I Promise” warning button (if it appears) – a long list of preferences used in Firefox is displayed.
• type newtab to narrow down the list to only display preferences containing that text.

• Double click the browser.newtab.url entry and change the String Value text to about:blank (default is about:newtab).

• Close Firefox and reopen it – now, whenever you open a new tab it should just display a blank page.

3.  Change New Tab to open your favorite website

• Open Firefox and type about:config in the address bar (URL), press Enter.

• Click the “I’ll be careful I Promise” warning button (if it appears) – a long list of preferences used in Firefox is displayed.
• Type newtab to narrow down the list to only display preferences containing that text.

• Double click the browser.newtab.url entry and change the String Value text to your chosen website address (URL) e.g. www.google.com (the default is about:newtab).

• Now, whenever you open a New Tab it will open your chosen website.

If your laptop wakes from standby inside your bag or backpack, it will likely overheat and possibly self destruct. Even if it survives, this takes life away from your hard drive and motherboard by getting so hot!

It cannot ventilate when running inside a laptop carrying case.

Laptop overheating causes:

Cause 1: USB mouse with nano receiver plugged in, when you get anywhere near the laptop, like putting it in your pack and lifting it from your desk to go out, it already is coming out of standby if your mouse isn’t completely disabled.

There’s a bug in windows settings that still allows the mouse to wake up the computer out of standby even if you have it set to not allow the device to wake up the computer.

Read this to make fix the USB mouse still bringing the laptop out of standby.

Cause 2: Plugged intake vent on the bottom, if you lay your laptop on a blanket or on your lap, make sure you know where your intake vent is and be mindful to keep it open to breathe air. Usually the exhaust is on the side or the back and is harder to block, plus you’ll feel a hot spot if you do plug it.

The clue: Dos prompt -> powercfg lastwake

The Problem:

Even though I had my nice new Logitech M325 mouse set to not “Allow this device to wake the computer” (unchecked), it still would wake up my laptop. This is dangerous!

The range on these mice are incredible and if you put your laptop into standby in a bag with the micro USB receiver always plugged in, as I do, you can accidentally bring your laptop to life. Possibly not for long with the heat factor of running inside a backpack…

The Solution:

Device Manager->Mice and other pointing devices->HID-compliant mouse->Power Management (tab) uncheck “Allow this device to wake the computer”.

Also the keyboard HID device must be disabled from the wake up call! (not your keyboard, that still wakes up my computer, as it should be)

Device Manager->Keyboards->HID-Keyboard Device->Power Management (tab) uncheck “Allow this device to wake the computer”.

Hard faults per second is just not having the info you need cached in RAM.

Don’t worry, Hard faults per second on Windows are not hard drive errors like you may think. They are simple pagefile accesses instead of RAM access.

Hard faults/sec in Windows 7 Resource Manager – too many?

You may see from 0 to more than 100 and it’s actually ok…well if you’re getting more than 50 or so, you’re system is running much slower than it can and most likely rattling the heck out of your hard drive.

Remedy:

• More ram
• Less hoggy programs running at once (easy to do with the new bloated software suites) just run the older lean and fast ones you remember and like if you can.
• Look in windows resource manager, find the memory hog and replace it with either an upgrade, downgrade, or another program. (Like I replace Adobe Reader with Foxit Reader which helps for memory use and security improvements)

from: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-files/please-help-winsxs-is-growing-fast-and-i-have-a/cd8af1dc-946b-e011-8dfc-68b599b31bf5

The winsxs folder bloats as you uninstall apps! This is counter-intuitive to gaining hard drive space huh? Within a week of running Windows 7 many people report a windows/winsxs folder to be 5 Gigs and as much as 10 to 12 Gigs.

What is the winsxs folder? A complicated mess that microsoft made, like the registry but even more of a black box space hog.

It contains manifests, dll backups, service pack backups, libraries for executables and other serious sounding junk. So many MS guys advise not to touch it that even I…windows modder and tinkerer from the win3.1 days have not dared delete any of the jillion little folders which turns out to the the bulk of my 5.5 Gigs of use.

My advice is to image your hard drive fairly often and when you want to uninstall stuff, go back to your image instead, of course after you’ve made sure you’ve copied your docs and bookmarks etc.

My Favorite Hotkeys for Windows 7:

Windows Explorer (file manager): Alt+Up: Goes up a folder level in Windows Explorer.

Backspace: is like back button (may be forward, may be back)

Alt-Right:is like back button (may be forward, may be back)

Win+Space: All windows become transparent so you can see through to the desktop.

Shift+Win+Up arrow: Maximize the active window vertically.

Shift+Win+Left/Right arrows: Move the window to the monitor on the left or right.

Double-Click Top Window Border (edge): Maximize window vertically.

from:microsoft

Start System Restore from a command prompt

You can start System Restore from a command prompt window if you can’t start your computer in any mode other than safe mode with command prompt.

1. Start your computer in safe mode with command prompt. For more information, see Start your computer in safe mode.

2. At the command prompt, type rstrui.exe, and then press ENTER. If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.

Windows 7 fixmbr:

from: http://www.planetmy.com/blog/how-to-fixmbr-using-windows-vista-bootable-disk/
This is a Malaysian computer blog which I find interesting, visit it if you like the tutorial below!
The following tutorial will teach you “How to fixmbr using Windows Vista bootable disk“.

• Boot up your computer using Microsoft Windows Vista Bootable disk. (Check your BIOS setup)
• When you see the 1st Windows Vista installation screen appear, please configure your ‘language‘ preferences.
• When prompted, click ‘Repair your computer’.
• Startup Repair will automatically detect a problem. When prompted, click ‘Repair and restart’, and then restart your computer from the Windows Vista bootable disk. If Startup Repair does not automatically detect a problem, continue to the next step.
• click ‘Repair Your Computer’.
• Click Command Prompt from the System Recovery Options.
• BootRec.exe provides the following command-line options:

• /FixMbr. Re-writes the master boot record (MBR) of the system partition to start Windows Vista. This won’t overwrite the existing partition table.

• /FixBoot. Writes a boot sector onto the system partition to start Windows Vista.

• /ScanOs. Scans all disks for Windows Vista installations and displays them to you. Oddly, this didn’t work for me, even on a test system that was starting just fine.

• /RebuildBcd. Scans all disks for Windows Vista installations and prompts you to pick the ones you want to add to the BCD.

• Type  ‘BootRec.exe /fixmbr‘ and press Enter.
• Congratulations! You’re done.

To fix grub after installing windows destroyed your boot sector:
from: ubuntuforums.org

…any time you install a copy of windows it will erase grub

its a simple fix..

1. boot live cd
2. open terminal
3. sudo grub
4.from grub prompt do this
find /boot/grub/stage1
it will give you something like this (hd0,0)
5.use the disk that you found with the command above for this next command
root (hd0,0)
(remember to change the numbers to correspond to whatever you got in the previous step)
6.setup (hd0) (notice how i left out the ,0) thats not a typo!
it should give you some type of confirmation that it worked
then you can just quit grub
quit
then exit the terminal
exit
reboot!
(you will need to add windows to your /boot/grub/menu.lst)

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