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Disable Write Caching on Your Hard Drive

Edi Kwie — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 00:58:20 +0000

Write caching on a hard drive is a great way to boost your hard drive performance. Unfortunately, it has a negative effect. If you’re enabling write caching on your hard drive, all traffic of data will put on your cache memory first then your hard drive plates. So, this why your hard drive performance will increases but if your electricity is turn off suddenly you’ll data could be lost.

I know, that’s a hard decision, if you enable the write caching, you have a risk if your computer lost its power but other side if you turn it off, your hard drive performance will decreased.
By default, Windows XP enable the write caching on your hard drive. And if you choose to disable it, follow these steps:

Open My Computer by double click My Computer icon on desktop or single click on Start menu.
After My Computer is opened, right click your hard drive icon and then click Properties menu.
Click Hardware tab; make sure your hard drive hardware driver is chosen.
Then click Properties button.
In your hard drive Properties window, make sure that Enable write caching on this disk option is unchecked. Click OK button.
Once again, click OK to close your hard drive properties window.
Now, write caching on your hard drive is disable.

(article no: 0151)

Optimizing Write Allocation of File

Edi Kwie — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 02:38:05 +0000

To make your hard drive health, one of the ways is manage when hard drive is wrote. Because if the operating system have well structured when it is writing, your hard drive won’t fragmented easily. Unfortunately, Windows XP doesn’t do that by standard configurations. Thanks to Registry hacked, that make you have a better configuration to make your hard drive be better.

And here is the way:

Open Registry Editor by click Start -> Run, enter regedit in box and then press Enter.
Navigate to registry path: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ OptimalLayout.
Find EnableAutoLayout value, if you don’t find it, create the new one by right click on empty space on right panel and then choose New -> String value menu.
Replace the original value with EnableAutoLayout.
Change its value data by double click EnableAutoLayout value, replace the original value with 1 and then click OK button.
Close Registry Editor and then restart your computer.
Actually, you can’t see its progress because your Windows XP will optimize the hard drive when the processor in idle mode. But at least, your Windows XP is better now.

To bring it back, just remove EnableAutoLayout value or give it value: 0.

Drive Letters as Initial Drive Label

Edi Kwie — Thu, 15 May 2008 03:14:11 +0000

By default Windows XP set drive label with this format: Label (DriveLetter:). And this format isn’t annoying me until I have many drives in my computer. And when I was realized it, I want to put drive letter as my drives label so that I can find my destination drive quickly. And this can be happened on your computer too, whereas you are a network administrator because a network administrator often to map remote drive onto their computer.
And with make drive letter as your initial drive label, which will make your will manage them easily because you don’t need read them by label but by drive letters.
And here are the steps:
1. To make it work, you need modify the registry. Click Start -> Run, enter regedit in box and then press Enter.

2. Navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer path.

3. In Explorer key, right click on empty space on right panel; choose New -> DWORD value menu.

4. Replace the original value to ShowDriveLettersFirst and then press Enter.

5. Double click it, replace value 0 to 4, and then click OK button.

6. Close Registry Editor and then restart your computer.

7. Now, if you did it right, your drives label are started with its drives letters.

And if you don’t like this, just modify ShowDriveLettersFirst to 0 or delete it from registry.

Set Quota Space Harddisk User By User

Edi Kwie — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 14:10:15 +0000

If you have a PC that shared for all family members, you need to manage and protect your computer wisely. And one of the important things is manage hard disk space so that you can’t run out hard disk space suddenly.

Windows XP gives you a smart tool to set quota your hard disk by user. So, you can set user A get 3GB, user B get 4GB, and so on. But this feature needs a NTFS partition to run.
So, how does to doing that? Just follow these steps:

1. Open your My Computer window.

2. Click right mouse button on your hard disk icon and choose Properties menu.

3. Click Quota tab, and check the Enable quota management & Deny disk space to users exceeding quota limit radio button then set limit disk space to size that you want on Limit disk space to option and set Set warning level to option (you must set this smaller than Limit disk space value) as well, and then click OK button at hard disk Properties window.

4. And click Yes when Disk Quota confirmation dialog appear to make a confirmation to you.

5. Repeat step 1, 2 to apply to others hard drive, and then click Quota Entries button and you will see Quota Entries window.

6. At Quota Entries window, you’ll see entire of users limit list. Also, you can see them one by one and if you’re an Administrator, you can set them through this window too. Just double click a user in list. In Quota Settings window you can set Limit disk space to and Set Warning level to value.

7. If you’re done, click OK button. Then the changed of limit can be looked in Quota Entries window.

(article no:0030)

Change Your Hard Drive Icon

Edi Kwie — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 03:51:47 +0000

If you’re boring with your hard drive icon, just change the icon…

Windows XP is setting the default icon this picture.

To change it, just follow these steps:
1. Open Registry Editor via Start – Run menu and then type regedit in the textbox then press Enter key.

3. Find DriveIcons key, if you don’t find it, create new one with right click on Explorer Key and then choose New -> Key menu.

4. Rename it from its original key name

to DriveIcons.

5. After DriveIcons key has created, right click on the DriveIcons key and then choose New -> Key menu.

6. Rename it from its original key name

to letter of your drive that want changed, in this case I want change drive C, so I rename it with C.

7. OK, right click on C (or letter drive that created at step 6) and then choose New -> Key menu.

8. Rename it from original key name

to DefaultIcon key.

9. If DefaultIcon has created, double click on Default value that located on right panel.

10. Before you change the value, make sure that you have the right icon path, for example you have the icon at C:\icons\pad.ico.

11. Type your icon path in the textbox on Edit String window, click OK button.

12. You’ll see the result of change like below picture.

13. Close your Registry Editor, and open your My Computer and you will see that your drive icon has changed.

(article no:0070)

Show Contents of Hard Drive As Toolbar On Desktop

Edi Kwie — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 15:55:07 +0000

This trick will show to you about making toolbar on the desktop which containing your hard drive contents and its folder. And you can access your folder faster.

Follow these steps:
1. Open My Computer.

2. Click on hard drive that you want makes be toolbar and drag drop it to top your desktop.

3. And you will get a new toolbar at top screen (you can relocate it to left, bottom or right of desktop.

4. If you want to make it Auto hide or remove it from your desktop, just right click on toolbar and select Toolbar menu then click to unchecked your drive which will removed.