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I love Firefox, but there are always minor issues with any piece of software that should to be addressed to make them run even better.  Here’s one that has bothered me for quite some time.  If Firefox has been running for a while and I have a bunch of tabs open Flash performance, especially video, tends to suffer.  It turns out there’s a simple fix.

If you’re watching video on Firefox and it seems to skip or stutter every ten seconds or so it’s because Firefox is taking a snapshot of all your open tabs in case your browser crashes.  You can either disable the session restore feature (not really recommended) or you can just change the interval from every ten seconds to something a little more reasonable.

To do so simply type about:config in your address bar, then type browser.sessionstore.interval in the filter box.  It’s default value is 10000 (10 seconds in milliseconds) so just change this to something like  60000 for 1 minute intervals 120000 for 2 minute, etc.  You don’t even have to restart Firefox for this to take effect.

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These hack are for advanced users, they can really mess up your system. Please make backups of your registry before you do anything else. Caveat utilitor!

First thing is first, fire up your registry editor. Goto start –> run –> type in “regedit32″ and press enter

1st hack-

Changing the speed of menu speed
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\

MenuShowDelay. Thedefault valueis 400. Set it to 0

2nd hack-

This one places the windows kernel in ram ( the heart of the OS, do this only if you have over 1 gig of ram)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\MemoryManagement\DisablePagingExecutive set this to 1 to disable paging and have the kernel run in RAM

3rd hack-

Prefetch Parameters

This places system files into cache for faster loading ( do this is you have more than 1 gig of memory)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SessionManager\MemorManagement\PrefetchParameters\EnablePrefetcher Set this to 0 to disable prefetching, 1 to prefetch application launch files, 2 to prefetch boot files, and 3 to prefetch as many files as possible.

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Fragmentation deals with hard drives, more specifically the filesystem on hard drives. Almost all  filesystems fragment, but some are better than others. But what exactly is fragmentation?  Hard drives are composed of platters of magnetic media ( think of an old LP record) The files take up a block of space , if there is free space on the drive , the block are contiguous with each other. Perhaps a visual explanation would help here. And this is a basic explanation of the internals of a file system.

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When you buy a new PC often times they come with dozens of programs you don’t want, don’t need and only live on your computer to slow you down and use system resources.  If you’re not an IT person the “add/remove programs” list might be a bit daunting, so how do you safely remove them?

PC Decrapifier to the rescue!

PC Decrapifier is an excellent free (for personal use) utility that will automatically remove unwanted programs from your new PC.  When you run it, the software will give you a list of currently installed “crapware” and allow you to choose which programs you would like it to uninstall.

Here is a list of the software that PC Decrapifier removes:

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