How To Speed Up The Shutdown Of Your Windows

The Windows shutdown process may be as slow as the start up unfortunately. But, due to Windows amazing ability of user managed settings, you can change that! So, how can you speed up your Windows Shutdown process ?

WARNING : BEFORE making any changes to the Windows registry, it is highly recommended to make a backup in case anything goes wrong. To backup your Windows registry, tap your Windows key on the keyboard and “R”. When the Run box comes up, type regedit. When the Registry box comes up, go to ‘File’ then ‘Export’. Save the resulting file to your hard drive.

Auto-Kill All Programs at Shutdown

This tweak can speed up the process a lot by killing tasks quickly and not requiring user input for closing them, e.g. the repetitive Firefox pop-up asking if you really want to quit. Here it is:

Step 1: Go to “Start,” “Run,” and type regedit..

Step 2: Navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop
Step 3: Find the Registry Key called AutoEndTasks and right-click then select Modify. Change the value to 1.

able Clearing of Paging File
We previously talked about the paging article in another article on speeding up Windows, but today we are talking about how to speed up the use of the Paging File even more.
On shutdown, Windows automatically removes the contents of the Paging File for security, because it may run as a temporary file, holding information such as unencrypted passwords, etc. (If you believe the security of your system will be too far out of control due to the absence of removal of such information, then it is not necessary that you use this hack.)
Let’s do it!

Step 1: Go to “Start,” “Run,” and type regedit.

Step 2: Navigate to:HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management.

Step 3: Find the Registry Key labeled ClearPageFileOnShutdown and right-click it, then selectModify. Change the value to 0.

Hope this helps you get into your tweaking mood! Have fun hacking tweaking! More next time on WinHack!

How To Create Custom Themes For Firefox With Personas

There’s no doubt that Firefox is the rising star of web browsers and one of the main reasons for its success is the sheer level of customization possible by way of add-ons and extensions.

Given this, it’s no surprise that Mozilla Labs has released Personas; a creative and fun extension that aims to customize the look of Firefox’s interface by letting you create custom Firefox themes.

Why Personas?

What separates Personas from the usual add-on themes available is that it eliminates the need to incessantly download new themes just to make simple changes to the look of Firefox every now and again. It allows for seamless transformations to the browser without constantly installing new themes and having to restart the browser over and over again.

How Does It Work?

Personas let users change the top and bottom grey backgrounds of the browser window in favor of colorful designs or images. Getting Personas up and running is also easy; simply download the add-on (compatible with Firefox 2.0 and above) and you’ll be presented with a small icon in the bottom-left of the browser on start-up. From here you can select your desired design from dozens of preset themes or you can opt to use the newest or most popular user-submitted Personas as well.

Create Your Own Persona

If you want to take Firefox customization to the next level, you could consider making your very own Persona. Header images should be 3000 pixels wide and 200 pixels long, while footer images should be 3000 x 100 pixels in dimension. Next, upload the images, apply your Persona and you’re good to go.

Keep in mind that .png images work best and that you should try and position the objects in your Persona so that they don’t distract from important areas in the browser, like the Home or Refresh buttons.

The folks at Mozilla Labs also promise that Personas will soon allow for wider content support, including HTML and Javascript, which should make the extension all the more fun.

Personas is currently available for Windows®, Mac and Linux, so go ahead and spice up that boring browser.Have a question or suggestions? Drop a line in the comments section and share your thoughts with fellow MUO readers. Any other alternative ways to create custom Firefox theme?

Set Firefox To Clear Temp Files, History etc. On Shut Down

There’s a running joke in my family that (as far as security is concerned) knows no bounds.

On the computer, my passwords are at least 30 characters long, I try to surf on as many secure webpages (https) as I can, I keep everything in encrypted folders behind firewalls, and when I close my Firefox browser, all my personal browsing information is automatically dumped and deleted so no nefarious devil can get their hands on it. Yep, you can call me Captain Paranoia.

This is one of the reasons why I like Firefox. If you go to Tools>Options–>Privacy, there is a section there called “Private Data” :

Now, by clicking “clear now”, you can wipe all your private data immediately but you can set it up so it wipes your browsing history, temp files and other stuff automatically everytime Firefox closes. You can obviously achieve this by ticking “Always clear my private data when I close Firefox”.

If you want to be asked first, tick the second box “Ask me before clearing private data” but personally I found it really irritating always having a pop-up box jump out at me. So I turned it off. But I guess it all comes down to personal preference.

But you may not want ALL the private data cleared. For example, I decided to keep my cookies as I didn’t want to log in and out of certain sites all the time (preferring to manually delete them once a week instead). So by clicking on the “settings” button, you can tell Firefox what you want wiped when your browser closes and what you want kept.

Some of them, such as cookies and cache, are fairly straight-forward. But if you would like explanations of the others, Firefox Facts has a nice article explaining what they mean and what they save exactly.

This is a feature that everyone should have enabled by default. As I said, you may find it inconvenient to always have your cookies wiped but you should always have everything else wiped and dumped everytime your browser closes.

Otherwise who knows who will be looking at that information behind your back? Your partner? Your boss? Your roommate? Law enforcement without a warrant? These days, in the era of the Patriot Act, it pays to dump your internet data when you’re finished with it.