Cubic

I've been using Windows for a really long time. As have many other geeks/nerds. I've seen my share of "Registry Cleaners", speedup tools, and tips from other people. All these things don't work. They really don't. You might get a temporary "boost" in certain areas, but a month later you'll be experiencing enough seemingly unrelated system problems that you'll end up reinstalling Windows. People always tell me their computers are slow and want to know how to speed it up. Today, I'm going to show you two ways to truly speed up a Windows-based computer and keep it lightning fast. First, fire up that slow computer and launch Task Manager. Go to the "Performance" tab, and look at the amount of memory being used. If the amount of memory being used exceeds 80% of the amount of available physical RAM, that means that portions of the OS and other programs are being moved to what is known as "swap space". Swap space...

Edit (July 6, 2013): It has taken me almost three (3) years to come up with a secure WiFi solution since I first wrote and published this article. It is my professional and personal opinion that, outside of running 200 ft. of Ethernet (which I actually did), only a WPA2-Enterprise AES w/ EAP+TLS setup is secure . My hope is that you come to the realization that your own WiFi network is not secure as you read my story below. I take security VERY seriously and violations of that security even more seriously. Hacking my personal networking infrastructure is near impossible. Or so I thought. First, some background. I run...well, I used to run a wireless network access point. Yes, it is one of those consumer-grade, wireless network setups because I'm a cheapskate. The brand doesn't matter. Here's the critical bit of information: I ran the wireless access point with WPA-PSK (TKIP) using a completely random key of about 40 characters in length and a different SSID fr...

I've decided that Windows Task Manager is ill-conceived, poorly designed, and extremely misleading. Especially the following: Most people have seen the "Performance" tab and that memory usage chart. Charts have a more powerful influence than a bunch of numbers and statistics. Take a good look at the chart and answer one question: What is the user going to think? Most users have no idea what a 'page file' is. But most can understand the terms 'memory' and 'CPU'. The chart is extremely misleading. The chart above this chart is 'CPU' usage. In terms of all the charts in Task Manager, that chart is the most useful. Think in terms of the average user trying to figure out why the computer is extremely slow. Now, based on this image, what can you tell about the current system? That is right - the average user cannot figure it out. This means Task Manager is poorly designed and is downright misleading. The user is mislead to believe that...

If you are reading this, you are probably coming from the CubicleSoft website to learn more about Windows Error Reporting. This blog entry will thus be a little more professional as a result. Windows Error Reporting, or WER for short, is a set of technologies Microsoft put together for Windows XP and expanded upon for Windows Vista: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Error_Reporting To summarize the Wikipedia article, WER gathers error reports in a central location (Microsoft servers) and developers of software then can log into the system and retrieve those error reports and thus fix bugs. End-users of Windows see something like this when the application crashes: The user clicks the "Send Error Report" and the bugs get fixed. The official website of Windows Error Reporting (WER): https://winqual.microsoft.com/ All that sounds good in writing until developers start reading the "fine print" on what is required. By default, applications are not WER enabled. That mea...