Improve your connection speed

If you have a broadband connection on a windows XP machine. If you are using applications that are QoS aware or running a server, this is one way to hug some bandwidth, not useful if you’re not. You could improve your connection speed by adjusting a few settings on your machine. Note this tip I’m about to show you does not work with windows XP Home.

Quality of Service packet scheduler or QoS is a method of network bandwidth management that monitor the packets to and from your machine and depending on the importance of the packet give it higher bandwidth or lower bandwidth.

- Make sure you're logged on as actually "Administrator". Do not log on with any account that just has administrator privileges.

- Start > Run > type gpedit.msc (not available in home version).

- Expand the Local Computer Policy branch.

- Expand the Administrative Templates branch.

- Expand the Network branch.

- Highlight the "QoS Packet Scheduler" in left window.

- In right window double click the "limit reservable bandwidth" setting.

- On setting tab check the ENABLED item.

- Where it says "Bandwidth limit %" change it to read 0 (ZERO).

- Close gpedit.msc.

Some systems will require you to reboot before it takes effect. Others don’t, the effect is immediate

Disabling the User Account Control (UAC) feature on my Windows Vista

Although UAC clearly improves the security on Windows Vista, under some scenarios you might want to disable. Some home users might be tempted to disable UAC because of the additional mouse clicking it brings into their system, however I  recommend not to do so, it’s put there for a reason, try to get used to it instead.

If you really have to though, there are four ways of doing it, Using the MSCONFIG feature which is the easiest and fastest way to do it, using regedit (I don’t recommend messing with your registry files unless you know what you’re doing), using the control panel and also by using group policy especially if the machine is on a network.

I’m going to give the steps for disabling UAC in vista using the MSCONFIG feature

Using MSCONFIG

1. Launch MSCONFIG by from the Run menu.
2. Click on the Tools tab. Scroll down till you find "Disable UAC”. Click on that line.

3. Press the Launch button.
4. A CMD window will open. When the command is done, you can close the window.
5. Close MSCONFIG. You need to reboot the computer for changes to apply.

You can always re-enable the UAC feature by selecting the "Enable UAC" line and then clicking on the Launch button.