Official Google Blog: We knew the web was big...

Official Google Blog: We knew the web was big...

Improve Performance By Disabling Indexing Service

The Indexing Service in Windows XP Indexes your files presumably to shorten the time needed to search your hard drive if you are looking for a specific file or part of a phrase inside a file. By default, this service is set to manual (so it won't start), but when you do a search on your computer, there's that little question asking you if you want to make future searches faster.... so you could have enabled it (it will tell you that you are going to enable the Indexing service when you choose this). Anyway, having run it for a while, it was one of the first things I decided switched off, and I haven't noticed any delay when I do my searches (and I presume that with my C:\ drive holding in excess of 106,000 files in over 2,700 folders I'm not a typical user!), but I did notice the improvement of having more CPU cycles available at all times. Don't you just hate it when you're playing a game of Hearts and your system decides that you are doing "nothing", so it can start indexing your files, thereby slowing down your game to a crawl. To disable the Indexing service, open Computer Management from Administrative Tools (on the Start menu if you enabled this, or from the Control Panel), select Services and Applications, double click Services, and find the Indexing Service. Double click to bring up the Properties window, and click Stop to let Windows stop the service. Then from the Status type drop down box select Disabled.

Remove Shared Doc’s from My Computer

Under My Computer you will notice a new folder called shared documents. Microsoft has made it easy to share files and folders over a network by dragging icons into it. If you wish to remove this folder from My computer all you have to do is delete a key from the windows registry. Start regedit. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\ CurrentVersion\Explorer\MyComputer\NameSpace\DelegateFolders. Locate the key {59031a47-3f72-44a7-89c5-5595fe6b30ee}. Right click on it and select delete. Reboot may be required to complete!

Remove Shared Documents Folder from My Computer

If your computer is part of a Workgroup, you will notice that a Shared Documents folder appears in My Computer. This folder lets you share files with multiple users easily. If you want to remove this folder you can: Start the Registry Editor Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Policies \ Explorer \ Right-click an empty space in the right pane and select New > DWORD Value Name the new value NoSharedDocuments Double-click this new value, and enter 1 as its Value data Close the registry editor Log off, or restart Windows for the changes to take effect To reverse this process, change the Value data to 0, or delete the NoSharedDocuments Value.

How to track the original location of an email via its IP address

Here’s a quick how-to guide on how you can track email to it’s originating location by figuring out the email’s IP address and looking it up. I have found this to be quite useful on many occasions for verification purposes since I receive lots of emails daily due to my blog. Tracking the IP address of an email sender does require looking at some technical details, so be ready to dig your heels in!

There are basically two steps involved in the process of tracking an email: find the IP address in the email header section and then look up the location of the IP address.

Finding the IP address of an email sender in GMail, Yahoo Mail, and Outlook

Let’s go ahead and take a look at how you would do this for Google, Yahoo and Outlook since those are the most popular email clients.

Google’s Gmail

1. Log into your account and open the email in question.

2. Click on the down arrow that’s to the right of the Reply link. Choose Show Original from the list.

Now here’s the technical part that I was telling you about earlier! You need to look for the lines of text that start with “Received: from“. It might be easier to simply press Cntrl + F and perform a search for that phase. You’ll notice that there are several Received From’s in the message header. This is because the message header contains the IP addresses of all of servers involved in routing that email to you.

To find the first computer that originally sent the email, you’ll have to find the Received From that’s farthest DOWN. As you can see from the above image, the first one is from a computer called “aseem” with the IP address 72.204.154.191. Then it was routed to my ISP’s server at eastrmmtao104.cox.net and so on and so forth till it got to your email server.

The computer aseem is my personal home computer and that’s my public IP address for my house! I’ll go through Yahoo and Outlook before talking about tracking the location of that IP address.

Yahoo Mail Beta

1. Log into your account and open the email (if you’re using Yahoo Mail Beta with the new preview interface, make sure you double-click on the email so that it opens in a new tab)

2. At the top right, you’ll see there is a drop-down option where Standard Header is selected by default.

3. Click on it and choose Full Header.

Again, you’ll see the same information as before, just in a different window:

Microsoft Outlook

1. Open the email in Outlook by double-clicking on it

2. Go to View at the top menu (the menu options for the email, not the main Outlook window) and choose Options.

You’ll get a dialog box where you can set the message options and at the bottom you’ll see the Internet Headers box. For some silly reason, the box is very small and you have to scroll a lot, so it’s best to simply copy and paste the text into Notepad to view it more easily.

Tracking the location of an IP address

Now that we have our originating IP address of 72.204.154.191, let’s find out where that is! You can do this by perform a location lookup on the IP address. My favorites are IP2Locator and GeoBytes IP Locator.

GeoBytes gave me a big map of New Orleans, LA along with a bunch of other information about the location itself.

IP2Location also gave me the same information pretty much, including the ISP (Cox Communications). Of course, this is correct since I live in New Orleans!

If you want more information, you can do a WHOIS database search also. My favorite one is theARIN WHOIS Database Search. This will give you information on who hosts that IP address and their registration information. You can always contact them to try and find more information on that particular IP address.

Have fun tracking down those emails! Questions, comments, or suggestions? Post a comment!

Physical Installation of the SATA Hard Drive

Find a free 3.5" drive bay in your case. Most computer cases will have a row of covered 3.5" drive bays directly below the floppy drive. If there is no floppy drive, they should be below the CD drive bay. Note that many 'big box' retailers like dell place hard drives in alternate locations, so your experience may vary.

If you are installing a second hard drive, it's a good idea to leave a space between your old drive and your new one if you can afford to. Hard drives can get rather hot while operating, especially 7200 RPM drives, and this can affect their lifespan. If you are nervous about heat, or you do not have a free 3.5" bay, you can purchase a 5 ¼" adaptor kit at any computer store. This is simply a pair of metal plates that screw on to the sides of the drive and widen it to fit the larger bay size.

Slide the drive carefully into the free bay with the connector end of the drive facing into the body of the computer, and screw it in tightly on both sides. Hard drives generally use larger-threaded case screws like the ones pictured above. These are identical to the screws used to secure the body panels of most computer cases.

Now it's time to plug in the SATA power and data cables. Connect either end of your serial ATA data cable to the corresponding plug on the back of your new drive. The cable is keyed to only fit one way.

Now connect your SATA or Molex power connector to the back of the drive. Again, the cable is keyed to only fit one way.

Finally, plug the other end of the SATA data cable into one of the SATA connectors on your motherboard. That's it, there are no master or slave settings to fuss with for SATA drives since each hard drive has its very own cable.

Physically Installing an IDE Hard Drive

Modern IDE hard drives use an 80-pin UDMA cable, while older hard disks and most optical drives use the 40-pin cable. If you are installing a hard disk that was made within the last eight years, you'll want to use the 80-pin cable. Note that the 80-pin and 40-pin names denote the number of wires in each type of cable, though both types still physically connect to the motherboard through a 40-pin connector.

Each IDE cable (both 40-pin and 80-pin types) can support two IDE devices, either hard disks or optical drives or a combination of the two. Depending on how your computer is currently configured, you may have an available space on an IDE cable that you can attach your new drive to, or you may need to add a second cable.

IDE cables connect to the motherboard through the IDE (Integrated Disk Electronics) controller interface, which provides the means to transfer data to and from the drives. An average PC will have a pair of IDE controllers, of various colours, each represented by one 40-pin connector (see picture).

Power down your computer, look inside and locate your existing hard drive and the IDE connectors on your motherboard to determine where you can add your new hard disk. Remember that each cable supports two drives, and each connector on the motherboard holds one cable.

Once you have figured out where you can attach your drive and whether you will need a new cable to do it or not, it's time to prepare your IDE hard drive for installation.