If you’re like me, you use Mozilla Firefox as your preferred web browser. However, Firefox has one great weakness; its great love of RAM. I browsed around the web a bit, and found this workaround, which should help a bit at least. I have tried it, and it worked nicely for me.
What this workaround does is move Firefox to your hard drive when minimized, which results in Firefox taking up less RAM. Obviously, the amount of RAM taken up will increase when you maximize the window, but it appears to increase to less than it used to be, which could certainly be said to be an improvement.
The number one objection I have seen to this workaround is that people say that Firefx will take longer to maximize as the cache is located on the hard drive instead of in RAM. However, according to other bloggers out there, any delay is not noticeable.
Now, to the step-by-step:
- Open Firefox and go to the Address Bar. Type in about:config and then press Enter.
- Right Click in the page and select New -> Boolean.
- In the box that pops up enter config.trim_on_minimize. Press Enter.
- Now select True and then press Enter.
- Restart Firefox.
This should help with the problem, and at any rate you can always go back and delete the same setting that you just created should you start to experience any issues.
Being one to muck about quite a bit with my computers, my wireless network connection is now called “Wireless Network Connection 5″, like so:
Annoying though it may be, it is, however, really easy to remedy. Here’s how:
- Right-click the Wireless Network Connection, and select “Rename”
- Call it whatever you’d like, and hit enter. I’ve called mine WLAN:
This is really simple to do, and works flawlessly for both wired and wireless network connections. Enjoy!
In my last post, I showed you how to use the GPEdit app to change the default Save As/Open locations. There’s another way to do this, using that great little tool called TweakUI.
If you haven’t gotten it already, download and install it before reading on.
Here’s how to make the tweak:
- Open TweakUI
- Navigate to the Common Dialogsentry
- Open the entry called “Places Bar”
- Set the settings as you want like so:
- You have a few predefined places, but you can point it to local folders such as c:\example\foldername or even remote computers such as \\remote.computer.network.net\folder
I’ve been annoyed that I’ve not been able to change the default Save As/Open locations, as well as changing the 5 options I get on the Places Bar. Here’s what it looks like default:
Now, there are two ways of changing this, this first one uses the GPEdit or Group Policy Editor app which you might remember from my post on branding Internet Explorer. Here’s how we go about changing it:
Here’s the end product:
Have you ever returned to your computer only to find it having restarted, and all of your data gone? For a myriad of reasons, I keep my computers running continuously for a long time at a time. This makes this insistence on a reboot not only annoying, but in its extremes, it can actually make me lose work. To prevent this, I have disabled the auto-reboot, and I am no longer annoyed with repeated requests for reboots.
For some reason, there is no GUI-button for this setting, so we have to edit the Group Policy of the computer. This is relatively safe, as long as you don’t start to fiddle with anything you do not know what is. The process is as follows:
- In the Start-menu, hit run
- In the window that opens (it is called “Run”), enter gpedit.msc
- Locate the following subfolder:
Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update
- Double-click the setting “No auto-restart for scheduled Automatic Updates installations”
- Choose “Enabled”
- Click “Apply”
- Close the gpedit.msc window
Congratulations! One less annoyance to contend with.
2008 STFU && RTFM