TechniTip.Net

Changing Volume with Mouse Wheel in Windows 7

This is only a very small tip but anyway it’s useful. Did you know that you can change the volume in Windows 7 using the mouse wheel?

It’s simple: click on the speaker icon in the task bar and the volume dialog will appear. Now move the mouse wheel up or down to change the volume.

Windows 7 has some of this nice features. The thing is to know them I guess there are much more.

Windows 7 LoginUI.exe Application Error

Some weeks ago I installed a Solid State Disk in my Latitude D820. The experience was very nice! Boot time decreased to 30 seconds. But two days ago a bad surprise: Starting the notebook did only show a blank screen (BIOS messages and Windows start logo appeared). After pressing FN-F8 (CRT/LCD) I could see a message box “LogonUI.exe – Application Error”. Pressing OK, waiting 10 seconds and the same message appeared again…

In my case the only way to get Windows 7 booting again was:

• Insert original Windows 7 CD and boot from it
• Start the console
• Enter “sfc /scannow /offbootdir=C:\ /offwindir=C:\Windows

I’m not sure what happened, but I hope the SSD disc has not failure.

Telnet for Windows 7 & Vista

You may have been wondering like me that no telnet command is available in Windows 7 and Vista after a fresh installation. Sometimes it’s still useful.

But it’s still available, only disabled:

1. Open your control panel
2. Select programs
3. Select “Turn windows features on or off” on the left side
4. Within the box enable [x] Telnet Client

When looking into these disabled windows features, there are features like:

• Services for NFS
• Subsystem for UNIX-based applications

Guess I want to check these NFS features…

Windows 7 Performance Tuning

Found a few tips on support.microsoft.com how to improve the performance of Windows Vista. Checking my Windows 7 installation it seems that these tips seem also apply to Windows 7. Unfortunately I could not found the English version of this support entry (KB954980), only in German language, but I think it should be understandable because of the many pictures:

• Improve Windows Vista Performance

Basically the article describes 4 things which help to improve the performance:

1. Part 2: Improve boot time using Windows ReadyBoost
2. Part 3: Disable Windows Aero
3. Part 4: Use extended hard disc write cache
4. Part 5: Disable unused hardware

On my Windows 7 installation I followed item 1. and 3. Think I have to make further checks how much it improves performance.

Especially item 1. ReadyBoost sounds interesting: Windows uses a USB stick or flash memory card to as additional cache. But I don’t want to use a USB stick, I want to use a PCI Express flash card adapter with a very fast memory card. Guess this should bring best performance.

After first checks my Windows 7 installation boots in about 1:45 minutes (completely). Looks not so bad, since I’ve already installed software like Photoshop, Office, iTunes, etc. The real boot time of Windows 7 is slightly lower than BIOS start up also needs time, approx. 7 seconds.

Windows 7 Screen Flicker/Dim on Notifications

I recognized this issue on a Dell Notebook Latitude D820 which is already a few years old. When you start an executable Windows prompts a notification window whether you want to allow the program to make changes on this computer. On this older notebook with maybe not very great graphical performance the screen blanks black for a short time (quite annoying!).

The reason is the too weak graphical performance of my Notebook. Basically Windows tries to fade the screen smoothly, but due to missing performance the screen blanks black.

But fortunately it’s easy possible to change this effect: When the notification appears press the link “Change when these notifications appear” on the bottom of the notification window.

Now change the slider one step down to “Notify me only when programs try to make changes to my computer (do not dim my desktop)”. Afterwards Windows 7 will no longer dim or fade your desktop when such a notification window appears.