Vista’s search system also gets singled out for being slow, or for slowing down the rest of the system, but you don’t have to live with that. First of all, ask yourself if you really need it. If you don’t use the search service a lot, then by all means turn it off. But if you do want to use the search service, start by checking that the directories being indexed for search (or “crawled”) are the ones you actually want to index.

To change the scope of the index, type “Index” in the Start menu search bar and select Indexing Options. Take note of the list of folders in Included Locations; if there’s anything being indexed there that you want to change, click Modify — Show All Locations to bring up a selectable directory tree.

On my system, I have the following folders indexed: my Users directory, my music directory (mostly so I can search music metadata without having Windows Media Player running), my photos folder. That covers everything of importance that I need to search, and so the amount of work on the machine’s part to keep the index up to date is minimal.

Some general advice for how to set up indexing:

• Don’t select an entire drive when you can simply select relevant folders. Unless you’re devoting a whole drive to material which is specifically being crawled for indexing, index specific directories. This narrows the scope of the changes that can trigger a crawl.
• Do not index program directories. There generally isn’t data in there worth indexing in the first place.
• Be mindful of third-party programs that might repeatedly write data into a crawled directory without you knowing about it, and in turn repeatedly trigger indexing crawls.

This morning while I was surfing the web I found this post that I want to share with you.

No, Windows is not a virus. Here’s what viruses do:

• They replicate quickly - okay, Windows does that.
• Viruses use up valuable system resources, slowing down the system as they do so - okay, Windows does that.
• Viruses will, from time to time, trash your hard disk - okay, Windows does that too.
• Viruses are usually carried, unknown to the user, along with valuable programs and systems. Sigh… Windows does that, too.
• Viruses will occasionally make the user suspect their system is too slow (see 2) and the user will buy new hardware. Yup, that’s with Windows, too.

Until now it seems Windows is a virus but there are fundamental differences: Viruses are well supported by their authors, are running on most systems, their program code is fast, compact and efficient and they tend to become more sophisticated as they mature.

So Windows is not a virus.

It’s a bug.

What do you think?…

Original post you can find it here.

JFileRecovery is a free Java Web Start application that can copy files from damaged storage devices and media, skipping over problematic regions that typically cause copying to fail. If the file is listed, there is a good chance that JFileRecovery can salvage much of the data with minimal corruption. For many media files such as MP3, MPEG, AVI and JPEG, corruption is often not even noticeable.

Copying large video files from scratched CDs and DVDs often results in CRC errors, aborting the process and making transferring the file impossible. JFileRecovery can bypass these CRC errors, with minimal data loss which may only be noticeable as a single bad frame in the video.

What is a CRC Error?

A cyclic redundancy check (CRC) is used to detect alteration of data during transmission or storage. This checking procedure is useful to identify when data is damaged or corrupted.

The most common time you will see a CRC error message is when trying to read data from a damaged CD or DVD. Usually the computer becomes less responsive and you hear repetitive seek noises from the drive for up to a minute. And then, if you are using windows XP, you will encounter the following error message:

Cannot copy [FILENAME]. Data error (cyclic redundancy check)

The copy process is then aborted with no option of retrying to read from the damaged region or skipping over it. This is very frustrating when copying large files because you must try copying again from the beginning.

JFileRecovery provides options to retry or skip bad sectors when copying files from damaged hard drives, CDs, DVDs and Flash media.

Download it from here.