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I had been trying to record some audio of about 4 minutes in length or so with Windows 7.  After about a minute in, the sound would become muffled and degraded quality.  I tried adjusting microphone level balance and boost levels to no avail.
 
After a while looking through the recording options, I later looked at the Communications tab of the sound options.  It was set to “Reduce the volume of other sounds by 80%” when Windows detects communications activity.  I changed it to “Do Nothing” and tried again to find that it did not suffer from any sound degradation.  I also noted that the degradation was in the actual recording itself and not just during playback. [more]

A while back we blogged about how you should disable the disk defragmentation scheduled task in Windows 7 if you are using solid state drives (SSD).  I would also like to recommend that Superfetch and Prefetch be disabled.  This is done by changing EnableSuperfetch and EnablePrefetcher from 3 to 0 in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters.  The Superfetch service should be disabled.

Briefly (and probably a little incorrectly), Prefetch copies frequently accessed files together into a contiguous area on the disk so they can be located and loaded faster.  There is no need to be copying these around – access times are basically the same regardless of where the file is.

Superfetch learns what programs you run when Windows first comes up and gets them loaded into memory before you run them.  In my opinion, the overhead in using this feature outweighs the performance gain, since loading times are so fast with an SSD.  And besides – it’s my own private business what programs I am going to run.

I have read second or third hand that Windows 7 will automatically detect an SSD and disabled these, but depending on the history of your Windows 7 installation, or if it’s a virtual machine, then this might not have happened.  I have also read that if you run the performance troubleshooter, it will may set these values back. [more]

If you want to understand more about Windows 7 and SSDs:

https://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

iMessage is a new feature allowing users to send messages over wireless across Apple devices beginning with iOS 5.  When I upgrade my iPad to iOS 5, I tried out the new iMessage feature & sent a message to a friend with an iOS 5 device.  He received the message and later replied, but his reply only went to my iPad, not my iPhone.  I found you can turn on the iMessage feature on your iOS 5 iPhone (to receive messages across multiple devices) by going to Settings, Messages, and turning on iMessage.  After you do this, messages (text) will be sent as follows:

• If is being sent to another iOS 5 device, it will try to send over wireless or 3G as an “iMessage” message and will show in a blue “bubble” (note: you will not be charged as a text for iMessages)
• If it is going to a non iOS 5 device, then it will go out as a “text” message in the traditional green “bubble”.

iMessage by default is linked to your Apple ID, so if you have multiple people using the same Apple ID (for example a family member), then when you turn on iMessage, all of the people using the Apple ID will begin to receive iMessage on all of the devices.  You can go into Settings, Messages, Receive At, and add additional emails (beyond the Apple ID) that you want to receive messages from.
Another cool feature of iMessage, if someone is responding to a message, a speech bubble with “…” will appear indicating they are in the middle of typing out a reply…

Many of us are getting systems with SSD disks. Defragmentation is not really an issue with this type of disk drive because of the technology. However, the technology has limitations in that there are wear considerations. A typical SSD drive (using the MLC technology that is prevalent in our laptops) are only good for 3,000 to 10,000 write cycles. The drives have compensating “wear leveling” algorithms built into the controller to mitigate this.  However, using a defrag tool will cause excessive writes to the disk and will decrease the life of the disk drive.
 
Windows 7 is supposed to detect that a drive is an SSD and turn off the defragmentation tool… however it seems that this is not always the case, so we should look at the Task Scheduler (not Task Manager) and disable the task that periodically runs the defragmentation tool. [more]
 
Now this also raises additional questions which are interesting!
 
1)      What about VM’s running as guest on SSD’s http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2011/09/should-i-defrag-my-guest-os.html

2)      What about Readyboost, Prefetch and SuperPerfetch capabilities of Windows 7

UPDATE:  I am beginning to believe that Windows 7 might actually be detecting the SSD drives and disabling Defrag, Readyboost, etc on these drives. In my case, I can check the task scheduler and Defrag has run as scheduled. HOWEVER, I have another non-SSD drive on my eSATA port (for backup).  This may be confusing the Task Scheduler.

I have been issuing new laptops to users and everyone seems to be having the same problem with the Lenovo Fingerprint Reader and Windows logon.   After installing the finger print reader software, I noticed a link to an article for users that were trying to logon to a domain using their fingerprint.

To enable the Windows or domain biometric settings in Control Panel, do the following:

1. Click Start > Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Biometric Devices > Change biometric settings. The Change biometric settings window is displayed.
2. Select Biometrics on.
3. Select Allow users to log on to Windows using their fingerprints.
4. Select Allow users to log on to a domain using their fingerprints if the check box is available.
5. Click Save Changes to save your configuration.
6. Log off from the Windows operating system.
7. You will be able to use your fingerprints the next time you log in to the domain.

Here is a link to the Lenovo article: http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/research/hints-or-tips/detail.page?&DocID=HT051327

There is still a lot of misinformation associated with charging Lithium-ion batteries.  Some people are still being told the batteries in their phones, tablets, laptops, etc. have a finite number of charge cycles and it takes from a cycle whether the battery is almost full or empty.  This would be true for some older types of batteries but not for Li-ion batteries.  Some systems will want you to cycle batteries (full to empty to full, etc.) in order to calibrate the power management software but not for battery life management. [more]

One battery resource says:

The smaller the depth of discharge, the longer the battery will last. If at all possible, avoid frequent full discharges and charge more often between uses. If full discharges cannot be avoided, try utilizing a larger battery. Partial discharge on Li-ion is fine; there is no memory and the battery does not need periodic full discharge cycles other than to calibrate the fuel gauge on a smart battery.

http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries

The exception to this is Li-ion batteries don't store as well if they're topped off.  That is, if you plan to leave one in storage without using it for an extended period of time, it's best to store it about half charged rather than completely charged.

I was recently trying to factory reset a Cisco Express 500 switch for use at a customer site.  I researched Cisco’s website and other websites, but nothing I tried would work.  The basic steps are these:

1. Hold down the mode button while applying power to the switch.
2. After the mode lights turn amber, let go and the switch will reset to defaults.
3. After a short time a port (usually port 1) light will start blinking.  Plug your workstation/laptop into that port.  Your workstation/laptop should then acquire a DHCP address from the switch.
4. You should then be able to access the web GUI using the default IP address.

Unfortunately, none of the online documentation I read mentioned the fact that this only worked when Windows XP was the operating system.  Windows Vista or Windows 7 will not work.  I did not find this out until after the fact when another engineer, who had also struggled with this issue, informed me that this was the case. 

Recently, a large audit required the use of a spare laptop to help with the scanning. We decided to use a quad-core laptop because CPU utilization is one of the bottlenecks for our LanGuard scans. While prepping the laptop, I wanted to make sure the quad cores were being utilized, but instead found out that two of the cores were “parked” and sitting idle. It turns out this is a feature built into Windows in order to conserve power and extend battery life. Windows can dynamically park CPUs when the system load is light and bring them back on line when the system load increases. If you have a quad-core processor, you can test this by opening Resource Monitor (open Task Manager, go to the Performance tab, click on the Resource Monitor button), clicking on the CPU tab, and looking at the individual cores on right hand side of the screen. If you don’t have anything running, you should see one or two cores go into a “parked” state and be greyed out. As you open applications, they will be reactivated. The feature also works with dual-core CPUs, but the system load doesn’t have to be as high to bring both cores online. [more]
 
During the audit we were preparing for, performance was much more of a concern than battery life, so I wanted all four cores to be active all the time. To accomplish this, you have to edit the registry using the following steps:

• Open regedit and search for  0cc5b647-c1df-4637-891a-dec35c318583
• Everywhere you find that key (there will likely be more than one instance), change the ValueMin and ValueMax keys to ‘0’
• Reboot the system

Cisco SGE2000 switches (and other Cisco switches) with a web interface still require that the running configuration get saved to the startup configuration.  Oddly, the option is buried under the “File Copy” menu option.  The “Save Configuration” menu option is for saving a backup (text) copy of the configuration.