windows

Like me, do you only have a really old USB DVD drive to install Windows Server on your servers? Would you rather have a faster way to install Windows 7 on your desktops? Here you go!

1. Create an NTFS formatted Primary partition on your drive at least 4GB in size and assign it a drive letter
2. Mark the partition active
3. Next insert your Windows7/Vista DVD into the optical drive and check the drive letter of the DVD drive. I will assume that your DVD drive letter is “D” and USB drive letter is “H”
4. Open a Command prompt (Start... Run... "cmd"... "Run as Administrator")
5. Type d:\boot\bootsect.exe /nt60 h: (where d: is your DVD drive and h: is your USB drive)
6. You will then see the message "Successfully updated NTFS filesystem bootcode."
7. Copy the DVD to the USB drive.
8. Be sure to invoke the boot manager when you boot the machine you'll be installing windows to.

The USB flash drive has replaced the floppy disk drive as the best storage medium for transferring files, but it also has its uses as a replacement for CDs and DVDs. USB drives tend to be higher in capacity than disc media, but since they are more expensive, they cannot (yet) really be used as a replacement. There are reasons why you would, however, choose a USB device over a DVD disc, and bootable software is definitely one of them. Not only is it faster to copy data such as setup files from a USB drive, but during usage the access times are also significantly faster. Therefore, installing something like Windows 7 will work that much faster from a USB drive than from a DVD.

This guide will show you two different ways to create a USB flash drive that works just like a Windows 7 DVD. In order to follow this guide, you'll need a USB flash drive with at least 4GB of free space and a copy of the Windows 7 installation disc.

Here's the article

There’s a common problem in Windows XP that can make network browsing very slow.

If the 'My Network Places' folder contains a shortcut to a network share, then each refresh of the explorer window will attempt to read icon information from every file in the remote location, causing the system to slow to a crawl.

Removing all shortcuts from 'My Network Places' will return the system response to normal.

Every time you open a file via a UNC name, Windows XP will automatically add another shortcut to the 'My Network Places' folder - so the issue tends to get worse over time.

You can prevent the automatic addition of shortcuts by setting:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\
Policies\Explorer\NoRecentDocsNetHood to 1.

Q841978 - Explorer.exe stops responding when you use network shortcuts (XP)

Similar issues affect the Start menu and Desktop - placing a shortcut to a network resource in either location can drastically slow down system response, particularly when the network resource is unavailable. Shortcuts to Domains or Machines don't suffer from these problems as they always have the same icon.