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The other evening I turned off my Windows XP system and busied myself with other matters, only to find the machine churning away several minutes later as it worked through its shutdown process. I could've understood the delay if it were installing updates, or even if some program or service had hung the system. But this was a typical PC shutdown, and it was taking forever.

"There's gotta be a better way," I thought, and after doing a little research, I found a bunch of Registry tweaks that reset Windows to close shop like it's late for the bus ride home. Keep in mind, any changes to the Registry can be troublesome, so you may want to make these alterations one or two at a time just to make sure they don't futz up the works (it'll also be easier to diagnose any problems that may arise). And for sure back up the Registry by creating a restore point before you begin.

Kill your apps
Some programs just don't know how to say goodbye. To speed up force-closing them at shutdown, open the Registry Editor (in Vista, press the Windows key, type regedit, and press Enter; in XP, click Start > Run, type regedit, and press Enter), and navigate in the left pane to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Control Panel/desktop (or Desktop). Double-click WaitToKillAppTimeout in the right pane, and change the value data (measured in milliseconds) to 1000-if you're in a real hurry--or something larger, if you want to give your recalcitrant apps a little more time to call it quits. Click OK when you're done.

To reduce the wait before forcing hung applications to close, double-click HungAppTimeout in the right pane of the same key, and change the value data to 2000, or however many milliseconds you want to give the apps to unhang on their own. Of course, a better approach is to figure out why the app is hanging in the first place; I'll cover diagnosing hung applications in a future post: Stay tuned!

You may also want to change the value data of WaitToKillAppTimeout and HungAppTimeout in HKEY_USERS/.DEFAULT/Control Panel/Desktop key to apply the changes to all users on the system.

Clip your running tasks and services
There's another Registry key that automatically ends running tasks at shutdown. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Control Panel/Desktop, double-click AutoEndTasks in the right pane, and change the value data to 1. Now to whack your slow-ending services, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control, double-click WaitToKillServiceTimeout in the right pane, change the value to 1000, and click OK.

Some people will tell you that you can speed up shutdowns by telling Windows not to clear the pagefile when it closes. Unfortunately, this could compromise your system security because sensitive data may be stored in the file unencrypted. There's even some question about whether disabling this setting will save you any time at shutdown. For me, the possibility of saving a couple of seconds on shutdown isn't worth the risk. That's why I recommend that you leave the ClearPageFileAtShutdown value at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control/SessionManager/Memory Management at 1.

Some Vista systems (including mine) don't have all the Registry key entries described above. To add a missing entry, right-click in the right pane of its key, choose New > String Value, type the name, such as AutoEndTasks, double-click the new entry, add its value data (1 in the case of AutoEndTasks), and click OK.

Tomorrow: create multiple workspaces in Ubuntu.

On Monday I described some simple ways to improve the performance of Windows XP and Vista. Since there's no such thing as a too-fast Windows PC, I'm returning to the subject with a handful of additional Windows speedup tips.

Disable remote services: If you never need to access the system over a network, nor have anyone else do so (for help troubleshooting a problem, for example), you can free up some Windows resources by turning these features off. In Windows XP Pro, click Start > Control Panel > System and Maintenance (in Category view) > System > Remote, uncheck the options under Remote Assistance and Desktop Sharing, and click OK (note that these settings aren't available in XP Home).

To disable these remote features in Vista, press the Windows key and type system, press the down arrow until System is highlighted, and press Enter. Click Remote settings in the left pane, and under the Remote tab in the System Properties dialog box, uncheck the option under Remote Assistance. In the Remote desktop section, click Don't allow connections to this computer, and click OK.

Deactivate System Restore: If you prefer to use a backup method other than the one built into Windows, you can disable this feature. Just keep in mind that if you go completely backup-less, you'll lose data. Maybe not today, and maybe not next week, but someday. Eventually Windows and your applications will crash--guaranteed.

In Windows XP you can shut off System Restore by clicking Start > Control Panel > Performance and Maintenance (in Category view) > System > System Restore. Check Turn off System Restore, and click OK. Next, return to Control Panel and choose Administrative Tools > Services, click or double-click System Restore Service, select Stop, and close the window.

Do the same in Vista by pressing the Windows key, typing backup and restore center, and pressing Enter. Click Create a restore point or change settings in the left pane, uncheck your hard drive under Automatic restore points on the System Protection tab, click Turn Off System Restore at the scary warning, click OK, and close the Backup and Restore Center.

Turn off unneeded apps in the system tray: Most of the start-up apps that have slipped their icons into your system tray are superfluous. To disable them, right-click the icon, choose its Settings option (it may be called something similar), and uncheck the option to start the program with Windows.

Lose the themes: If you followed the advice in my previous post to set Windows for best performance in the Visual Effects dialog box, you disabled themes, but you didn't stop the service associated with them. In XP, click Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Services, click or double-click Themes, and choose Stop.

Vista's Aero interface is one of the few things that most people (including me) like about the operating system, but you can improve your system's performance by going with the old-style Windows look. To do so, press the Windows key, type personalization, and press Enter. Click Theme, choose Windows Classic in the drop-down menu, click OK, and close the Personalization applet.

Uninstall the Windows components you don't use: In XP, click Start > Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs, choose Add/Remove Windows Components in the left pane, uncheck the components you can do without (MSN Explorer is a prime candidate), click Next and then Finish when the components are removed, and close Add or Remove Programs.

To get rid of these space-wasters in Vista, press the Windows key, type programs and features, press Enter, click Turn Windows features on or off in the left pane, uncheck the options you don't need, and click OK.

Monday: move your e-mail out of Outlook and onto your hard drive or other local storage.

There's one thing all Windows users have in common: They all want the OS to run faster. Here are five ways to turn your tortoise PC into a hare.

Go the one-click route with the "best performance" option in the Visual Effects settings. In Windows XP, right-click My Computer, choose Properties > Advanced, click the Settings button under Performance, and then select the Visual Effects tab. In Vista, press the Windows key, type performance information, press Enter, and click Adjust Visual Effects in the left pane. In both OSes, you can choose Custom and deselect the options in the window below as you prefer, or simply select Adjust for best performance. When you're done, click OK twice.

Tell Internet Explorer not to save encrypted pages. Open Internet Explorer, click Tools > Internet Options > Advanced, scroll down the Settings window to the Security section, check "Do not save encrypted pages to disk," and click OK.

Disconnect network drives you no longer use. Double-click My Computer (Computer in Vista, or simply press the Windows key, type "computer", and press Enter). Click Tools > Disconnect Network Drive, choose the drive you no longer use, and click OK. (If you use Vista and don't see the Tools menu in Computer, press Alt.)

Unload DLLs when the apps that use them close. When you close an application, Windows keeps the DLLs it uses open so that the program will reload faster should you choose to reopen it. You can keep these unneeded DLLs from cluttering things up by changing a Registry setting. Because making changes to the Registry can screw up your system, create a restore point first. With your Registry backup in place, press the Windows key (in Vista) or click Start > Run (in XP), type regedit, and press Enter. Navigate in the left pane to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer, right-click in the right pane, and choose New > DWORD (32-bit) Value. Name the value AlwaysUnloadDLL, double-click it, give it a value of 1, click OK, and close the Registry Editor.

Disable Indexing Service. You may be happy with Windows' built-in search feature, but I prefer a third-party desktop-search utility, which I find to be faster and more accurate. If you rarely use Windows' own search tool, you can free up memory and processor cycles by disabling the resource-hogging Indexing Service that it relies on: Open Control Panel's Add or Remove Programs applet (Programs and Features in Vista). In XP, click Add/Remove Windows Components, and in Vista choose "Turn Windows features on or off" in the left pane. In both versions, uncheck Indexing Service, and click OK.

Tomorrow: Sort messages in Gmail using instant folders.

The fact is, you don't need all of the services that Windows starts automatically when it boots. Disabling the non-essential services frees up memory and processor cycles for more important tasks. The trick is knowing which of Windows' automatic services you can do without: disabling the wrong service can render your system unusable. If you're careful, you can figure out which automatically enabled services your PC can do without.

Things would be so much simpler if I could just list which services to disable, but each Windows configuration is unique, so there's no way to predict which ones are required on your system. That's why I rely on sites such as Charles Sparks' BlackViper.com.

First, play it safe by setting a restore point
Start by backing up the Registry (the page also describes how to restore it). Next, open the Services applet: In XP, click Start>Run, type services.msc, and press Enter; in Vista, press the Windows key, type services.msc, and press Enter. (Avoid the temptation to access your services via Msconfig, aka the System Configuration utility.)

BlackViper.com's list of XP services shows the default settings with Service Pack 2 installed. Likewise, the site's Vista services list assumes that you've downloaded and installed all "important" updates for that OS.

You'll likely find more services on your system than are listed there, most of which were installed by software you or the PC's vendor added. You may also find services on the BlackViper.com list that aren't on your machine (especially if you use XP Home); some OEMs choose not to install some services. Work your way through the services, disabling those enabled by default that you deem unnecessary. You can play it safe by setting a service on Manual, which starts it only when Windows decides that your system needs it. Unfortunately, some services set to Manual won't start when they should, so you may need to reset these to Automatic.

To determine which other services a particular entry requires (and which other services require it), double-click its entry in the Services list to open its Properties dialog box, and click the Dependencies tab. Along with the suggestions on the BlackViper.com site, look for services relating to hardware you no longer use. Other candidates for disabling are Remote Registry, Themes (if you're happy with Windows' Classic appearance), and Windows Firewall (only if your system is protected by a third-party firewall). Note that changes you make here apply to all users on the system.

Tomorrow: A free utility that removes unwanted start-up apps from the System Configuration utility (Msconfig) once and for all.

Our review of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard last Thursday lauded its lovely interface innovations but withheld judgment about the operating system's speed until we could put it through its paces.

Tests returned from CNET Labs on Saturday show that Leopard didn't perform noticeably faster than Mac OS 10.4.6 Tiger. (See the chart in CNET's review of Tiger.). Because Leopard's improved speeds of between 1 percent and 3 percent fall within the 5 percent margin of error, it's fair to call Leopard and Tiger even.

Lab tests explored Leopard's boot time, multimedia multitasking, and handling of the Quake 3 game. Similarly, the 2005 release of Tiger did not demonstrate vast speed improvements over Panther, a previous version of Mac OS X.

Still, some users commenting on Leopard-related message boards and stories at CNET and elsewhere swore that they detected faster performance with Leopard.

Unfortunately, CNET Labs could not vouch for the performance of Adobe Systems' Photoshop CS3, which, for reasons not yet understood, wouldn't run on Leopard in our usual battery of automated tests. Don't jump to conclusions, however; the photo-editing application seemed to behave under normal conditions, and Adobe insists that Photoshop can run in Leopard.

However, full Leopard support for all versions of Adobe Creative Suite 3 won't become available until Adobe releases updates in three to four months. Among the applications needing updates are AfterEffects, Premiere, Soundbooth, and Acrobat Pro 8.1.2 (PDF). Sadly, Adobe fans cannot count on running earlier iterations of the Creative Suite or Macromedia Studio uneventfully within Leopard.

Although we find Leopard's interface relatively seamless, the same can't be said for everyone's experience getting started. Some people reported installation headaches, including the famed "blue screen of death," which historically has made so many love to hate the rival Microsoft Windows. Apple has acknowledged that issue as a glitch with third-party software.

Another application that won't run properly in Leopard yet is FileMaker Pro 9, due for an update next month. Some at CNET have found other applications, such as Groupcal and Parallels, failing unexpectedly in Leopard. And although only Safari was also running at the time, GarageBand wouldn't run in our first two attempts to open it in Leopard. A reboot seemed to do the trick.

Leopard also appeared to be converting some Mail settings from administrator to standard accounts; MacFixIt explains a solution. We're looking into these and other issues, and will continue to update our Leopard review as we learn more.

Our conclusion remains that you must have Leopard if you need to run Boot Camp, and you'll want it if you eagerly await Time Machine's elegant backup system. Developers will also like the full, native 64-bit support for both Intel- and PowerPC-based Macs.

Yet the majority of obvious improvements are on Leopard's surface. That isn't necessarily a bad thing; interface tweaks like Cover Flow, Quick Look, Spaces and Stacks offer powerful, practical improvements that make it easier to multitask. The operating system overall is a treat to use, even if it's unlikely to deliver preternatural speed.

So unless $129 feels like a trifle to spend, holding off on this upgrade wouldn't hurt. Depending upon your software toolkit of choice, waiting for third-party applications to catch up to Leopard might even save some frustration.

Hewlett-Packard's board of directors agreed with shareholders Thursday, passing a new policy tying executive pay closer to performance.

The company disclosed the new program, in which stock issued to executives will vest based on whether individuals meet their performance goals over a three-year period, in an SEC filing Friday.

The issue was first brought up at the annual shareholders' meeting in March. The proposal surfaced in response to shareholders' unhappiness regarding the compensation given to ex-CEO Carly Fiorina after she was removed by the board.

HP has not revealed any specifics about how performance will be measured, but will reveal more details at the next shareholder meeting next year, according to the SEC filing.

These days, most new PCs have dual-core central processors (CPU). That's one chip with two complete microprocessors on it, both sharing one path to memory and peripherals.

If you have a high-end gaming PC or a workstation, you might have one or two processor chips with four cores each. An eight-core PC is a very powerful machine--in real terms, up to eight times faster than the best desktop PCs you could get in 2004. For many years, PC performance doubled roughly every 18 months; multicore technology has produced annual doubling for three years now.

But that's not really so impressive when you look at the 15-year history of 3D graphics on PCs. The companies making graphics processors (GPUs) have delivered a doubling of performance every 6 months or so for this whole time. That means today's graphics chips are faster than 1992 products by a ratio of 2 to the 30th power, or about a billion to one.

CPU progress is slow by comparison. Over the last 30 years of the microprocessor, performance on integer operations has improved by about a million to one. Floating-point performance looks much better, since early CPUs had to emulate floating-point operations in software. With hardware floating-point units (FPUs), today's processors run FP-intensive code about 100 million times faster than those of 1977.

Floating-point performance is the key to the rapid progress of graphics chips, too. Most of the math required to display the special effects in a game like Company of Heroes is done using floating-point numbers. This math has to be done over and over for each pixel on the screen, but the work for many pixels can be done in parallel.

That's the loophole here, the trick that graphics chips exploit to boost performance so much with each new generation of 3D chips. It's all done in parallel.

So if you think eight processor cores is great, think about an Nvidia GeForce 8800 GPU with 128-thread processors running at 1.35GHz...or an AMD Radeon HD 2900 with 320-stream processors running at 743MHz. These processors are very simple by comparison with the cores in a CPU, but there sure are a lot of them. (There's no easy way to make direct comparisons between these numbers, so don't worry about it...just let the numbers flow over you.)

Then think about this: either one of those chips could, in principle, run a word-processing program all by itself. But such a program would probably run on only a few of those thread or stream processors, and inefficiently at that, so the program would probably run more slowly overall than it would on some old Windows 98 machine. For some things, CPUs are still much better than GPUs.

And this brings me back to the subject of yesterday's blog (here). Nobody's really sure how to evolve a CPU to the point that it could replace a GPU without losing what makes it a good CPU. Or vice-versa. CPUs and GPUs are likely to have distinct designs for a long time to come.

But they won't necessarily stay on separate chips. I'll explain why later this week.

Yahoo's Exceptional Performance team has put together a list of "13 rules for making web pages fast" and posted it on Yahoo's developer network. The list, which includes "Make fewer HTTP requests," "Use a content delivery network," and "Avoid redirects," should really help webmasters figure out what is slowing their site down.

As if that wasn't enough, the team just released a Firefox add-on which integrates on top of Firebug, a web development tool. This add-on will analyze any web page to check for how they comply with the 13 rules. Once your page is analyzed, it will give you a letter grade, just like in school, on how your website fared against the various rules.

Yahoo has really compiled a great resource for web developers and I think everyone should take advantage of it. So, give the list a read, grab the Firefox add-on and see how you can help those page load times out!

13 Rules for making web pages fast (Yahoo)

YSlow Firefox Add-on (requires Firebug)

UPDATE: Well, we just met with Monolith, developers of the original F.E.A.R. and we don't have much new info to provide. We were told that Monolith heard from Logitech about the issue and Vista, but that Monolith never heard back when it asked Logitech whether the glitch happened in Windows XP. Even if it had, it would still be up to the hardware vendors to dig up the problem and point to a specific place in the F.E.A.R. code. The developer theorized that it could be due to something going with DirectInput, the Direct X component that deals with mice and keyboards, but it didn't have anything concrete. Dizzy yet?

In better news, Monolith showed us a playable demo of the as-yet-unnamed sequel to F.E.A.R., which looked absolutely awesome, and seemed to really push current-generation graphics to the limit. They didn't allow cameras at the screening, so we have no screenshots (they're waiting until they have a name before they release any art), and wouldn't even take any real questions about the game. What we found interesting is that in the part we saw, at least, rather than ceding to critics of the original's claustrophobia by blowing the game up into a larger environment, Monolith ramped up the intensity of the close-quarters shooting to highly creepy, dramatic effect. It comes to PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 in 2008.

ORIGINAL POST: As bug discoveries go, we can't technically claim to have discovered this one. Still, it seems that by stumbling upon a major slowdown in F.E.A.R. during a recent Maingear desktop review, we've come across what might be a more universal issue in PC gaming performance. We're not trying to cause a panic. F.E.A.R is the only game we've seen suffer a significant frame rate loss. But an intriguing post on the official F.E.A.R. forum indicates that the issue might be more widespread. The potential culprit? USB mice and keyboards.

From what we've seen, if you have either a USB mouse or keyboard connected to your PC while playing F.E.A.R., you'll get a major frame rate drop on even the mightiest of gaming PCs. We're talking from 150 frames per second down to 13 fps or so. Using old-school devices appears to fix the issue. We found big performance hits with Logitech and Saitek hardware, although there's a world of USB devices that we haven't tested. We found that the Creative-made mouse and keyboard that come with Velocity Micro PCs don't seem to cause as much trouble, but they still show a measurable decline in performance, by roughly 10 fps.

The less severe drop-off with certain hardware might explain why we never noticed the problem until the Maingear review. If all USB input devices cause some kind of performance loss in F.E.A.R., the scores for all of the systems we've reviewed with that test will have suffered, giving us no "normal" baseline to compare to. We only noticed the problem because, for some reason, the Maingear system caused a significant-enough slowdown. We were also able to replicate the issue by connecting the same Logitech G5 mouse and Saitek Eclipse keyboard to a to-be-reviewed Falcon Northwest PC we have in the lab, so the issue isn't unique to Maingear (and that's why we didn't slam that system in the review). Still, we've tested F.E.A.R. on other PCs in months previous with one or both of those devices connected to them, and saw no frame rate drop until now.

As we said, we are not the first people to find this problem. Posters over at the official F.E.A.R. forum reported this issue last year. A forum thread on Nvnews.com also eventually finds its way toward talking about input devices. Interestingly, a poster by the name of "Noe" put a new thread on the F.E.A.R. forum this past July 3 (a few days after our Maingear review posted), asking readers for information to provide feedback on the forum, which will then be forwarded to "a group of qualified people looking into the technical aspects of the 'USB bandwidth issue'." This lends credence to Noe's claim later in the thread that the issue isn't unique to F.E.A.R., since (assuming Noe is telling the truth) it's an external group conducting this troubleshooting research, rather than Vivendi, Sierra, or any other companies behind F.E.A.R.

Before we had any idea it was an input issue, we simply saw F.E.A.R. scores tank during testing on an otherwise powerful PC. Alongside our trusty lab technician Joseph Kaminski, the guys from Maingear and Nvidia technical marketing director Nick Stam narrowed it down to the input devices, largely based on the suggestions of the Nvnews forum thread. We were afraid that Nvidia would bow out at this point, since the slowdown didn't appear tied to a 3D driver like we initially thought. We're glad we were wrong. As Nick wrote me two weeks ago: "I'm still very interested in understanding the pure technical reasons, as this is definitely one of the strangest issues I've seen in a long time."

With Nvidia working on the problem independently, we then moved on to Logitech and Saitek, neither of whom had heard of the issue. We're still waiting to hear back from Saitek's technical team (which has been traveling), but Logitech's was available and got back to us quickly. It doesn't appear that Logitech's SetPoint mouse and keyboard software caused the issue (it wasn't installed on the Maingear PC during testing), but from what we've heard, a forthcoming SetPoint update will fix the problem.

We're glad that Logitech hardware owners, at least, may have a solution, but we'd still like to know what exactly causes the slowdown, and whether it affects other games. We have a meeting with Sierra (one of F.E.A.R.'s developers) at E3 this week, so we'll definitely be asking them in person.

Of the vendors we've talked to so far, all of them remain interested. That gives us faith that the problem will get the attention it needs. We were frustrated, though, when we saw people had posted about this issue in official and unofficial forums as long as 10 months ago. Apparently it takes a while for the wisdom of crowds to sink in.