If you’ve ever wondered just how long your PC has been continuously running without a reboot and you are using Windows NT, 2000, XP, Vista or 7, there are a couple of simple ways to obtain this information using tools built right into the OS.

Method 1: Windows NT/2000 and XP

Open up the command prompt (Start > Run > cmd > Enter/Ok). When the command prompt has loaded type “net stats srv” (or “net statistics server”). NT4 users (are there any, really?) need to download a special utility instead.

Method 2: Windows XP and beyond

Alternatively, you can use the command prompt to obtain system information, type “system info” which will also provide you with your PC’s uptime.

Method 3: Windows Vista and beyond

For those on Vista or Windows 7, things are a little easier (although the above will work just fine). Right click the taskbar and choose “Task Manager” or “Start Task Manager”. Head over to the “Performance” tab and on the bottom right of the window you ought to see your system uptime.

Also, should you so prefer, there are many other lightweight applications that will provide you with your system uptime. There’s a desktop gadget dedicated to that and here’s yet another alternative.

Feel free to share your current uptime in the comments below. Mine right now is at 47 hours, 51 minutes on Vista x64.

Since we redesigned around mid last year, we updated our favicon to match our new looks. Now, whoever told you making a nice and sleek looking favicon was easy, they were blatantly lying!

As it turns out, it’s quite the challenge to turn up with something that looks good within 16×16 pixels, though I’m confident you will like our updated favicon as it looks distinctive, which is perhaps the most important attribute in a favicon when you are browsing around and switching tabs on Firefox, or accessing a bookmark from your favorite browser.

TechSpot new favicon

Google updated their favicon just a few weeks ago and we thought why don’t we as well? I got to work and came up with an improved version of the “T” favicon, adding a bit of a gradient/depth and rounded corners. Kudos to favicon.cc for making my life easier when porting the 16×16 image to .ico format.

You have probably heard already how Windows 7 simplifies and aids window management by letting you move and dock windows using the mouse, for example, dragging a window to the top edge will maximize it, or clicking on the right bottom corner will show the desktop. Now, you can do all this and many others using some equally useful keyboard shortcuts (hotkeys).

Brandon Paddock, who is one of Windows 7 Explorer developers, recently posted a complete list of Windows 7 hotkeys which I have copied below. I have also highlighted those which I believe are most useful and probably golden time-savers if you get to incorporate them into your day to day usage (though you will first need to use W7 as your primary OS for that).

Windows 7 Show desktop shortcut

General

Explorer

Taskbar modifiers
 

The new Windows 7 beta release just like Vista preview releases before it incorporate some additional UI elements meant for testers to submit feedback back to Microsoft.

Now considering you may be running this Beta 1 release as your main OS for some reason (I admit it, I have given in to the temptation many times before), one of those elements in particular can become annoying and obtrusive to your otherwise neat configured desktop.

Windows 7 Beta Send Feedback link

Here’s how to remove the Send Feedback link:

(1) Run the Registry Editor (type regedit on the start run menu)
(2) Browse to the following registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop
(3) If it’s not already there, add a new DWORD (32-bit) value “FeedbackToolEnabled” and set its data field to 0.
(4) The change should take effect on your next restart.

An alternative way to do this is to run this registry key file I have compiled for you. Just download, run and then restart.

Windows 7 Build 7000 watermark

There’s also a way to remove the wallpaper watermark from the beta, though I don’t find this quite as bothersome.

The process for doing this is a bit more complicated, having to patch the original user32.dll.mui file found on your Windows folder. So what I recommend you do is download this utility (found via My Digital Life) that will take care of everything for you – notice however this is only meant to work with Windows 7 Build 7000 (Beta 1).

Update: We still encourage all users to submit their feedback to Microsoft. It’s obvious that’s the reason Microsoft is giving away the OS code at this stage (besides building momentum after a lackluster Vista reception from most media), so if you come across some obvious bugs please submit them so developers can get them fixed in future revisions.

Our intention with this tip is to give you a fix for aesthetics if you will be using the beta for a prolonged time and the send feedback link bothers you visually. Ultimately what we all want is a flawless-as-you-can-get Windows 7 final release later this year.

Last update: Microsoft has removed the 2.5 download million limit and has for now made the Windows 7 Beta an open public test version. The information for downloading remains the same, but for getting keys you now must go through the normal process, which shouldn’t be much of an issue anyway.

As reported earlier on our frontpage news, Microsoft released the Windows 7 Beta publicly on Friday. Unless you jumped into the leaked torrent bandwagon a week ago, this would be your first chance to get your hands on the beta and as it’s become evident, demand for the installation ISOs has been overwhelming enough that Microsoft has taken down the download sites temporarily.

But anyway, you can always either download via torrents (illegal? not sure it counts for a public release) or use Microsoft’s own servers via the direct download links we posted here.

And while the beta will let you run the OS without activation for 30 days, you will eventually need a CD-key to run until August when the beta is supposed to expire.

Windows 7 beta cd key

Some clever folks have found a way to get you a key despite of the official site being down…

(1) Login to http://technet.microsoft.com (I guess using your passport in Hotmail works just as well)

(2) The copy and paste one of the following links in your address bar:
(32-bit key) https://www.microsoft.com/betaexperience/scripts/gcs.aspx?Product=tn-win7-32-ww&LCID=1033
(64-bit key) https://www.microsoft.com/betaexperience/scripts/gcs.aspx?Product=tn-win7-64-ww&LCID=1033

If you receive a page not found error just press F5 (refresh) until you are redirected and taken to a page where your key will be displayed (similar to the screenshot above). Now, it won’t work easily with commentators from around the web saying it took them anything from 5 minutes to an hour to get it. It’s up to you to decide if the effort is worth it :)

Update: Per points out that you can refresh automatically using this Firefox add-on.

Update #2: The links posted above are working right away today. The fact is Microsoft has posted back the Windows 7 Beta on their site. Microsoft announced it would limit the public beta to 2.5 million users, so download it as it lasts.

I’ve been using Windows XP x64 for about a year now. My previous OS of choice was Windows 2000 which I really loved, I swore to never upgrade to XP and in a way I succeeded because XP x64 is really just Windows Server 2003 x64 with another name. Some apps even identify it as the Server OS since it bears the same NT build number of NT v5.2.

The reason I finally upgraded was so I could access all of my new system’s 8GB of RAM, and also because I was getting tired of writing Win2K fixes for games like Bioshock and Crysis. ;-)
But from the very beginning of the transition I was disappointed; XP x64, when handling large files would slow down to a crawl.

I tried in vain to look for a solution, to give you an example: I’ve got a RAID5 array with 3 x 1TB hard drives and a lone Raptor 150GB for the OS. If I played back a 1080p trailer off Apple’s site stored to my hard drive using Quicktime Alternative the video would start to skip massively if at the same time I copied a large file from the RAID5 array to my Raptor disk, or extracted a file using WinRAR in the same manner.

Of course this is not the only problem, just an easy way to reproduce it. When I extracted large files I noticed that the Task Manager did not report memory being used under its graph, however the counter for available memory under ‘Physical Memory’ would go down a whole lot, using as much as 4GB of RAM when copying files at least that large!

This in itself is not an issue when memory is freely available as it’s a good idea to use it for cache. However something in the design of Windows causes it to be detrimental to performance. It wasn’t until I started using the Performance Monitor (perfmon) that I realized what the problem was and came upon a solution. When I monitored the system I noticed excessive Page Faults and Lazy Writes which would peak as performance dropped. So the reason for the slow performance is that when the file is cached in RAM it causes massive page faults, which also needs to be committed to the disk, which leads to disk trashing.

The issue gets more pronounced the larger the difference is between the disk that reads and writes, in the case of my system the RAID5 array has a read capacity of 160MB/sec, but the Raptor can only write at ca 70MB/sec. So therefore when reading a large file it takes only seconds to fill the cache. At which point the performance of my computer plummets, even browsing the start menu or opening the Control Panel takes ages, if I try to open the Add/Remove Programs applet which is filled with stuff it actually never opens until the copy process is completed!

After all this trouble looking for the solution I finally found the KB article that explains this issue:

You may experience a decrease in overall system performance when you are copying files that are larger than approximately 500 MB in Windows Server 2003 SP1 or in Windows Server 2003 SP2

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