Note: This guide is written for Windows 7 but most tips apply for Windows Vista

Save Battery Power

Here are some ways to save your battery’s power. You don’t need to apply all these tips but every little helps.

1. Turn Down Screen Brightness

To turn down screen brightness, click the battery icon in the system tray and click Adjust screen brightness.

Slide the brightness slider to the left until you can comfortably see the screen and it’s dimmest setting.

2. Cut Down on Background Applications

Many background applications don’t need to run and only increase CPU cycles and, in turn, the demand on your battery. Here’s a couple of things you can do to cut down on background applications:

2a. Disable Windows Sidebar Gadgets

If you don’t use the sidebar, you probably have it disabled already (right click the Windows Sidebar icon in the system tray and click Exit.)

If you use the Windows Sidebar, do you really need all your gadgets running when you’re on battery power? To disable Windows Sidebar gadgets:

Click the Start button and click Control Panel. Type gadget in the top-right search box, and click View list of running gadgets.

Next to the running gadgets, click remove.

2b. Diable Startup applications

To disable uneccessary startup applications, follow this guide.

3. Disable Your Wireless Internet & Bluetooth

If you’re not using the internet or Bluetooth, consider disabling the hardware to save battery power. To disable your wireless, bluetooth, or both cards, either:

A. Locate the switch on the side of your laptop (many now have this) and turn your wirelesss cards off.

or

B. Click the network icon in the system tray and click Open Network and Sharing Center.

In the left-hand menu, click Change adapter settings.

Right click your wireless connection and click Disable.

Repeat for your Bluetooth device.

4. Disable Screensavers

Screensavers use CPU when your PC is idle. To disable your screensaver:

Right click the Desktop and click Personalize.

Click Screen Saver.

In the drop down list, select (None) and click OK.

5. Change Power Options

You what your computer does to save power when idle. To do so, click the battery icon in the system tray and click More power options.

Select Power saver and click Change plan settings.

Lower the time it takes for your computer to dim the display, turn off the display, and sleep when on battery.

Click Change advanced power settings to fine tune your power-saving preferences.

6. Adjust Visual Effects

Visual effects also use CPU and memory and this drains your battery. To lower the effects and save battery power:

Click the Start button, click Control Panel, and type visual in the top-right search box. Click Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows.

Select Adjust for best performance and click OK.

7. Turn off Windows Aero

Windows Aero enables the glass effect you see on your Windows. This (surprise surprise) also uses CPU and memory and should be disabled to save battery. To disable Windows Aero:

Right click the desktop and click Personalization. Click Window Color.

Uncheck Enable transparency and click OK.

8. Disable the Search Index

The search index indexes your files for quick searching. This is a convenience but comes at a great cost to battery life when it’s running. To save power, consider disabling the search index. To disable the search index:

Click the Start button, click Control Panel, and type index in the top-right search box. Click Change how Windows searches.

Click Modify.

Remove all locations by unchecking them and click OK.

9. Keep Your PC Cool

The hotter your PC gets, the harder your fans have to work to keep it cool. To minimize the power drawn by your fans, keep your PC cool. If using it on your lap or on a pillow, ensure there is proper ventilation. Never use your PC on a blanket or soft surface where airflow is restricted. This will also keep your hardware working longer as hardware is less likely to overheat and fail.

10. Only Use Your Screen When You Need it

This tip links back to tip number 5. When in the power options, click Choose what closing the lid does. I always set the lid closing to do nothing and the power button to put the laptop to sleep. This way, when I’m taking a break, I can put my laptop lid down (which turns off the display and saves power) without my laptop going to sleep. I’m also lucky because my laptop has a Display button that, when pressed, turns off my display. I found this button very useful when I sat in class and didn’t need to use my laptop but didn’t want to close and open the lid repeatedly.

11. Disable Automatic Program Updates

Many programs like iTunes, Java etc. come with their own auto updating software. These programs frequently communicate with update servers and, collectively, can take a toll on battery life. It’s important to keep software up to date; however, you should consider disabling update checkers for software installed on your PC. Good software lets you disable this behavior when you install it; some software may require a little bit of digging to disable automatic update checking.

Here’s how to stop Java checking for updates:

Click the Start button and click Control Panel. When the Control Panel loads, type java in the search box, and click Java:

On the Update tab, uncheck Check for Updates Automatically:

Click Never Check:

Note: I’ve noticed the scheduled task for Java update checking is often left behind.

To remove the task:

Click the Start button, type task, and click on Task Scheduler

When the task Scheduler loads, click Task Scheduler Library in the left pane

In the right pane, look for the Java Update task, right click it, and click Disable:

12. Remove Peripherals and Media

CDs spinning in drives, external hard disk drives, memory cards in slots, and even a plugged in USB thumb drives all drain power at varying levels. Remove all external drives, cards, and CDs to save battery power and the life of your machine.

13. Add more RAM

I just added 1GB of RAM to a netbook and I noticed the battery life is quite a lot better. This is because when you run out of memory, application data is written to the hard disk (virtual memory), which requires the movement of mechanical parts and not just electrons alone. By adding RAM to a computer that is always swapping/thrashing, you’ll save a noticeable about of battery life.

14. Use Hibernate not Sleep/Standby

If you want good battery life that spans multiple sessions, consider hibernating your PC instead of putting it to sleep/on stand by mode. Hibernation mode stores all volatile memory on disk and requires less power than leaving volatile memory in RAM for quick access when you turn your PC on. You can easily use a whole battery in two weeks or less of sleep mode, so you could be losing around 10% of battery life each day your laptop is sleeping instead of hibernating (if you’re not using hybrid sleep mode.) For more details on sleep vs hibernate, visit this guide.

To hibernate your PC, click the Start button, click the arrow next to Shut Down, and click Hibernate:

If you do not see the option to hibernate, press the Windows Key + R (or click Start > Run), type the following, and press Enter:

powercfg -h on

If the option is still not available, a reboot is required to show the Hibernate option on the start menu.

Bonus Tip

To get a power efficiency report:

1. Click Start, type CMD, right click cmd.exe and click Run as Administrator.
2. On the command line, type powercfg -energy to view a power efficiency report.

Having the whole operating system on disc isn’t necessary if you just need to repair your Windows installation. Recovering or repairing your current installation of Windows is favorable because most recovery software that comes with brand name PCs will wipe your PC back to factory settings.You should have a repair disc on hand to deal with the following situations:

• You’ve made a change to your PC and it now won’t boot into Windows
• You get a message such as NTLDR is missing but your hard drive has not failed
• You get a virus on your PC and need command line access to fix the issue
• Windows starts to boot and then your PC power cycles

In this guide:

• How to make a Windows 7 repair disc yourself
• How to make a Windows 7 repair USB drive
• How to boot from a disc/USB drive and use it to repair your PC

Note: A repair disc cannot be used to install Windows and provides no functionality beyond that of a Windows installation disc. If you already have an installation disc, you can use that for system recovery.

Burn a Windows Vista/7 Repair Disc

To burn your own Windows repair disc you’ll need to be using Windows 7 or Windows Vista SP1 or later release:

1. Click Start, type create and click Create a System Repair Disc (Windows 7) or Create a Recovery Disc (Windows Vista)

2. Insert a CD/DVD, choose the DVD drive in which the disc resides and click Create Disc

Once the disc is finished, I recommend booting from the disc to test it—before you really need it.

Make a Windows Vista/7 Repair USB drive

If you own a netbook, don’t have an optical (CD/DVD/Bluray) drive etc., you should create a bootable USB repair drive.

To make a bootable Windows repair USB drive you’ll need to:

1. Download the Windows recovery disc
2. Make your thumb drive bootable
3. Copy the recovery files to your thumb drive

1. Download the Windows Recovery Disc

Do a web search for and download one of the following recovery discs

• Windows 7 32-bit Recovery Disc torrent
• Windows 7 64-bit Recovery Disc torrent
• Windows Vista 32-bit Recovery Disc  torrent
• Windows Vista 64-bit Recovery Disc  torrent

How to use torrents.

2. Make your Thumb Drive Bootable

To prepare your USB thumb drive, you will need to delete all the drive’s files, create a FAT32 active partition, and copy over the Windows recovery files. To do this:

2.1. Press Windows Key+R to open the Run dialog

2.2. Type diskpart and press Enter (If you don’t have diskpart, get it here)

2.3. Type list disk and press Enter

2.4.  Type select disk 3 where the “3″ is the corresponding number of your USB drive

2.5. Type clean and press Enter

2.6. Type create partition primary  and press Enter

2.7. Type active  and press Enter

2.8. Type format fs=fat32 quick  and press Enter

2.9. Type assign and press Enter to assign the USB drive a letter in Computer

3. Copy the Recovery Files to Your Thumb Drive.

To copy the files to your thumb drive:

3.1. Open the file you downloaded in step 1 with a utility capable of browsing ISO images (7 zip works well)

1. Download 7zip and install it
2. Right click the ISO file and select 7-Zip > Open Archive

3.2. Extract the contents of the ISO to the USB drive you formatted in step 2

Boot from a Disc/USB Drive and Use it to Repair Your PC

So now you’ve either downloaded a burned the Windows Vista/7 recovery disc, created your own Windows 7 recovery disc, or made a bootable Windows Vista/7 recovery thumb drive.

To boot from your disc/USB:

1. Insert your bootable repair disc/USB drive

2. Reboot your PC

3. When your BIOS is loading (if you have a brand-name PC, this is usually when you can see the brand’s logo), press the key that loads the boot options menu (this is usually displayed as an option on the screen and is typically the ESC/F8 key)

4. Arrow down to “CD-ROM Drive” / “DVD-ROM Drive” / “Removable Media” / “USB Media” and press Enter

The recovery software will take some time to load:

5. Now select your default keyboard layout:

6. After the software detects your installation of Windows, click Next:

What Can You Do with a Repair Disc?

A repair disc cannot be used to reinstall Windows but can perform many repair tasks. Here is just a small list of what you can do with a repair disc:

1. Startup Repair
2. System Restore
3. System Image Recovery
4. Windows Memory Diagnostic
5. Command Prompt

The most commonly used function (for me at least) is the Startup Repair. I use this when I get an error message like “NTLDR Missing”, “Unable to boot” etc. The startup repair checks the MBR, GPT etc for common errors and repairs them.

If you cannot boot into Windows because of corrupted settings, a virus etc, then you may find using a previously-created System Restore point will help you get back to Windows.

If you created a system image using Backup and Restore, you can use it to completely restore your computer to a previous state.

The memory diagnostic is used to check for bad memory sectors (more about the memory diagnostic tool.)

Finally, the command prompt can do (almost) anything the full command prompt can do while using Windows. This can be very useful to run tools like chkdsk to find out why your hard drive is suddenly not working.

For what functions have you used a system repair disc?

If you’re using an SSD, there are a few things you can do to extend its life. One of the things you can do is move the search index cache.

The Search Index I/O activity can take a considerable toll on your system drive by keeping it busy. If you have an SSD, this may reduce its life. By moving the index to a separate drive, you can increase overall performance of your PC (more noticeable under load) and preserve the life of your SSD.

Move the Search Index to Another Drive

1. Click Start, type index in the search bar, and click indexing options

2. Click Advanced

3. Click Select new and select a new location on a different physical hard drive:

4. Click OK

The service will restart and moved the index to the new drive:

Note: While the index service is rebuilt on your new drive you may notice a decrease in system performance.

Note: you can also crack the password; however, a little preparation will save you the hassle of doing this.

Before you begin this guide, you’ll need the following:

• A USB drive (does not have to be empty)
• A current password set for your account (how to)

Create a Password Reset Disk

To reset your password, you’ll need to create a password reset disk; to create a password reset disk:

1. Insert your USB drive into your PC

2. Click the Start button, type reset, and click Create a password reset disk.

3. On the Forgotten Password Wizard dialog, click Next

4. Select your USB drive from the drop down list and click Next

5. Type in your current account password and click Next

The password reset file is now written to your USB drive:

7. When the wizard completes the reset disk creation, click Next, and then click Finish.

Note: The file is encrypted as userkey.psw. If you lose your thumb drive, nothing can be done with this file to obtain your password. This file can only be used to reset your password locally at your PC. With that in mind, you may want to keep this thumb drive away from other PC users who should not have access to your account.

userkey.psw is placed on your thumb drive:

The file is encrypted and can not be used to obtain your current password:

Test Your Password Reset Disk

It’s a best practice not to wait until you’ve lost your password to test your disk. This section will show you how to test your disk:

1. Print this guide or bring it up on your cell phone (http://bit.ly/zWM6P2)

2. Insert your password reset USB drive

3. Click the Start button, click the right arrow next to Shut Down (or different if you changed it), and click Switch User

4. Type in or click your username, leave the password field blank, and press Enter

5. After you’re informed you’ve typed an incorrect password, click Reset Password

5. Click Next

6. Select the flash drive and click Next

7. Type your new password (can be the same as your current password) and password hint and click Next

8. Click Finish

Note: This password reset disk will last the lifetime of your account. You do not need to create a new disk after using the one you set up as part of this guide.

Set a Windows Password

To set a password for your account:

1. Click the Start button and click Control Panel

2. On the Control Panel, click User Accounts and Family Safety 

3. Click Change your Windows password

4. Click Create a password for your account

5. Type in your password twice and a hint (optional.) Click Create Password

Your password is now required each time you unlock or log in to your account.

Change Your Windows Account Password

By changing your password regularly, you decrease the chance of someone finding out your password and getting in to your account (and posting silly pictures of you on your Facebook account.) To change your Windows account password:

1. Click the Start button and click Control Panel

2. On the Control Panel, click User Accounts and Family Safety 

3. Click Change your Windows password

4. Click Change your password

5. Fill in the blanks with your old password, your new password twice (so you don’t make a typo and lock yourself out), and a hint (optional). Click Change password

Add/Change a Different Account Password

If you’re using an administrator account, you can also manage other accounts and set or change passwords without logging into the other account. To change another account on your PC:

1. Click the Start button and click Control Panel

2. On the Control Panel, click User Accounts and Family Safety 

3. Click Change your Windows password

4. Click Manage another account

5. Click the account you want to manage:

6. Either click Create a password or Change the password

7. Fill in the blanks with the account’s old password (if changing), your new password twice, and a hint (optional). Click Change password/Create password

Bonus Tip

Stepping away from your PC for a moment? Use the shortcut Windows Key + L to lock your PC before you do. You probably have a great deal personal information on your PC (not to mention active email, social networking, and even bank sessions in your browser.)

If there’s a piece of equipment that works hard in your PC, it’s your hard disk drive (HDD.) HDDs operate at anywhere between 4200 and 15000 RPM (perhaps higher) while in use. In other words, these things spin anywhere between 70 and 250 times a second—sometimes for days on end! While the information in this guide mostly applies to both HDDs and Solid State Drives (SSD), SSDs have no moving parts so some of the information will not apply.

With high speeds and enormous data transfers on a daily basis hard drive file systems, used to store and access all your data, are prone to corruption and failure. Thankfully, all versions of Windows come with a nifty, free tool called “Check Disk” (chkdsk.) In this guide, we’ll show you how to use Check Disk and explain a little about common errors to which hard drives are prone.

How Do Hard Drives Get Corrupted?

All storage media is prone to corruption; however HDDs are a little more exposed as they have moving parts. Included in these moving parts are read/write heads that, when jolted mid read/write (i.e. when you put your laptop down on a table) can crash into the hard disk platters and ruin data. Technically, a jolted head can wipe out a whole HDD if it hits the right area and I’ve seen this happen with a coworker’s laptop. Presumably, that won’t happen to you if you’re careful; however, you may have already lost/scrambled data without realizing it.

Even you’re careful with your PC (or it’s a desktop and you don’t move it while it’s powered on), there are other ways to corrupt data. Common ways in which data is corrupted include: power surges, malware, turning your PC off without a clean shut down (Windows may label your drive as a “dirty” disk), and even flipped bits resulting from non-ECC protected memory. These corruption issues affect both HDD and SSD users. Often, HDDs will take care of bad sectors with self-detection mechanisms; however, corrupted file systems are dealt with using chkdsk.

What Does chkdsk Do?

chkdsk scans your hard drive, identifies problems, and attempts to fix these problems. Specifically, chkdsk:

• Searches for invalid file names and dates
• Identifies and attempts to fix bad compression structures, sectors, and invalid clusters
• Finds lost clusters (orphaned) and fixes cross-linked clusters
• Fixes file-system cycles (e.g. folders referring to themselves as their parent folder)
• Marks unrecoverable sectors as bad so they cannot be used again to store (and lose) data

What is a Sector? What is a Cluster?

Hard disks are made up of millions of tiny storage areas referred to as sectors; these sectors are a physical section of a hard disk platter in which data (usually up to 512 bytes) is stored. As hard drives increase in size, addressing so many sectors (a 1TB drive has up to approximately 2,147,483,648 sectors) becomes difficult. Thus, sectors are grouped, by Windows, into clusters. A cluster size is determined by the size of your hard disk partition.

What Happens to these Clusters?

Clusters can become orphaned (disassociated with their original data), incorrectly marked (unused put part of a cluster chain), invalid (incorrectly valued), or cross-linked (assigned to two files or twice for one file.) Another way to think of this is to take a look at your food pantry/storage/cupboard. Without regular upkeep, food expires; ingredients, purchased specifically for meals get forgotten; and labels may even fall off so you’re left guessing what spice concoction you have.

There are many reasons why this may happen and while you may be able to prevent much of this through proper hardware care, sometimes data just gets out of line without you realizing. Thankfully, chkdsk can often convert these broken clusters to files that you can copy somewhere safe.

How Do I Use chkdsk?

You can access chkdsk in two ways: through the graphical user interface (GUI) or through the command line interface (CLI.)

Note: chkdsk requires admin privileges. If you are unable to run chkdsk, please check with your systems administrator. If you run chkdsk on a disk from which files are in use (i.e. your “C” drive), you will need to allow Windows to run chkdsk next time you boot your PC (using autochk settings stored in HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\BootExecute.)

To run the chkdsk GUI:

1. Click the Start button and click Computer
2. Right click on any drive and click Properties
3. Click the Tools tab and click Check Now
   Caution: Check Disk may run for many hours (a full check on a 1.5TB drive once took 28 hours) so please be patient and don’t schedule a disk check  when you require access to your PC
4. Select Automatically fix file system errors and click Start
   Note: I’d use “Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors” sparingly as many drives do this, for the most part, themselves

To run the chkdsk CLI:

• Bring up the command line and run chkdsk /F C: to fix file system errors only (on drive C)
• or run chkdsk /R G: to fix system errors and attempt recovery of bad sectors (on drive G)

How Often Should I Run chkdsk?

Your PC works better when there’s organization and data is both referenced and stored in the same place. Thus, I recommend you run chkdsk 4-12 times/year depending on your PC usage. Running it more often than once a month is probably a waste of time.

Note: If your computer is infected with a virus or if your hard drive is seriously damaged, chkdsk may fail mid operation. If you opted for a boot-time check, you may not be able to get into Windows to do much else with your PC (if it still boots into Windows.) Diagnosis and explanation of such an issue is out of the scope of this basic guide. If you’re stuck and need assistance, we can help at Windows Forums. 

There are a number of Windows Guides that ask you to start the computer in safe mode:

• Remove Viruses And Malware in Safe Mode [How To]
• 5 Easy Ways to Uninstall Toolbars In Internet Explorer 8
• Perform a System Restore in Windows Vista and 7 [How To]

In this guide, we’ll show you a couple of ways to get into Safe Mode in Windows XP, Vista, 7, and Windows 8.

There are two easy ways to boot into safe mode. I recommend the first method if you want to boot into Safe Mode one time; I recommend the second method if you plan to boot into safe mode each time your computer starts or if you have trouble with the first method.

1. Use the F8 Key when Windows boots to invoke Safe Mode
2. Modify the BOOT.INI file to boot into safe mode every time

Use the F8 Key when Windows Boots to Invoke Safe Mode

The quickest way to boot into Safe Mode is to hold and press the F8 key as you restart your computer:

1. Remove flash drives and any optical discs from your PC

2. Restart your computer; once your computer is shut down (the power will go off and on for a brief moment), hold the F8 key down until you see the following menu*:

Modify the BOOT.INI File to Boot into Safe Mode every Time

Vista/7/8 msconfig settings:

Next time you boot you will see something like this:

If you find you can’t access Safe Mode, please head over to Windows Forums where we can give you a hand.

Launching Sysinternals tools from the command line/Run dialog is easy. First, you’ll need the list of names of the Sysinternals tools, which can be found here: live.sysinternals.com

Once you have the name of the tool,  launch the Run dialog (Winkey+R) and type the following:

 \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\toolname.exe

Replace toolname.exe with the name of the tool you want to run. For example, if you want to run Process Explorer, enter the following command:

 \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\procexp.exe

Give it a few moments and you’ll be prompted to run the tool for which you executed the command:

For most tools, you are asked to accept the terms of the software and then you’ll be up and running:

That’s it. Now you can access Sysinternals tools from any Windows PC  with an internet connection—anywhere in the world. If you’d like to carry the most important tools with you in a suite, check out the Sysinternals Suite here. If you want to learn more about Sysinternals tools such as Process Explorer, head here.

We like using Sysinternals tools here at Windows Guides; these tools bring core Windows functions together and help you administer to your systems more easily.

In this guide, we’ll cover the basics:

1. What are the Sysinternals tools?
2. How to download and run these tools on your PC
3. Where can I learn more about these tools?

We’ll then take a look at two of my favorite tools: Bginfo and Process Explorer.

Here are some other tools that we’ve covered in the past on Windows Guides:

• AutoRuns – What is really going on inside your Windows?
• SDelete Deletes Your Files Permanently
• Microsoft Desktops Gives You Multiple Desktops to Work With

What are the Sysinternals tools?

Sysinternals utilities help you manage, troubleshoot, and diagnose Windows and applications. These tools are created by the Microsoft community and are kept up to date to work with the latest versions of Windows. I’ve used some of these tools for as long as I can remember using modern versions of Windows (Windows 2000 and beyond) and you might just find one or two useful–even if you don’t consider yourself a PC geek.

How to Download and Run these Tools on Your PC

You have a few choices when using the Sysinternals tools:

1. Download individual tools from the Sysinternals website
2. Run Sysinternals tools from the command line (requires internet connection)
3. Download the Sysinternals Suite (all troubleshooting tools in one)

Where can I Learn More about these Tools?

Note: Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 come bundled with PowerShell so you don’t need to do anything.

If your PC is in a domain or workgroup where its use is prohibited, speak with your IT administrative staff.

Download PowerShell 2.0 (Vista, Server 2008/3)

	Download PowerShell 2.0 for Windows Vista
	Download PowerShell 2.0 for Windows Vista (64-bit)
	Download PowerShell 2.0 for Windows Server 2008
	Download PowerShell 2.0 for Windows Server 2008 (64-bit)
	Download PowerShell 2.0 for Windows Server 2003
	Download PowerShell 2.0 for Windows Server 2003 (64-bit)

Download PowerShell 1.0 (XP, Windows Embedded)

Download PowerShell 1.0 for Windows XP and Windows Embedded

Now you’ve downloaded PowerShell, why not use it as a calculator?