While shopping around for SSL Certificates I decided to compile a short table to compare the various ones available. It is available below. They are all 128/256 bit encryption targeted for web applications.
I recently set up a Windows Vista HTPC and only had 512 MB memory and a Sempron 3200 lying around. Until I could get to the store and pick up another stick of memory, I thought I’d try it with 512 MB RAM. Whoa! Vista was SLOW. I spent a few hours tweaking to get it to work faster, and to my surprise it worked.
I’d have to say the #1 tip for speeding up Vista when you have 1 GB of RAM or less, is to disable Superfetch. Superfetch memorizes what programs you use and when, and loads them into memory during start-up. This is a fantastic idea iff (if and only if) you have large amounts of memory. If you have 512MB or even 1GB in some cases, you may be better off disabling Superfetch. This will free up system memory and allow it to be used exclusively by the program currently running (good for games too).
To disable Superfetch go to Start -> type services.msc in the run/search box -> Double-click Superfetch -> Set Start-up type to Disable and press Stop. Then restart your computer.
When hovering over a folder in the start menu of Windows Vista, it expands very slowly. This is a result of “highlighting new programs” in the folder list.
To speed it up, Right-click the start menu, select properties -> customize-> scroll down and un-check “highlight newly installed programs.”
Here’s a quick tip for anyone using Windows Vista. When using Windows Explorer (My Computer), you’ll notice that green glow that slides across the location bar when browsing a directory. It is building thumbnails of all files in that particular directory – movie files have a screen capture as the thumbnail. As you can imagine it slows down file operations considerably. To turn this feature off (and speed up your computer), Open up Explorer.exe, go to Tools -> Folder Options -> View. Then go to the Advanced Settings and check “Always show icons, never thumbnails.”
By default, Explorer does not show the file menu, so press ALT-F to show the menu while in the window.
Creating an SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record helps prevent other servers from spoofing your email address and also helps other servers determine whether or not your messages are spam. However, without widespread use of SPF at the moment, the latter isn’t very effective.
SPF Records use reverse DNS to check if a sending email address is valid. For example, if you see an email from info@iishacks.com it may or may not be from me. A server will perform a reverse DNS check for iishacks.com to see if the sending machine is authorized to send that message. If the SPF Record is on my server and I authorize only my server to send messages from IISHacks, then only messages sent from info@iishacks.com from my server will show up as valid.
More and more email servers are using SPF records as a way to sort and rank possible spam. If a sending server does not have an SPF record or is not an authorized sender of a server with an SPF record, some email servers will flag that message as spam or else reject it completely. Large email hosting companies are already incorporating SPF as a spam tool.
If you host your own email server but your DNS/MX records are hosted somewhere else (ex. Godaddy) you can login to their administrative panel and follow their steps to create and publish an SPF record. If you host your own DNS you can follow the steps at openspf.org to create a valid SPF record and then follow the steps below to implement it into your Windows server.
Go to Start –> Programs –> Administrative Tools –> DNS
Expand the DNS tree, under Forward Lookup Zones select the domain you wish to create an SPF record for. In the white space, Right-Click and select Other New Records…
Select Text (TXT) in the Resource Record Type dialog box, click Create Record…
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