Boot Options

 Boot options
-------------------
If you are not booting multiple
operating systems, you can
turn off the option permanently,
until it is required. If
there is another OS on your
system, say LINUX, you
can reduce the amount of time
the option to choose which
OS to load is displayed. Rightclick
My Computer, click Properties
> Advanced and click the
Settings button under Startup
and Recovery. Here, you can
choose which operating system
to boot by default. You
can uncheck the boxes to
show the boot options, or
select the number of seconds
for which the choices are displayed.
Five seconds is usually
more than enough.
You will notice recovery
settings in case of a system failure.
Alerts and debugging
information will not be very
helpful for most users, so you
can turn these options off too.
_____________________________________

Choosing Performance

Choose performance
--------------------------
Windows XP has some very
good features to maximise
performance. Unfortunately,
the default settings are no
good. You can choose to have
it optimise itself for faster
computing. To change these
settings, click Start, rightclick
My Computer and click
Properties. Switch to the
Advanced tab and click the
Settings button under Performance.
By default, ‘Let Windows
choose what’s best for
my computer’ is selected.
Choose ‘Adjust for best performance’
instead, and you
will almost immediately
notice a boost in speed. This
is because all graphic effects
are turned off. You can
optionally choose each type
of effect that should be
enabled from here, but if it’s
power you are looking for,
leave them all off. Note that
the behaviour and appearance
of a lot of Windows such
as the Control Panel, will
become quite different. If you
prefer the helpful wizard-like
interfaces, you may want to
sacrifice a bit on performance
and enable the option to ‘Use
common tasks in folders’.
_____________________________________

By turning off display effects

 Turn off display effects
---------------------------------
Switching off transition and
animation effects can save a
lot of system resources. These
effects are not required to run
programs and cause an
unnecessary load on the
processor and RAM. Rightclick
on an empty area of the
desktop, click Properties and
switch to the Appearance tab.
Click Effects and clear all the
checkboxes.
__________________

By Changing the theme

(Tested on WINDOWS -XP PROFESSIONAL)

* Change the theme
-----------------------------
The default Windows XP
theme looks very pretty, but
hogs a lot of system resources
for the eye-candy effects such
as bevelled objects and transitions.
If looks are not important
to you, switch over to the
classic Windows look. To do
this, right-click an empty area
of the desktop and click Properties.
Under the Themes tab,
set Windows Classic as the
current theme and click OK.

By cleaning temporary files

* Temporary cleaner
------------------------------------
Regularly removing files that accumulate in the Temp folder can also show better performance—
these files are usually very small and unnecessarily fill up the hard
disk. This also causes high disk fragmentation and pushes important data towards the periphery of the
disk, where read/write operations are slower. Ideally, create a batch file that empties this folder and place it in the
Startup, so that it runs every time you boot to Windows.
You could do this from the autoexec.bat too, but this file runs while still in DOS mode, so disk access will be much 
slower than when in Windows.
You should strip all file attributes before running the delete command, since hidden and system files will not
be deleted from the Command Prompt. Also, using the deltree command instead of
del will ensure that even folders are deleted. Thus, your batch file should contain the
following commands:
attrib -a -s -r -h c:\Windows\
Temp\*.* /s
Deltree/y C:\Windows\
Temp\*

Using Defragmentation

* DEFRAGMANTING
----------------------------
Regularly defragmenting the hard disk maintains optimum performance for read/write operations. Hard disks store
data in sectors and clusters,the latter being the smallest addressable unit. Clusters are of a fixed size, depending on
the file system (FAT, FAT32,NTFS, etc). A cluster can hold only one file, but a file mayspan over several clusters.
For FAT32 partitions, the cluster size is 4 KB. Thus, any file between 0 bytes to 4 KB will occupy one cluster.
Should its size increase beyond 4 KB, it will look for the next free cluster to fill up.
With frequently changing files such as documents, spreadsheets, images, etc, the fragments of the file may
not be on contiguous clusters.
Reading and writing to such files spread all over the partition is obviously slow.
Defragmenting brings pieces of the file together, so that they are accessed faster.
All versions of Windows are bundled with defragmenting tools. In Windows 2000 and XP, you
can run it from Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter
  OR  
rightclick My Computer and click Manage. Look for Disk Defragmenter under Storage

COMPUTER THREATS:

One reads about Web site security problems in the newspaper almost weekly. The situation is really pretty grim. Let us look at a few examples of what has already happened. First, the home page of numerous organizations has been attacked and replaced by a new home page of the crackers' choosing. (The popular press calls people who break into computers ''hackers,'' but many programmers reserve that term for great programmers. We prefer to call these people ''crackers.'') Sites that have been cracked include Yahoo, the U.S. Army, the CIA, NASA, and the New York Times. In most cases, the crackers just put up some funny text and the sites were repaired within a few hours.

Now let us look at some much more serious cases. Numerous sites have been brought down by denial-of-service attacks, in which the cracker floods the site with traffic, rendering it unable to respond to legitimate queries. Often the attack is mounted from a large number of machines that the cracker has already broken into (DDoS atacks). These attacks are so common that they do not even make the news any more, but they can cost the attacked site thousands of dollars in lost business.

In 1999, a Swedish cracker broke into Microsoft's Hotmail Web site and created a mirror site that allowed anyone to type in the name of a Hotmail user and then read all of the person's current and archived e-mail.

In another case, a 19-year-old Russian cracker named Maxim broke into an e-commerce Web site and stole 300,000 credit card numbers. Then he approached the site owners and told them that if they did not pay him $100,000, he would post all the credit card numbers to the Internet. They did not give in to his blackmail, and he indeed posted the credit card numbers, inflicting great damage to many innocent victims.

In a different vein, a 23-year-old California student e-mailed a press release to a news agency falsely stating that the Emulex Corporation was going to post a large quarterly loss and that the C.E.O. was resigning immediately. Within hours, the company's stock dropped by 60%, causing stockholders to lose over $2 billion. The perpetrator made a quarter of a million dollars by selling the stock short just before sending the announcement. While this event was not a Web site break-in, it is clear that putting such an announcement on the home page of any big corporation would have a similar effect.

We could (unfortunately) go on like this for many pages. But it is now time to examine some of the technical issues related to Web security. For more information about security problems of all kinds, see (Anderson, 2001; Garfinkel with Spafford, 2002; and Schneier, 2000). Searching the Internet will also turn up vast numbers of specific cases.