Money through blogging

Increase your internet speed (bandwidth) by 20%



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Windows holds back a large portion of your internet bandwidth as part of it's network settings. But if you're not on a corporate network, if this is your home computer, free that up for greater bandwidth. Get that extra speed by making a very quick, simple and easy change in the Windows Group Policy editor (works just like looking through your files and folders) as follows:

1. Click START, then click RUN.


2. Type "gpedit.msc" without the quotes, then click OK.


3. Browse to the highlighted area shown above -- the folder you want is Computer Configuration/ Administrative Templates/ Network/ QoS Packet Scheduler in the left-hand pane (shown above) then double-click "Limit reservable bandwith" in the right-hand pane. The dialog box shown below will pop up.
   
   


4. Click the dot (radio button) for Enabled as shown below, and in Bandwidth Limit, type or click up or down until a number between 0 and 10 is shown.


5. Click Apply, and click your way out of the open dialog boxes: you're done!

The lower the number you enter in Bandwidth Limit (where I have entered a "1" in the image below), the faster your internet connection will be. However, "5" is probably low enough, though you can play with this number:





However, realize if the if the network card has a specific limit set on it in registry, this would have no impact on it.





Speed up Firefox



If you have a high-speed (Cable, DSL, etc.) connection this change will give you a very noticeable speed increase for larger web pages. Inside the address bar on Firefox (where web page addresses/URLs go) type this and press enter:

about:config

and then find:

network.http.pipelining

network.http.proxy.pipelining

and set them both to "true".  This adjusts the pipelining settings. For more cool settings available in about: config, go here.)



Then find

network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

and set it to 8, as suggested by http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.http.pipelining.maxrequests  (though you can play with this number).



Finally, right-click anywhere (on any setting) and a menu will pop out: select 'new' and then 'integer'. Copy this (without the quotes): "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and paste it in as the name, and then set the value to "0" (zero).  This removes the render delay.  You should experience a BIG speed increase!





More speed tips

• More Firefox connection speed tips site 1 (see also: site 2)
  
  


• To speedup XP in general, try these tips.

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You might ask: who else uses their monitors in portrait mode? Here's a couple of photos from the Googleplex to give you an idea:

I use a 24" flat panel widescreen (16:10) monitor set to 1920 x 1200 in portrait (vertical) mode. I've tweaked or montaged a number of free images into vertical 16:10 desktop wallpapers in Photoshop. For example, the first image, Eagle Mountain Mist, is a montage of six images, and lots of Photoshop "mist" (you can also see it on Flickr). Some have been rotated to work well vertically. If these are too huge for you, realize Windows can auto-size them for a desktop background. (Here's a great site for completely free images.)

Montages and optimized free images:
Note: These are vertical as shown.









Best of Hubble and the night sky

Note: These are vertical as shown (regardless of original image)





Free Nature Desktop Images: Vertical or Horizontal
Note: these come in a horizontal orientation.

Rotate to vertical as desired in an image program















Free Abstract Wallpaper: Vertical or Horizontal
Note: these come in a horizontal orientation.Rotate to vertical as desired in an image program





Finding other sources for widescreen vertical wallpapers
Probably the best is interface lift, but Stock Exchange has quite a few to pick through. And there's a big list of links here. Try this useful large image search for popular, large nature wallpapers easily cropped. I can't post any here since they prohibit redistribution.

Graffiti Wallpaper is also excellent. Some of the nature images shown here are simply rotated from Mike Swanson's excellent collection.

If you've ever thought of making 1920 x 1200 wallpapers for your widescreen monitor from online map images, check out Earth Wallpapers.

Sources
Here are the source of some of the montaged and optimized images, in order from first appearing above:

• Eagle Mountain Mist is a montage of several images and lots of photoshopping;


• Lazy Days II by boss019; April 24th, 2007;


• Neutron Revolver by Parth; November 18th, 2006;


• Peace by Grant Erb; December 15th, 2005--Morfee Lake, Mackenzie, British Columbia, Canada;


• Silence by shiftedreality; May 13th, 2007;


• Epic Falls by Chris Fenison; June 15th, 2006;


• Splash/3D rendered water by Ratow; January 15th, 2006;


• Crepuscule, by Fabien Egot; August 16th, 2007;


• Courage et dévouement (Courage and dedication) Cédric Sacilotto's photo taken with a Canon EOS 400D at f9, 1/200 s; France, copyright 2007;


• Solar Wind effect on Earth's magnetic field: Scaling The Universe;


• Modified from Haleakala Sunrise by Greg Martin;


• If anyone can help me with the original source of the starry night over golden building (MIT) HDR image, I'd be grateful;


• The rest are adaptations of classic Hubble Space Telescope photos from a variety of sources.

Photoshop optimization techniques include HIROLAM, LAB color adjustments, BlendIF layer styles to reduce white halos after sharpening, etc.
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