Here is a nifty program I cam across to simplify the tweaking of Mozilla Firefox. Its called Firetune. You run the application, and it fine tunes Firefox settings for the type of speed of your computer and the speed of your internet connection. Its simple and it works.

FireTune for Mozilla Firefox was developed for an optimization of your browsing experience with Firefox. It is based on a collection of popular and well working optimization settings used and tested by the experts. Usually you have to optimize Firefox manually, which can be time consuming and difficult for the novice user. FireTune helps you here–it includes all the performance optimizations.

Click here to download

Seems like the iPhone will now be able to connect to Microsoft Exchange servers for email now. I have actually been waiting for that since the iPhone was first introduced. The support should be available to iPhones in an a 2.0 update in late June as per an article in ZDNet. Some of the features promised in the update are:

• Deliver a global address list and push contact.
• Support Cisco IPSec VPN, enterprise class WiFi. (Was this part of a deal to end the iPhone naming spat?)
• Allow security policies and remote wipe.
• Enterprise configuration.
• And support for Exchange (also see Microsoft’s Q&A). Along those lines Apple has licensed ActiveSync for the iPhone. Mary Jo Foley reported that a Microsoft-Apple deal was in the works last year.

More on the iPhone here: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8179&tag=nl.e540

The power requirements of the modern desktop PC have jumped to astronomical levels. Rigs sporting multiple processing cores and graphics cards and multiple hard drives require more juice than previous generations of hardware did. Some high-end power supply units are now rated in excess of 1,200 watts. A modern computer enthusiast’s gaming rig, including monitor, might pull as much as 400 watts just idling. Leaving a computer on all the time can translate into a pretty hefty power bill at the end of the month. An “always on” 400 watts at a $0.12-per-kilowatt-hour rate would cost you $34.56 a month! When talking these kinds of figures, it’s easy to see how taking the time to configure a proper power-saving state for your PC could save you some serious cabbage. Click here to download the PDF to Maximum PCs article excerpt: pc2sleep.pdf

For those of us who want to squeeze out a little more from our Windows XP startup:

To speed up your boot process slightly, disable the Windows XP loading screen. This can be accomplished easily by opening the MSCONFIG utility (‘start\run and type msconfig’), selecting the ‘boot.ini’ tab and checking the /NOGUIBOOT option.

When you boot your system, you will see a black screen in between POST and the welcome screen from now on.

Another memory tweak…

For Users with 256 MB RAM or more this tweak will boost their Windows- and Game-Performance.

What it does: It tells Windows not to use any Swap File until there is really no more free RAM left.

Open the System Configuration Utility by typing msconfig.exe in the RUN command. There in your System.ini you have to add “ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1″ under the 386enh section.

Restart your Windows and enjoy better Game performance