You might wonder why this is a problem. Well, obviously if your system has more than 2GB of RAM, it’d be great to allow your applications or games to make use of it. Furthermore, some applications actually crash when they hit this limit, or start popping up boxes with out of memory errors. If you work on large excel files (500,000 rows+) then you’ll know what I’m talking about.

The Solution

Thankfully, there’s a solution! A great coder by the name of Daniel Pistelli has written a little patching application that will modify your 32-bit programs, and allow them to address up to 4GB of RAM. It’s important to remember that this utility is only useful if you are running a 64-bit OS. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then here’s an easy way to check:

1. Go to Control Panel, and click view by “small icons” in the top right hand corner
2. Click System
3. As per the image below, next to System Type, it should say 64-bit operating system. If it doesn’t then this utility is of no use to you.

The second thing to remember is that this utility can only be used on 32-bit applications. If you are unsure if an application you are running is 32-bit, run task manager by pressing CTRL-SHIFT-ESCAPE. Click the tab for processes. A list of currently running programs will load. Find your application in the list, and look to see if it has *32 next to it. The example image below illustrates what I mean.

Using the patch

Assuming that you’ve followed the previous two points and now wish to patch your 32-bit application, first backup the executable file of the program you wish to patch. If the patching process fails, or if you need to download an update for the program you are patching, you may need to revert to the original file. Remember, you only need to backup the executable file for the program (i.e. the file with a .exe extension), not the entire program folder itself. Once you’ve done this, download the patching utility from here. Run it, and it will ask you to select your program. Simply select the executable file you wish to patch and the utility will work its magic. Upon completion, it will ask you if you wish to patch another file. If you do, go ahead, if not, quit!

Conclusion

If all goes well, your application should now be able to make use of up to 4GB of RAM. Obviously this will be most useful for resource-intensive applications, and you’ll probably see the greatest benefits with games. Some productivity software will also benefit, assuming you aren’t utilising the 64-bit versions of these (e.g. Excel, Photoshop, 3D Studio Max, and so on.)

In this tutorial, I’m going to walk you through setting up CCleaner to automatically run on a schedule in Windows Vista so that you can simply set it and forget it.

Configure Your Options

Making sure that you have set the correct options inside of CCleaner is very important if you plan to automate it. For example, what if you decide to run it every night and you have it set to clean out your recent documents or cookies. That could become very frustrating in a very short time.

Start by opening CCleaner and selecting the options you want in the Windows Cleaner section that opens by default. I can’t tell you what settings to use because everyone will have different needs. All I can tell you is that you need to think about each option carefully and consider that possible outcomes.

The next piece that you’ll want to look at is the Advanced Options. Click on the Options button in the lower left corner of the window, then click Advanced. Make sure that Save all settings to INI file is checked.

Create the Scheduled Task

Open up the Start menu in Windows, then go to All Programs –> Accessories –> System Tools –> Task Scheduler. If Windows prompts you to tell you that it needs your permission to continue, simply click the Continue button.

Once the task schedule window is open, click on Create Basic Task. A new wizard will open to help you through the process.  Give your task a meaningful name and description. I chose “System Cleanup” for the name and “This task launches CCleaner to perform a system cleanup on a regular basis.” Click Next.

The Task Trigger window is where you determine what causes the task to run. In our case, we want a time period to be the trigger. I personally find weekly to be sufficient, but you can choose daily or monthly depending on your individual needs. After you select your trigger, click Next.

Now the scheduler needs you to get a little more granular by selecting the day of the week and the time that the task will run.  This choice is very important. For example, if you turn your PC off at night, then you don’t want to run the task in the middle of the night. You also don’t want the task to run when you are likely to be in the middle of using the computer. Once you decide on the finer details, click Next.

Now it’s time to tell the scheduler just exactly what you want it to do. It defaults to Start a program, so just click Next. Click the Browse button and locate the CCleaner.exe program file. The default location is:

C:Program FilesCCleanerCCleaner.exe

In the Add arguments section, add the /AUTO switch. This tells CCleaner to run automatically without waiting for user input.  Click Next to get to the Summary screen. Check the box next to Open the Properties Dialog for this task when I click Finish and click the Finish button.

In the Properties window, check the box next to Run with the highest privileges. This is required so that the task can run without prompting you for administrator privileges. Next click on the Conditions tab and check the box next to Wake the computer to run this task. This will bring your computer out of sleep mode in the event that the power saver settings have put it to sleep.  Click Ok to finish the process.

You can try out the task to make sure everything was configured properly by right-clicking on your new task and selecting Run.

If everything is ok, you should see the CCleaner icon appear in your system tray.

You can get more info about CCleaner from the CCleaner website, or from our handy walkthrough.

Below I have compiled 10 useful Windows Vista tips and tricks to help you improve your gaming performance.

1) Upgrade your hardware

This includes the RAM, CPU and graphics card. For gaming in Vista, make sure that you own a dual core CPU, 2 GB RAM and a DirectX 10 compliant graphics card.

2) Disable System Restore

Vista’s System Restore helps you to backup your files and provide a restoration in the event that the OS crash. Although a useful feature, it can slow down your system to a great extent. To disable it, click on Start -> Control Panel -> System and Maintenance -> System and remove the tick next to any drives that you have protected.

3) Turn off hibernation

If you don’t use the hibernation feature, you can disable it and recover around a gigabyte of hard disk space. To do this, open up “Run” and type “powercfg – H off”

4) Disable the Sidebar

While this is a great eye-candy, it takes up a lot of resources. To disable the sidebar, open Control Panel -> Windows Sidebar Properties. Uncheck the “Start Sidebar When Windows Start”.

5) Move swap file to another drive/partition

Swap file is a temporary file used to store data for future use. If you have another drive, you can speed up Vista a bit by moving the swap file to that drive. Or if you are using only one drive, you can set up a partition to store your swap file.

• Click on Start -> Control Panel -> System and Maintenance -> System
• Choose Advanced system settings from the top left hands side
• Make sure that the Advanced tab is selected
• In the Performance section click Settings
• Click on the Advanced tab
• In the Virtual Memory section click Change
• Uncheck “Automatically manage paging file sizes for all drives”
• Click on the partition you want to use as a swap partition, select Custom Size, and set the new sizes of your swap file. The recommended size is 2.5 times your RAM size, and my choice is to set the Initial Size and Maximum Size values equal, to get a fixed size swap file.
• Click on the primary partition, check “No paging file” and click Set. This is to prevent Vista from placing a swap file on your primary partition.
• Restart the computer

6) Add 3D sound

The DirectX 10 architecture changed the ways sound is processed in gaming. If you are playing Windows XP games that use hardware 3D audio effects, most likely you will not hear any sound at all. To overcome this, you can use Creative’s ALchemy tool. Download and install the ALchemy tool from Creative website. This tool will pipe any DirectSound calls in Windows XP games to OpenAL to give it a full 3D audio hardware support.

7) Turn off Vista’s Indexing Engine

The Vista’s Indexing Engine is a useful tool that allows you to search for files easily. However during gaming, it is running in the background and takes up resources that affect the gaming performance. To turn it off, go to Control Panel -> Indexing Option. Click Modify -> Show All Locations to remove any drives or folders that you don’t want to be indexed.

8) Change your Startup program

To prevent any unused programs from loading during the boot up process and take up your system resources, you can change your startup program by typing “msconfig” into the Run box. Click the startup tab and uncheck the box next to any software that you don’t want to run during startup.

9) Use Ready Boost

This is a new feature in Vista that uses an external USB flash drive as a cache to store frequently access data. It is said to be able to increase the performance up to 10 times. Insert in a USB 2.0 flash drive into your USB port. In the window that pops up, click on the ReadyBoost tab. Select “use this device”.

10) Disable SuperFetch

Another new feature of Vista that utilizes all your free memory to store frequency accessed data. While it is a good feature, it is actually causing more harm to your game performance. Your game needs a lot of free memory to load maps, process AI and so on, while the SuperFetch is constantly taking up free memory to store data. To disable the SuperFetch, open Run and type “services.msc”. Select “Stop/Disable SuperFetch”, and then reboot the computer.