RAM Disk

A RAM-Disk, Ramdisk or Ramdrive is a virtual solid state disk that uses a segment of active computer memory, RAM, as secondary storage, a role typically filled by hard drives. It allows you to create directories, copy files to and from it, etc…. Access times are greatly improved, because RAM is approximately a million times faster than hard drives. However, the volatility of RAM means that data will be lost if power is lost, e.g. when the computer is turned off. RAM disks can be used to store temporary data or hold uncompressed programs for short periods.

Believe me.. Any software that is installed on Ram Disk works with rocket speed… I installed Photoshop for trial..

A ramdisk can perfectly be used to store :

• Web content of web servers.
• Temporary index files and tables of database servers.
• Temporary files ( TEMP and TMP environment variable ) and “Temporary Internet Files”.
• The scratch disk for Adobe (R) Photoshop (R)
• Games and programs in general (1), reloading parts and data occurs many times faster
• Audio and video capture / editing
• Creation and playback of slide shows
• Data that has to be written to CD , to prevent underrun during the burn process
• All kinds of data that may be lost ( or MUST be lost for security reasons ) at shutdown

The installed software can also be reloaded automatically at boot time from an image file or by means of a backup program.

You can use any of the software to setup Ram disk on ur PC. Remember that you must have atleast 512 KB for nice performance although s/w vendors say 256 is sufficient.

Microsoft [sample] RAM DISK driver : (with source code!) for Win2k. I don’t really recommend this unless you are a tweaker/developer. In its current form there is a maximum disk size of 32MB and unfortunately the new disk identifies it self as a “Ram Disk” -not- “hard disk” hence some applications may get confused and not see the disk. Also you have to change registry entries to configure it. The sample driver is good to learn how RAM Disks work however.

Ram disk9x / RamDiskNT : Whilst not free this software provides the richest feature set. There are lots of settings to optimize your Ram Disk including disk images. If you chose this software please read the documentation thoroughly as the various options are VERY powerful. Also it supports both the NT/2000/XP AND Win9x architecture.

RAMDisk for 2000/XP/2003 (and WinPE) : Freeware RAM DISK software based on Microsoft’s sample driver but includes a graphical interface to easily change settings. Easy to install and the disk can be dynamically resized without a reboot. An extended version is available that allows for disks over 64MB and support for WinPE systems. The source for the standard version is also available.

Virtual Hard Drive : File and applications perform up to 340 time faster.Virtual Hard Drive Pro supports an unlimited amount of RAM.

How to watch a video by setting it as wallpaper?

Most of u may know this trick already, but.. for ppl who donno this.. its really a gud tip..

What if we want to chat with some one simultaneously watching movie? Opening a movie in window is quite irksome.. So, how about making the video as wallpaper?? Just try out…

For this, you need VLC player. It is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats. (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, h264, xvid etc…) .If you are having a hard time playing videos, VLC media player will more than likely will solve your issue.Download it from here

Now, Play any movie in VLC player, Right click on the screen and select Wallpaper. Minimize the screen.. Thats it… you can do anything in parellel watching the movie…

You can also find this option in BS Player.

Create a CON folder in Windows

Many ppl dont know that they cannot create “CON” folder in windows. Some ppl dont know why they cant create it? Very few know that they can still create it someway.. but donno why are they supposed to do exactly like that.. Now, After reading this, you will become one of the rest!!

Try out creating a folder named CON…

Not only CON, we cannot create any of these CON, PRN, AUX, CLOCK$, NUL, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, LPT9 and more

The reason is that con, prn, lpt1..lpt9, etc are underlying devices from the time dos was written. so if u r allowed to create such folders, there will be an ambiguity in where to write data when the data is supposed to go to the specified devices. In other words, if i want to print something, internally what windows does is — it will write the data to the folder prn (virtually u can call it a folder, i mean prn, con, etc are virtual folders in device level). So if we are able to create con folder, windows will get confused where to write the data, to virtual con folder or real one.

So Now, Try this…

Open the Command prompt by Start -> Run and typing cmd

C:\> md \\.\c:\con

Now, Open My Computer and browse through the path where you created CON folder… Surprising.. ?? Yeah.. you have created it successfully

Now, try to delete the folder from My computer

OOPS!!! You cant delete it…

Now, try this in command prompt console

C:\> rd \\.\c:\con

Yeah!! You did it…

It is just because of the UNC Path (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Univers…ng_Convention). The Universal Naming Convention, or UNC, specifies a common syntax to describe the location of a network resource, such as a shared file, directory, or printer.Since, these conventions did n’t exist under pure DOS, they are not backward compatible. The UNC syntax for Windows systems is as follows..

\\RemoteHost\sharedfolder\resource

where RemoteHost is the computer name / IP address of the computer that you wish to connect through remotely for accessing shared folder. The rest is the path.

(Here \\remotehost\drive:\con doesn’t make sense anyway, because without having a process on the remote host, there is no current ‘console’). It would be a security hazard as well, having the serial and parallel ports accessible for everyone who is allowed to read or write in any single directory.

The “.” in the command \\.\c:\con suggest the local server. Now, you are pointing to your own computer. since, you have all privilages on every folder of ur computer, you can easily create it.

How to enqueue Audio files directly by Double Clicking ??

This is a very useful tweak for music lovers.. Generally we enqueue a music file ( in winamp) or add to media player list ( in WMP) by right click -> context menu -> Add to playlist/Enqueue. This is tedious if u need to select a large list. Ofcourse you may claim that you r gonna create a playlist and then reuse it. But, atleast for creating a playlist, this tweak would be useful… How would it be if u can enqueue single song or group of songs directly with a single doubleclick..??

For winamp users, To enable this option, Open the preferences window (Ctrl + p) and navigate to filetypes under General Preferences tab. Just select the option “Enqueue files on Doubleclick in Windows Explorer” and now it is done..

For WMP lovers, There is no option available in built in media player. But we can add the option by using a third party software – TweakMP. After installing the software, navigate to Plug-ins under Tools menu. Select TweakMP and u ‘ll find lot many more options other than Enqueue on doubleclick.

How to generate Folder listing of a Directory

How many times do you wish if you could generate a text file or printout listing the files and folders? It seems like a simple request, but it’s amazing the option isn’t available by default. Many Third party softwares now provide this option. But why not we do it ourselves??Now, our aim is to include the option Save folder Listing into our right-click context menu. To create the entry in the context menu it’s necessary to make a command that generate folder listing.

Download this and unzip it. Copy the file into c:\windows directory.

Open Windows Explorer and choose Tools –> Folder Options

Navigate to File Types –> Folder –> Advanced–> New, to open the New Action box shown

Enter the fields as shown below (or in the image above)

Action : Save Folder Listing to FileApplication : C:\windows\dir2file.exe

Note: The path specified above should be same as the path where the extracted attachment file is copied. Otherwise, windows will throw an exception.

And That’s it! Congratulations. You’ve created a new item on the context menu that’s ready to go to work.

Open My Computer and browse to any path, rightclick on the folder and click “Save Folder Listing to File” , choose the path and save it to a filename. you are done..

Alternate ways :

Since, editing the folder options is sometimes risky, you can directly add the following registry keys.

Create the Key Save Folder List in the following path
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\

Create a sub key called Command in the Save Folder List key

Edit the default value to “c:\windows\dir2file.zip” “%1″ (as it is, with quotes)

For Advanced users:

We can also create a batch file script for redirecting the output of a dir command into a file. People who want to proceed further, can use this command.

dir /a /-p /o:gen >filelisting.txt

The above command, when executed in the command prompt, will save the Output of DIR Command to filelisting.txt in the current directory. You can also use this batch file to run instead of the dir2file.exe and follow the same method as above, but there are some issues with it. If you succeed doing this, please let me know.

For Newbies, I have created an utility which will automate the whole process in a single click. You can download it from here. You can also find the Help file in the Programfiles\Dash\FolderList directory.

Download link: here

How to type text in your regional language

This is an eyecatching tweak for guys who would like to have some Hindi text in their signatures or who would like to scrap wishes in hindi. If you wanna type a message in Telugu/Hindi or some other desired language.. Here is the way!! No third party software is needed. This is all stuff to do with Microsoft word. Lemme demonstrate how to get text in Hindi.

Open Microsoft word and select Symbol in insert menu. Select font as Mangal and subset as Devanagiri. Here u find all the characters that are required to type any alphabet.

Suppose if you want to type “अपुन अच्छा लडका है” Insert the following symbols in the order. Neglect + and signs. I just placed it for seperation.

अ + प + ु +न अ + च + ् + छ + ा + ल + ड + क + ा ह + ै

While typing the characters, you will observe that the related characters merge themselves. After typing the required message, just copy and paste the characters wherever you want. Soon after u paste the message.. u may notice blank squares appearing instead of message (in Googletalk window for example).. Dont worry.. The tweak works after you save it/send it.

If u wanna have ur profile name of Orkut in Hindi… U can do the similar thing… Just type the text in microsoft word. Edit your profile and paste the text there… You can also send the messages in Google Talk or Yahoo IMs.

Similarly.. use Gautami font for Telugu and Tunga font for Kannada. You should download Unicode fonts for other languages to enable this feature…

There are editors available which will do the same work for you. But, for small messages, this is useful. You can also use character map in Windows System tools for the same.