Claim more SSD drive space on Windows

Ok when we talk about SSD, we all knew the sweet juicy lovely speed of it, but we hate the pricey pricetag, its tiny size and the performance degradation.
But worry not, price is lowering everyday. I just got my 240GB Kingston SSD 3K for less than $1/GB. Kingston claims it can last for more than 8 years with daily IO of 10GB. That’s about 29.2TB IO !!! I bet personally I’ll never exceed that limit.
But 240GB is a bit tiny for my OS, Virtual Machines + all the dev tool (FYI I have VS2008,VS2010,V2012, MSSQL 2008-2012 with 50GB db in total.
So, I only worry about its “tiny” size. What I do ? I go cleanup hard disk. How?
1. Manually I go disable the page file, disable hibernatation (powercfg –h off) and move my System Restore folder to the other 3TB drive. I don’t need any of these on my SSD. Love it, +14GB at least.
2. http://www.iishacks.com/2011/06/23/reduce-windows-7-winsxs-folder-size/ : in short, run this command:

dism /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded

Reduce huge WinSXS folder. Love it too, +4GB.
3. Run CCleaner – useful and easy. Just a click, +3GB and all thrash cleanup.
Results: on my workstation with 240GB SSD
Before: Free space = 121GB
After: Free space= 142GB (+21GB ! Yay)

How to download Steam update faster ?

Recently I ran into this kind of frustration, whenever I login Steam to play my favorite Dota 2, I’ll be force to install some updates. The update download take forever to finish, it keeps stuck at some certain percent. Poofff Valve, wth ?!!!

So it take a while and I figure out that somehow my TCP connection to Valve update server got stuck.

Tada, that’s an easy fix ! I downloaded Sysinternal TCPView, and whenever the connection got stuck, I close it and wait for a while: the update connection will auto-reconnect back to the server, and zap!! My update finished much faster than before.

Try it for yourself if you have my problems

DOWNLOAD: HERE

http://download.sysinternals.com/files/TCPView.zip

Personal Hotspot on iPhone is not working ?

If you have turn on the Personal Hotspot and still not seeing the connection, here is the first and easiest fix: plug in and plug out your USB cable.

It did work for me – it could be USB connection reset.

How to improve Visual Studio performance

 

In this series, I’ll discuss how to the steps that I did to improve VS 2008/2012/2012 performance. Following these guidelines, I managed to reduce build time from +10sec to 3-5sec , and solution opening time from 20+ sec to just mere 5sec.

For some may think “a few sec ain’t a big deal”, I would like to stress: it’s really make a different when you test & debug. Anyway, what else will you do when VS is compiling ? Thinking of what to do with your life ? . Life’s better when you can cut down build time and spent that on other hobby (for me it’s building performance workstation-  I just upgrade mine to 16GB DDR3-2000Mhz with RAID10 SSD ^^ )

OK enough chit chat, now back to the main point.

1.Requirements:

Before proceed with the guide, ensure that your machine meet these minimum requirements:

• At least 2Gb free memory.
• Core2Duo 1.8Ghz (dual-core) or equivalent AMD multicore.
• At least 5Gb free HDD space.

2.Steps:

a. First, if you have lots of RAM (4GB+ ), you can use Ramdisk to create a separate partition, then map your output folder to it.

I downloaded Ramdisk , then install it. Using the tool, I created the symbolic link from the VS output folder via mklink :

C:\mklink /D "F:/RamdiskTemp/Src/bin" "C:/Work/Web/Src/bin"
symbolic link created for "F:/RamdiskTemp/Src/bin" <<===>> "C:/Work/Web/Src/bin"

b. Use the same mklink tool, create symbolic link for your ASP.NET temp folder, point tothe newly created Ramdisk.

The ASP.NET temp folder (for .NET 4.0) is at :

C:\windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Temporary ASP.NET Files (64bit)

C:\windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\Temporary ASP.NET Files(32bit)

c. Use eBoostr to implement cache at OS-level for your VS. I used 512MB of memory to cache.

Detail of how to use eBoostr, please refer to their website.

<<to be continue>>

How to detect what JavaScript function is hooked up to an element

 

Recently I worked a lot with front-end development, and most of the time I want to know what JavaScript function is fired when I clicked on some buttons or images.

Luckily with Chrome, it is so easy.

How?

In Chrome, press F12 – it will open developer tool. Now right click on the element and select Inspect element. In the developer tool, look for the right hand side and expand Event Listeners. Tada, there you go – all the events that hook up to that element are shown. See the image below: