April 1999
Tips and Traps
by Lowell Rapaport
Speed Up NT Menus
Hard to believe but the menus in Windows NT are actually slow by design! You can speed them up by editing the Registry. Remember to keep a backup just in case you damage the Registry.
Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Control Panel/Desktop. Double click MenuShowDelay and change the number from 400 (the default) to 100. Close RegEdit and restart. Menus should now respond faster.
If you administer your office server in addition to your everyday work, maintain two different accounts on your server. Use a network administrator account with privileged access for system administration tasks. Have a second user account for everyday computing.
Maintaining two log-on accounts improves security. While in user mode, an administrator canıt accidentally change system settings or generally infect a system file with a virus. A server can also be left unattended while in user mode, while it can't in administrator mode without compromising security.
Put a Priority on Server Task Management
In a real-world environment, document imaging/management servers can wear many hats. They're likely to run databases, storage management software, scanners, etc. You can control how much system resources are dedicated to each process in the task manager in Windows NT.
Open the task manager and click on the processes tab. From here you can change the priority for each process running. Important tasks, like serving documents to users, can be given high priority while less important tasks, like system backups, can be given a lower priority.
Icon Problems
Windows caches icons in a file called ShellIconCache. If the icons on your desktop seem to get lost or take a long time to redraw, you can delete this file and restart your machine to automatically rebuild the icon cache. ShellIconCache lives in the Windows folder. You can also locate it using the Find command.
Another Windows NT Registry hack can be used to protect the C drive from users who know just enough to make your life difficult.
Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer.
Right-click in the right pane and choose New, DWORD Value. Name the new key NoDrives and then press Enter twice (once to accept the name and once to open the Edit DWORD Value dialog box.) In the dialog box, select the radio button labeled Decimal. Now, enter 4 and click OK.
Close RegEdit and restart. The C drive should no longer appear in Explorer. The protection is not perfect. The C drive can still be accessed from a DOS prompt, but users donıt generally use the command line interface.
You can hide other drives as well. Here are the drive letters with their associated numbers.
Drive A: = 1, Drive B: = 2, Drive C: = 4, Drive D: = 8, Drive E: = 16
If you want to hide more than one drive, take the numbers following the drive letters you want to hide and add them up. To hide drives C:, D: and E:, add up 4+8+16 and set NoDrives to 28.
A persistent trend has been to make storage or scanning devices connect directly to the network. The computers used in network attached devices are classic thin servers. Occasionally theyıll use a complete OS like Linux or Windows NT. However, since the goal of most network attached devices is to have network plug and play, full operating systems are generally not used. Instead, they normally use a simplified OS, usually an embedded version of Unix.
Network attached devices have a number of advantages related to convenience and decentralization. Adding a network attached device is as easy as, and often easier than, adding a computer to the network. Network addresses can be assigned automatically or manually entered via a control panel. Once mounted to the network, most network attached devices are configured with a remote client or have their own HTML based interfaces that can be operated with a Web browser.
Network attached scanners distribute the job of scanning documents across an enterprise. They bring scanning closer to the users who will actually work with the scanned images.
Network attached RAIDs, tape libraries and CD jukeboxes are convenient ways of getting extra storage for a workgroup. Users can log on to a network attached storage device the same way they log on to a server, and networked attached storage devices are easy to share. However, network attached storage may not be suitable for applications like databases that need fast direct access to storage. These storage devices are best for low-transaction-rate archives.
