liggyman's blog

If you do incremental or diff based backups, or if you compress your Windows Virtual Machine you will find that this tip will save you plenty of time, bandwidth, and disk space.

The Windows page file changes constantly and is large. It’s up to 4GB on some of my Virtualized workstations. It also doesn’t compress well and is really not needed in your backups.

By filling the pagefile with zeros when shutting the VM down to do a backup, that part of the image will be unchanged between increments/diffs. It will also compress down to almost nothing.

To achieve this we need to set one registry key to do this you can import the following from a .reg file or make the appropriate changes manually.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]
“ClearPageFileAtShutdown”=dword:00000001

I converted my main workstation at home to a virtual machine, and started connecting to it via RDP from a thin client machine. I found that images didn’t look quite right, and had banding instead of proper gradients. The color depth was set to 16-bit and couldn’t be raised, even when setting the depth higher using the RDP client.

Remote Desktop server on Windows XP, by default runs at a maximum 16-bit color depth. However up to 24-bit color is supported. Read the rest of this entry »

The other day, by chance, I came across the built in status bar quota usage display.  I had accidentally set the storage limit on one of my mailboxes to ‘null’.  In turn Thunderbird presented me with a red bar warning me that I was way over my quota.

Today, I decided I wanted the usage to display on my IMAP accounts at all times.  This is what needs to be done:

1. In Thunderbird go to Tools -> Options…
2. Select the ‘Advanced‘ panel, under the ‘General‘ tab, click the ‘Config Editor…‘ button.
3. Find the following setting:  ’mail.quota.mainwindow_threshold.show‘ and set it’s value to ‘0‘

Thunderbird needs to restart for this setting to take effect.

Additionally, there are options for setting the Warning and Critical thresholds.  These cause the precentage bar to change to yellow and red.

mail.quota.mainwindow_threshold.warning
mail.quota.mainwindow_threshold.critical