A very important new feature in Microsoft Windows XP is the ability to do a boot defragment. This basically means that all boot files are placed next to each other on the disk drive to allow for faster booting. By default this option is enabled but some upgrade users have reported that it isn't on their setup. Start Regedit. Navigate to      HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOptimizeFunction Select Enable from the list on the right. Right on it and select Modify. Change the value to Y to enable and N to disable. Reboot your computer.

To disable unneeded start up services for a safer, faster XP, use the "Services" Admin Tool (Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Services). If you are a single user of a non-networked machine, you can disable the following items, with no ill effect.  Alerter  Clipbook  Computer Browser  Fast User Switching  Human Interface Access Devices  Indexing Service (Slows the hard drive down)  Messenger 

Right–click the executable or the program shortcut to the executable, and then click Properties. Select the Run this program in compatibility mode check box. From the list, select an operating system that the program runs in comfortably. If necessary, also change the display settings and/or resolution, or disable the Windows XP visual themes. Run the program again when you’re finished changing the settings. Adjust the compatibility settings again if the program is still not running smoothly: a program that’s unhappy on Windows 2000 may flourish on Windows 98.

Google just  announced  that its social search results will now include public Google Plus posts. Since the  expiration  of Google's realtime search agreement with  Twitter  last month, it hasn't been clear how Google will continue to integrate posts from social networks into search results. Now that Google's in-house social network will provide a stream of content, Google can try to build out its social search out from there. For users logged into their Google Accounts, searches will now display public Google Plus posts from people in their circles as search results, right alongside web pages. If it's a link, for example, that link will show up like any other Web result would, but the person who posted it will be displayed underneath it, along with the date of the post. Google launched social search  in 2009  as a way of adding personalization to search results. Facebook's  partnership  with Bing puts a big squeeze on G...

               Six weeks after launching, the demographic make-up of people who are visiting Google's new social network  Google Plus  is changing to become less focused on early adopters than it was at launch, says leading web traffic monitoring company Experian Hitwise, which posted the results of a 10 million person tracking study today.               It will be very interesting to see how the graph below looks some time after yesterday's launch of Games on Google Plus. The use of arbitrary terminology in the graph below is a little confusing, but the simple version is: Google Plus is now more popular among suburban parents and well-off empty nesters than it is among the College and Cafe crowd.            At launch Plus was disproportionately popular among people in its "Coll...

Waiting for a  Google Plus  invite? Google is rolling out the service in waves and you can expect it to become a ubiquitous social option in the coming months. We have been playing with the service since getting invites yesterday and there are a lot of things to like about Google's new social initiative. Unlike Google's last big invite-only rollout of a social initiative -  Google Wave  - users will not be confounded on just what the heck you are supposed to with the service when signing up for the first time. From Friendster, Friendfeed, MySpace and Facebook, users are familiar with how a social platform is theoretically supposed to look. At its core level, Plus is not that much different. Yet, there is so much more. How do you get started with Google Plus? Let's break down the nuts and bolts. A word from our sponsor: The  Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University  offers programs that combine the enduring skills and values of journalism with ...

Google finally announced Google+, its next effort in social. Basically, Google+ is an amalgamation of several services we already use. The idea, according to Google, is to do them better. We'll have a full review and impressions soon. In the meantime, check out our breakdown of what Google+ can do below.