This morning, I got a call from a friend of mine who was having some terrible performance issues with her new Dell Latitude E6500 laptop running Windows 7 Professional. I had some extra time, so I offered to drop by and have a look.

I did the usual things like run msconfig.exe, and disabled as many startup programs and services as I could without interfering with anything. This may have helped some, but not much. The machine would boot up fine, but then hang out for a considerable amount of time after logging in but before it would be fully loaded.

I went into Norton Security Suite, and found that she had configured her machine to run backups to a non-existent USB drive. I disabled the backup feature of the software since she really didn’t understand how it could have been activated in the first place. I also went into the Task Scheduling and disabled all of the PC Tune-up settings. I rebooted, and this time the machine completed the startup process much faster. But I wasn’t finished just yet!

The last thing I wanted to do was to check to see if the Indexing Service and the Windows Search features were installed. Based upon my personal experience, I’ve solved a lot of performance issues just by turning these features off. I can’t remember the last time I actually searched my hard drive for a file, and should I ever need to in the future, I’ll suffer the slow search results quite happily if this makes my machine run faster the remainder of the time.

So I asked my friend how often she actually searched her hard drive for a file, and she really didn’t even know how to do that. I considered the operation to disable fast searching safe in this case. I Opened the Control Panel and clicked Programs and Features. I then selected Turn Windows features on or off. I then de-selected Indexing Service and Windows Search. Clicked Ok and waited for the operation to complete. I then restarted the machine to complete the operation and rebooted.

This made a huge difference in performance! My friend was totally amazed!

Later in the day, I decided to see if I could get my OfficeLive web site redirecting to my personal web server. Since Microsoft OfficeLive doesn’t allow for any kind of server-side technologies, it’s pretty hard to develop anything decent. So my idea is to use an iframe tag and have that point to my personal web server. I found a great article on using iframes in this manner on the shouldersofgiants web site. But another site stackoverflow iframe 100% height inside body with padding gave me the best solution for my needs right now. Here’s the code I developed. This is a copy of my default.aspx file: