Faster Vista Booting

Press the start button and in the "Start Search" box type: msconfig

The "System Configuration" utility will run.

Choose the "Boot" tab.
Check "No GUI Boot". This will disable the splash screen during startup.

Click the "Advanced options..." button.
Check "Number of processors", and choose the highest number. This will allow multi-core (multi-CPU) processing during startup.

XP Memory Usage

While refreshing a Windows XP desktop, I noticed what would now be considered low memory usage. Compared to Vista desktops easily surpassing 1GB of memory usage, XP was using 81M while running IE. After patching, the XP memory usage increased to 107M.

USMint.gov Passwords

The US Mint website inexplicably disallows passwords that end with a number.