Dell Fast Pics

PC users who run the Dell printer software, may encounter "Dell Fast Pics" popping up upon insertion of a USB stick or drive.  It monitors drives and prompts to transfer photos.  Dell's printer program monitoring drives for pictures is annoying.


Several Dell printer manuals describe the Fast Pics program.

Dell V515w Printer User's Guide by George Arellano

If you are not interested in using that program and you do not want it monitoring your drives, look for file dleamon.exe.  Either disable it from starting up or rename the file in the printer directory.
Those using Microsoft Windows 7 or earlier can look at the startup programs by running msconfig.exe
In Microsoft Windows 8 start the Task Manager and look in the Startup tab for "Printer Device Monitor" and ezprint.exe.
You may also look for file "[Windows drive]\Program Files\Dell Vnnn-Vnnn Series\dleamon.exe" and exprint.exe.

ReadyBoost Slows Down Microsoft Windows Vista

In an attempt to relieve pressure on  the hard drive of an older Microsoft Windows Vista laptop,  I formatted a one gigabyte SD card using FAT (exFAT is not available on Windows Vista).  I dropped the SD card into the slot, right-click in File Explorer and dedicated the SD card to ReadyBoost.  The laptop immediately began to feel sluggish and shutdown took many minutes whereas it had been quick.  The Windows Vista version was Home Premium.

Some exploration and looking at running processes led me to find that Windows was trying to be helpful and preparing to sync files from the laptop to the SD card.  This entailed periodically (seemingly every few minutes) starting mobsync and wmplayer.exe.  The SD card was entirely dedicated to ReadyBoost, so there was no possibility of syncing to the card.  I removed the SD card, mobsync and wmplayer stopped running, and the machine was again very responsive and shutdown was quick.

I recommend ReadyBoost when the primary drive is not speedy.  Flash memory on a SD card or USB stick, particularly when running through USB 3, will relieve pressure from the hard drive.  But be wary about doing this on machines with Windows Vista which may then start other processes and actually degrade performance.

Using alternative DNS for host name lookups

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a distributed hierarchical system to look up and translate a name such as "www.yahoo.com" to the IP address which is used to reach the yahoo server.

Most people use the DNS provided by their internet provider.  Some providers automatically intercept misspellings and send the user to their own search page.  A good alternative DNS provider is OpenDNS, which provides some malware filtering at the domain level.

You can change your computer settings in network properties to use OpenDNS.  If you have access to the router, change the router settings so all of your devices will use OpenDNS.

On a Cisco Valet M20 router, set the following static IP address for DNS.  The first two are for OpenDNS:
208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

The third is for Google DNS:
8.8.8.8