Using
your PC??™s BIOS setup page (see Appendix A) or, optionally, a fan control
program like I8kfanGUI (free at http://www.diefer.de/i8kfan/), try increasing
the allowed temperature of your CPU by a degree or two, and see what happens.
With luck, your fan should come on less often and your battery
should last a little longer, all without (hopefully) frying your processor.
Manage IRQ Priority
Most components directly attached to your motherboard??”including PCI
slots, IDE controllers, serial ports, the keyboard port, and even your motherboard??™s
CMOS??”have individual IRQs assigned to them. An interrupt request
line, or IRQ, is a numbered hardware line over which a device can interrupt
the normal flow of data to the processor, allowing the device to function.
Vista lets you prioritize one or more IRQs (which translate to one or more
hardware devices), potentially improving the performance of those devices:
1. Start by opening the System Information utility (msinfo32.exe), and navigating
to System Summary\Hardware Resources\IRQs to view the IRQs in
use on your system, and the devices using them.
2. Next, open the Registry Editor (see Chapter 3), and navigate to HKEY_
LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\PriorityControl.
3. Create a new DWORD value in this key, and call it IRQ#Priority, where
# is the IRQ of the device you wish to prioritize (e.g., IRQ13Priority for
IRQ 13, which is your numeric processor).
4. Double-click the new value, and enter a number for its priority.
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