As I mentioned in the previous post, I recently wiped out everything and installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 on my personal laptop. After that, as any self-respecting ColdFusion professional would (kidding...sort of), I installed the Developer's edition of ColdFusion 9 application server and ColdFusion Builder. Also installed the MySQL database server, but that is sort of besides the point for the purposes of this post.

Anyway I was starting to feel pretty happy about my newly setup development environment when I noticed the memory usage slowly starting to go up. That reminded me that running an application server continuously in the background on a personal laptop is probably not a good idea. So initially I created a shortcut to Windows "Component Services" on my desktop and figured I would just start and stop the ColdFusion services as needed. But that was taking about 4 clicks and 80 seconds (yes, I counted) to start/stop all those services. Certainly did not seem to be the most efficient solution.

After some research I found that I could possibly write a batch file to accomplish this and that should speed things up. So that's what I ended up doing and it really does work delightfully well! I'm sure other people have done the same thing in the past but since I just discovered the wonders of batch files, I figured I'd post what I came up with (feel free to use this code if you want to):

Batch file to start ColdFusion:

Batch file to stop ColdFusion:

Note: You will have to right-click and "Run as administrator" on Windows Vista or Windows 7 for this to work.

Funny story - I wrote this batch file, ran it, something flashed on the screen and went away and I had no idea what it did. It was actually pretty annoying at the time. So I started looking around to find out how to keep the output on the screen. In case you haven't figured it out yet, the "pause" command at the end does that. Took me more time to find that command than it took me to do everything else previously described combined. Hopefully this will save someone else some time :)

That's it for now folks!

Peace out.

Aloha fellow humans (and bots)!

Recently, as in this past Sunday, I updated my laptop which is a HP dv4t from Windows Vista to Windows 7 and boy am I glad or what! I wiped the machine clean and did a fresh install. After restoring all my data and reinstalling majority of the programs I use, I found that this whole exercise had freed up almost 30 GB of space on my machine, which I think is pretty ridiculous. Either I had way more bloatware on this machine earlier than I realized or Vista hogs up hard disk space much like it hogs memory.

Now I say Vista is a memory hog because that is exactly what it used to do, at least on my machine. This laptop has 3 GB of memory and the memory usage used to be around 50-55% when Vista would start up. On the other hand, I'm noticing that the memory usage is only 25-28% when Windows 7 starts up. Again all that factory installed HP bloatware was probably causing higher memory usage but still it seems like Microsoft has done a much better job with optimizing resource usage in Windows 7. Oh, also the boot up period itself for Windows 7 is much shorter than Vista (woohoo!!).

Another thing I'd noticed was that this laptop used to get very hot with continuous usage when I was running Vista which would cause the fan to run all the time. The sound of that fan running continuously annoyed me (a LOT) and I was almost at the verge of buying a new laptop last week. Installing Windows 7 seems to have totally fixed that problem! The laptop has not been getting that hot since Win 7 was installed and I've hardly heard the fan running at all. So apparently Vista is a processor hog as well! Microsoft, I'd be mad at you but at least it looks like you are possibly starting to learn from your mistakes. Anyway it looks like Windows 7 has saved me a decent chunk of cash, for now :)

Feel free to chime in about your Windows 7/Vista experiences folks.

Stay warm!

Anant

Disclaimer: Windows 7 marketing team did not pay me to write this blog post, although I wish they did!