I’m rebuilding my new Sony Vaio Z with Windows XP, and as usual there are a load of tweaks I need to make to the OS before I feel “at home” again. Since the fingerprint reader software on the new build has an annoying habit of popping up info balloons on every boot - regardless of how often I click them - I felt the need to Disable Notification Area Balloon Tips in Windows XP.
Much better.
And sorry Vista, I tried, I really did. I liked how your hot-swap driver support meant I could switch between stamina and speed modes without a reboot, but I hated your poor network performance against my NAS (even with SP1). Maybe I’ll try again on the next new laptop. Oh, and Sony? Thank you for my XP downgrade CD and drivers. Lovely.
Another post from the “helping future Howard” category. I use Outlook 2007, which is great, but in order to be able to search your email with decent performance you must install Windows Desktop Search. Unfortunately when you do this it integrates with Explorer without asking permission to do so. This means that should you hit F3 to search inside an Explorer folder you’ll be presented with the monstrosity on the left; an entirely useless dialogue box unless you happen to be indexing the contents of your entire machine and network. I’m not: I only index my Outlook content.
So, to disable this you must open regedit and find:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Desktop Search\DS
and set the ShowStartSearchBand value to 0. That’ll give you back the default behaviour.
I find it quite irritating that the interface chooses to admonish me that I’m not indexing the content instead of just presenting me with the search functionality that is able to search the content for me.
As I mentioned previously, installing Leopard on my MacBook Pro gave me the opportunity to reinstall Windows XP and the new Boot Camp 2.0 drivers. This time (and again, for the benefit of my future self) I’ve compiled the list of what gets installed on a fresh machine: Continue reading ‘Reinstalling XP on the MacBook Pro’
I keep needing to do this - so once again to help my future self:
When you have a number of public IPs being translated through a router to an internal address space, a router’s dynamic translation can get full. I’ve got an 877W, and it seems that a combination of running BitTorrent and a CounterStrike: Source server can quickly cripple the router (even with a memory upgrade!). When it gets too full you end up getting timeouts on other connections, usually this is most obvious by my browser failing to return pages.
To clear the dynamic translation table before timeout occurs log in to the router via ssh (or telnet) and in enable mode, type:
clear ip nat translation *
That seems to do the trick on my network anyway.
Again, a techy post more for my future self’s benefit (so little space in my memory for anything useful, it being full of StarTrek trivia and the like). A trick to optimise a VHD (Microsoft’s Virtual Harddrive format - used in Virtual PC and Virtual Server). Turn of the system file checker. Not always advisable, but if you’ve created a machine where you think you don’t need it, try this.
To turn off SFC, open a command prompt and run
sfc /cachesize=0
sfc /purgecache
Then perform the standard compaction routine in Virtual PC/Virtual Server. For even more benefit, see also the Invirtus Optimizer which is outstanding, taking a 4.2GB VHD down to 1.4 by removing the cruft it didn’t need.
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