Recently I sat in a room trying to write something on a Sony Vaio PC laptop which seemed to be running a special slow-motion edition of Windows Vista specifically designed to infuriate human beings as much as possible.
LOL
I don't like Apple products. And the better-designed and more ubiquitous they become, the more I dislike them. I blame the customers.
Posted by
pchelptech
at
10:21 a.m. |
Saturday, September 26, 2009
If like me, you are still using Windows on your primary PC or Notebook, and - heaven forbid - are still using XP, and you're not a fan of re-formatting and reloading the OS every time things get bit infected, or slow and heavy... Pause for breath... You're probably either just not interested, or , quite the opposite, you're fond of poking around the registry, tweaking and optimizing.
When I get a virus, trojan or other nasty, I like to remove it, clean up all traces of it, and kill off the previous System Restore point(s). I have Nod32, Xoftspy, Malwarebytes, Spybot S&D, Spysweeper and other tools to help me out in this regard. I don't do "re-format and rebuild" - not ever. You learn nothing, and you lose too much. It takes time to lovingly customise your user experience. Reloading XP might be quick, but all the little flourishes you add over months, even years, is definitely not.
The downside of all this, is that eventually, things start to slow down over time. It gets tougher and tougher to clean up the remnants of this and that. One by one, the applications, files, pictures, movies and mp3s accumulate until you're short of resources; CPU, memory and disk space.
So, you do your best spring clean and you look at what you can optimise.
This is a minefield... Many so called optimisations can do more harm than good, so it's best to stick to the few that are known to work well. Keep it safe, at least at the start.
Boot up - we all want that to be quick.
System readiness from logon - that's really important.
Application loading times - Firefox, anyone?
I'm not going to go through all the things you can do to improve performance, because this article makes a pretty good fist of that, but the most important thing to me to start with is boot time.
If you don't feel like using a tool like BootVis, you can always turn on boot logging and read through the boot traces. You'll be digging around for ages, but you'll learn a lot this way (I picked up a thing or two, anyway). You can really see where the bottlenecks are occurring, and can address them one by one. You can read all about this painstaking approach and try it out if you want. Another alternative is tracelog.exe, part of the Win XP SP2 Toolkit, which is described in detail in an article on citrix.com.
Posted by
pchelptech
at
11:35 p.m. |
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
It's called Courier and it's beautiful
Some people are complaining because it's hinged. So it has a hinge? So what!?
Journals, diaries and binders have "hinges" - nobody moans about that.
Seriously - if Microsuck can deliver on this, I might just stop calling them Microsuck. This could single-handedly make up for Win ME, Vista and even Visio.
Posted by
pchelptech
at
10:18 a.m. |
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Most of the time I don't face issues with dropped connections, but recently I found myself in a situation where the signal was not so strong (no repeaters were located any where near me, and the access point didn't have a 5dB+ aerial). As a result, connections were dropping so often, that I was nearly driven mad.
Every other wireless device was fine, dropping either occasionally, or not at all, but my Lenovo Thinkpad T61 was, or rather the drivers for the Intel WifiLink 4965AG card were, quite frankly, performing pretty poorly.
In deperation, I visited the Lenovo site to see if there was any upgrade available. There was:
However, I realised from reading that page, that it wasn't going to be all that simple. The webpage lists a daunting number of prerequisites and caveats relating to model number, card version, current installed program versions and so on. So many, in fact, that I was beginning to get turned off.
Eventually, for me at least, it boiled down to this:
Note: The part numbers are listed so that you can find each component driver easily.
From the readme notes for Intel Wireless LAN (11abgn, abg, bg) - 6hwc05ww.exe:
Make sure that the following driver prerequisite were installed on your system before installing this driver: - MSXML6.0 Parser or higher - Windows Installer 3.14 or higher (Download installer from http://www.microsoft.com)
- If you use ThinkVantage Access Connections, the following software must be installed. - ThinkVantage Access Connections for Windows XP/2000 version 5.1 or higher - ThinkPad Power Management Driver for Windows 98 SE/Me/2000/XP/Vista version 1.51 or higher or ThinkPad Power Management Driver for SL Series version 1.44 or higher - ThinkPad Hotkey Features for Windows 98/98 SE/Me/NT 4.0/2000/XP version 1.24.0603 or higher or Hotkey Features for Windows Vista/XP/2000 version 2.09.0002 or higher (Note: Refer to each Hotkey package for which version to use.)
- If you currently use IEEE 802.1x authentication on Windows XP Service Pack 1 and do not use WPA encryption, Lenovo recommends you to uninstall Q826942 (WPA Supplicant update rollup package in Windows XP) and Q815485 (WPA Wireless Security Update in Windows XP). This does not apply if you are running Windows XP Service Pack 2.
To check if Q826942 or Q815485 is installed and to uninstall it: 1. Start Windows XP and logon with administrative privileges. 2. Click Start and then click Control Panel. 3. Click Add or Remove Programs. 4. Click Windows XP Hotfix (SP2) Q826942 or Windows XP Hotfix (SP2) Q815485 if it is listed under Currently installed programs. 5. Click Remove and follow the instructions on the screen.
Note: The above action will remove all the fixes within the update rollup package, Q826942. You may need to re-install the other specific hotfixes you expect for this rollup package.
- You may need to re-enter security information after updating the Wireless LAN driver.
- If you use Single Sign-On with the following authentications, ThinkVantage Access Connections version 4.22 or higher is needed. - LEAP on Windows XP
- [Specification changes] 2200BG/2915ABG Network Connection will report lower signal strength than with previous driver versions. Because the 2200BG/2915ABG methodology was changed to be more accurate and responsive, similar to the 3945BG/3945ABG. However, wireless network performance and functions are not affected at all by this change.
I don't know about you, but I find even the readme a little bit discouraging.
So from the notes, check you have the right MSXML parser 6.0 +, and the latest Windows Installer, and from there:
Switch off wireless radio (use the hard switch to be sure it's not going to come back on)
For the T61 with the 4965AG WiFi card:
Install the following parts in this order:
You will have to restart after each install. Make sure you do this. Messing this up is not an option!!!
Note: you may find that you are already at some of the minimum driver / program levels, but still look for the latest for your platform. For the Vista versions of the drivers above (points 3. and 4.) visit those pages and you'll find the link to the page for the Vista drivers / programs.
So, after doing all this, how was the performance of the new wireless adapter driver?
In short, pretty much perfect. Not one droped connection, and even a 40% signal could be used to get acceptable transfer speeds (18-24Mbps out of a possible 54).
What was an added bonus wass that the new Access Connections program is pretty cool and flashy. It's still the same underneath, but there are some extra features. I won't spoil the surprise for you in this post. Maybe later.
If you are suffering at work or at home from all-to-often dropped connections (and I know many of you are), you could do a lot worse than upgrade. Your sanity will thank you for it.
Posted by
pchelptech
at
9:52 a.m. |
Saturday, September 05, 2009
Well, no need to guess. ManicTime is a handy little freeware utility that allows you to track your time spent on your computer, by program, and your idle time too.
All this information is stored in a local database, isn't transmitted anywhere (for those with security concerns, rest assured), and can be displayed in all manner of views, graphs and charts. It's not a mindreader, so you might have to tag your time, but that's pretty easy.
It might not be something you'll use often, but it's interesting to give it a try at work, you might be surprised just how much you spend time switching applications when you see the results, not to mention the surprising amount of downtime. An eight to ten hour day doesn't amount to as much real work as you might think, especially when you take away the time lost to meetings, lunch, coffee breaks and other meanderings.
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Well, no need to guess. ManicTime is a handy little freeware utility that allows you to track your time spent on your computer, by program, and your idle time too.
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