jonypawks

I've noticed that letting Windows manage your pagefile can slow things down because it's always trying to figure out how big the pagefile should be. I think the recommended size is around 1.5x the amount of RAM you have. So if you have 512MB of RAM you'd use 768MB pagefile but that could be wrong. Whatever windows sets it at should work fine too, just set it yourself to a constant rate so that Windows doesn't waste time figuring out what the size of the pagefile should be.

The Microsoft spyware removal tool was actually released recently. I work for the oncampus networking at my university and we deal with spyware problems on machines all the time. The Microsoft spyware removal tool's first release actually detected internet explorer as malicious software and would try to remove it. But they fixed that supposedly, just thought it was funny. There's a whole bunch of tools we use to get rid of spyware on the machines where I work, I'll list them all off for you guys. We can almost always remove anything using either these programs or just knowing good ways to do it manually (regedit). Here's the list:AdawareSpybot (we only use this cause our university bought a license from them, we actually recommend adaware over spybot)Hijackthis! (have to know what you're doing)CWshredderXcleanerKazaaBeGoneBlubsterRemovalToolAnd we always install firefox and set it to be their default browser because it is superior to internet explorer.

Well I really like linux and opensource software. But I don't really like KDE or GNOME. Both are too bulky for me. I enjoy a very minimalistic interface. I use openbox with no taskbar and instead i use xfce4-iconbox which only shows minimized applications. In case anyone's interested here's a link to a screenshot of my desktop. http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

Actually WindowBlinds has improved quite a bit. It used to use API calls to override the window decorations but now that WinXP has it's own theming engine I think it uses it instead. Much faster. I don't notice any performance change when using WindowBlinds on my machine. The only thing it adds is whatever Microsoft's theming engine uses and the little amount it takes to put the icon in the system tray, and I believe you can disable that although I'm not sure (in linux now ). I remember back in the day WindowBlinds sucked away alot of resources, but they've improved a lot recently. On most modern machines there is very little to no performance decrease from using WindowBlinds. If you really wanted a customizable interface you'd use linux anyways.

If the "rumor" you mentioned is true cryptonx then I would say Microsoft is making a huge mistake. Businesses are very concerned with security, something that Microsoft has never been very good about dealing with. In my opinion linux can provide a more productive environment that windows can. There's a whole lot less fluff and you can just get to work and get stuff done. But that's just my opinion.

I'm at work right now and we're still using Firefox 1.0 Preview Release on this Slackware box. It fails on both with and without SSL, so there's a good motivation to upgrade firefox to the latest version.[edit]Correction: Tried it on a gentoo box at work that was using Firefox 1.0. It failed both tests, maybe you've just got a special box there?[/edit]

That's pretty nice, yet another way to make windows a more bearable operating system.

I've looked for this before, there are some programs that will do it for you, but I'm pretty sure they're just disabling something in the registry or something that could be done without a program running. I just opened up my keyboard and took them out and covered the holes with electrical tape since my keyboard's black.

Forgetting that your howto posts need to be accepted, i accidentally made a double post there. I apologize for the mistake and would appreciate if you could just ignore or delete the second post. Sorry for the inconvenience. Oh, you can also take 5 points off of my credits since it gave me double credits. Thank you.

Man, and just when I thought that they were doing better with their Royale aka "energy blue" theme for Windows XP. This looks horrible, in my opinion. That MSN bar is huge and very unnecessary. I'm probably biased though since I'm a linux user as well as a minimalist when it comes to my desktop.

I would recommend the Knoppix method. qt-parted will let you resize your ntfs partition. Partition Magic will work but myself and a couple of my colleagues have had issues with it. Once you get your partition resized you can make a new Linux partition and put your favorite distro on there. For a linux newbie I recommend Ubuntu, it's pretty new and it's based on Debian but it's dumbed down a bit. It's pretty good about being up to date. You could always try Gentoo but that may be a bit difficult for someone who's never used a *nix operating system before. Hope this helps, cheers.

http://www.geekswithblogs.net/jking/archiv1/04/14345.aspx There's a link on where to download the new theme and how to install it on a standard home/pro edition of windows (google is amazing). It usually requires media center or tablet edition but this guy figured it out. I hope this isn't breaking the rules of the forum since this is kind of a workaround but whatever. Today at work I saw the new theme on a new media center pc that came in, and I like it. Although I use linux primarily, when I'm windows I will probably be switching to the new 'energy blue' theme. I hope this is the same theme I saw today, I believe it is but I'm not 100% sure.

Blender is amazing, it's great and open source now. I remember when it was going open source and they needed donations. Some friends of mine and I were checking the site daily. Blender is extremely powerful for a free 3D modeler, and it doesn't have crippled or no rendering like gmax. The only difficult part about it is the interface, which once you get used to it, it seems a lot more efficient than some other programs. You just keep one hand on the keyboard and the other on the mouse. I also enjoy using POVRAY, since I'm a programmer it's kind of neat to write a script to make the scene.

I wasn't really sharing this to brag on firefox or anything but I see where you're coming from, it's hard to read anything on the internet now without being told to use firefox. I'm also have other reasons to use firefox. I work for the oncampus support for the internet at my school and the first thing I do on most computers I work on is put firefox on there, even if I'm removing it later. The machines I work on usually have ridiculous amounts of spyware and crazy plugins and searchbars for IE. It makes my job a lot easier if I just put on firefox. Firefox is more secure than IE, but if you don't do stupid things IE shouldn't be a problem. I myself use it because of the tabbed browsing, I hate it when I have like 7 tasks in my taskbar and a tabbed browser can help a lot. I used to use MyIE2 but when I heard about firefox, I tried it out and liked it a lot. Firefox is also open source and I'm a huge fan of open source projects. Sorry to rant about this, it's all personal preference in the end, so I hope your happy with whatever you're using and I apologize for ranting so long about firefox again.

I used to run my own webserver and I wrote my own blogging scripts. It was pretty barebones but it did what I needed. I just went and setup a modblog, it seems pretty neat. I like how you can customize it yourself with your own html. That's pretty handy. And they do have quite a few layouts already to use, if your lazy like I am right now. I'm sure I'll forget about this blog in a couple weeks and end up never posting to it ever again, but it's still fun to intend to keep friends and family up to date on my life.

Sorry intelboy, you're wrong about the warranties. Seagate has a 5-year warranty on their drives. They have great support, you can call them up and say "I have this drive and I ran out of cables." and they'll send you some brand spankin new cables for no charge. They'll also replace a drive if it craps out. I have a friend that bought a drive off of ebay and it was damaged when it got shipped and Seagate replaced it. Seagate makes good drives that are atleast in the running with WD and Maxtor, and I've never had a problem with one of their drives. If you can't decide I would choose Seagate because of their outstanding support.

You could always add a paypal donation button, just let them give you the money directly.

If you use Eclipse or Borland JBuilder they have gui designers you could use. I was required to use JBuilder for a class and hated it. It generates the most inefficient code I've ever seen sometimes. The designers for Eclipse are usually a little better, there's a bunch of them and they're plugins. I would just keep trying them until you find one you like. I've heard good things from friends about one that's called Jigloo, atleast I think that's what it's called. I don't remember anything about it, so I'm sorry I can't give you my opinion. Eclipse is also a really IDE if you didn't already use it, one of the better IDEs I've ever used.

Google Preview is a plugin for firefox that adds a screenshot of the search results next to the links on the google results pages. I think it's one of the better plugins for firefox. You can grab it here. Just thought I'd share this neat little addition that makes google that much better.

I love emerge, it's amazing. I use a cron to update certain packages for me at like 5 in the morning. Works great. The glsa-check is also an amazing tool. Updates all packages with known security problems, yet another brilliant idea.

If your running a 1.4ghz then you motherboard probably has support for EIDE drives, hell, when i had my celeron 433 it used EIDE. Just be sure not to buy a SATA drive since your mobo probably doesn't support that.

DarkBasic is good for learning basic game programming methods. But I don't think it's powerful enough. Eventually I think you'll have to learn C++ and OpenGL or DirectX or SDL. SDL would probably be the easiest to learn at first although there's less documentation for since it's newer.

Man, I guess I'm in the minority here but wasn't expecting it. I prefer Linux, it's so easy to develop for. Using GTK or QT seems so much more intuitive than Win32's API. Plus your source can be compiled under Mac OS X making it a little more portable. I haven't really developed anything under Mac so I can't say anything about that. I also really like how easy it can be in linux. I can write a perl script and throw it in my /usr/bin folder and I've got my new command. I like the non compile options it offers. Well I guess that's enough for my rant.

I've used firefox since 0.7 and have liked it a lot. I love this plugin called Adblock, it's amazing. You can block ads based on their URL, you can even block scripts and flash animations, it works great. It's painful to use a machine that doesn't have it now that I've gotten used to it.

I've been using ReGet, but I only use it when I get big files, so I can resume. I only really use it when I get live concerts from Live Music Archive.