Wednesday, April 19, 2006

:Good Bye Windows 98, ME

In what is bound to go down with some screaming and yellling, Microsoft has announced that it will stop support of Windows 98 and Windows ME in July of this year. Support documents will still be available online though. Microsoft is planning a 2007 release of their latest Windows desktop software called Microsoft Vista.

Friday, April 07, 2006

:Windows XP Paging file missing

Virtual October is on the case of the "Missing Windows XP Paging File". The paging file is a swap file, or virtual memory file that Windows uses in addition to your RAM installed in your computer. Without a page file, Windows is sluggish and slow.

Even after I reset the Virtual Memory in Control Panel, System, Advanced Tab, Performance, Settings and rebooted there is still no pagefile.sys. I did this multiple times so I was sure I wasn't losing my touch.

Norton Antivirus was installed, that could be it. I was upgrading to Trend Micro Client Security anyway. So I removed Symantec Norton AV, installed the Trend Micro CS client and rebooted. No change.

Then I found a Microsoft article about the issue. Which directed me to a site about Intel's Application Accelorator. I downloaded and prepared myself to be let down again, but after the reboot, it worked. Pagefile.sys intact and working. Performance is much better now.

:DELL laptop fuzzy display fix

For some reason Dell is shipping their laptops with a "low resolution" setting in Internet Explorer (IE). When you browse the Internet, all the pictures are blurry, fuzzy and really quite nasty looking. After ton's of research, I finally found the fix and ran it on quite a few laptops already. It does work, but you need to edit the registry. I strongly suggest making a backup of the registry first and then making the change, just in case.

You just need to change one registry setting located at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main

Change "UseHR" to dword:00000000. It is probobly set to 1 right now.

Reboot and everything is clear!