Global Toad News

Apparently Microsoft is getting tougher (with it’s legitimate customers). At Zdnet there is this article which has an interesting statement:

“WGA might be on the verge of getting even messier. In fact, one report claims WGA is about to become a Windows “kill switch” – and when I asked Microsoft for an on-the-record response, they refused to deny it.”

I think that WGA (and WPA) is already breaking machines, but apparently the broken machines, destroyed work and lost productivity that I have already seen is going to pale with the new onslaught “features” from Microsoft.
So go buy a Mac, or at least run Linux as a host operating system (and use VMWare to run Windows for the little that it is needed), but you might want to follow Bill Gates’ example and leave Microsoft behind.

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(NOTE:This pertains to Windows XP )

In any case, my 1 gig ram drive wasn’t large enought to store all the temp file for the latest Microsoft install that I did, so I had to reconfigure the system though apparently windows had problems when I changed the temp files back to their “normal” settings.

So I enabled the page file.

Now I was able to devote more space to the temporary files to install this one program from Microsoft, then I reset my ram drive back down to a normal size.

Then I resized the ram drive down to 128 megs (much more normal size).

However explorer (the task bar in windows, desktop icons, start button) would take an INCREDIBLY long time to load (I could load other program from the task manager, but explorer was very slow). This is with a set page file size that was defraged offline so that shouldn’t have been an issue.

But the page file turned out to be THE problem, when I disabled the page file (my computer right click, properties, advanced, then set the page file to none) the computer was much, much more responsive.

Unfortunately Microsoft is going to load so much “user experience enhancement” stuff under Vista, that I don’t think that you will be able to disable the page file for a while under Vista, so we all can just hope that Microsoft misses shipping Vista for another year or so.

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With today’s laptops, sometimes they run slower than you want, and for some reason, it’s not always as easy as you might like to force the speed to be faster. A useful program to manage this issue is CPU Rightmark, which supports a wide range of CPU’s and such (under Linux I use a plugin for KDE that works well for me that came with the Novel SuSE 10 desktop edition).

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Many people wonder about their IP address, there are actually several layers of IP addressing that are used there is the local ip address (what you see on a intranet, or behind a router) to find that under linux you can use ifconfig, to be different Microsoft uses ipconfig (I go to start->run and type cmd{command under Windows 98}, press enter then type ipconfig into the console window to get the results), to find out what your outside ip address is you can use nwtools.com.

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