Windows tag

Hibernation is my favourite power saving method – I press my power button and my computer powers down. I press it again and it starts up again, but with everything exactly the way I left it. Sleep never gave me the same satisfaction of reducing my power usage. But Windows XP gave me troubles with this upgraded machine of mine. I’d press the power button, Windows will proclaim it’s about to hibernate, but everything goes horribly wrong, the screen cuts out, comes back in, with a nice little balloon telling me

Windows - System Error: Insufficient system resources exist to complete the API.

How can their be insufficient resources? I have 220GB+ free on my hard drive! The system logs tell me nothing either.

Well, it appears that Windows does have troubles from time-to-time when your RAM exceeds 1GB. Go to the Knowledge Base article 909095 and download the hot fix patch there (you won’t find it in Windows Update). The problem should now be fixed.

Excellent.

[Tip: Tales from the Crypto]

The more information in the KB article says:

To prepare the computer to hibernate, the Windows kernel power manager requires a block of contiguous memory. The size of this contiguous memory is proportional to the number of physical memory regions that the computer is using. A computer that uses lots of RAM is likely to use more physical memory regions when the computer prepares to hibernate. Therefore, a larger amount of contiguous memory is required to prepare the computer to hibernate.

Additionally, the number of physical memory regions varies according to the programs, services, and device drivers that the computer uses. Therefore, the hibernate feature occasionally fails.

That still doesn’t explain why it failed on my machine… oh well.

Quick one today, procrastination isn’t good when you have an exam in 3 hours.

Now, people without a Mac can test their websites with Safari, as Apple announced Safari for Windows, along with some announcements about Leopard. This brings more choice to the browser market.

I’m kind of dubious about the following claim,

Safari has always been the fastest browser on the Mac and now it’s the fastest browser on Windows, loading and drawing web pages up to twice as fast as Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Mozilla Firefox 2.

They even claim that Opera is much slower to render pages, which I’ve found to be false in my experience.

Steve Jobs quote that I’m also concerned about,

“We think Windows users are going to be really impressed when they see how fast and intuitive web browsing can be with Safari,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Hundreds of millions of Windows users already use iTunes, and we look forward to turning them on to Safari’s superior browsing experience too.”

“Hundreds of millions of Windows users already use iTunes,” because they think it is the only thing they can use with their iPod. iTunes is a horrible and slow application. I can’t use the cover view as it is a pain to browse through and having the covers down the side (a view similar to that from Windows Media Player 11) makes scaling your library a pain as well. If Safari really is faster, which I’ll try after my exam, then I’ll update this here. But for now I see through Steve’s “reality distortion field.”

• Download Safari for Windows (beta)

One of the recent things I’ve been doing in Vista is playing around with stacks. A new view in Windows Explorer in Vista is to stack your files into groups by attribute. In reality, it is a bunch of searches for specific files with pretty icons. To stack folders, you can click on the arrow next to the heading you want to stack (say, Name) and selecting “Stack by Name”. You’ll then get lots of icons with files holding a certain name.

This can be helpful in certain situations. One of the things I like to keep organised is my music. In XP, I would’ve had to create a folder to each artist, then another for each album. In Vista, I can do half that work automatically.

I just type “kind:music” in the search box, then go Artist → Stack by Artist, and all my music is magically put into virtual folders. (We first type kind:music because of the folder images that can add unnecessary cruft).

Now I can double-click on an artist and get all the music by that artist.

But, what if I want to get a certain album? Well, this is why I said “half that work automatically.” It cannot remember stacks within stacks, but you can still do so. Just go Album → Stack by Album. The music is then stacked by album.

You can navigate the stacks just like any folder from the folder tree as well.

Now you may think this all useless because you can’t access this in Open dialogs. You are mistaken. Click on the Save Search button in Explorer to save it to your Saved Searches folder (or anywhere else for that matter). Then, open up an Open dialog box somewhere, goto Saved Searches and double-click your new search. Tah-da!

I finish off this post with a tip that not even US PC World knew. If you are finding the icons too large or too small, you can quickly resize them by holding down Ctrl and rolling the mouse wheel - roll up to make them bigger, roll down to make them smaller. The thing PC World didn’t mention in the article above was that this applies to the desktop as well. Just go to your desktop then Ctrl+Mouse Wheel. And yes, if you make the icons 32×32 (the old size), the shortcut icon will overlap a quarter of the icon. Just scroll down one more and it won’t.

I recently installed Windows Vista (build 5536). It’s nice, but I’m still not going to use it full-time just yet. But I wanted a way to share my profile for Firefox in Windows XP and in Windows Vista. So I installed Firefox and started doing a bit of research, and it is quite easy.

First, backup your profile. It will be in C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles.

In Windows Vista, either go to Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Run, Start > Run if you have it showing, or WindowsKey + R to show the Run dialog. Next, type:
X:\path to firefox\firefox.exe -p
This will load the profile manager, delete the Default profile.

Load the Run dialog again, type:
X:\path to firefox\firefox.exe -CreateProfile "default c:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxx.default"
That xxxxxx you’ll have to find out by going to that folder. When you hit enter, you are done and should load up Firefox with that profile.

(If you are trying to find Application Data in Vista, it is X:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming)

I’ve been hearing recently talk of a possible virus outbreak that is due to a recently found flaw in Windows 2000 and up (including XP SP2). Microsoft has issued a Security Advisory warning of Win32/Graweg which exploits code in Augusts set of patches.

The Microsoft Security Response Alliance partners as well as our own internal teams have determined that there is not widespread customer impact and have rated Win32/Graweb as a Low threat. At this time it does not appear to be a self-replicating internet-wide worm.

Microsoft continues to recommend that customers apply the August updates as soon as possible with additional urgency and consideration given to the update detailed in MS06-040.

While we can only watch and wait to see if anything would come of it, it is still a good idea to update. You should be doing it anyway.

It has recently been announced that IE7 will be a high priority update when it is released. There are some good points and some bad points I’d like to raise.

The good point is everyone will automatically be getting the latest version of the browser, it is pretty slick (yes, you heard me) and has lots of feature enhancements. It can make my job of modifying this site easier as a lot of people will get the latest version right off the bat.

The bad point though is that I cannot test my web browser in both versions at the same time. This is a terrible thing. When I made the Gallery posts (the ones where there are lots of images and you can click on them to view images and videos) I tested it in Firefox and Internet Explorer 7. I assumed IE6 would be alright. Shortly, I uninstalled IE7 for various reasons that I can’t remember. Checked out the website and it was broken in IE6. Now, I’m not going to be one that’ll install and uninstall IE7 just to test my websites.

A lot of other web developers are having the same gripes. IE7 does have a lot of changes, they have fixed a lot of stuff meaning that hacks are no longer necessary (IE6 has lots of hacks to get it working correctly). How are we supposed to test on both IE6 and IE7 without having Windows installed twice? Terrible!