Toluu

Windows Insight

A newsletter devoted to hints, tips, tricks, news and goodies for all flavors of Windows users by Serdar Yegulalp, former Senior Technology Editor of Winmag.com, with over twelve years of Windows experience under his belt.Check out our ongoing series, The XP User's Guide to Windows Vista!

Start Me Up ... Faster!October 17 2007

I recently noted that Vista has some interesting new behaviors regarding applications that are launched from the Startup folder.  By default, their I/O priorities are throttled back for a total of one minute from launch.  This is a good idea to keep lots of smaller or background-use applications from all starting up at once, but it doesn't seem to be such a good idea if you try to boot an application like Outlook, which is by nature I/O intensive, by putting it in the Startup folder.

To that end, I tried a few experiments.  I wrote a batch file to start up several major applications -- Outlook, Word, Windows Live Writer, AIM and at least one or two other things -- and put it into the Startup group.  Between each program launch, I instigated a forced seven-second delay by using the CHOICE command (a sneaky trick I picked up from somewhere).  I wanted to see if this would cause any difference in the amount of utilization or responsiveness.

When I used this to launch the programs in question, all of them were launched at the Very Low I/O priority -- and the end result was that they were all fairly difficult to work with during that low I/O period.

I then took the same batch file out of the Startup group and ran it from the desktop after a cold boot.  The programs in question all started up quite snappily and I could choose between any of them without difficulty -- and they were all running at Normal I/O priority, too.

So here's my tentative r

PowerMenuOctober 16 2007

I love all-in-one utilities that do a bunch of things in as little space as possible.  Aside from allSnap, I recently bumped into another tool that I use as a regular adjunct to my Vista installs: PowerMenu.

PowerMenu adds four things to every single control menu for a window: a priority control, a transparency control, an "Always On Top" function, and a "Minimize to Tray" tool.  That's three or four separate utilities packed into one, and even though PowerMenu was originally written back in 1998 (!), it still runs extremely well with Vista.  Obviously I'd like to see it brought up to date whenever possible, but it works well enough right now that I can recommend it with little hesitation.

I Prefer To Call It QUACKTimeOctober 10 2007

For the last month or so, I've been trying to track down a problem I've been having with Apple QuickTime on Vista, and I suspect the whole thing may simply be a fool's errand.

At first, I thought the problem was related to something I've seen reported in a number of circles: QuickTime has not played well on systems that use Intel SATA RAID controllers as the medium from which the content is played back.  Most of the symptoms revolve around playing back HD content: on my end, if I try to play back full 1080 HD content on my system, it drops frames and skips like crazy, and the CPU utilization tops out.  This, by the way, is on a dual-socket Opteron with 2GB of RAM and a 256MB AGP 8X video card.

On a whim, I browsed Apple's QuickTime support forum and encountered a couple of other people having the same issues.  Most of the folks polled were running NVIDIA graphics or disk controllers (my video's ATI), and the one generic suggestion was to switch QuickTime back into "safe mode" (i.e., no DirectX or Direct3D acceleration).  Not one of the changes to that setting made the slightest difference.  Another workaround was to copy the playback media to a non-SATA drive, but this isn't always a possible option.  If you play back QT content in the browser, for instance, it's copied to your local QT cache -- wh

Snap To ItSeptember 18 2007

Windows doesn't seem to have (at least not anymore) the native ability to allow windows to snap to the edges of the screen, or to snap-align windows to the edges of other windows.  I like having this feature; I'm a bit of a neatnik when it comes to window edges.  Windows used to have a function that enabled a snapping grid on the desktop, but it no longer does anything.  (It's possible to align desktop icons to that grid, but not window edges.)

Now, the solution: allSnap.  When run, it does exactly what I want: it snaps windows to the edges of other windows, to a predefined grid, and to the edges of the screen.  I love being able to grab a window and stick it somewhere off in a corner and not worry about accidentally having it hang partway out of sight.

The bad news is that allSnap doesn't seem to know how to hook into all applications.  For instance, if I move a Word 2007 window by grabbing and dragging it by the top edge, allSnap doesn't kick in -- in fact, when I use allSnap's handy debug window, it doesn't even have any messages in there, so I can only assume Word's hooking into a different window-management function call than the one allSnap is assaying.  But if I grab Word's window edges and drag them around to resize, it works fine.  Ditto for resizing a Firefox window instance from the grab bar at its bottom right corner, but if I just resize from the window edges it works correctly.

I'm currently ru

Why I Don't DIY (Anymore)August 20 2007

Ed Bott's post at ZDNet about the counterproductivity of whining about Vista (and its follow-up) got me thinking about something I've been asked about a number of times.  If I'm concerned with getting the best possible PC for my money, why don't I build one myself instead of relying on a manufacturer?

This whole topic got sparked off when I mentioned to a friend that I had bought an Alienware machine (which I have been very happy with overall) instead of going the white-box route.  Out came the justifications for going the DIY route: Oh, but you could save a lot of money; it's better if you build it yourself; you know exactly what you're getting that way; etc.

Well, I've gone the DIY route myself before, and it proved to be no better than going the pre-built route.  In fact, it was a good deal worse for a variety of reasons.

1. Warranties.  When I buy a computer, I'd like to have at least some guarantee that the machine I get will last me for the next few years.  If I buy a pre-build, I have some degree of assurance for that in the form of a warranty.  If I cobble my own machine together, it's that much harder to deal with things if any one piece fails, because then I'm at the mercy of many different hardware makers, not just one.
2. Integration.  It took four tries before I finally got memory that worked properly with my original DIY machin