Feanor

I am reading some MS comments about coming Windows 8.
They are openly saying that the focus is on devices that people use for "reading and socializing" instead of "creating and writing", then the focus won't be on doing things but on "people". Now, this reflects another thing I have read "You can lounge on the couch enjoying a beautiful, fluid experience, doing the things you love to do on a tablet: playing games, socializing, browsing the web, reading, touching up photos, watching TV".

Conclusions:
1. traditional personal computers are at their end because they are (too) powerful tools invented to empower people to do basically everything they wanted, from writing a book or post-produce a movie to design a skyscraper or do astrophysics. Please pay attention on the "to do" part.
2. people are too stupid to use personal computers, basically they are teenagers with nothing in their mind other than message friends about rumors and parties, snap pictures of people with sticking out tongues and pay per view whatever entertainment while "lounging". Then smartphones and tablets.
3. Windows 8 aims to be the OS that runs on/across all the non-PC devices, having the "PC mode" only as "fallback mode" for the few asocial users who don't "lounge" with "a beautiful, fluid experience" and insist on doing meaningful things instead of focusing on "people".

All this was already obvious from other clues, for example the fact that Gnome 3 was designed to make it difficult to run multiple applications in the same time, centered on "activities" instead and sized for touch screen on small size displays. So this view of the future does not come from Microsoft, seems to be "common sense" among some groups.

I was using Avast 6 on some XP computers. It is a free antivirus "suite".
Suddenly on Saturday night the software notifies me that there is a pending program update and I accept it. The result is v.7 tries to install, almost makes it, then:
1. at every boot it asks me to complete the installation.
2. half of the features are disabled because some module failed loading.
3. it asks me to register but registration process fails
4. the updated GUI is so bloated that it barely fits on my uncle's 1024 display.
5. it refuses to unistall.
At that point I am already in "emergency mode" and I am not even thinking of testing email and other scanning components, to not mention the option of digging the support forum for working around issues.
Fortunately Avast provides a tool for forcing the uninstall from Windows in Safe Mode, which BTW is something mu uncle could never do.

Here is the first part of the comedy:
Apparently Avast v.7 was released without proper testing or maybe I should say it wasn't tested on Windows XP and Windows 2000 systems. Then those geniuses at Avast decided to push it as "auto-update" when the only (few) chances to make it work is to manually uninstall v.6 before and then to make a "clean install" of v.7. Basically the auto-update crippled all the WinXp and Win2K systems and forced users to do the same emergency uninstall as me.

Here is the second part of the comedy:
Avast has got a sort of "support forum". Of course the forum was flooded by issue reports and complaints. And here comes the funny part, you are told that if Avast 7 doesn't work is your fault as dumb user and anyway that is what every software does when it get updated. This sort of things really annoy me. What idiot "fanboy" blames the user for a defective software that asks for auto-update, fails to install, fails to uninstall, forces you to remove it in Safe Mode? When the only serious answer in a support forum should be "sorry but it seems v.7 is not working on Windows XP and 2K, you should not update and stay with v.6 until issues are addressed".

Here is the third part:
Avast v.7 is bloated.

Microsoft is giving away a free antivirus, Security Essentials. They don't have a "payed" version like Avast so they don't mind of adding bells and whistles to their software to lure the "american minded" people to think that "more/bigger is better". In fact Security Essentials is almost perfect from the usability point of view.


Avast instead is going the same downhill of any other "security suite". They keep adding "advanced", "smart", "cloud" and "social" features in a GUI with huge buttons and gigantic "toysh" images that "illustrate" the meaning of a feature. The only real function of an antivirus is to scan files and processes in the less intrusive way possible. But if you make a product that is silent and goes unnoticed, then the "american minded" customer would not buy it, because the competing product that looks "bigger" must also be better.



Yes, been there, done that.
At the end I come back home to old good Microsoft.

I got the computer from the store and they said the RAM was defective and they replaced it. I guess I will never know what they actually did. Anyway, I reinstalled Windows 7, plus drivers, plus updates, plus all software then I restored data saved on an external disk. Boooring.

Meanwhile I managed to get a cold so tonight I will get an aspirin and then I will go to bed early.
Anyway, happy new year everybody.

Everyone is different. I get VERY upset, so much I can't sleep, when one of the few things I own breaks and I cannot fix it. In this case it was my 8 months old desktop PC:

Friday night it started with a blue screen. Then another, then the whole desktop froze, it was almost impossible to use Windows.

So I tried all the recovering procedures I could think of, which resulted in more errors given.

At the end I decided to reinstall Windows from its original CD. It did not work, every time I tried the installation aborted with the 0x80070570 error. Now, looking on the Internet for a fix I am told it can be everything hardware related, the CD ROM, the RAM modules, the HD, the BIOS (BTW, updated), the CMOS, etc.

So after cursing for a couple of days I packed the PC and I am going to take it to the store to ask them to fix it. It should be guaranteed for 1 year. Unfortunately I am not much confident on their will to properly diagnose the problem and ability.

And, one thing I haven't considered before, since I don't have a car I depend on my brother to transport big things anywhere. So I have to ask him to come to my house and bring me and the broken PC to the store, then back again if/when it gets fixed. Lesson learned, when you don't have a car, you better use a laptop or have the store in the next corner. Pity computer shops have disappeared from here.

This post is about Windows XP which I am still using. There are good chances it applies on Vista and 7 but it is up to you to verify on MS knowledge base.

Windows XP uses a "page file" located on the hard disk to move some stuff out of RAM to a "virtual memory". This is of course more frequent when you have few RAM available. By default the page file is located on the same partition of the Operating System, usually labelled as C: "drive". This is not the optimal configuration for reading/writing operations. It is recommended to use a dedicated swap partition much like Linux. You could get rid of page file located in C: but since it is still needed for "dump" in case of system crash, the recommended settings are:
1. page file on C: of the suggested size (which is 1.5xRAM size).
2. page file as large as the whole partition on a dedicated swap partition (another "drive"). The minimal size is like the above 1.5xRAM size but you can make it bigger like 2xRAM size).
The dedicated partition for Windows page file MUST be on a different PHISICAL drive, not on a different partition of the same hard disk than the OS. So you need two hard disks for this kind of "optimization".

Windows automatically picks the page file located on the "less used/accessed" partition, so in our case it will use the page file in "swap partition".

I am not going to tell you how to set page file size and position in Windows XP because I have the system in italian and I am not sure of menus/options in other languages. Here is the Microsoft support page in english, on the right column you can find translations in other languages:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314482/en-us

There are free tools to resize and create partitions. A popular one is GParted, a Gnome/Linux tool that you can use it from a bootable CD ROM so you don't have to install anything. Since bad things can happen when you work on partitions on a "live" system, remember to SAVE everything you don't want to lose on another drive before proceeding.