Latest Posts
I've moved
my blog to my own domain and onto a
WordPress engine, CS + SPAM was driving me nuts!
Catchup posts:
Oh yes, I've been in Japan for a couple of months,
first 2 weeks of photos are uploaded on Flickr, I still havent had a chance to upload the thousands after.
Whats more, I've actually written some information about me so you can finally find out my sad sad way of life. See
About Thushan Fernando.
A little tip for those running Windows Vista (and some on Windows XP) who experience a very slowed down system, and notice almost continual 100% use of the CPU...
Chances are you're running OneCare as your antivirus, right? I found this to be caused by
MsMpEng.exe which was clogging up a huge amount of resources.
This is an issue that Microsoft are aware of and have apparently "taken strides" to resolve. It's caused by OneCare's realtime virus scanning, and doesn't happen on all systems, only in certain cases. *Don't* just end the process, as this will put your system at risk. Likewise, don't turn OneCare off altogether, as this will have a similarly negative impact on your security.
This is what I did without compromising my system too much, and I got my CPU usage right down to minimal levels again and my system is now usable again.
Double click the (hopefully green!) "1" icon in the taskbar to open up OneCare. Click on the "Change Settings" link on the left hand navigation bar from the main window. Then click on the "Viruses and Spyware" tab. Simpy uncheck "Also look for virus-like behaviour." LEAVE VIRUS MONITORING ON!
I can't guarantee that this work-around will work for all systems, but it did the trick for me, and I still have adequate protection against viruses. The most effective protection is of course a brain, so still make sure you
don't click on "Pamela_Anderson_hot_and_nude.jpg.vbs" like a first-rate gooon ;)
So there you are, hopefully in future releases this problem will be even rarer or even non-existent in OneCare!
For those of us who still work with Windows XP every now and again, here is the link to download the SP3 standalone .exe from Microsoft...
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=5B33B5A8-5E76-401F-BE08-1E1555D4F3D4&displaylang=en
There's also this one which is for an ISO but to be honest I'm not yet sure what it's an ISO of! Am currently downloading and will know for sure once that's done!
http://download.microsoft.com/download/e/e/9/ee9d0116-c9fe-4fc2-b59c-406cbfb6d515/xpsp3_5512.080413-2113_usa_x86fre_spcd.iso
It's 544MB so presumably it's more than just a SP3 installer, but seems a bit small for a full install disc as my iso for xp pro is 628MB... and the "x86fre" implies it might be French... hmmm... the things you stumble across when Googling!
Wow its been almost 2 months since my last post. I've been so busy at work its not funny!
Today marks the date that MSFT release Service Pack 1 to the 15K or so of testers, so if you were among the crowd you'll find the RTM builds of Vista SP1 on your Connect download page.
and
Have a trip on down to
http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2008/02/04/announcing-the-rtm-of-windows-vista-sp1.aspx and you'll see that Microsoft have RTM'd SP1 for Vista....
I was running the RC for a while before Christmas, it seemed OK but I didn't bother reinstalling it after I had to do a clean install. I didn't have a chance to actually properly test it out (damn final year uni work...) but I didn't notice it being superbly amazing. Hopefully the RAM upgrade which is in the post will help in that department though ;-)
I'm missing my MSDN subscription which has now run out (thanks though James, that was great!) so I haven't been able to download SP1 yet as it doesn't seem to be on the 'public' bits of the MS site yet, and they have quite a slow rollout planned for a variety of probably quite sensible reasons.
Areas I hope are improved:
- Media Center faster to load and more reliable. It seems to break every few months and require a full reinstall of Vista. Not good.
- Better battery life when using it on my laptop (Dell Inspiron 6400). Apparently this is somewhere they've worked a lot on, so I look forward to properly seeing how it is in the RTM version. First thing I noticed when I switched to Vista back in December 2006 was the shorter battery life, and I was living in Marseille with my laptop as my only computer...
- TBH general performance has always been very good for me on both computers that I use Vista on - I know they've been working a lot on this for SP1 so I can only hope that SP1 will make it even better. Although doubling my RAM to 2GB is sure to help as well. As I write this 86% is used up with WLM,IE7,2 folders,Word,iTunes and Outlook open.
- Hibernate/sleep issues hopefully resolved, as they promise they are. Hibernate on my Desktop PC is a nightmare - *every* time (even with reinstalling) you resume, when you come to the logon screen the keyboard/mouse inputs are frozen so you have to reboot, losing your saved session, so I've not used hibernate. Also sometimes sleep and hibernate modes have been dodgy on my laptop, but reinstalling fix them. But we shouldn't have to reinstall Windows so much!!!
- Yeah, and although I know they haven't done this, once they've stopped faffing around making Windows more secure (which they do need to do, to be fair...) I'd like them to make an Operating system which breaks/gets clogged up less easily. I'm very careful with my system, what I install etc. etc. but still have to format every now and again to get the most out of my hardware.
That's about all I can think of off the top of my head that I'm hoping for from SP1. I did run the RC for a while and sent a few bits and bobs of my experiences to MS, so I feel I can say I did my bit to contribute :)
Coming soon to my blog: a full review of my shiny new Nokia N82... absolutely brilliant... er, phone....? computer...? PDA...? I'll decide what to call it ;)
Grab it while its hawt,
Windows Vista SP1-RC and
Office 2007 SP1. I think most people on Vista would be most pleased with SP1 as it smooths some of the roughness RTM brought with it.
Microsoft have published a list of changes that are in SP1 of Vista, quite detailed too. You can
Download a copy of the change log or see the summary on
Long Zheng's (hola!)
iStartedSomething Vista SP1 Change log post.
Oh dear, it's great when things work, but less great when they suddenly stop working.
I got hooked on
Fifa '08 this afternoon after eating my lunch, instead of working (*slaps hand*)... and whilst
Neighbours was on I happily played away on my Wii knowing that Media Center would be recording so I could watch it when I got bored of failing miserably to control the ball...
Except when I came upstairs, for some reason it had failed to record. And what's more, when I try to set it to record tonight's, I get this error:
APPLICATION FAILURE
A critical Windows Media Center process has failed. Please restart the computer and try again. If the problem persists, contact your hardware manufacturer for assistance.
I thought it might be to do with the
October 2007 Cumulative Update for Media Center for Windows Vista (KB941229) which I installed from Windows Update a few days ago back on 17th November (bit late for an Oct update...) so I uninstalled that & rebooted ... still get the error... reinstall update and reboot.... still get the error
Some Googling around suggested that maybe this file
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome\mediacenterdatastore.db might be corrupt so I renamed that (to cripple it but not irreversibly), rebooted and tried again to schedule a TV recording for a few hours' time....
... still I got the error.
The only thing I've installed recently was the new version of OneCare which I installed this morning... I doubt it would be that but I suppose it wouldn't hurt to try. Or I could just system restore to a few days back and see if that does the trick, without bodging up my OneCare subscriptions (I wouldn't be surprised if it then thought this PC is a differnet one to the first PC added to the subscription, etc. etc. etc.)
I'll keep the blog updated with any news so that other Googlers the world over can learn from my tribulations.... until then... :)
Update: system restore had no effect... will try updating hardware for pci tv card, although i'm doubtful that will make much difference...
Another Update: that made no difference, but a full format did the trick :)
Quick post before our Games Programming exam in a few hours,
Scott Guthrie's blog has just announced the launch of Visual Studio .NET 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5...
Yayyy! All the details are on his blog. Download away!
woah, not blogged on here for a while by the look of it! I'm currently ill and have taken day off work, so decided to tidy up my room and found a quote for a computer system I bought back in 2001...
| ATX Tower System Unit & PSU | 23.50 |
| System Board with Sound & Graphics | 82.25 |
| Pentium III 800 Mhz CPU | 135.07 |
| 20GB Hard Disk Drive | 64.57 |
| 128MB RAM | 20.00 |
| 32MB Video | 37.60 |
| Floppy Drive | 8.94 |
| 50X CD-ROM Drive | 24.62 |
| 15" Digital CRT Monitor | 99.00 |
| Keyboard | 9.70 |
| Mouse | 9.70 |
| Speaker Set | 10.23 |
| 56k Internal Modem | 20.63 |
| Total: | £545.81 |
OK so that's not the exact computer system that I went for in the end (for a start, as a pre-gcse schoolboy I economised by switching to Duron 800) but it's interesting to see what you got back in 2001... And that was considered a pretty decent system as well, just before XP was released. I remember 1GHz chips had only recently come out so 800MHz was pretty modern...!
Amazing to see how things change over the years, what little you got for so much money back then. Anyway, back to tidying the room.... :-)
Well what an exciting few weeks/month this has been. We've had:
Just when you thought things couldnt get better and
as predicted in an earlier post (well I cheated a bit!) now Microsoft will finally
RTM Visual Studio 2008 early next week. MSDN Subscribers can download it from the "
Top Subscriber Downloads" list according to the
MSDN Subscriptions Blog.
Thats right, it appears
S. Somasegar let werd out that Visual Studio 2008 (aka 'Orcas') will ship sometime this month. I cant wait to get my hands on the final, read more on
his blog entry.
While on the topic of
Movember, did you know:
- Depression affects 1 in 6 men...Most don't seek help. Untreated depression is a leading risk factor for suicide.
- Last year in Australia 18,700 men were diagnosed with prostate cancer and more than 2,900 died of prostate cancer - equivalent to the number of women who die from *** cancer annually.
- Men are far less healthy than women. The average life expectancy of males is 5 years less than females.
Please
get involved and contribute to fighting depression and prostate cancer. Find out more about
Movember.
After so long, Creative have updated their X-Fi drivers for Vista.
Changes
This download is a driver providing Microsoft® Windows Vista™ 64-bit and Windows Vista 32-bit support for Creative Sound Blaster® X-Fi™ series of audio devices. For more details, read the rest of this web release note.
This download supports the following audio devices only:
- Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic
- Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer
- Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum
- Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty®
- Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatal1ty Pro
- Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum Fatal1ty Champion Series
- Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Elite Pro
Current release features:
- X-Fi Crystalizer™
- X-Fi CMSS®-3D
- MIDI Playback
- EAX® Effects
- PCM stereo output through Optical Out
- Line-in connectivity
- SPDIF passthrough is supported on both Vista 32-bit and Vista 64-bit
- Recording capabilities
Fixes:
- Resolves an issue for Windows Vista 64-bit systems with 4 GB RAM
- Resolves loud speaker noise when restarting your computer
- Resolves an issue that causes OpenAL games not to respond
Known issues:
- Applications from the original Sound Blaster X-Fi CD (for Windows XP) will not work with this download.
- The following are not supported:
- Decoding of Dolby® Digital and DTS™ signals (Cyberlink® PowerDVD™ or InterVideo® WinDVD® is required)
- DVD-Audio (PowerDVD may support selected DVD-Audio content)
- EAX or DirectSound®3D (Download Creative ALchemy to restore this feature in Windows Vista)
- 6.1 speaker mode (not supported by Windows Vista)
Download page for x64 |
Download page for x86 |
Other OS's
I was planning to call it an early night tonight but alas the
Crysis demo was released moments ago. Weighing in at about 1.7Gb it comes with 1 single player level and the Sandbox2 editor. So I'm here sucking it down the pipes at ~1.2Mbs... the anticipation is killing me...
Download from the mirrors:
Dont forget to checkout the
Crysis System Requirements page. Something about Saturday (or friday) game releases, just like
UT3 was released a couple of weekends ago. I'd be up till about 9/10am playing (remember we have to turn our clocks forward one hour today!) and before you know it its already sunlight on a Sundy morning, time for church...
UPDATE
*WOW* What an insanely great visual feast! Awesome graphics, great gameplay and I hung onto that flare you pickup on the beach for a while (it never runs out!!!) you drop it when you get to the forest again and the cut-scene starts but go back and pick it up for the next stage when you cloak up... confuses the hell outta the two guards you come across.
If you notice that your explorer process (inside the VM) crashes when you map a shared folder in VMWare your not alone. Just goto Tools -> Folder Options -> and check 'Classic Folders' option (so use Classic folders instead).
Shouldnt crash anymore. Simple!
So I finally had some time to install Gutsy on the
Dell M1330, however I got stuck at 82% while it was "Scanning the mirror", it was stuck for atleast 40mins (went to get some dinner, came back and it hadnt moved!). This is because the official mirror's are getting a pounding right now, so here's a quick fix if your stuck in the same boat.
- Goto System -> Administration -> Software Sources
- Drop down the Download From combo box and select 'Other'
- Then click 'Select Best Server', this will go and try a list of official mirrors and pick the fastest, for me i'm using the Pacific mirror in Aus.
- Make sure you opt to reload the apt sources list.
- Give it a couple of minutes, the installer should use the new mirror and continue installing/configuring...
Easy as:-)
Came across a funky new way of throwing a bugcheck in Windows. You've seen/heard/experienced-more-than-you'd-like-to the pleasure/pain/excitement/horror of Windows throwing a
Blue Screen of Death, just the other day I came across a slightly cooler bugcheck system halt, colored green (with envy!) and a semi rendered progress bar added to the mix. This is purely for Windows, the
Xbox does have GSoD's.
This was with Windows Vista x64 (Service Pack 1 beta) loading after a few OC'ing sessions. So what causes a
PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA ? There is an *excellent* article about it on
OSR Online that will tell you.
Well after buying a copy of
PCMark Vantage I decided to get the two machines I mess with on a daily basis a slogging.
The first is the lightweight and quite cool
Dell XPS M1330 that was clean installed with Vista x64 soon after recieving it, the other my personal "daily machine" (or dev box) with QX6850/P5WDH & 4 GiG of Corsair 6400C4PRO.
See the
PCMark comparison page for more info/specs and a rundown of how each machine faired. Its important to note that I'm running Vista x64 SP1 Beta on both machines and they both where *not* clean installed before this test, just a clean reboot and disabling of anti-virus and some user mode apps that ran in the background.
For the impatient, the
Dell XPS M1330 scored a generous
2148, whilst Morpheus an awesome
5385. All stock, no overclocking or tweaking!
After uni finishes and I've actually got time to mess with things again I'll try and tweak
Morpheus and see how much better it can perform.
FutureMark the cluey guys who make Benchmarking apps like
3DMark and
PCMark have released
PCMark Vantage aimed purely for Vista.
Download a copy and see what you get:-)
Thats right, the final countdown comes to an end and Gutsy's ISO's are now able to be
downloaded from the Ubuntu servers. Mirror's should start propogating it soonishly! *HOWEVER* I would strongly suggest you try the
Ubuntu 7.10 (Desktop AMD-64) Torrent (
Desktop x86 or
Server x86 /
Server x64 ) instead, faster download and less choking on the server.
I've been busting to install it on the
Dell M1330 XPS ever since I got it and now finally the moment has come. Oh, i'm so happy.
UPDATE:
Mirror's for those down-under.
Yes thats right, I almost fainted, the demo for Unreal Tournament 3 is out now! Servers are still mirroing but here's an interesting dump of links to work off for now.
Runs absolutely nicely! I've heard issues with Windows XP 64-Bit but runs fantestically on Vista x64. There is a post about a
possible work around too. Frag away, my weeeekend plans are now void. Make sure you have the latest
AMD-ATI Drivers or
NVIDIA Drivers.
UPDATE Epic have posted official patch to address
XP x64 and Windows 2003 issues on their forums.
The
MSDN Subscriptions Blogs have given an indication into when MSFT plan to release
Vista SP1 (Q1-2008)
Windows XP SP3 (1H CY2008) and Windows Server Home (TBA). Meanwhile,
Office XP Service Pack 3 is already
available for download.
See the official notification on the
MSDN Blog page.
Yay! Service Pack 3 for XP is available on
Microsoft Connect now too.
|
Title
|
Windows XP Service Pack 3 Beta
|
|
Release Date
|
10/4/2007
|
|
Size
|
1,037.24 MB
|
|
Version
|
|
|
Category
|
Build
|
|
Milestone
|
Beta
|
|
Description
|
These are the self-extracting executables that contain the update packages for Windows XP Service Pack 3 Beta, English, German, and Japanese as well as release documentation.
It is recommended that you apply your selected update package to an activated, genuine copy of Windows XP, in a test environment. As with any pre-release software, it is also recommended that you back up files and settings on your machine before applying this update package.
We thank you for your interest and are looking forward to your feedback.
Please ensure you uncheck any files you don't wish to download.
|
Download away, roughly 330Mb in size (EN/JP/DE).
I had to read this a few times before I was able to digest it, then I pee'd my pants - it was also raining tonight on the walk back to the car from uni...
Scott Guthrie's blog just mentioned about .NET being openned up with the release of Orcas. Here's the important bits:
One of the things my team has been working to enable has been the ability for .NET developers to download and browse the source code of the .NET Framework libraries, and to easily enable debugging support in them.
Today I'm excited to announce that we'll be providing this with the .NET 3.5 and VS 2008 release later this year.
We'll begin by offering the source code (with source file comments included) for the .NET Base Class Libraries (System, System.IO, System.Collections, System.Configuration, System.Threading, System.Net, System.Security, System.Runtime, System.Text, etc), ASP.NET (System.Web), Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms), ADO.NET (System.Data), XML (System.Xml), and WPF (System.Windows). We'll then be adding more libraries in the months ahead (including WCF, Workflow, and LINQ). The source code will be released under the Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL).
You'll be able to download the .NET Framework source libraries via a standalone install (allowing you to use any text editor to browse it locally). We will also provide integrated debugging support of it within VS 2008.
Unfortunately, the licensing terms make this a 'readonly' view of the source as stated in the
Licensing Terms. So what does this mean to .NET Developers? We can finally debug at the Framework level!!! You can even opt to download the sources from MSDN. Checkout the
Channel9 video of Shawn Burk, the man behind the curtain that made it happen and discusses the implications! His
official announcement is available on Shawn's blog!
. If you havent already, grab the latest
Beta 2 release of Visual Studio 2008 or wait for the final due out early November.
Personally I cant wait to see the sources for WPF. So many good things coming in the next couple of months, not to forget
Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10),
MythUbuntu and
Visual Studio 2008.
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