Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - Posts

COOL: ProcessTamer (Manage your CPU Load)

Just came across a cool utility that deserves a mention called ProcessTamer. This baby sits in the tray and monitors processes that hijack the CPU and automatically sets the CPU to a lower priority. While this may not be ideal when you want the CPU to be used to its max potential (Eg. encoding videos) it's quite cool for normal use.

Take a look at it Here. The guys behind that rely on donations to deliver their software, so support their cause if you find it useful:-)

Process Tamer is a tiny (100k) and efficient utility for Microsoft Windows XP/2K/NT that runs in your system tray and constantly monitors the cpu usage of other processes. When it sees a process that is overloading your cpu, it reduces the priority of that process temporarily, until its cpu usage returns to a reasonable level.


screen shot from developers

posted Wednesday, March 23, 2005 10:03 AM by wsoftware with 0 Comments

Write Auto-Updating Apps with .NET and the Background Intelligent Transfer Service API

Very good article about writing .NET Applications that are self-udpating with a bit of work...

MSDN Magazine February 2003 [ C# ]
Both the .NET Framework and Windows have some very interesting APIs for creating applications that are capable of updating themselves automatically over a network. There are many advantages to writing your application to update itself like Windows Update does, including convenience for your users, from easier maintenance to network administration. Automatic updates require attention to factors such as discovery, security, and file replacement. In this article, the author, Jason Clark, covers the BITS API as well as a number of features of the .NET Framework that take care of these facets of auto-updating using the same facilities that the Windows Update uses.

You can also use this method outside .NET (non-managed code), anyone given this go?

posted Wednesday, March 23, 2005 2:53 AM by wsoftware with 0 Comments

Microsoft Hardware Quality Control/Testing Laboratory Photos

How serious do you think Microsoft are with testing hardware? Well heres a peek from the MS Labs where they test the hardware under some very rigorous conditions (some wierd, and others ingenius!). Nice insight into what work goes into such fine products, mind you my IntelliMouse Optical (with two side buttons that are life savers thanks to IntelliPoint v4.0 Pro) and MS Internet Keyboard Pro I bought in 2002 are still just as good as they were when I bought them (minus a few stains and dirt in the keyboard)

posted Wednesday, March 23, 2005 12:45 PM by wsoftware with 0 Comments