Using Registry Cleaners are a Bad Idea (via S Anand). I agree — if your registry has enough flotsam in it to impair your system’s performance and you don’t know enough to hand-edit the registry, you’re probably better off restoring from backups (you do have backups, right?) than trusting random registry cleaners that promise a sparkly-fresh computer for $29.

If you’re concerned about easily restoring your system, you’d be better off with Windows System Restore or spending money buying Norton Ghost and backing up images of your system.

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Every time I use OSX my arm hurts from all the mousing I have to do — and that’s not because I don’t know the Mac keyboard shortcuts. The culprit is OSX’s mouse cursor acceleration logic, and here’s how you can fix it to be more Windows-friendly.

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Is Project Aardvark a remote desktop service that works through firewalls using an HTTP-based reflector, like GoToMyPC and MyWebexPC, given some of the hints the Aardvark team has been dropping? Given the team’s working with a lot of GPL code, maybe they’re extending VNC?

Incidentally, I find myself using MyWebexPC a lot these days and it’s quite good (and the basic version’s free for upto 5 PCs) … if you find yourself working on several machines, you might want to give it a try.

Update: Hadn’t noticed this: Michael Still has discovered what Aardvark is: SidePilot, a service that allows ‘people to help their friends, relatives, and customers fix their computer problems by temporarily controlling their computers via the Internet’.

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I decided to try out the optimized MOOX Firefox builds today (I used the SSE-ready M2 build of Firefox 1.0). An interesting quirk I observed is that the text reflow bug #217527 that caused havoc on Slashdot goes away with this build. This is consistent with how timing bugs sometimes vanish, although by the same token the MOOX builds could introduce several other bugs. I have now switched off Raefer Gabriel’s Slashfix extension and Slashdot renders well again. Lucky me.

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If you use Firefox and visit Slashdot, especially as a logged in user, you may have noticed Firefox mess up the rendering on the home page and many inner pages. This is due to Bug #217527 and it seems it will not be fixed in Firefox 1.0 (but is scheduled to be fixed thereafter). I wish the Firefox devs would reconsider, it’s never a good idea to render one of your biggest booster sites badly.

That said, workarounds exist: hit Ctrl+ followed by Ctrl- to reset the display. Or download the latest Mozilla trunk builds. Or (gasp) use IE, it works great with Slashdot.

Update 9 Nov 2004: Hardgrok has a handy little hack extension that sort of fixes this problem, although /. pages opened in background tabs still get borked.

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Folk bothered by Firefox’s slow (1-line) up/down-arrow scrolling can install Cosmic Cat’s SuperScroll extension and set directional scrolling to an IE-like 4 lines.

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From the access-ramps dept: Toggle Keys is a killer Windows Accessibility feature that works very well for touch typists who keep hitting cAPS lOCK bY mISTAKE (as when touch-typing on a different keyboard). To switch it on, use Control Panel | Accessibility Options, Alt+T, Alt+A, Enter.

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Andrew Duthie has a great tip for privileged file management while running as an ordinary user in Windows. This is important because explorer.exe cannot be launched as another (higher- or lower- privileged) user using its Run As feature. The tip? Use iexplore.exe, which doubles up as a file manager when fed a local path.

On the other hand, what this says about IE’s potential to wreak havoc on a system is best left unsaid. If I were an auditor going over IE code, I would not be a happy man .

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Intel video driver installers (for example, the 82845G) add a few annoyances to the user’s machine: a system tray icon (igfxtray.exe), a hotkey processor (hkcmd.exe) and entries to the Windows desktop context menu. Apart from needlessly duplicating the Display Settings applet’s functionality, this eats resources and increases the time it takes to display the desktop context menu. Here’s how to remove these annoyances:

• From HKLM\SOFTWARE\ Microsoft\Windows\ CurrentVersion\Run, remove the IgfxTray and HotKeysCmds values.
• From HKCR\Directory\Background\ shellex\ContextMenuHandlers, remove the igfxcui key.

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For all those people wondering where they can get good Indic fonts from: Windows XP and Office XP ship with great Indic fonts for some scripts, and for the rest there’s always James Kass’ Code2000 (direct link).

As an aside, now’s a great time for folk to ditch their proprietary fonts and user-defined encoding (examples 1 2 3) and get onto the Unicode Encoding bandwagon like Google (which uses UTF-8).

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