Vista Screen Saver Started Working Again!

A few weeks ago, my Dell Inspirion 1501 laptop, running Vista, suddenly stopped displaying screen savers for some reason. I tried everything I could Google, including rolling back to a restore point, downloading the new HID driver, playing around with a wireless mouse, etc.

This morning, my wife and I were discussing lithium ion batteries, and I removed mine from my laptop (to check the manufacture date). When I put the battery back in, the screen saver magically started working again. Go figure. Something to try if you're having the same problem...

Vista Mail Using 100% of CPU?

When I got my new Dell Inspirion 1501 laptop, one of the first things I did was port my email from Outlook Express that was on my old Windows XP desktop.

Ever since, every time I open Vista Mail, the CPU shoots up to 100%, and stays there for hours. I finally, accidentally, figured out the cause. I was looking for certain files on my hard drive, and noticed I had hundreds and hundreds of zero-byte EML files. So I searched for all EML files (using Agent Ransack), and found 41,000 of them - 30,000 of which were zero-byte!

After I deleted the empty ones, Mail immediately started behaving normally. Of course, that was three days ago, and when I checked just now, I see I have 284 empty EML files. Haven't Googled to see what may be going on, but I'm just glad for now Mail works correctly. For a while, at least. Now if I could just get any screen saver to start working again...

TinyUrl.com for Long E-mail Addresses

When you're job hunting, you realize the importance of an e-mail address that's easy to spell and pronounce. Both in phone conversation, or when someone is reading a hardcopy of my resume, it's much easier to work with TinyUrl.com/LAL-2010 than with www.larryleonard.net/files/LarryLeonardResume.docx.

Now if only the nice people at TinyUrl.com would you let you pick you own tiny url... "tinyurl/lal77", for instance!