Thursday, November 29, 2007

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...

Saturday, November 17, 2007

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...

Thursday, November 15, 2007

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!