Archive for December 19th, 2007
Just a quick note to help folks who want to get rid of the annoying restart prompt that keeps popping up after an automatic update has installed.
- Press the windows button and R (windows button + R) for the run prompt
- If you’ve done this before the command will be pre-filled … if it isn’t then type in
- net stop “automatic updates” <——— note the quotes?
Remember … you really should restart your computer after an update has installed. So make sure you do that eventually.
PS: Starting certain applications will cause the automatic update service to start running again and the nag will come back. Just Rinse and repeat 
December 19th, 2007
This is a neat little feature in the new Windows Live Mail.
For those who don’t know, Windows live mail is the Microsoft’s email replacement for Outlook Express 6.
I love this feature so much because now, my email client won’t corrupt my contacts with a ton of useless entries (if you use craigslist a lot you’ll know what I mean).
Its exellent logic, because if I exchange emails with a person a couple of times, then its a pretty good bet that I want that person in my contact list but am too lazy to do it manually. Now Live Mail does it automagically, so you don’t have to … thats called an “intelligent default”. Makes for excellent application design because it “doesn’t make me think”
What would be even better would be the ability to set the threshold number manually.
December 19th, 2007
Microsoft just released an update to IE6’s JavaScript engine. It was in response to problems with its (jscript 5.6) garbage collection that would cause poor performance with Large Ajaxy applications … like Gmail. It probably also helps their hotmail web ui too, since that uses ajax as well.
I would personally have liked to see more done with this update (its only a “minor” update), but I suppose you don’t want to give people a reason to hold on to IE 6 right? Hopefully this stops Feed Demon (my RSS reader) from freezing on CNN’s pages?
Read more about the update here
December 19th, 2007
Safari for Windows (3.0.4) became my current favorite browser by (to my trained eye) slaughtering Opera in Javascript performance.
Hopefully that changes with Opera 9.25. Of late though, I’ve been having trouble with it. Safari initially broke on my Windows Laptop a few weeks ago, popping up a debugger prompt and closing immediately if I cancelled out of it.It kept running on my main workstation, however … that is until this evening, now its doing the same on my desktop.
I realize how poorly supported this browser is, because there is no place to file a bug report except from in the browser itself. Shouldn’t there be an active bug database or something for Safari on windows?
If anyone knows how to fix this please let me know … I want my super fast javascript back!
[Click on Images to see bigger versions]
December 19th, 2007