Matthew Ernest: Toys

Bigger not better

Wed, 07 May 2003 02:06:51 GMT

I made the mistake of "upgrading" to AIM v5.1. Now I'm stuck with this huge buddy-list window. This stuff should get smaller, not larger.

Windows DNS caching

Wed, 02 Apr 2003 00:28:31 GMT

Windows caches DNS lookups, including failed ones that it will refuse to look up again for a period of time. This is almost never what I want, as I have the next upstream DNS source do the caching.

The relevant registry entries live under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesDnscacheParameters

DWORDs MaxCacheEntryTtlLimit and NegativeCacheTime are the timeouts in seconds for positive and negative lookups respectively setting NegativeCacheTime to 0 disables failed lookup caching.

For an added bonus, DWORD QueryIpMatching set to 1 will reject DNS responses from servers that the resolver did not query.

Working net

Wed, 11 Dec 2002 19:36:21 GMT

I've been having a problem with networking in the lab after waking from from hiberation when I come in for the day. Typically I would have to do a cold boot and was unable to shutdown Windows while the problem existed. Removing the campus VPN client, which never worked in the first place, seems to have improved things.

Win2k SP3 autoupdating

Thu, 22 Aug 2002 05:10:57 GMT

How to defang Win2k SP3's auto updating. We think this covers it - any more contributions? [The Register]

It seems like windowsupdate.microsoft.com doesn't work after this. Can you be sure that you can manually download any updates... beter yet, can you be sure to FIND OUT about them?

Pegasus v4.02

Thu, 15 Aug 2002 21:45:07 GMT

I've upgraded my mail client from Pegasus v.312c to v4.02. I was holding back due to the number of known issues discussed in the newsgroup. However, since my new laptop with WinXP tends to stay up longer between reboots (on occaision up to a week!) I would also tend to leave Pegasus open. On numerous occaisions this has caused WinXP to blue-screen. No such problem with v4.02 so far.

The v4 series has a nifty preview mode that avoids the opening of billions of gratuitous windows that I never enjoyed. Still no mail sync with Palm, though. In all honesty, I admit that I want something that is like Outlook without being Outlook. Word has it that Evolution is like that, except it doesn't run on Windows.

Dual head with Win2k

Wed, 10 Apr 2002 01:11:26 GMT

I have just moved my Win2k desktop to a dual head setup. It was quite an "Out-of-Box Experience".

I bought a Matrox Millenium II 4 MB graphics card with a PCI interface off EBay for $15. It's a card that I often see recomended on multi-monitor sites. They're cheap, look good, and play nice with other cards. Even with 4 MB, it's more than enough to drive my second monitor.

I shutdown the machine, stuck the card in a random slot, plugged in the video cable (this cable actually goes to a KVM, so that the monitor can also show console from my linux machine), and booted Win2k. It detected the card, I stuck the Win2k CD in the drive to get the default Windows drivers. Voila, two monitors.

(The only problem I had was self-induced. I always forget to take the Win2k CD out of the drive before rebooting. When the machines boot from that CD, it rearranges the drive ordering. I boot from a SCSI drive, but have another drive in the system that's IDE, so I have to set the search for a bootable drive to start with SCSI first.)