Two little snippets of knowledge picked up this week, both in answer to some issues that have been troubling me for some time. I offer them here on the offchance that they will be picked up by whatever search engines happen to come across these pages, and will prove of use to others seeking answers.
1) Microsoft Network Monitor 3.1 can be a right pain. There's some kind of problem between MNM and the Intel wireless network card in some laptops (specifically, in my case, a Dell Precision) which results in a runaway state on boot-up where the SYSTEM process chews up CPU time and memory usage goes up and up. Eventually, various peripherals such as a USB mouse and even the keyboard stop working and it's BRB (Big Red Button) time. Re-booting sometimes works, but equally often just allows the same thing to happen. I've had up to five reboots before I end up with a usable system. The trick (once you do manage to get logged in) is to disable to Network Monitor Driver in the adaptor network properties. All seems to work nicely then
2) Vista does nasty things to some 'shared' files. I have to report a very unusual source for this snippet - although we've been actively using Vista for over a year now, I hadn't seen either the problem or the solution until recently. The nature of the issue is that supposedly shared files aren't always - they can disappear when another user logs on to the local system. This is because Vista tries to virtualise data wherever possible, moving it from the normal 'Program Files' area to a hidden folder in the user's individual 'Local' tree. (There's one oddity which explains why we haven't seen this before - disabling UAC apparently prevents this behaviour. Although Microsoft would probably disapprove, this is exactly what we do as soon as we get hold of a Vista PC.) Where did I come across this? In Usenet, of all places in the uk.rec.motorcycling group, a source of knowledge that is unequalled anywhere else on the 'Net.
That's it for this week. If anything else of interest comes up, you can read it here - assuming the search engines do manage to find this.
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