Category Archives: Rants

No Start Menu for You

I tend to launch most programs on my Windows 10 laptop by typing the <Win> key, then a few letters of the program name, and then hitting enter. On my powerful laptop (SSD and 32 GB of RAM) this process … Continue reading

Posted in Code Reliability, Debugging, Investigative Reporting, Performance, Programming, Rants, uiforetw, xperf | Tagged , , | 25 Comments

Arranging Invisible Icons in Quadratic Time

Near the end of January I was pointed to a twitter thread where a Windows user with a powerful machine was hitting random hangs in explorer. Lots of unscientific theories were being proposed. I don’t generally do random analysis of … Continue reading

Posted in Investigative Reporting, Performance, Programming, Quadratic, Rants, Symbols | Tagged , | 18 Comments

Windows Timer Resolution: The Great Rule Change

The behavior of the Windows scheduler changed significantly in Windows 10 2004 (aka, the April 2020 version of Windows), in a way that will break a few applications, and there appears to have been no announcement, and the documentation has … Continue reading

Posted in Environment, Investigative Reporting, Performance, Rants | Tagged , | 77 Comments

O(n^2), again, now in WMI

I recently hit some multi-minute delays on my workstation. After investigating I found that the problem was due to a lock being held for five minutes, and during that time the lock-holder was mostly just spinning in a nine-instruction loop. … Continue reading

Posted in Investigative Reporting, Programming, Quadratic, Rants, uiforetw, xperf | Tagged , , , , | 23 Comments

Zombie Processes are Eating your Memory

Zombies probably won’t consume 32 GB of your memory like they did to me, but zombie processes do exist, and I can help you find them and make sure that developers fix them. Tool source link is at the bottom. … Continue reading

Posted in Debugging, Investigative Reporting, Performance, Programming, Rants | Tagged , , | 74 Comments

What We Talk About When We Talk About Performance

TL;DR – the phrase “90% faster” is interpreted by people in two different ways: 90% less time The speed (ops/sec or km/h) is 90% greater I strongly prefer #2 but due to the ambiguity this phrase should never be used. … Continue reading

Posted in Math, Performance, Rants | Tagged , , | 20 Comments

The Spoils of Law (Moore’s Law)–a New Laptop

I just got a new laptop (Lenovo P51, four-cores, eight-threads, 32 GB RAM, multiple drive bays). My old machine was more than six years old so it was probably overdue. I wanted to record some of the reasons for the … Continue reading

Posted in Investigative Reporting, Rants | Tagged , , | 30 Comments

A modest proposal for a more natural KB

I recently wrote a blog post saying that I thought Windows Explorer should use the more natural base-10 meanings of the kB/MB/GB/TB prefixes, instead of the base-2 meanings that are a few percent larger. I convinced nobody. I was told, … Continue reading

Posted in Fun, Rants | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

Base Ten For (Almost) Everything

It’s 2016 and Windows still displays drive and file sizes using base-2 size prefixes. My 1 TB SSD is shown as 916 GB, and a 449 million byte video file is shown as 428 MB. That is, Windows still insists … Continue reading

Posted in Rants | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 73 Comments

Home Network Printer Setup That Works

Whenever I add a network printer to one of my Windows computers at home I end up with a reference to a hard-coded IP address. That means that the next time my home router reboots and assigns a different IP … Continue reading

Posted in Computers and Internet, Rants | Tagged | 18 Comments