GuruStop.NET

For many years, people used to laugh at the World End 2012 prophecy. This year, people’s joke was that we’d be very lucky if we manage to get to the end of 2011 even!
Yeah, 2011 is such a bloody, surprising, rich, optimistic, pessimistic, and loaded year. So many events, so many famous deaths, so much fire, so much energy, and indeed, so much hope.

Seems we are lucky anyway. We’re only less than two weeks close get into 2012, Many have either started their holidays already, or just about to.
Unless you believe that year is the end of the world truly (no, not discussing it even!), that alone should make you optimistic :-)

The title “Year O’clock” is not mine, it’s my colleague, Steven Nagy. I may talk about the origin of the name later, for now, let’s say it’s a friendly internal new year’s resolutions cheer-up message.
Few days after I responded to it, I thought I’d share my response with you too, after removing some customer identifying parts and adding some context to a few parts of course.

The Year O’clock Email:

Just Three Questions

1. Work related highlights for the year

   • Been across 4 different big clients in the same year. Really enjoyed them all

It’s been quite sometime since I first installed VS 11 (soon after dev preview came way), so, I thought I’d share my experience around using it as primary IDE (with VS 2010 solutions most of the time):

• It works nicely with Visual Studio 2010 solutions, even big real-world ones. It doesn’t convert them but does some changes to project files which are backwards compatible (mainly minor formatting changes). Note that from the source-control point of view, those are still changes.
  • Somehow all my IIS 7.5 application pools lost their "Enable 32-bit applications" option very shortly after that. This is too coincidental with Visual Studio 11, although I’m not 100% sure if it was the reason.
    It could be hard to debug, If you start getting errors like "unable to load assembly <some path>.dll. or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format.". Check for that option.
• It works a bit faster than Visual Studio 2010. Maybe because it has fewer plug-ins, but I think if I remember bare-bones Visual Studio 2010 correctly, this Visual Studio 11 one is still (slightly) faster.

Problem

Synaptics is the most common touchpad driver for laptops. However, Synaptics touchpad driver takes SO MUCH RAM, even when you uninstall the "Scrype" application that comes with most recent versions of it.

The 236 MB above is just a small number. I have set the process priority to "Low" to get only this. The default priority of the process is "Above Normal". If you are like me and rarely shut down your laptop, depending more on Sleep, etc.. this is going to bite hard because it just keeps growing….

Details

Here is one interesting discussion about it:

This forum is a gold mine for laptop owners. I might blog how it helped me in other more important issues.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/lenovo-ibm/565124-synaptics-touchpad-enhancements-using-over-512mb-memory.html

Form the forum I got a really nice tip:

The leak has been reported on Lenovo Forums, and has been reproduced on their end. You can roll back to an earlier driver. 15.2.1.0 and earlier don’t seem to be affected.

Note that I have an ASUS not Lenovo and still affected. The problem is with the recent versions themselves.

Just a quick note, if you install Productivity Power Tools For Visual Studio 2010.

It has a nice feature.. Copy code as html. The feature doesn’t add any new menu option or whatever, simply when you copy the code the usual CTRL+C or Edit -> Copy way in Visual Studio, and paste it in a text-only editor like Notepad, it’ll be treated as text normally, but if you paste it in an HTML capable editor like Microsoft Word, it’ll be paste as HTML.

Note

If you already know what the feature is, and have a problem with Live Writer 2011 or similar version, you can skip to the title that mentions it.

• If you wonder how  made this rectangular selection, you can do it by pressing ALT before selection and holding as you move the mouse to continue to select
• If you wonder why, simply to avoid the spaces on the left in the pasted code

If I paste this in notepad, nothing new!

But if I paste in Word 2010 (Outlook is the same)

(it can be better if play with font size and text wrapping options)

Egypt has finally cancelled the Time Saving setting, however, computers and other devices still think it should take place from the last Friday in April. Microsoft has released a hotfix for Windows to solve this problem

قامت مصر أخيرا بإلغاء التوقيت الصيفي، لكن ساعة الكمبيوتر و أجهزة أخرى مازالت مضبوطة على أن التوقيت الصيفي يبدأ في أخر جمعة في شهر أبريل. مايكروسوفت أصدرت ملف إصلاح لنظام ويندوز لحل هذه المشكلة.

You can download the hotix from:

يمكنك تحميل ملف التصليح من

http://bit.ly/lvnmrE

Steps To Apply Fix:

خطوات تشغيل ملف الإصلاح

In the next page, scroll down till the part in picture

فس الصفحة التالية. أنزل بالفأرة حتى الجزء المبين في الصورة

If you don’t know your platform, go to C: drive, if you have “Program Files” folder and “Program Files(x86)” folder then your platform is x64 (yes, x64 not x86). If you have only “Program Files” folder, then your platform is x86 (default).

إذا كنت لا تعرف خيار 64 بت x64 أم 32 بت x86 ادخل على جهاز الكمبيوتر، الدرايف أو القرص الصلب C .. إذا وجدت فولدر أو مجلد Program Files(x86) و معه Program Files إذا وجدت الاثنين اختار 64 بت x64 أما إذا وجدت فقط Program Files إذا اختار 32 بت x86