Real men don't make backups
Today after updating my Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit with Service Pack 1, I noticed, that almost all Right click context menus (for example on Desktop) are on wrong side – left side of mouse pointer instead of right side.
It turns out, that Service Pack somehow changed my Windows settings. To get back the old behavior:
Click on Windows button and type “Tablet PC Settings”. Press enter. Now open “Other” tab, and change Right-handed to Left-handed as shown in screenshot.
One of my video cards kept crashing and showing various artifacts. Usually this happened when playing youtube.com videos or using DirectX. Video card was GIGABYTE nVidia GTX 460.
When crashing, Windows temporary disabled both monitors / displays and, then balloon tip appeared showing:
[Display driver stopped responding and has recovered]
Display driver NVIDIA Windows Kernel Mode Driver, Version 266.58 stopped responding and has successfully recovered.
I tried to reproduce this error by opening and playing various video files, including youtube, but without any luck. I couldn’t reproduce this with 100% probability. And after one crash, it was very hard to crash driver again in a reasonable timeframe.
Today, I thought, that I need some way to stress test my video card. One software that I run was Video Card Stability Test from freestone-group.com. Another was famous Stress test – FurMark from ozone3d.net. Both tests crashed my video card constantly within few seconds.
Now changed my video card to another nVidia GTX 460 made by SPARKLE and all problems have gone away.
P.S. Temperature was in normal level when driver crashed – ~50 °C.
P.S.S. Windows Event log was logging multiple: “Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered.” events.
Hardcore optimization story – Would you believe me if I claimed that an algorithm that has been on the books as “optimal” for 46 years, which has been analyzed in excruciating detail by geniuses like Knuth and taught in all computer science courses in the world, can be optimized to run 10 times faster?
Bjarne Stroustrup about C++0x and standardization.
Several of the Internet’s most popular Web sites – including Facebook, Google and Yahoo – have agreed to participate in the first global-scale trial of IPv6 on June 8, 2011.
Test your IPv6 connectivity with test-ipv6.com.
Neural Network for Recognition of Handwritten Digits in C# in Codeproject from Vietdungiitb.
Printing 1 to 1000 without loop or conditionals from Stack Overflow.