Apple Knacks

One of the most annoying things about Windows 7 is that disabling system updates never really seems to stick.  Microsoft always finds a way to push out those updates, no matter what method you go by – disabling updates via Control Panel, disabling updates as a Service, disabling updates in the Registry, etc.  Fortunately, there’s a better way.

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Recently I’ve been doing a massive SSD rollout at my workplace using OWC’s wonderfully fast Mercury drives.  One of the things that has been driving me nuts is that Windows will hang for up to 5 minutes after logging into the domain.  The login script will sit there long enough for you to make a sandwich.  No joke.  Not quite the performance boost I was going after with a solid-state upgrade, lol.

Since most of our machines run older 5400rpm mechanical hard drives, the login time has just been accepted as part of the machine’s bootup time.  However, with an SSD, even older single-core machines are pretty dang zippy, so the long login time is a real killer. And for some reason, the machines with the mechanical drives joined in less than half the time of the SSD’s!  Obviously, this didn’t make me real happy with the amount I’ve been investing into boot drive hardware.

Fortunately, I came across a fix this week in this Technet thread: If you are using an SSD, are on a domain, and are using Windows XP or Windows 7 (I don’t allow Vista in my workplace, so I can’t comment on that one), the solution is simple – set a desktop wallpaper instead of using a solid color.

Yes folks, Windows on an SSD hangs like molasses off a spoon after logging into a domain all because the desktop background is a solid color.  Un-freakin-believable.  Login time is now roughly 2 seconds to the full desktop after adding a wallpaper.  Go figure.  My default XP configuration for corporate usage is the Classic theme with the default solid blue background, so pretty much my entire network is affected by this bug.  Some users are simply setting the background color as a wallpaper after taking a screenshot or doing some magic in Photoshop or MS Paint to create a usable jpeg.  Sigh.  tburkins, I owe you lunch, sir!

I always used to run into the issue of not being able to eject a USB flash drive or USB hard drive under Windows XP – it’d give me the error that the drive couldn’t be stopped right now and to try again later:

Usually, if you close out of the applications or files running on the USB drive, you’re all set – the drive will eject just fine.  But sometimes, sometimes, you will continue to get that error. As it turns out, the solution is simple: Occasionally, Windows XP will not allow you to eject an external drive if an Explorer window containing the root drive or any of the sub-folders is open.

Solution?  Close any folders that you have open on that drive.  XP will typically allow you to eject the drive even if a file browser window is open on it (and then auto-close all open Explorer windows from that drive), but randomly will spit out that error message at you until you close all associated Explorer windows.  And thus we get the notification that it’s safe to remove your drive before you yank it out in frustration and corrupt your data:

Ta-freakin-da.  This bugged me for years, lol.

The latest version of Adobe Reader PDF software for Windows (Adobe Reader X) brings a lot of speed improvements, but also brings us a super annoying bug: opening PDF files over a network (such as from a file server) can cause an “Access Denied” error as seen below:

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