Which applications should you leave checked so that they continue to autoload? First and foremost, you don’t want to operate without your antivirus, firewall, and other security programs.

Yes, these programs slow your PC’s boot-up and shutdown, and they can even cause conflicts, but the cost of not having them running is too high to bear.

For any other program in the list, use your judgment. Don’t ask yourself “Is it a good program?” but “Does it need to be on all the time?” For instance, I unchecked Adobe Elements’ Photo Downloader, a program that I use whenever I download photos from my camera, because it serves no purpose when I’m not downloading photos. On the other hand, I allow Copernic Desktop Search to autoload because it needs to index my data files continually.

After unchecking the programs that you don’t need to autoload at startup, click OK and reboot. Windows will load with a very wordy message box that might look like an error message. Just check Don’t show this message or launch the System Configuration Utility when Windows starts (the wording is slightly different in Vista) at the bottom of the dialog box and click OK.

I don’t know about you, but I love spending the first 10 minutes of every workday watching Windows start up. It’s like a Zen thing. If you’d rather get right to work, though, the following tips should help you make Windows start much more quickly.

A typical PC loads a lot of programs every time it starts. Each of the icons in your system tray (the area near your clock) represents an auto-start application. And there are probably other programs on your machine that start automatically but don’t make their presence known so easily. Each autoloading app slows your boot time–a little or a lot. And because most of them continue to run in the background, they rob you of a little performance.

Before you start eliminating autoloaders, though, make sure you can undo your changes. In Windows XP, Select Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, System Restore. Select Create a restore point, click Next, call your restore point something like before removing autoloaders, and choose Create. Click Close once you’ve created the restore point.

In Windows Vista, select Start, Control Panel, System. Under ‘Tasks’ on the right side of the window, click System Protection. In the System Properties box that comes up, click Create at the bottom of the window.

XP users should now select Start, Run, type msconfig, and press <Enter>. (In Vista, select Start, type msconfig into the Search box, and press <Enter>.) Click the Startup tab, and you’ll see a list of all your autoloading programs, each with a check box. Uncheck an item, and it will no longer load at startup.

Bsod is caused by many things:over clocking to far, software issues, power supply issues and over heating issues.

If your system is not getting enough power when you start playing a game the voltage will drop just enough not to cause the system to shut down but to cause software issues. system chips are very sensitive to voltage changes. most can handle up to 2volts +/- when it goes over that it will cause heat issues or intermittent system shut downs.

I know it’s late but baghira stated you should look into a graphics card with direct x10 over direct x9. This is not important and direct x10 cards right now do not offer anything better than a direct x9 card. Performance is about the same and the graphics arent any better switching to direct x 10.

I have an idea for an invention that involves technology.  I have been searching for someone to help assist me with the program and direction to take to get it developed.  So far all I have found is companies that promote researching and developing but want a big percent of royalties. Is this the norm?

Ascension NOLE and Machinehead420 well the power supply depends on what you have in your system the more hard drives, expansion slots filled and the type of video cards.

when i build systems for people i will put in a 600watt power supply unit. if you do sli depending on the card you might have to get a larger power supply. if i build a quad with 2 or more hard drives and 2 cd/dvd burners along with nvidia 8800 video cards in sli mode, i will put in a 1000 watt psu.

If you are still depending on the card you might have to get a larger power supply. if i build a quad with 2 or more hard drives and 2 cd/dvd burners along with nvidia 8800 video cards in sli mode, i will put in a 1000 watt psu.

Video memory, video memory, video memory. 128 MB at least, and not on-board. Get a good card that you can pull out and upgrade later. More (256-512) would be better, but it can wait if the cost is prohibitive. 128 MB will run most current games, but newer ones will demand more for good performance. Make sure you can upgrade your video to get the most life out of the system.

And a good 1GB of system RAM (or more) helps too. If cost is an issue, you could get a comp that has less RAM right now but space for more as he starts playing more demanding games.

The processor should be better than 2GHZ. If you can go a lot better than that, you should.

Sound is important but not as critical as video. It doesn’t have to be extreme unless he is a sound geek. I went with on-board sound and then upgraded later to a low-end card - but then I don’t try to listen to music while I’m playing. My husband does though, so I got him a mid-range card and some decent headphones.

If you can afford it, get a comp that will run DirectX 10. It’s well worth it for gamers. I don’t know the requirements, but you should be able to find them on the DirectX site.

This evening I decided to spend some quality time in my local Barnes and Noble. Usually I stick to the history/current affairs/sociology sections, but today, I ventured further afield into the Java section. I thought maybe I’d learn a thing or two, see what kind of nonsense people are writing about, maybe have a giggle or two at the ludicrous things that people deem book worthy. The most common ’specialised’ book tends to be about Swing. Somehow though, they all assume that the reader is completely new to the subject. No matter what level the book advertises itself as, half the book is always wasted going over the standard Swing components. It’s as if the reader is assumed to be without access to a JDK/javadocs at all, and thus utterly unable to find this stuff anywhere.

Looking onwards, it turns out that this is a rather recurring theme. Almost every single book has, to some degree or another, huge tracts of information that can be gleaned from the most trivial online search/javadoc perusal. Some of the Struts books particularly excel in this space filler technique; often consuming up to 100 pages explaining the statelessness of http, the mystical nature of request/response protocols, and how useful forwards and redirects are, with the obligatory blurb about MVC this and MVC that. Perhaps they all secretly acknowledge that the average Struts developer is a bit less, well, developed than most people, and thus needs a little bit more hand holding. I suppose that does make them well aimed at their target audience, to be fair.

The EJB books also provide much hilarity. I was particularly tickled by a book advertising itself to be all about EJB 2.1. I naively thought to myself ‘Great! Something that’ll explain all the cool new things in a reasonable detail, perhaps even provide good critical analysis’. No such luck. The ‘2.1′ portion of the title turned out to be mostly a marketing gimmick. The OR/QL chapters all were wisely marked with a ‘2.0/2.1′ heading, with little to no 2.1 specific content. There was a little blurb in the back about Timers and web services, but it seemed to be grudgingly tacked on to avoid being sued, rather than any genuine interest in 2.1. Worried that they might alienate the huge swathes of EJB 1.1 developers (a crowd best left to slowly die the painful miserable death they deserve, foolish fashion victims that they are), the book also wisely includes much 1.1 material.

The one book I was actually looking out for was Bitter EJB. I’m vaguely mulling posting an EJB rant, and so wondered if it had anything I should take into consideration before spouting off. Sadly it was conspicious by its absence.

So I’m left wondering, are there any worthwhile Java books out there aimed at developers well versed in the (seemingly black) art of spec/javadoc reading?

While perusing intellij.org in search of the latest and greatest IDEA plugins, I couldn’t help but notice how some of them are…well…useless. So a brief summary of the top losers might be in order. Note to any plugin authors: I am not mocking you, I am mocking your plugin. I realise you likely wrote it for fun and as an educational exercise, and take no responsibility etc. If someone wants to feel insulted, then I’d like to nominate people who use these plugins and/or asked for them in the first place.

I’m also going to ignore plugins which are clearly meant to be toys (connect4, google, tetris, sonar), and focus on ones which allegedly provide worthwhile functionality. The first of this sorry bunch is ConfirmExit. A plugin designed, presumably, for those incredibly clumsy oafs who keep hitting ctrl-F4 (or command-Q, or the linux equivelant) by accident. Perhaps a diet is in order, to trim those chubby fingers before that long IDEA session you’re about to attempt.

A Spelling plugin also exists! Initially I laughed hysterically at this silly plugin. Upon further reflection, it seems that people like Fred Grott do exist outside of ’special institutes’, and I guess they need all the help they can get.

Tagify is also another plugin worth noting. It will convert html, placed in html files (where it belongs, many would argue) into out.println() statements. The advantage of this plugin is that it enables you ignore the years of effort many people have poured into coming up with solutions to prevent you from ever having to do out.println(htmlstuff).

It’s pretty annoying that there aren’t really any cool IDEA plugins. Most seem like playful halfhearted attempts at hacking up something ‘fun’ in a day or two. The clover plugin though does look interesting, in that it actually does stuff in its own right that has slightly more than passing novelty value. Having said that, it’s hard to decide if the lamentable lack of decent plugins is due to IDEA having all the cool things one would want built-in, or whether the openAPI is not rich enough for anything beyond gimmicks.

Depressingly, despite making a somewhat valiant attempt to get enough sleep, the night before TSS ended with the usual mix of drinking, stumbling about helplessly, and stay up until 3:30am. Last year the question to inflict on poor unsuspecting victims was ‘have you masturbated on a plane’, which surprisingly 50% of people seem to have done. This year I’m hoping to get a good list going with ‘what deviant sexual act would you pay $10 to see if it were socially acceptable’.

The keynote in the morning kicked off with the usual fumbling intro, with the TSS guys clearly looking like they’d much much rather be somewhere else, possibly somewhere very far away.

As usual, the audience polling thing was a total and utter shambles. It’s 9am, there’s no way I can count down a bulleted list of 7 items to figure out what number I should press. Which genius though that a bulleted list is a good way of displaying numbered options? Even more depressingly, as I finally figure that out and start furiously jabbing the appropriate button, the handheld piddly pile of poop steadfastly refuses to acknowledge my pitiful attempts.

The one mercy is that there were very few of them compared to every year. Interesting it turned out to be yet another venue where they managed to sneak in vendor content, asking a bunch of java devs whether they’re interested in DTrace or ZFS is a perplexing choice, certainly.

The talk is supposed to be about Jazz, and we’re halfway through the talk and I still have as much information about what Jazz is as I do about the contents of Bill Burke’s panties (eeeurgh, even I winced at that lurid image).

The one interesting thing I guess is the release management arm waving, and all the boring crap that goes with it, its impact on development velocity, marketing, metrics, blahblah. Still no clue what Jazz is, but maybe we’ll find out soon!

We finally find out that Jazz is some kind of collaboration thiingyboggy. Unfortunately, many people have already chewed off their own heads in sheer boredom, so it might be a little too late. Still, maybe something can be salvaged!

From what I can gather, it sounds like a more pretentious and happy agile noises version of TeamCity with better role and team management (at least to the marketing blurb we’re being subjected to). Team collaboration junk, better isolation, scalable, blahblahblah. I’m still angry that yet another hour of my life has gone down the drain.

Ultimately I guess the only people who don’t want to kill themselves just to end this talk are probably Eclipse developers (not users), who likely could manage to keep themselves sufficiently entertained by masturbating in the stage’s generation direction for this infinitely long hour.

In late 2006, Palm’s Treo 700w received a quiet upgrade to the 700wx, which has the same design and runs the same OS but contains enhancements under the hood. Most notable is the RAM upgrade: With 48MB after a hard reset, the 700wx (available from Sprint) gives the user double the amount of program memory that the 700w does, which goes a long way toward making the new Treo quicker to refresh screens and generally more responsive.

My few criticisms of this device, like my gripes about other Windows Mobile-based Treos, revolve around the unit’s unintuitive interface and the excessive number of taps and button presses required to launch any program that isn’t reachable from the Today home screen. The 700wx includes the usual complement of Mobile Office applications. You can handle e-mail perfectly serviceably through Mobile Outlook; but as with the 700w and other Treos, typing on the 700wx’s keypad becomes an unpleasant chore because the keys are slightly too big, too stiff, and too close together.

The 700wx resembles other Treos in its phone capabilities. Its voice quality is average, but it performs nicely as a speakerphone or with the included headset. With a talk time of 5 hours, 28 minutes in our lab test, the 700wx’s battery life is subpar, but similar to that of other Treos we’ve tested.

At $500, the 700wx carries the same price as the 700w. Of the two, I definitely prefer the 700wx.

If you’re a fan of the Palm OS, you don’t have many options in PDA phones–basically, your choice is between the Treo700p and the Treo 680. (The Treo 680 wasn’t ready in time for us to test it for this story.Years of refinement have molded the 700p into an intuitive and useful PDA phone. Setting up and accessing e-mail is painlessly simple, whether you are tapping at the screen with the stylus or using the navigation controls to get around. Only the lack of a thumbwheel makes the Treo at all frustrating to use, though people with large fingers may find the keyboard somewhat cramped.

Like all Treos, the 700p feels a bit unwieldy during extended conversations, but its audio quality is fine and the speakerphone is exceptional. Talk-time battery life is on the weak side, however, at just 4 hours, 59 minutes in our lab tests.

The great software bundle includes a trial version of Documents to Go for file viewing and editing, the Pocket Tunes music player, and more. Overall, the 700p is a great little–well, not that little–PDA phone, especially if you’re a fan of the Palm OS.

Focused more on fun than on work, the neet T-Mobile Dash is a device designed to appeal to the Sidekick set. Though it resembles the Motorola Q, this candy-bar-style phone is rubberized, rounded, and in general made friendlier for riding along in a pocket when you hit the road.

Unfortunately, the Dash lacks some key software components. The handset includes Wi-Fi, and its e-mail works well, but it has little in the way of office applications, bundling only the ClearVue suite for viewing–but not editing–documents. Typing on the cramped keyboard is tricky, too, as the tiny buttons feel mashed together.

As an entertainment-oriented gadget, the Dash is a hit, with a standout media player and a microSD expansion slot so you can add music to the device. But as a phone, despite lasting 10 hours in our battery tests, it has faults. Calls are loud and clear, but dialing them is difficult: Unlike every other smart phone, the Dash lacks an on-screen dialpad for dialing digits by their letter alternatives. Whoops!

Hollywood’s “it” phone is now in its third revision. The Sidekick 3 packs an impressive set of features, headlined by a suite of easy-to-use e-mail, text messaging, and Web browsing applications.

As a phone, the Sidekick 3 is a bit bulky and difficult to hold for long, and you have to flip it open to dial a call. But its speaker is clear and loud. The Sidekick 3 turned in an excellent talk-time battery life of 9 hours in our lab tests. Navigating with the unit’s light-up trackball is a pleasure–you may never want to use a thumbwheel again.

Features new to the Sidekick 3 include a music player (which handles only MP3 files) and a faster CPU. The camera has been upgraded to a resolution of 1.3 megapixels, and you can expand storage beyond the included 64MB via a miniSD card.

Ultimately, the Sidekick 3’s Achilles’ heel is attributable to T-Mobile: In lieu of a genuine 3G network, the company continues to offer its roughly 120-kbps EDGE network as its fastest service. Compared with phones that use a 3G network, the Sidekick 3 feels dated (and decidedly slower). And lacking Wi-Fi, the $350 phone gives you no way to bypass the cell network to take advantage of the device’s otherwise sweet Internet capabilities. It’s too bad, because the performance shortcomings really hamstring the Sidekick 3’s usefulness.