If you ever noticed the hiberfil.sys file in the root of your Windows system drive and wondered what it was and how to get rid of it, well here’s your answer!
The hiberfil.sys file is used with the Windows Hibernate feature, and even if you modify your power plan and disable the hibernation features in there, the file will still be on your system. The file size depends on the amount of RAM your system has, as it is used to dump some (or almost all) of the data in RAM on to your hard drive so it can enter a hibernation state. For my system, since I have 4GB of RAM, the file was almost 4GB in size so it made sense to get rid of it if I wasn’t going to use Hibernation mode.
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I’ve been using Windows 7 Ultimate for just a few days, yet I’m already miffed by a few glaringly obvious oversights in the design of some of the most often seen parts of the GUI; the Start Menu.
As you can see in this screenshot, there are two particular areas which I consider design oversights when they were apparently overhauling the GUI to make it look nicer. First is the appearance of the “menu” displayed when I expand “Computer” (it would be the same for any folder – I just have the others set to act as links, not menus). It appears as though they decided to use a generic Windows “context menu” container to display the file list, however you would figure that for the nice and fancy new Start Menu that they could have put a bit more “love” in there and made it look more integrated (such as you’ll get if you were to expand one of the items in the Start Menu list such as “Sticky Notes” or “Windows Virtual PC” in this particular screenshot). I think it would have made it look much nicer, complete, and more thought out.
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Are you a fan of how Linux (Unix) allows you to designate an actual hard drive partition to swap space? Ever wished that Windows would let you do something similar, instead of having to either store it on the same partition as Windows, or have to designate an actual drive letter to another partition just for swap?
For the longest time ever, I always wished that you could do more than just move your Windows swap file (pagefile.sys) to another drive letter. First of all, having to assign a drive letter to the partition you want purely for storing the Windows page file really sucks because then that means the drive letter shows up in explorer (sure, you can hide drive letters, but you’ve still wasted a drive letter on the partition). Second of all, if you think you’re being smart by creating a partition at the root of your drive during Windows installation, chances are you kicked yourself after going through the install only to realize that it assigned that partition the letter “C:” and now Windows is installed on “D:” (good luck getting out of that scenario – I’d recommend just redoing the install entirely; trust me it saves you a ton of headaches).
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If you’ve ever tried to get a Bluetooth headset to work in Windows Vista, you know you’re in for a world of hurt if you want to try and make it work with the existing Microsoft Bluetooth stack. You have to steal drivers from other manufacturers or basically just give up and switch to using the Broadcom WIDCOMM Bluetooth drivers.
For the longest time I refused to use the WIDCOMM drivers because their look and feel was stuck in the Windows XP days – it wasn’t horrible, but it didn’t integrate nicely in with Vista and it completely took over the Bluetooth stack which I didn’t want to do because I was afraid it would prevent my Microsoft Wireless Entertainment Desktop 7000 (Bluetooth keyboard & mouse combo) from working.
Well, the other day I decided to replace my old Plantronics Explorer 320 headset (Bluetooth 1.2) with a new Sony Playstation 3 Bluetooth headset (cheap, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR). I went and paired up the new headset with Vista, however the sound was just as choppy as before and it really didn’t seem to be any better; those old Bluetooth Audio drivers I hacked in to Vista needed updating…
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I’ve spent the last week with a very very odd networking problem, and all my attempts at figuring it out and fixing it have yielded nothing but more questions than answers.
I first noticed the problem after having taken my network apart because I got a new Rogers VOIP cable box (Rogers Home Phone service) added, and I opted to hook it up myself so I could do a nice wiring job. I got that done and hooked everything back up just the way it was – powered on my firewall/server box, cable modem and router all hooked up just they were before. Things seemed normal until I tried to go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com and my browser stalled half way trying to load it up – refreshes wouldn’t help much, sometimes it would get a bit further, but it never got to loading the ActiveX part of it. Other sites were working fine though which was really confusing.
I thought maybe Windows XP was pwned or something, so I tried Vista – it worked which led me to think XP was in trouble – so I spent countless hours searching for anything – something – that I thought might be the cause. I tried fixing *everything* from network stacks, registry, hardware, drivers, WSH reinstall – you name it. Nothing worked. Then I noticed file transfers were very slow for uploads through XP and Vista, so I got to tinkering with stuff to figure that out.
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Categories: General Tags: ActiveX, cable modem, D-Link, DHCP, firewall, Gentoo, Internet, Internet access, iptables, LAN, Linux, MTU, network, network card, NIC, Realtek, Rogers, router, SSH, VOIP, Windows, Windows Vista, Windows XP, wireless router, workstation