Sunday, February 24, 2008

Enabling or disabling Large Fonts for Internet Explorer

As documented here [1] you need to change this following registry value to 1 (= enabled) or 0 (=  disabled) and restart IE.

  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER

    • Software
      • Microsoft
        • Internet Explorer
          • Main
            UseHR = dword:00000001

 

[1] http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa770067.aspx

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

FIX: Performance too slow when doing web development with Visual Studio 2008?

Microsoft released a hotfix [1] for Visual Studio 2008 (also targeting Visual Web Developer Express) that corrects several issues with the web development features.

At this time the hotfix is only available for the English and Japanese versions.

List of things that were corrected according to this post [2] by Vinaya Reddy:

HTML Source view performance

  • Source editor freezes for a few seconds when typing in a page with a custom control that has more than two levels of sub-properties.
  • “View Code” right-click context menu command takes a long time to appear with web application projects.
  • Visual Studio has very slow behavior when opening large HTML documents.
  • Visual Studio has responsiveness issues when working with big HTML files with certain markup.
  • The Tab/Shift-Tab (Indent/Un-indent) operation is slow with large HTML selections.

Design view performance

  • Slow typing in design view with certain page markup configurations.

HTML editing

  • Quotes are not inserted after Class or CssClass attribute even when the option is enabled.
  • Visual Studio crashes when ServiceReference element points back to the current web page.

JavaScript editing

  • When opening a JavaScript file, colorization of the client script is sometimes delayed several seconds.
  • JavaScript Intellisense does not work if an empty string property is encountered before the current line of editing.

Web Site build performance

  • Build is very slow when Bin folder contains large number of assemblies and .refresh files with web-site projects.

Make sure to read the installation instructions at [2].

Enjoy!

[1] https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=10826

[2] http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/archive/2008/02/09/downloadable-hotfix-performance-and-editor-fixes-for-microsoft-visual-studio-2008-and-visual-web-developer-express-2008.aspx

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

PRB: Dell Dimension freezes periodically for approx 30 seconds on Vista

Usually I try to blog things that interest many people, but there are some cases where the audience is knowingly extremely small, but nevertheless these people will be very glad to have found a solution to their problem.

If you own a Dell Dimension 9xxx and install Windows Vista, which at least in my case is not officially supported, but Dell Support did a very good job in helping me out, and your system periodically freezes (music stops etc.) and after approximately 30 seconds it's like is has never happened and after 2 or even 10 minutes it starts over.

There can be different reasons for this behavior, I can name two of them:

  1. Install the firmware for your Philips DVD 6316 [1]
  2. Install Intel Matrix Storage Software (this one solved it in my case). [2]

I'm looking forward to hearing success stories. :-)

 

[1] http://ftp.us.dell.com/rmsd/DROM6316_ODFN.zip

[2]ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/SATA/R139843.EXE

PRB: Windows DreamScene reappearing under Windows Update

Do you happen to know the situation as well? No matter how often you install Windows DreamScene it keeps reappearing as a "new" update?

However the solution is easy: first uninstall it (Control Panel > Software > Installed Updates) and rerun Windows Update.

Now install it once more and it should not appear again (but instead you'll see the content packs with more "dream scenes" [2]).

Enjoy!

[1] http://windowsultimate.com/blogs/extras/archive/2007/03/14/windows-dreamscene.aspx

[2] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931133