Searching With WindowsXP

Why o Why….

When you do a search on your computer using Windows XP built in search mechanism, XP uses explorer.exe to execute your search. For some reason this process has a high priority thread setting and since searching is a reasonably intensive job it starts to use a lot of cpu time. But WTH! Does every thing else has to freeze because of that? Bill seems to say yes, I say NO Continue reading “Searching With WindowsXP”

How Vista crashed my Acer or the other way around.

Yesterday I managed to crash my Acer or Microsofts Vista. Or maybe both, the latter probably helped the former.

The portable was running on batteries, for some reason I didn’t log in yet and Vista was waiting for me to give in a password. As Vista decided that it had to wait to long, it let the Acer go in hibernate mode. Upon returning to the laptop, activating it, Vista asked my password. So far so normal… but after waiting 8 minutes on the loading screen I got tired, cause it normally takes less then 30 seconds, I pressed any key that could have any effect, tried the mouse, ctrl+alt+delete, but nothing helped. It was hanging. The only thing left to do was press the hardware button ‘start/shutdown/reset’. So I did.

Guess what: upon restarting, the Acer starts looking for a boot-device… for some reason the HD had disappeared.  No more booting !! (unless from network/usb/cd/dvd)

If it is Vista that crashed the HD or if it’s the ACER that crashed the HD, I have not determined yet. The acer is going back to the shop (it’s still in guarantee).