Hi all,
       bloody Microsoft is driving me crazy! Whoever wrote the online
help, and the Software Developer's Kit Book is a lunatic! It obviously
drove him crazy too.

 I decided enable my power management to put the computer in standby
and turn things off. The last time I just disabled it in the BIOS and
that was that... but when I enabled the BIOS nothing happened unless I
*manually* started the power management software. All I had to do was
change the profile, put it back, APPLY and then it worked.

 Obviously, the power management software was not starting
automatically when I booted. So... I looked up STARTUP, and then
POWER, and then I went roaming through the entire HELP and SDK Book
trying to find out HOW THE FUCK you added a program to the starup when
you didn't even know WHAT THE FUCK the program was called!

 Talk about going around in circles... I read half the entire HELP
file and *all* SDK Book! And I went hunting in the REGISTRY and now
*THERE's* and exciting way to spend an afternoon! Finally, I gave
up and went into the Windows directory to run down *all* all the EXE
and DLL's looking for something that might be called POWER, or pwr, or
some fucking thing I could put in the starup directory and have it
run. I didn't find anything useful... until I found msinfo32.exe.

 What a jewel! It tells you what started up, what is running, and
better still it has a tool that lets you tick what you want in the
startup, including every line in AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS.

 Unfortunately, being Microsoft, there is no clue as to how you *add*
new programs, but the power management was there, TWICE! It is called
"rundll.exe powrprof.dll,LoadCurrentPowerScheme" and BOTH of them were
unticked. I wasn't game to tick them both... God knows what would
happen. In fact, most of the programs were listed twice, but I've come
to realise that it's pretty standard for the M$ Registry. It only adds
new things; it never removes the old ones...

 Plus, there were all sorts of useless stuff starting. Every time you
add a new program to the Windows environment, it rewrites the registry
and starts something useless that runs in the background. I've found
the way to get rid of them! The idea of a registry that just keeps
getting bigger with totally incomprehensible entries is a work of the
purest genius. I am pretty sure that Bill Gates now has a Mini-me
Clone like Dr Evil.

 msinfo32.exe! It's a hidden jewel. Of course, there are all sorts of
warnign that if you change anything you'll destroy the Universe
and Western Civilisation as we know it. I was disappointed when it
still works. 

 Now, all I have to do is find out why my bloody printer has stopped
working. 

Regards,
Bob


 

--- BQWK Alpha 0.5