This time it was my monitor. Three and a half years old. LG 700E. CRT. 17″ non-flat. SXVGA (that’s a maximum resolution of 1280×1024). And now it’s gone.

It was funny. One morning, I switched on the monitor, the PC being already running all night, and I noticed something funny about the display. Flickering and wavy lines…the sort you see on long distance transmissions in sci-fi movies. I thought my 8600 was going to conk out again, so I took some emergency measures, the simples of which being switching off the PC for a while. It had been donloading for a while now, so I though a bit of cooling down would help. I had almost killed my motherboard last time by letting it run for too long.

Anyway, after I booted the PC again, the problem persisted, so I came to the logical consclusion that my monitor was acting up. I didn’t pay much attention to it, and continued with my work.

Later in the day, I started Burnout Paradise. My PC, being 3 years old, isn’t exactly all that great for the game, and I had set the resolution low, and just as Burnout changed resolution, I heard a faint ping, and then darkness. Quite undramatic actually.

If I switched off the monitor and restarted it, I would just hear the faint ping, instead of the sound of degaussing. I was pondering for quite a while, and called up Mom to ask if we could ask for a spare monitor or something. And that’s when she reminded my that we still had the old 15 inch monitor from my Compaq Presario. Agreed it’s white, which goes against the colour scheme of my entire PC (black with silver highlights). But it works. And it has been working for over 8 years. Agreed it’s just 15″ diagonally and supports a max resolution of 1024×768. but it works…

And this makes me think about quality. I clearly remember when I was about to buy my PC, that I wanted a Philips monitor, but they gave me a LG one anyway, and I didn’t quite mind at the time, but now I think that I should have raised hell. If only my monitor was like my LG refrigerator, which has been running flawlessly for over a decade.

But now I have a newfound respect for my old ‘heap of junk’. I think I’ll try to get the old PC fixed…needs a ROM flash or something…otherwise it’s completely fine…and quite ancient…but that’s OK.

So I was early at 5 on the 29th. Went for a jog, came back, then went to Sirifort for a spot of cricket. Came back around 8:45. The result was due to come out at 10, but the people at NIC decided to release it an hour early. I guess I was one of the first to access it, because none of the friends who I called after checking my result knew theirs, and consequently I can be held responsible for the sudden increase in heartrate induced in all of them. Anyway, with certain apprehensions, I headed to cbseresults.nic.in, navigated to the page for class X results, and entered my roll number : 6168782.

• English – 88 – expected, mainly because this is the most unpredictable subject in the CBSE boards. There really is no way a student can get to know where his/her paper was checked. Anyway, the problem, more often than not, is that the language used can get a bit complicated. Long winding sentences. Strange (at least for the examiner) words. In short, the paper’s too good for a 90+. I tried my best to control myself as I wrote my paper. Tried to use simple words, and tried to keep my sentences short. I guess even that didn’t work. But I’m not really complaining. What when really smart people were in the 70s. So I was thankful that I atleast got 85+.
• Science and Maths – 93 - disappointed. I knew I made a mistake in Maths, that would cost me 3 marks, but what I didn’t know that there were other mistakes as well. And it all seemed to have gone so well… Science was a bit iffy, because the last exam I gave, the MCQ, wasn’t a piece of cake, not by a long shot…
• Social Studies - 99 – shocking…I mean, I know I studied for SSt, but not well enough. Still, I read in the papers that the marking scheme and checking was better this time, so I guess I just got lucky.
• French – 97 – just wow…I just have one thing to say, in my pre-board, I got 64.5…and now this! Still haven’t fully accepted it…

Anyway, shortly after the result came, and I had satisfied all the relatives I knew and those I didn’t with a satisfying answer of 94%, I went out to play cricket and so forth, with my friends. Next day, I’m down with a fever, cold and cough. Went for a VMC class in that condition, and I still regret it… Have just sort of recovered cause my temperatures stable at normal for a few hours. Ciao…

P.S. Whoops and sniffles is not a stupid way of saying celebrating and crying at the same time like some demented insecure teenager. I just mean I’ve got a cold…

Firstly, if you’ll just jog your memory not too far back, you’ll remember a number of phishing attacks that Facebook came under. A large number of login IDs and passwords were stolen as well. So that got me thinking, if I login with my GMail account and password, and if that got stolen, that would probably lead to a lot more trouble.

By the way, the entire concept is called OpenID, which lets you login to multiple web services with just one set of credentials. The login and password can be of one of the many OpenID providers, like Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, PayPal et al. It’s pretty useful, but then, even if the security of even one of the websites accepting OpenID accounts is compromised, it could, lead to trouble with your entire online life.

Anyway, the problem is that Windows 7 constantly bugs me about the amount of space left on these drives. Luckily, there’s a simple registry tweak for this.

Usual Disclaimer : Since I’m not behind your chair, with a gun at your head, you can’t hold me responsible for your actions. Do what you’re doing, at your own risk. You have been warned….muhahahaha…

Open the Registry Editor by typing in ‘regedit‘, in a Run dialogue (Ctrl+R). Now, in the tree, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER -> Software -> Microsoft -> Windows -> CurrentVersion  -> Policies. Right-click on the right pane, and select New -> Key, and give the name as ‘Explorer’. Now, select the Explorer key in the left pane and in the right pane, right-click -> New -> DWORD (32bit) Value. Type in the name as ‘NoLowDiskSpaceChecks’. Then right-click on this new entry and select ‘Modify’. Change the value to 1.

Then you’re done. All you’ll need to do is restart ‘explorer.exe’. Do this by entering the Task Manager, going to the Processes tab, selecting explorer.exe, and pressing Delete. Confirm it, and all your windows will magically vanish…:-P…just open the Run dialogue and type in explorer.exe, and you won’t have any more annoying pop-ups and system tray icons.

I’ve got 3 tabs open : My Wordpress post page, my Gmail inbos and a PCWorld article. Memory usage? – 285 MB!

No, that isn’t a typo, nor have I missed a decimal or something. I mean, you can run an entire OS for less RAM than that, and a simple web browser decides to lord it over my system. And I haven’t really got all that many resources to spare here. On checking the task manager, I find that there are a total of 3-4 processes for iexplore.exe. Each taking a humungous amount of RAM. And it’s not exactly as if IE8 is the zippiest browser around, as I pointed out in my earlier post.

Plus, I doubt the level of security of this browser, seeing Microsoft’s past record with IE. Seeing the level of browser integration with the OS, a small security loophole could just compromise the entire system. Thankfully, XP and Ubuntu are still around. I’m sure it’s just a piece of swiss cheese with a ‘blue e’ pasted on top.

And for some reason, it won’t automatically open the last Browsing Session, unlike Firefox, which asks you the first time you close the browser. Instead, all it asked me the first time I closed it, was whether I wanted to close the current tab or the entire browser. Speaks a lot about what Microsoft thinks of its customers…

Haven’t yet used WebSlices, mainly because I don’t really need it. Nevertheless, the big shocker was the memory leak. <shakes head>