Under The Hood - Matt Pietrek

Last week I mentioned ordering a CPU upgrade for my main home machine , taking it from 1.4GHz up to 2.8GHz. I promised to report back on the experience. The upgrade was on my doorstep when I arrived home from work last night. Before getting started, I...

A co-worker recently asked me what I thought about the upcoming hardening of the x64 versions of Windows , which makes it harder to write cool programs like Compuware's SoftIce , or RegMon & FileMon from SysInternals . The gist is that Windows will...

As part of this weekend's fun improving the performance of my aging 3-year old machine at home, I found that I could upgrade to modern day CPU performance for not that much $. My main machine at home is a 1.4 GHz Dell Dimension 8100. Apparently these...

This weekend during an unexpected burst of energy, I tackled the problem of my IDE drive which seemed to have gotten slower recently. A little detective work lead me to the difference between PIO and DMA mode. (Which I previously hadn't paid any attention...

Back when I was first learning .NET, I was always wondering why there wasn't an IL debugger. It wasn't until I had really seen the guts of .NET executing that I realized that an IL debugger wouldn't be particularly useful for real world debugging. The...