It seems a number of folks have been having problems finding touchpad drivers for Windows Vista. I recently started trying out Vista on a laptop at home which happens to have a Synaptics touchpad. Without the drivers and its enhancement programs, using...

At first I thought it was just the random person ... Now it seems there are lots of folks trying to soup up Hybrid electric cars with Lithium-Ion batteries! Are they nuts?! Li-Ion can be very very unstable and dangerous. Deform or puncture one and you...

So you have been spoiled by years of running as an Administrator on Windows and used to being able to do whatever you want? Well you'd better start getting used to not running as Admin all the time otherwise Windows Vista is going to drag you into the...

Ever notice how you sometimes write a small batch file to automate something and then it starts growing and soon you start hitting the limits of what the batch file language can do and everything becomes an unmaintainable mess? The natural solution...

It's amazing and funny how fast my post about the slow notepad issue has become the top result when you do a web search for slow notepad :) MSN Search , Yahoo and Google all show that blog post as the top result (at least as of now). Ironically enough...

Say you want to debug your .Net application on some production enviroment, customer site/server and remote debugging is not an option due to various network issues like firewall, latency, cordoned off network etc. Installing Visual Studio might just take...

So it comes to pass. The beginning of the end of the Win9x era with the (official) end of support for Windows 98 and ME. Its been a long time from the heady days of Windows 95 for the Win9x line and nowadays most people probably don't think much of it...

Time for a post related to the division I work in (MSTV). I'm sure most of you would have heard about HDTV and depending on your perspective its a revolution or an evolution. If you care about picture quality and you are one of those folks who would never...

Hmm ... So I've fallen into the same trap as so many other bloggers who start something and then it peters out. Life happens in between ... But as a new year resolution I plan to start blogging a bit more consistently and frequently. But don't hold me...

Recently I started having some device driver related problems on my laptop. Sometimes when I would leave my laptop in a standby power state and come back, the system would have strange problems after coming out of standby. IE would hang trying to load...

Well PDC is underway and for all the nice Vista, WinFX and Office 12 news, what really excites me most is LINQ (Language INtegrated Query) . This is huge. Finally COBOL and xBase have some serious competition in terms of language integrated data capabilities...

Ever notice how notepad can be really slow opening large files? Yeah I know why use notepad at all? For the simple reason that it might be the only editor on some random server that you logon to look at logs etc. Well there is Wordpad too but the default...

So I thought I'd finally start a blog and start sharing some of my views, ideas, tips and tidbits related to computers with the rest of the world. I'm Shiv (Shiv Shankar Ramakrishnan) and my job at Microsoft is to watch TV :) Well not really but kind...