October 2004 - Posts

• Part II of "Breathing more life into an "old" PC"

  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 Read More... Posted Tuesday, October 26, 2004 2:02 PM by Matt Pietrek | 0 Comments

• The death of 3rd party system tools?

  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 Read More... Posted Thursday, October 21, 2004 12:25 PM by Matt Pietrek | 24 Comments

• Breathing more life into an "old" PC

  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 Read More... Posted Monday, October 18, 2004 5:56 PM by Matt Pietrek | 12 Comments

• Are your IDE drives slower than they used to be?

  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 Read More... Posted Monday, October 18, 2004 5:41 PM by Matt Pietrek | 4 Comments

• Mike Stall on "Why can't I step through my IL?"

  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 Read More... Posted Monday, October 04, 2004 3:03 PM by Matt Pietrek | 0 Comments