TMP Archives - The Silicon Underground

Cleaning the Windows registry – and optimizing

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 17 Feb 2017 12:00:53 +0000

Cleaning the Windows registry is a popular and controversial topic. Many pundits tell you never to do it. When I wrote a book about Windows back in 1999, I dedicated most of one chapter to the topic. But today the pundits

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Common AmigaDOS commands

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 16 Aug 2016 11:00:00 +0000

The Amiga had a command line, or CLI. It was a rather powerful CLI, especially for its time. But there are a number of differences between AmigaDOS and other operating systems you may be familiar with. These are the common

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Curing random errors when installing Office 2013

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 19 May 2015 11:00:36 +0000

I got lots of random errors installing Office 2013 when I went to do it, including error code 112-4 and error code 0-4, and some other install errors mostly ending in 4 that aren’t documented on Microsoft’s web site. Although previously

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SSD write endurance (aka longevity) vindicated

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 10:01:22 +0000

I found this chart earlier this week regarding SSD write endurance. Basically, it plots out how long an SSD would last if you set out to deliberately destroy it by writing to it continuously. You could expect a mainstream 128-GB

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How to move your temporary files to a ramdisk

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 12:16:27 +0000

Moving the rest of your temporary files to a ramdisk provides a number of performance benefits. Program installations proceed noticeably faster, and fewer files written to your system disk means less fragmentation, less maintenance for an SSD, and, most likely,

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Using video memory as a ramdisk in Linux

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 22:58:54 +0000

An old idea hit me again recently: Why can't you use the memory that's sitting unused on your video card (unless you're playing Doom) as a ramdisk? It turns out you can, just not if you're using Windows. Some Linux people have been doing <a href="http://hedera.linuxnews.pl/_news/2002/09/03/_long/1445.html">it</a> for two years.<p>

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Optimizing dynamic Linux webservers

Dave Farquhar — Mon, 26 Jan 2004 23:20:00 +0000

Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP (LAMP) provides an outstanding foundation for building a web server, for, essentially, the value of your time. And the advantages over static pages are fairly obvious: Just look at this web site. Users can log in and post comments without me doing anything, and content on any page can change programmatically. In my site's case, links to my most popular pages appear on the front page, and as their popularity changes, the links change.

The downside? Remember the days when people bragged about how their 66 MHz 486 was a perfectly good web server? Kiss those goodbye. For that matter, your old Pentium-120 or even your Pentium II-450 may not be good enough either. Unless you know these secrets...

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If I had my own Linux distribution

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 30 Apr 2003 21:54:32 +0000

I found an interesting editorial called If I had my own Linux Distro. He's got some good ideas but I wish he'd known what he was talking about on some others.

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Red Hat and Debian fans debate desktop Linux

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 19 Nov 2002 23:28:27 +0000

Mail from longtime reader Steve Mahaffey on the state of desktop Linux. My responses interspersed within:

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How to get mod_gzip working on your Linux/Apache server

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 30 May 2001 17:00:34 +0000

My research yesterday found that Mandrake, in an effort to get an edge on performance, used a bunch of controversial Apache patches that originated at SGI. The enhancements didn't work on very many Unixes (presumably they were tested on Linux and Irix) and were rejected by the Apache group. SGI has since axed the project, and it appears that only performance-oriented Mandrake is using them.

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