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How to slipstream updates into Windows 8.1

I need a Windows box, so I figured I’d experiment with Windows 8.1. I know it’s terrible, but I want to see just how much less terrible I can make it.

The first thing I wanted to do was figure out how to slipstream updates into it. I recommend slipstreaming because you get a faster performing system, you get the system up and running a lot sooner, and you save a lot of unnecessary writes to your SSD. It’s very similar to slipstreaming Windows 7, but not quite identical.

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Ctrl-Alt-Del history: non revisionist edition

When it comes to Ctrl-Alt-Del history, there’s a lot of selective memory going on.

Bill Gates said last week that he regrets the use of Ctrl-Alt-Del as a logon sequence, while David Bradley, the IBM PC engineer who built that feature into the first IBM PC, says he doesn’t know why Microsoft chose to use that sequence for logon anyway.

Both of them, for whatever reason, are forgetting a few things.

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Four simple steps to optimize WordPress

A couple of years ago, I stood up a WordPress server. I made no effort to tune it, let alone turbocharge it, which is a decision I later came to regret. If your site gets more than a few hundred hits per day, you need to tune it. If you want to get more than a few hundred hits per day, you need to tune it because Apache and MySQL’s default settings are by no means one-size-fits-all. And you can never have too much speed. There are two reasons for that: Google favors fast sites over slow sites, and Amazon found that a one-second delay in page load drops traffic by 7 percent.

There’s a lot of advice out there on tuning WordPress, some of which seems to be good, and some of it not so good.

Here are four things that I know work. I run Apache and MySQL under Linux; these tools may run under Windows or OS X too.
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How to make finicky 32-bit applications install and run in 64-bit Windows

Certain older 32-bit applications (notably Adobe Creative Suite CS2 apps, but there are probably others) object to being installed in “C:\Program Files (x86)\”, which is where 64-bit Windows wants to put legacy 32-bit apps.

The solution is easy but non-obvious, as is true so much of the time.

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Amiga on x86

Re-implementing Amiga OS on cheap, commodity x86 hardware always made sense, so I’m not surprised that someone is doing it. Mostly I’m surprised that it took me this long to find it.

Am I interested? You bet. I’m sure I can find some PC hardware to run it on. I certainly don’t see myself using it as an everyday machine, but as something to tinker on, and something to have running next to my everyday machine, I can see it being fun and possibly even useful.