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Taming Windows
On this page, some issues with Operating systems will be addressed (mainly Windows XP).
Apparently, many users treat their mouse like a toy car, resting their paw on it and hovering it around as far as the mouse pad will allow.
It's better for the tendons and a lot
smarter, to have the palm rest on the table and just kick the
mouse around between fingers.
Windows 98 and 2K made this easy, as their acceleration and sensitivity
levels allowed for appropriate settings.
Not so Windows XP. Just using Window's system control for mouse speed settings either results in a very slow mouse, or it lets the cursor move in steps of several pixels at once. At least this happens with a mechanical mouse. XP apparently is designed for optical mice only. So either you get an optical mouse - default settigs work best with an 800 dpi mouse, about 400-1600 dpi can be adjusted for - or you follow the instuctions below:
Developers gave XP a new mouse acceleration curve that could be influenced from the registry, but the implementation seems to have been abandoned half way through. There are these registry entries, yes, but there is no tool to access them but the registry editor, the values are hex and several digits long, and albeit there is a description available, it's apparently not entirely correct.
If you change these registry values they only take effect after a reboot, and any changing of the mouse settings with normal Windows system control will inevitably restore the default registry values again, so just trying out values can take forever.
Some alternate registry values can be found on the web, but they are only for inhibiting acceleration with some games. In Windows, the mouse is even slower with these.
What would be necessary, a tool with a user interface to access the acceleration curves, is not available and probably won't ever be, as long as the precise function of the values is unknown.
At least here is a setting that reproduces acceleration and accuracy as found in Windows 2K as close as possible. The registry values have been experimented with a lot of effort and this has proven tricky, as even a small change with some of the values may suddenly almost paralyze the mouse pointer or have other unpredictable results.
Now here is how this works:
First, access your mouse settings in system control, and with the cursor movement options, set it to fastest, and place a hook at the acceleration field.
Then, download this .reg file, double
click on it and confirm (right click and select edit if you want
to know its content before).
Here it is in plain text:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Mouse]
"SmoothMouseXCurve"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,15,6e,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,40,\
1c,00,00,00,00,00,29,dc,00,18,00,00,00,00,00,00,80,ff,00,00,00,00
"SmoothMouseYCurve"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,b8,5e,01,00,00,00,00,00,cd,4c,\
00,02,00,00,00,00,cd,4c,28,ff,00,00,00,00,00,00,38,ff,00,00,00,00
Now reboot. After this, you should have the speedy mouse.
In case you don't like the result, just change mouse settings in the system control. This should also restore the registry values to default. In case it wouldn't, here is a .reg file with these default values. It's plain text is:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Mouse]
"SmoothMouseXCurve"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,15,6e,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,40,\
01,00,00,00,00,00,29,dc,03,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,28,00,00,00,00,00
"SmoothMouseYCurve"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,b8,5e,01,00,00,00,00,00,cd,4c,\
05,00,00,00,00,00,cd,4c,18,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,38,02,00,00,00,00
You may also modify the .reg file and try to adapt the acceleration curve to your own taste, but be warned, that's cumbersome and may take lots of reboots and time.
Memory Myths
Some tuning tools tell you it would be
good to activate 'large system cache' under Windows 2000 or XP.
If you followed such advice, just try to copy 1 GB of data onto
a memory stick with USB 1.0. You'll first see an astonishingly
short estimated time estimate displayed. Then this will switch
from seconds to minutes. Then your system will almost stop to
respond, for half an hour.
Why? because with this setting, Windows will fill your entire
system memory with cached data, until not a single byte is left
for applications. There are fixes, little apps and even payware
"solutions" for such problems, mainly tweaking around
with the 'IoPageLockLimit' setting. Fact is, newer Windows updates
don't even care for the latter, and even a Sysinternals tool called
'Cacheset.exe' lies to you about the cache size, as this tool
could only be useful to old NT if at all.
Use Window's Task Manager too look at memory usage and you can
easily verify this.
So there is only one correct setting for the 'LargeSystemCache'
key in your registry: 0.
You find this key in your registry, with Regedit.exe, under
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session
Manager\Memory Management
There you also find the obsolete 'IoPageLockLimit'
that's best left at 0 as well.
(Do not try any registry
editing if you don't exactly know what you're doing - this is
100% at your own responsibility and risk !!)
Try the copy test described above again, an in Task Manager you
will see that no more than half the system memory will be used
for caching, and that the available memory will not decrease at
all (i.e. will really be freed if applications need it).
Given the possible catastrophic effects of 'LargeSystemCache' set to 1, it's not even recommendable for file servers, because even these need software to run !
Vista, anyone ?
DRM in my opinion can't ever work in
an acceptable way, as it tries to overcome the laws of mathematics
and physics. The author of this extensive study on the impacts of Vista's DRM and related
'features' comes to equivalent conclusions. It may be worthwhile
reading this, especially if you do professional media work. The
real complexity of the DRM stuff involved is shown in this MS
lecture. Of course, it's not MS to be blamed for all this,
they didn't invent DRM !
Just recently, there has been a largely off-topic discussion on ZDnet, about the energy consumption
issue in the study, a single paragraph treating one special aspect
of the total economical consequences (of course, the Keyword 'global
warming' arouses anyone). To put this one right, encryption of
high resolution video, if the feature is used, will of course
consume significant power, and it's not relevant if in the CPU
or in a separate chip. Just recently, the AACS LA has announced to insist on bus encryption
in the future, and as this concerns uncompressed video data, the
throughput will be 1-2 orders of magnitude higher than what can
be handled with software encryption. Which would imply using specialized
chips not present on existing hardware (that would then become
obsolete once more - ain't it nice).
But this is not the real issue. The total damage
from perpetrating DRM is way more complex and many orders of magnitude
higher.
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