Drivers

Having made the switch from my trusty Lenovo T520 to the W540 here is my account of what works well and what does not. If you wonder what made me choose the W540: read this.

Configuring an HP Elitebook with integrated HS2340 mobile broadband module to use the 3G connection can be a little tricky. Here is how it works - without third-party dialer software!

Installing a software that includes a driver may leave your system in an inconsistent state. If the install fails, parts may remain on the system. And if the remaining part is a driver, I get nervous - drivers are not the kind of stuff I want to have lingering around my system’s memory. Here is a way of identifying when a driver actually got installed.

Normally, finding the cause for high CPU utilization is easy - just start Task Manager. But what if the component consuming CPU cycles is a driver that runs in the kernel? In that case, there is no regular process Task Manager could attribute the usage to. You will see the “System Idle Process” at around 98%, but the “Performance” tab might indicate 50% CPU usage. How can that be?

After neglecting my good old Canon EOS 350D for some time, I took some pictures with it yesterday, which I wanted to transfer to my laptop, of course. And there the trouble started.

In the previous article of this mini-series I described how to install Windows 7 x64 beta 1 into a virtual hard disk (VHD) file. In this post I will share some thoughts on what using Windows 7 x64 actually feels like.

This is the fourth part of a mini-series on Windows x64, focusing on behind the scene changes in the operating system. In the last article I wrote about the changes to the x86 processor architecture that make x64 possible. But there is of course more to a new platform than just updated hardware.