I came across this article on Ars Technica a while ago while looking for ways to improve Flash performance on my two Ubuntu machines. I wanted to see if there was a way to get YouTube clips to play properly. Both my 1 GHz Pentium III and the 1.6 GHz Atom have trouble with Flash videos and especially it seems with Flash’s full screen mode.

Ars tested how much CPU load YouTube caused on some pretty interesting machines.
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I know. This is basically silly, but some system tray icons bug the hell out of me. Here part of my current setup. See the mushroom sticking out like a sore thumb? I love Cobian Backup, and have recently installed it as a service, but the tray icon is making me itch. Codenamed “Amanita”, version 9 of course needed a mushroom icon, but compared to the black moon icon of version 8 this is pretty bad. A slightly more sedate colour scheme would be nice, as well a proper anti-aliasing.

Unfortunately, I can find no option to change the icon under Vista Home Premium, so I guess I’ll have to live with it. Seen against the greater scheme of things this is of course only a minor gripe, but if anyone knows an easy fix, please drop me a comment.

I haven’t been doing much Flash lately, but each time I needed to edit older projects I noticed how slow the Actionscript editor was since I moved to Vista. It was so sluggish I ended up making all sorts of typos. I googled for a fix, and eventually found one here.

Setting Flash.exe’s compatibility mode to “Windows XP” will restore the editor to its former speedy self. What a relief. Let’s hope this gets fixed altogether in future versions…

I’ve never been a loyal customer when it comes to graphic cards in my PC. If I remember correctly I went from an S3 card to a Matrox G100, a G200, a nVidia geForce 256, a cheap ATI card and now I’m back with nVidia. During all this the only real driver trouble I’ve had was with the Matrox cards, which could not render OpenGL games. But today I found out that nVidia’s Vista drivers do not feature nView.
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I recently bought a couple a HomePlug adapters to see if they would get me a more stable network connection over wifi. However, as soon as I connected them and fired up my PC I started getting all sorts of network trouble. DHCP would work, but DNS wouldn’t, leaving me unable to surf the web. I now turns out that all this was due to driver issues with the onboard network adapter on my Asus motherboard. This ‘Attansic’ or ‘Atheros’ adapter has apparently been causing issues for many people.
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