unsigned long geek = random();

For a while I’ve been suspecting that the Intel Speedstep settings on my laptop have been a bit wonky. Although the Pentium M CPU is supposed to run at 1500Mhz, it’s always seemed a bit sluggish and video performance has been pretty poor. Unfortunately with Windows XP and Server 2003 there isn’t much out-the-box support for tweaking the power settings. Compaq do have some utilities that work under XP, but of course I use Server 2003 on my Evo N620c and the utilities won’t install on anything but XP. D’oh!

Luckily I found SpeedswitchXP, which can do some pretty mean tweaking of the power settings of newer AMD and Intel CPUs. It works very well, doesn’t use much in the way of resources and is GPLd. Schweet!

Finally got around to fixing an annoying problem that manifests itself when clicking on links in Outlook with Firefox as default browser. Before applying the fix, everytime I clicked on a link, I’d get an Open dialog. The link would still open in Firefox, but Outlook would be sitting there with a dialog box open.

For the solution, check out Fixing an annoying Firefox and Outlook glitch and the original solution in Graeme F’s weblog.

Works for me with Outlook 2003 and Firefox 0.9.x.

Before you ask: I only use Outlook for work email and groupware functionality – Mutt is still my MUA of choice.