Under the Tree at TWC

Notalotta outrageous gifting going on @twc this year. Biggest deals: My Wonder Woman okayed the purchase of a new (VERY inexpensive–cheaper than WallyWorld 17″-ers; gottalove Amazon.com) 22″ Acer LCD screen for my “old eyes computing,” Son&Heir and I exchanged (used) Xboxes (originals) for conversion to media servers–a fun lil project–and Lovely Daughter got a very nice new coat.

No biggies. Some other lil things.

Oh, one (very inexpensive) “biggie”–for a couple of years now, my Wonder Woman’s been kinda limping along with her otherwise exceptionally nice Toshiba Satellite A105 running on 512MB of memory. It was a compromise at the time of purchase, but memory prices have tumbled since then, so now it’s doing very nicely indeed with 4GB of memory. Which reminds me of a tip for those of y’all running 32-bit Windows with more than 3GB of RAM. Since 32-bit Windows doesn’t really see more than 3GB (oh, M$ claims it can see up to 4, but they can just pull the other one), it has to be tricked into seeing more. And even with (legitimate) trickery, it can still be a tad stinky about the 32-bit limits. But if you are one of those folks who added more RAM to a 32-bit Windows installation than the OS can see, here’s a workaround that at least partially works:

Enable DEP.

Yep. “Data Execution Prevention” is a M$ method of providing at least some OS protection against some malware. It’s not all that effective, so some folks don’t even bother to have it enabled. But the interesting thing about DEP is that enabling it also enables Physical Address Extension (PAE), “a feature of x86 processors that lets 32-bit operating systems overcome the 4GB memory limit.”¹

To enable DEP, simply go to Control Panel>System>Performance>Advanced>Settings>DEP and enable it… if it’s available on your hardware.

If PAE is not enabled on your system, you can do a teensy lil hack to enable it using Notepad (or some other PLAIN TEXT editor):

* Step 1. Choose Start, Run.
* Step 2. Type notepad c:\boot.ini and press Enter.
* Step 3. Under the [operating systems] heading, look for a line that contains the /noexecute switch, which turns software DEP. For example, it may be /noexecute=optin, /noexecute=optout, or /noexecute=always on. Place the cursor directly after that switch and type a space followed by /pae.

Save the file and reboot.

This neat lil trick is from Windows Secrets Newsletter. But be warned: if you’re not comfotable editing system files like boot.ini, leave it for your friendly local techie to do, ‘K?

OK, that lil diversion was all in aid of saying simply that my Wonder Woman’s lil Toshiba needed nothing in order to recognize and use the memory but a reboot and wipeout of a bum “System Restore Point” that wanted to insist she still had 512MB. (“System Restore” is a utility whose time has come… for being eliminated. Piece of junk, IMO.)

Looking at our laid back gift giving this year, I must admit it’s little different from other recent years since the kids gained adulthood. As a family, we have MORE than enough “stuff” and need very, very little. It’s nice to simply reflect on the Reason for Christmas apart from all the shopping and wrapping and all the other material effluvia.

But I will admit that it’s nice to see my Wonder Woman taking more pleasure in her computer use, Lovely Daughter dressing warmly (and stylishly) and Son&Heir having fun approaching his XBox/computer hacks. (OK, OK, we’re doing software mods/hacks rather than hardware hacks at this time. If the hardware hacks become necessary to get the performance we want, then we’ll look at that. Well, a couple of small hardware hacks to controller cables, but those’re trivial.)