Visual Studio can be a tremendous resource hog, especially if you have a large solution and you're using a productivity add-in or two. On my current project we're running VS 2008, we've got just under 20 projects in the solution, and several of us are using the ReSharper 4.0 EAP nightly builds to enhance our dev-fu. And you know what... we're restarting VS at least a half dozen times a day to work around a nasty exception we regularly encounter while trying to compile: Not enough storage is available to complete this operation. ...

The tech support for a certain large computer manufacturer, who shall remain nameless... but their initials start with an H and end with a P, recently stole more than eight hours of my life. Yep, that’s a whole work day’s worth of my life that I’ll never get back. Sound familiar? It should. Anyone who has ever owned or been responsible for any significantly complex piece of technology and/or equipment (read: magic) has at some point called tech support or customer service. Calling tech support/customer service is never fun. No one likes to spend their already limited...

As a geek there is only one thing I love as much as shiny gadgets - pictures of shiny gadgets I have yet to acquire! It should come as no surprise that Jeff and Scott’s recent posts about building the Ultimate Developer Rig have triggered a fair amount of geek envy among the community. Want it, want it, gotta' have it! In attempt to curb my desires to go out and build a new rig, or buy in the case of the MBP I’ve lusting for, I’ve decided to post a little geek pr0n of my own. Be...

Tonight I wasted several hours troubleshooting hardware/driver issues with my development box - a fully loaded Dell OptiPlex GX620. I've been fighting with this particular machine since the day I got it. Recently it's been freezing up, the USB controllers malfunction at random times, it hangs during boot (before the OS even starts loading), and all kinds of other fun stuff. I've already upgraded the BIOS to the latest available version, released back in December 2006, and applied all relevant firmware and chipset driver updates. Oh, and I'm running Vista Ultimate 32-bit... though I had the same hardware issues...

Not too long ago I was reading up on some of the cool new features Inside the Windows Kernel (part 2) and I got pretty excited about one new feature in particular - ReadyBoost. So when I upgraded to Vista (about a month ago now) one of the first things I tried was plugging an extra 1GB Flash drive into various USB ports - so I could use the drive to Speed up my system. Speed up my system? Apparently when you plug a new USB device into a PC running Vista there is a new option at the bottom of...