Tech Spot

I upgraded from Windows Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Home Premium.  Right away I had some CPU issues (high CPU usage around 85%-90% without a corresponding item in taskmgr, even with "Show processes from all users" checked).  Some of these I believe were driver related.  And then one was because of Skype 4.1.  It turns out that even though Skype 4.1 is now officially Windows 7 certified, it's extremely buggy in 64-bit versions of Windows 7, even though I'm running in 32-bit compatibility mode.  Not only did it cause some issues for Windows 7, but Skype itself didn't work right.  Sometimes the Skype app would freeze without warning.  I was able to call someone using SkypeOut, but they could not hear me.  It also locked out my audio options such as "Playback Devices" and "Recording Devices", and possibly even the RealTek HD Audio Manager tool. Here's a way to make Skype run smoothly, by changing the compatibility run mode to Windows Vist

Recently I had some major performance issues with Firefox 3. I upgraded to 3.5 but it was still painfully slow even though my system memory and CPU were fine. Turns out it was the SkypeNames.exe that got installed with Skype 4.0.0.227. All you need to do in Firefox is go to Tools menu -> Add-ons, then uninstall the Skype service. It only uninstalls the SkypeNames.exe; Skype works normally after that. Here's a thread on the Skype Forums discussing it. http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=374041&st=0

You see mistakes all the time in really crappy ads, but it's interesting to see it from Amazon.com in a banner ad for their Video on Demand service. I guess they "instanty" made this ad and skipped quality control. xD