Dosboy's Bits and Bytes

I've been trying to figure out how to do this for awhile now since the on-access scanner really slows down my laptop. Stuff on the 'net points to disabling services, removing the Run registry key via MSCONFIG, etc. All of those answers are bunk. The correct way to do this is as follows:

1. Right-click the avast! system tray icon () and select On-Access Protection Control from the popup menu.
   
2. Click the Details button in the bottom of the window that appears.
3. Click the Terminate button under Provider Actions.
4. Click Yes when the Persist the changes? dialog box appears.
5. Select the next item under Installed Providers and repeat steps 3 and 4.
   
6. Repeat step 5 for each of the Installed Providers, or whichever ones you don't want running on startup.

The advantage to doing this as opposed to disabling avast! completely is that you still get the startup scan and you're still able to scan files on-demand. I don't know why it took me so long to figure this out, but it is what it is. Hopefully it helps some people out there.

I was sitting around today wanting to do some work on my HTPC while also watching TV. Obviously if I'm watching TV full screen it's tough to mess around with software and the like. So I started googling to see if there was any way to get a 2nd Remote Desktop (Terminal Services) session (or VNC or anything really, other than console) on XP. Well, whaddya know, but there is!

See, when MS was working on SP2 they were also touting some technology called Mira. However Mira never made it to a version 2, as MS decided (most likely due to licensing restrictions) that they didn't want to allow multiple concurrent sessions on XP. So they scrapped it.

What they DID do though was release betas and release candidates which included the ability to have concurrent sessions. And enterprising individuals have made this work on SP2 boxes. I followed the directions here and it worked beautifully. The one thing you have to remember though is that you can't have the same user logged on twice. So you have to create an additional account for each remote session you're going to have connected. I also found this page that seems to automate the process, but I didn't try that one, so use at your own risk.

In downloading a bunch of stuff from microsoft.com, Firefox decided to stop letting me load MS pages while 2 concurrent downloads were running. After a little research, it turns out that if you type about:config (tried linking that but it seems you actually have to type it directly) in the Firefox address bar, you get a whole lot of options that I had no idea existed. One of these is network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server. The default value was 2. I changed it to 4 and immediately Firefox started responding again. Who knew?!