Nice of Microsoft to screw up the sleep/hibernation feature when they released Service Pack 2 for Windows XP. However, it’s even nicer of them not to fix it… that is unless you manual do it yourself.

So, if you’ve been having trouble getting your computer to wake up from sleep and/or hibernation, check “this”:1 fix out over at the Microsoft support site. Symptoms of this problem are:

bq.. Your Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2)-based computer may unexpectedly stop responding or experience random memory corruption when you resume from standby or from hibernation.

p. Of course, both of my Windows XP boxes suffer from these symptoms. I’ve downloaded the fix on one of my machines, and it seems to have done the trick.

Of course, the bigger fix is Vista… or perhaps the more permanent fix of “OS X”:2.

[2(Fix your Windows problems)]http://www.apple.com/macosx/

[1(Get your hibernation working again)]http://support.microsoft.com/kb/889673

Even though I primarily use Firefox for web browsing, I also use Internet Explorer. I find that it’s nice to have two browsers running at once. For example, if you have a couple of Yahoo! accounts you can quickly access both of them by having a different set of Yahoo! cookies enabled in each browser.

Unfortunately, one of the bad things about using IE 6 is that… well, it’s IE 6. Since Microsoft acquired a monopoly in web browsing after it killed Netscape, Microsoft did what all good monopolies do — they didn’t innovate. Ironically, this left an opening for products like Firefox, so thanks to Microsoft’s laziness, we now live in a much better browsing universe. And today that universe just got even better.

Today Microsoft released the beta 2 preview of “IE 7″:1. I’ve been using it for just a bit, but I like the new, cleaner interface, tabbed browsing, RSS integration (which kicks Firefox’s default RSS-integration’s butt), much better printing ability, multiple homepages (which you can set to load all at once) and better standards compliance/rendering. Try it out if you’re not afraid of beta 2 preview software (the new, new term for beta??).

Zoinger says, it’s about time.

P.S. Ok, I guess I’m a day behind, since the preview for IE 7 was actually released yesterday.

[1(IE 7 download home)]http://www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/ie7/default.mspx

There’s a pretty cool “demo video”:1 of Microsoft’s new “Office Communicator”:2 IM product over on “Channel 9″:4. Office Communicator is an enterprise IM solution that allows interconnection with both AOL’s AIM product and Yahoo!’s Messenger product. Some of the highlights of the video are:

* AOL AIM and Yahoo! Messenger integration
* Enterprise directory lookup
** Search by IM name or email address
** Lists phone numbers from directory
* PBX phone control via Office Messenger (cool!)
* Call forwarding and transferring control from Office Messenger
* VoIP calling from Office Messenger
* Live meeting data-sharing integration
* Conference calling integration (MCI service in this case)
* Discussion of security and encryption

I think the integration with “PBXs”:3 is particularly cool. PBX systems seem to be designed to be as non-intuitive as possible — a big part of this is due to the limits of a phone’s interface (i.e., a simple keypad with no display or a very small display). Obviously, you can build a much richer interface on a PC. I imagine that it would take some effort by a company’s IT department to get all of this working, but the productivity benefits could make it worth while.

I know a lot of people at work use IM to check to see if someone is at their desk before placing a call. Now you can check and call with a simple click of the mouse.

[4(Microsoft Channel 9 site)]http://channel9.msdn.com/

[3(Wikipedia PBX entry)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBX

[2(Office Communicator home page)]http://www.microsoft.com/office/rtc/client.mspx

[1(Microsoft Channel 9 video demo)]http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=69437

I can’t remember how I found this, but you might want to check out “TaskSwitchXP”:1 if you are interested in a highly-customizable Windows XP _alt-tab_ replacement. I installed it today, and I think I’m gonna keep it loaded. It’s small and fast and generates a preview window of each application as you scroll through the list like this:

!/img/TaskSwitchXP.png (TaskSwitchXP preview windows screen shot)!

TaskSwitchXP is really fast… so fast it “feels” like the normal _alt-tab_ utility — and not like the Microsoft “PowerToy”:2 replacement which is really slow. TaskSwitchXP also has about 1 gillion things you can “customize”:3 on it, is “distributed very free” and is open source… so what’s not to like?

[3(Things you can customize with TaskSwitchXP)]http://www.ntwind.com/taskswitchxp/config.html

[2(Home of Microsoft PowerToy Windows XP add-ons)]http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx

[1(TaskSwitch XP home page)]http://www.ntwind.com/taskswitchxp/index.html

“Scintilla”:1 is an open-source freeware code editor that I use a lot when editing CSS and HTML files. In fact, I use it in conjunction with Firefox’s “ViewSourceWith”:2 extension to view the source of pages. Why is Scintilla so useful? Well, for one, it makes the source of a page much more readable than Firefox’s built-in source viewer or applications like Windows Notepad. In addition, it has a bunch of advanced features like:

bq.. As well as features found in standard text editing components, Scintilla includes features especially useful when editing and debugging source code. These include support for syntax styling, error indicators, code completion and call tips. The selection margin can contain markers like those used in debuggers to indicate breakpoints and the current line. Styling choices are more open than with many editors, allowing the use of proportional fonts, bold and italics, multiple foreground and background colours and multiple fonts.

p. Here’s a screen shot that shows how readable Scintilla’s rendering of a page is:

!/img/Scintilla_screen_shot.png (Sample Scintilla view source output)!

If you do any kind of simple code editing like CSS or HTML or PHP, Scintilla is a great, lightweight application that will greatly increase your productivity.

[2(Zoinger post on ViewSourceWith Firefox extension)]http://www.zoinger.com/words/archives/2005/05/01/viewsourcewith-yet-another-handy-firefox-extension/

[1(Scintilla home page)]http://www.scintilla.org/