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Disable Finder Auto-Opening of Mounted External Drives

I recently made a DMG of OSX 10.5.6 off of the original Apple Install DVD via Disk Utility. I then restored it to a partition on my PCI ExpressCard to act as an installer and boot from it when needed.

The problem I am having is that when I rebook, Finder opens as if I had inserted the actual optical disc. To solve this problem, you need to open Terminal and execute:

sudo bless -folder /Volumes/X

Where X is the drive name.

LifeTime of a Solid State Hard Drive (SSD)

Solid State Hard Drives (SSD) are incredibly fast. Nowadays, you don't replace your laptop, you replace your hard drive. However, there are a couple of things you need to know about SSDs. For example, their limited lifetime. Let's take for example Intel X25-M 80GB SSD.

Intel aimed to make it last AT LEAST 5 years under NORMAL USAGE CONDITIONS, the 5 year estimate is based on a ludicrously high amount of writes per day.

Only Intel guarantees that their SSDs will lasts 5 years at least. If you manage to somehow use it up before that they will replace it under warranty. However, it is totally unrealistic even on a heavy server load.

80GB x 100,000 life-time writes * (1 data unit /1.1 write amplification overhead) = 7.27 million GB lifetime writes of data. Write speed 70 MB/s = 0.07 GB/s

7.27 million GB lifetime writes of data / 0.07 GB/s = 103.8 million seconds lifetime writes of data
103.8 x 1,000,000/1 million x minute/60 seconds x hour / 60 minutes x day / 24 hours x year / 365 days = 3.29 year lifetime writes of data. (double it for the 160GB version)

So if you max out the sequential writes at a nice flat 70MB/s which is the drive's max, and it has a write amplification of 1.1, and you do that 24/7/365 non stop, it will last 3.29 years.

of course, to put this in perspective:
0.07 GB/s x 60 seconds / minute x 60 minutes / hour x 24 hours / day = 6048 GB a day written to an 80GB drive. every day, 24/7/365 non stop writing.

Windows Live Messenger Configurations

I always wanted to start Windows Live Messenger in the background but I don't want it to automatically start when I log on to windows. In the Tools->Options, under Sign In, if you uncheck "Automatically run windows live messenger when I log on to windows" you can not un-check "Open Windows Live Messenger main window when Windows Live Messenger starts". To hack this, you need to modify your registry settings or paste the below to notepad and save it as MSN.REG then double-click on it.

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Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MSNMessenger]
"AppSettings"=hex:42,00,01,00
"AlwaysOnTop"=hex:00,00,00,00

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Another settings I use is to disable the tabs, and the annoying MSN Today window, logging, and enable showing messenger in the task bar. NOTE: open your registry and change XXXXX according to your specific number.

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Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MSNMessenger\PerPassportSettings\XXXXX] "DisableTabs"=dword:00000001 "DisableMSNToday"=hex:01,00,00,00 "MessageLoggingEnabled"=dword:00000000 "ShowTaskbar"=hex:01,00,00,00

Remove AcroRd32Info.exe

When PDF files are selected in Windows Explorer, a hook to pdfshell.dll calls on AcroRd32Info.exe to load the selected PDF file, extract the required information, and then pass it back to the shell for display. The shell integration is also what allows for the PDF tab in the file properties. If you like to stop this behavior:

• Click on Start->Run
• Type:
  • regsvr32 "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Acrobat\ActiveX\pdfshell.dll" /u
• Click Ok