I am a great fan of Remote Desktop and have been using it for over a decade. It’s built in and just works. One gripe of mine has always been the poor framerate which makes animations and transitions super janky by default. In RDP 10 it turns out this can be massively improved by enabling a screen encoding based on AVC/H.264 video. By enabling the group policy “Prioritize H.264/AVC 444 graphics mode for Remote Desktop Connections” under Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Remote Desktop Services > Remote Desktop Session Host > Remote Session Environment, I was able to get a glorious 60fps, almost double what I was getting before.

Running Windows 10 Anniversary Edition? Click this link and say yes to the prompts (You’ll, er, have to press CTRL+ALT+DELETE to exit and sign in again). Back? You just launched the hidden Take a Test app. Windows 10 Anniversary now includes a chromeless kiosk mode that web pages can launch. Basically any link in the format… ms-edu-secureassessment:<URL>!enforceLockdown<br></br> …will launch the app. Administrators can even create user accounts that are locked down to single web pages where CTRL+ALT+DELETE is the only way out.

It is increasingly looking like the Surface 3 is going to be discontinued. Microsoft is running out of stock on the 128GB / 4GB RAM model. Third party vendors are heavily discounting it, suggesting a clearance. The biggest sign of its demise is that Intel are simply going to stop making the quad-core Cherry Trail Atom processors that power the Surface 3 and other tablets like it. This is a crying shame.

Update 19th August 2015: Apple have released Bootcamp 6, which fixes all of the below when using Windows 10. If you already have Bootcamp 5 installed, run the Apple Software Update utility to get the latest set of drivers. The only oddity I’ve had with Bootcamp 6 is that is resets your DPI scaling to 200%. Windows 10 on Bootcamp (Macbook Pro 13 inch, Bootcamp 5.1) has some teething issues as of build 10162.

Update 13th June 2015: It looks like Microsoft has reversed course and reinstated the Windows 7 Backup and Restore feature in Windows 10! Success! Update 16th Sept 2013: What follows is a rant written after upgrading to 8.1 and seeing my automated backups just stop working and the backup restoration function also removed. An afternoon was wasted faffing about with the new File History feature which still refuses to backup files not on my system drive and deliberately ignores files in the SkyDrive folder, preventing you from having a local backup.

Much noise has been made about Evernote’s new Windows client. For version 4, they dropped WPF/.NET and released a C++ native application. They were pretty damning with their reasoning: Evernote 4 is a major departure from Evernote 3.5 in every way. While 3.5 added tons of great new features, there were some problems we simply couldn’t fix: the blurry fonts, slow startup times, large memory footprint, and poor support for certain graphics cards were all issues that the technology behind 3.

The first preview version of the Windows Phone 7 SDK is out and it doesn’t support Japanese (or non-Latin) text in the English ROM. This is a huge disappointment. One of the major advantages the iPhone has over almost every other smartphone platform (and the major reason I bought mine in the first place – I needed Japanese language support) is the built in support for non-Latin languages and their input methods.

I have been having a problem where I would get “This page cannot be displayed” errors the first time I tried to access a website. The odd thing was that hitting Refresh would solve the problem and I would get through to the site immediately. At first, I thought it was a DNS problem due to the Internet Connection Sharing setup, but turns out it is Vista messing around with the net connection with a process called “Receive Window Auto-Tuning” (this alters the size of the packets on your network based on network conditions).

After a lot of trial and error using Process Monitor and Virtual PC, I have finally sussed out exactly what XNA2.0 games on Windows need to run. The requirements are slightly different to XNA 1 games. Direct X runtimes There are four files that need to be installed in the system32 folder for XNA to initialise properly. They are: xinput1_3.dll x3daudio1_3.dll d3dx9_31.dll, and xactengine2_9.dll The first three can be placed alongside the application exe and then load fine, but xactengine2_9.

I frequently use Remote Desktop (RDP/Terminal Services) to access my machines running Vista SP1 RTM. 90% of the time, after connecting, I get this annoying problem with the Start bar: Only the Start button itself is visible. This happens on all my Vista machines, both SP0 and SP1 This happens no matter what version of Remote Desktop I am using, the XP version or the “new” Vista one It only appears to happen when the computer was originally using the Aero DWM composition engine and originally in a different resolution to what I am asking the Remote Desktop session to render It happens wether or not the taskbar is at the top or bottom of the screen So far the only way to get the taskbar back I have found is to click the lonely Start button, click Windows Security, choose Start Task Manager, kill the explorer.

UPDATE: No need to do this now, its fixed! For edngames.com I use Facebook, Yahoo! and Windows Live as sign on solutions. However, Windows Live is the only system with a restriction on the domain names you can register. For instance, because of the word “games” in my domain, I get the error message “The Return URL field contains a forbidden word or domain. Please use a different Return URL and enter the HIP solution again.