shahine.com/omar/

Since the day I installed Vista on my laptop I have had nothing but unexplained problems with docking and connecting to a projector. Additionally, my Media Center with an Intel Graphics card would also have problems when it would reboot or login and my plasma was off.

I experienced:

• Random changes in resolution from my setting to 1024 x 768 or 800 x 600
• Changes in resolution when my laptop would awake from sleep
• Changes in resolution when docking my laptop

If you go and read about Transient Multimon Manager (TMM) you will learn that you aren't supposed to have any of these problems.

On my old Thinkpad T60 these problems eventually went away when I installed the Lenovo custom ATI driver. However, now I have a Thinkpad X61T which has an Intel GMA graphics chip, similar to the one in my Media Center.

The problems on my Media Center went away when I upgraded to a nVidia card.

However, my laptop is still foobard.

If you read about TMM you will find such promises as:

Transient Multimon Manager (TMM) is a Microsoft Windows Vista operating system feature targeted at improving the user experience of connecting and disconnecting displays, particularly for the mobile user. Currently, although the Microsoft Windows operating system notifies the user of most hardware devices when it arrives, it does not do this consistently for displays. Windows is not aware of the arrival or removal of a display on a desktop system, and the user must manually set up and configure the display through the Windows display control panel or an IHV display UI. On a mobile system, the experience often involves cryptic function keys, a variety of user interface, and possibly reboots. It is particularly inconvenient with a transient display, a display that comes and goes, which is also unfortunately the most common scenario for mobile users.

Windows Vista is committed to addressing this problem through the Transient Multimon Manager (TMM), which enables the automatic detection and setup of displays as they are attached and removed. Furthermore, TMM persists the user's settings on a per-display basis when possible, so that users can move between multiple displays at ease. The goal is to enable users to work with displays in the same stress-free, Plug and Play fashion as with most other peripheral devices today, and alleviate the frustrations of using multiple monitors.

Umm, am I missing something? I am constantly frustrated about this and as far as I can tell, even with Vista SP1, this is still an area that is rife with bugs.

Is it the driver's fault? Generally Intel does excellent work... but I'm starting to wonder... when will connecting a laptop to a display be truly seamless?

There is really no excuse for my laptop not getting this 100% right after it gets to know my monitor (they are on a first name basis) and the 5 or so projectors I use every week.

Anyway, to disable TMM you need to:

1. Press the Windows Key and type "Task Scheduler"
2. Navigate to Microsoft\Windows\MobilePC
3. Right Click on TMM
4. Select Disable

now reboot.

One nice side effect of this is that your laptop will wake from sleep a few seconds faster.

As of yet I can't figure out what feature I am missing, as everything "just works".

Comcast is upgrading all customers on their Performance Plus plan (8 MBits down / 768 KBps up) to Comcast Blast (16 MBits down / 2 MBits up) by the end of Feb.

I just upgraded from slow poke cable modem (6 MBits down / 368 KBps up) a few weeks ago so this upgrade is very welcome!

I'll post a new pic when I'm upgraded.

I'm now running Vista SP1 everywhere. The best thing about Vista SP1 is that there is a bug fix to Windows Imaging Component (WIC) that addresses an issue with photos on network drives. Under Vista meta data changes to files (like keywords and ratings) would take 30 seconds to 1 minute to get written per file.

This was incredibly annoying for me since I store > 20 GB of photos on a Windows File Server and utilize numerous Vista computers to manage that library. With Vista it was unusable to manage meta data.

I'm extremely happy that the Vista folks took this bug fix for SP1. It now means I can use Windows Live Photo Gallery to manage my keywords and ratings again.

Data Loss? Been there, done that.

Windows Live ID hijacked? Replace Windows Live ID with Google or Yahoo ID.

What do you do when some one:

1. hacks into your account
2. changes your password
3. changes your secret question
4. changes your "alternate email address"
5. changes all your profile information
6. sets up mail forwarding to another account
7. Turn on the exclusive junk filter (deleting all your email)
8. Deletes your life (email, contacts etc)

That is what I found this evening. I believe that some one managed to issue a password reset command to my account and then somehow logged in and reset my password essentially owning my data.

How did they do this? Like this for example.

Not sure how this happened to me since my Hotmail password is strong, secure, unique etc.

But right now I am totally and uterly hosed.

Luckily I have my email offline (Outlook Connector).

But I feel like crying.

The amount of personal information in my email account. Just think about what is archived "in the cloud" under the username and password of a single network.

Now thing of how you would feel if you found out that some one else had all that information. Just think about that for a second. What do you have in the cloud? What kind of personal information is up there?

Lucky for me I could make some phone calls and get my account access restored. But I am feeling extremely vulnerable right now.

update: my account just got hijacked again, minutes ago. Also so did my GMail account.

I have no idea WTF is going on here. I have only used one computer this entire time.

Also the attacker changed my First and Last name in passport to:

"hey omar i can access all your email

you omars@micro dont paly with me aigne"