Month: February 2013

Hyper-V and Widescreen

Moving to Windows 8, and migrated my old virtual pc images (used for dev purposes) to run under Hyper-V. Some things seems a bit weird at first but was able to resolve them all.

 

Except: running xp under hyper-v does not allow resizing the screen and have it change the resolution of the hosted OS.

Ok, kinda bummer, maybe they’ll fix this eventually. I’ll just pick a res that is close to full screen and use it that way for now.

But no: the resolutions supported are all 4×3. This means to make the screen small enough so that it doesnt show scrollbars to move it up/down to reveal the full hosted desktop, one must reduce the resolution down to… 1024×768. (assuming a 1080p screen).

So, now my nice dev envrinoment is reduced to this little postage stamp on my screen.

I’ve read forum posts complaining about this going back to 2009, but apparently MS has no intention of supporting dynamic resizing *nor* even supporting some widescreen resolutions.

 

So now my dev efforts in the VM will be run in a window that is effectively a 10″ screen. Hooray Eyestrain!

 

Here is some further discussion on the topic: at MS Technet: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverhyperv/thread/19f32070-46c7-4dec-8824-9942f7fc5a2c/  and a shorter discussion on superuser.com http://superuser.com/questions/496434/hyper-v-wide-screen-resolutions

 

 

 

 

 

thunderbird is dead

I’ve used thunderbird for my email client for a good number of years now. I have multiple accounts running in it – 7 at last count. When I started using tbird, it supported multiple account far better than any other client, and was the primary reason I started using it.

Recently there was news that mozilla is pulling a bunch (or all?) of the developers off the thunderbird project to assign them to other work. see https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stability-and-community-innovation/ 

Many interpreted this as the “death of thunderbird” blah blah. Maybe, maybe not.

But my own experience: over the last number of versions, the product has become increasing lower performing, to the point that it is almost unuseable for me now. Now I’m not a normal user, I have massive quantities of emails and multiple account, all connected via imap to their servers. But, earleir versions of tbird seemed to handle this ok. Not so anymore. I get a few emails open and actually start using the app, and it doesnt take long before it is hogging 100% of a cpu core, and doesn’t stop. Rebooting helps for a bit but not for long.

I’ve seen many complaints online about thunderbird hogging 100% of the cpu, so I know I’m not the only one. It’s unfortunate that this seems to have gotten worse instead of better over time.

So for my own purposes, thunderbird is already broken, and with the reduced emphasis on the product, won’t likely be fixed.

Anyone recommend a good replacement? Lawdy, am I going back to outlook after all these years?