Archive for October 3, 2012

Video And Pictures From The iPhone 5

Posted in Commentary with tags , on October 3, 2012 by itnerd

I’ve been asked what photos and videos look like from the iPhone 5. Here’s a few samples taken at this past weekend’s Toronto’s Nuit Blanche by my wife. First, here’s a video:

The video quality is pretty good in low light. I think it’s comparable to the Sony Xperia Ion that I recently wrote about. Next are the still pictures. Here’s one of the quasi famous Toronto Batman:

Now here’s another shot:

The colors look good and the shots are clear. Overall, I think the iPhone 5 camera is as good as anything out there.

What do you think? Post a comment below and share your thoughts.

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Hey IT Nerd! What’s The Best Setting For The Paging File On My Windows Computer?

Posted in Tips with tags , on October 3, 2012 by itnerd

First let me explain what a paging file is. The best description that I found is in this Wikipedia article, but here’s all you need to know:

In computer operating systems, paging is one of the memory-management schemes by which a computer can store and retrieve data from secondary storage for use in main memory. In the paging memory-management scheme, the operating system retrieves data from secondary storage in same-size blocks called pages. The main advantage of paging over memory segmentation is that it allows the physical address space of a process to be noncontiguous. Before paging came into use, systems had to fit whole programs into storage contiguously, which caused various storage and fragmentation problems.

Now this is true if you have 1GB of RAM or 16GB of RAM. The thing is that if you have more RAM, paging happens less. But it still happens.

Now, what’s the best setting for the paging file? Set it to System Managed Size (if it isn’t already set there) and leave it there. Windows does a great job of managing the pagefile that you should never have to think about it and 99% users would not benefit from changing any of these settings.

Now what about setting it on a different drive? I’ve never seen any benefit to doing this other than freeing up space on a particular drive. Thus you’re better off just leaving it on your C: drive.

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It Seems My Wife’s Computer Went Haywire Because Of The iPhone

Posted in Commentary with tags , , on October 3, 2012 by itnerd

My wife has been complaining that since she got the iPhone 5, her computer was slow. Now her computer is beyond overdue for an upgrade, and there should be no connection to getting a new iPhone and the computer being slow, so I didn’t really take much notice of it. That is until I used it and it was completely unusable.

I did some poking around, which was difficult as it was so slow that anything took to minutes to execute. But I tripped over the cause. By using task manager to see what was going on, I discovered that a service called applemobiledeviceservice.exe was consuming a high amount of CPU time. When I say high, I mean 90% or more of the CPU. Clearly, it was going haywire. Now this is the Windows service that helps iTunes to sync with your iPhone, iPad or iPod, and I had just upgraded the version of iTunes when she got the iPhone, so it made sense why this started when she got the iPhone.

The question is why.

I did some research and found this Apple support document that speaks to this issue.  I followed the steps in the document and confirmed that as per the document, a program that monitors the Winsock protocol for Windows was conflicting with iTunes. Now, the solution that Apple would have you perform is to uninstall the offending program. I decided to go a different route. Thanks to the level of detail in the article, I figured that rather than uninstall applications, I could simply reset the Winsock protocol. Here’s how I did it:

  • I opened a command propmpt
  • I then typed in netsh winsock reset
  • From there, I rebooted the computer

The problem went away after I did that. Now I did test all her applications and everything seems to work. But it was entirely possible that what I did would have “broken” an application such as anti-virus program. So to be safe, I upgraded her AVG Free software to the latest version which is AVG Free 2013. I recalled from another posting that they had made the product more memory friendly, so it couldn’t hurt.

I’ll keep an eye on it but I think she’s in a better place until she upgrades to a more modern computer.

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