Public Class GeoffAppleby

Useful Life Tip #4

Update: Sorry guys, I honestly thought everyone would realise that this doesn't actually work. It's been long enough now, people have had their fun, so I think I need to make it explicitly clear (for the sake of Google and such). THIS ENTIRE ENTRY IS A JOKE. My apologies if you really ended up with a computer that won't boot, or wiped your hard drive with a Linux boot disk :)

Continuing the saga of useful life tips...actually, this one needs to be sub classed - it's more of a Useful Computer Geek Tip.

Perhaps I should explain. Bring up the task manager (one of my favourite shortcuts - Ctrl-Shift-Escape). Order the list by CPU Usage, with the highest at the top. If you have not much else running at the time, you'll see something like this:

Do you see that? There's some process chewing up 98% of my CPU! Every windows box has one of these little bastards running on their machine (XP/2003). This thing takes all the CPU cycles it can, wasting your precious computing power. I'm not sure why Microsoft included it, but there's no way it's going to be something useful.

The worst thing is, they've made it very hard to kill off. If you try to end the process, all you get is this message:

After a lot of research, I've worked out how to get rid of it and my computer runs so much faster now, it's unbelievable!

There's two stages to getting rid of this thing - it's not hard, just well hidden. They couldn't make it impossible to disable, or the 'Softies wouldn't be able to turn it off either. First, you need to go into your registry editor and find the key 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\Hacks' and the value called 'WasteCPU'. It will be set at 1 - change it to 0 (off).

Now that you've done that, go to your services control panel. Visible now in your list is the 'System Idle Process' service. Change it's start up type from 'Automatic' to 'Manual'.

Reboot your computer, and watch it haul ass!