The chief engineer at the radio stations where I work just built me a new computer. I guess it is adequate to the task of running a primarily text-based suite of applications.

3 GHz processor
2 GB striped high speed RAM
400 MHz front side bus
80 GB hard drive for programs
Dual 300 GB hard drives in a Raid-0 array for data
330 GB USB external hard drive for system backups
256 MB video card with digital and HDTV output
52x CD/CD-R/CD-RW/DVD/DVD-R player

Like I said, a minimal system, but adequate to my needs.

It has Windows XP with the latest updates, and this particular version of XP does something I find annoying. Every time I send a job to the printer, a little dialog balloon pops up out of the task bar describing in great detail the fact that I have just sent that job to the printer. It hangs around for at least 10-15 seconds or until I stop what I am doing and X out of it. Now, my printer sits about 30 inches from my keyboard. Since I just sent the damn print job to the printer, and the printer is noisily printing away, there is a better than even chance that I already know that I am printing that document.

Is there a way to turn this obnoxious message off?

tanstaafl.

Try:

TweakUI > Taskbar and Start Menu > untick "Enable Balloon Tips"

HTH

BTW, while you are in TweakUI, disable Autoplay on CD drives (under My Computer > Autoplay) to prevent copy protected CD's from installing a rootkit

Keep in mind using the TweakUI method will disable all balloon tips, not just the printer one. This may be what you want though.

Is raid-0 really a good idea for data?


I don't think so, and told the engineer as much when he told me what he was doing.

My preferred method is to have a C: and D: drive, and a batch file that copies my C: drive to the D: drive using XCOPY with a lot of parameters (xcopy /d/s/e/v/c/h/r/k/y/exclude:C:\Batch\exclude2 c:\*.* d:\) and use Windows task scheduler to run that process every morning at 5:01 am. The advantage to this arrangement is that if I make a mistake (for instance, save changes to a file and then realize I didn't want to save those changes) I always have the original version of the file readily available.

Update: I just talked to my engineer about the Raid-0 situation, and he was mistaken in calling it Raid-0; it is actually a Raid-1 (mirrored) setup without striping.

Speaking of Windows Task Scheduler... I had 35 different jobs in the old computer's task scheduler. Is there a way to transfer them to the new one, or do I have to re-create them one at a time from scratch? (It wouldn't be that difficult -- each task just calls a batch file on the first, second, third etc. monday, tuesday, wednesday etc. of the month.) I was able to copy the job files to the new computer (they're just sitting in a folder on the desktop) but of course they are not "registered" with Windows and are disabled (little red Xs in the icons).

tanstaafl.

Edit: fixed a tag -wfaulk

MUCH better, Raid 1 makes a LOT more sense. I hope it's hardware based.

I hope it's hardware based.


I think it is.

There are two physical hard drives, each one 300 GB, but the system displays them as a single drive (E:).

The two drives are mirror images of each other, not striped.

tanstafl.

go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Printers\Settings in the registry and change "EnableBalloonNotificationsRemote" to 0.

Unfortunately that didn't work for me.

I don't seem to have that setting available (see attachment)

tanstaafl.

You can try creating it. It shouldn't hurt anything.

No, it won't hurt, and it will work

You can try creating it. It shouldn't hurt anything.


Can you offer some pretty detailed and explicit instructions on how to do that? I am not skilled at registry editing, and don't know exactly where or how to insert this.

Edit: OK, I tried this (see attached) and it didn't work, so no doubt I did something wrong.

tanstaafl.

It needs to be a DWORD.

If you can't get it to work, unzip and run the attached file.

If you can't get it to work, unzip and run the attached file.


That did the trick! Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Didn't even have to reboot.

tanstaafl.