I’ve been running the Microsoft AntiSpyware beta on this machine for a few days now. Shortly after installing it, I noticed a notification window fly from the bottom of my screen, up the side and off the top. I thought it was weird, but explorer was behaving strangely anyway, so I didn’t think to much of it.

Until today. Today I wrote a little cmd file that will pause for 4 minutes and then play a chime to use as a countdown timer to keep my on task. Problem was, the script wouldn’t run. Instead an antispyware notification would fly over the side of my screen, too quickly to do anything about it.

I looked around for any reports of similar behavior in Microsoft’s support site, and via google and found nothing. My first thought was that it was a preverse revenge tactic by some piece of malware, but that seemed unlikely, since I practice safe net hygene and haven’t been infected by anything in years, even when I’ve not been running anti-virus software.

Then I had a bright idea. I moved my taskbar from the right of the screen, where I like it, back to the default position at the bottom. Voila!

Under default conditions, the notification display slides up and stops above the horizontal taskbar. However, because my taskbar is on the right and stretches the full height of the screen, there is no way to get clear, so the notification flys away.

I guess I can see why its still in Beta.

*Update:* They finally fixed it!

If you are going to set up a search engine to index tech content, like, say, a tech discussion forum, its really stupid to automatically exclude two or three letter terms from the index given the ubiquity of short acronyms. If you insist on dismissing short terms as being unlikely to generate a search result, I’d suggest a somewhat more intensive approach: compare the term to a dictionary of common english terms and only index the ones that don’t match.

Review: Antec Aria SFF Case (w/PSU) :: SilentPCReview.com

People who want style and general use and low noise usually don’t want to bother with motherboard details. That’s far too technical for them. Chances are they don’t even build barebones systems, let alone a system from the ground up.

Bullshit!!