Ever since I installed SP3 last year during a lull in my fall classes, I noticed that the power saving state on my display wouldn’t always work. Eventually, it didn’t work at all. If I opened the dialog to configure power saving modes, clicked apply, and then closed the menu, power savings would return to normal–until the next reboot. It was infuriating at best, especially if I forgot to turn my monitor off and left for a half hour or more. I’d return, the monitor would still be on, and the screensaver would be happily chugging away.

Thankfully, I believe I fixed the problem. Read more…

I was at university today when I realized I had disabled my WinVNC service over the weekend in order to isolate a problem that–as it turns out–was not related to VNC. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to restart the service and was left with no way to remote into my desktop at home. Worse, since I’ve been using Visual Studio a lot, I configured the bootloader to enter Windows by default rather than Gentoo–so no hope of fixing things remotely from there, either. As it turns out, however, the problem wasn’t nearly as difficult as I made it out to be. Read more…