How many Easter eggs have you found in WinXP?

[MyK Von DyK]

Just wondering... it's a nice day to find one or two isn't it?

Edit: Don't know if this actually qualifies as an Easter egg but it sure looks good... If you use any OpenGL screensaver that comes with XP installation and first set as a texture any bitmap and then delete it (or better rename it), you'll get nice "candy" effect.

 

[Canterwood]

I read there weren't any due to XP being used by government's and such.

No idea how true that is though.

 

[DennyD]

Nope. No easter eggs at all. I've worked for XP Tech support for 3 years and if there were any, I'd know by now...

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: MyK Von DyK
Just wondering... it's a nice day to find one or two isn't it?

Edit: Don't know if this actually qualifies as an Easter egg but it sure looks good... If you use any OpenGL screensaver that comes with XP installation and first set as a texture any bitmap and then delete it (or better rename it), you'll get nice "candy" effect.

http://www.windowsitpro.com/Article/ArticleID/23057/23057.html

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: DennyD
Nope. No easter eggs at all. I've worked for XP Tech support for 3 years and if there were any, I'd know by now...

Then you've not been googling......

 

[stash]

dclive, I want the five minutes of my life back that I wasted reading the comments on that link.

 

[dclive]

So you've not been playing solitare, STaSh?

 

[bsobel]

Then you've not been googling......

Could you provide a link or two? After the excel '97 fiasco easter eggs (at least in office and the OS line) are a fireable offense at MS.

Bill

 

[dclive]

I'm not on a Win box right now, but I'd look at that link and try Solitare. I just googled a bit for XP easter egg and that was one good link i found. (Posted above.)

 

[timswim78]

My favorite Easter Egg was the car racing game in Office 2000.

 

[MyK Von DyK]

Yup, I thought XPs are boring. Ah, to hell with it, Easter season will soon end and we'll all have to loose a pound or two, right? I think I'll crawl back to my bunny

Just an advice on XPs (NOT an Easter egg!) - If you are doing any CPU intensive task and still want to do other stuff but don't want the first one to suffer from any new tasks, then first set priority of that CPU intensive task to "High" then set "Explorer" task to "Below Normal". This will cause all new tasks to inherit Explorer's priority level. Can be quite handy when you rip anything (especially live content) and don't want to disturb that process.

Have a nice weekend all!

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: MyK Von DyK
Yup, I thought XPs are boring. Ah, to hell with it, Easter season will soon end and we'll all have to loose a pound or two, right? I think I'll crawl back to my bunny

Just an advice on XPs (NOT an Easter egg!) - If you are doing any CPU intensive task and still want to do other stuff but don't want the first one to suffer from any new tasks, then first set priority of that CPU intensive task to "High" then set "Explorer" task to "Below Normal". This will cause all new tasks to inherit Explorer's priority level. Can be quite handy when you rip anything (especially live content) and don't want to disturb that process. Have a nice weekend all!

Interesting, thanks. I wondered why the heck starting any program, seems to cause burn-proof to kick in while burning a DVD, even though my disk IO/sec rate, RAM, etc., are all quite good enough not for that to cause a slowdown. It's a disappointing change from W2K. :|
(I did notice that Explorer.exe, the default desktop shell, is set to "high", although I had no idea that processes launched from it, would also initially be set to "high" - that would explain the disk IO starvation for background burning tasks, if the process to be started had to read from the disk, and disk IO is current prioritized according to CPU priority settings.

 

[MyK Von DyK]

Default process priority for Explorer.exe should be "Normal" in all Windows installations, but you can change it through registry. Perhaps you've done that unknowingly with any of a plethora of different XP tweakers, like TweakNow, TweakXP, XSetup, TweakUI,...? Some do that without notifying users when you check items like "Enhance core system performance" (should be done with loading full core into memory and perhaps increasing system ram cache but some tweaker change Explorer priority also - this results in loading all processes with "High" or "Above Normal" priority). Hope this helps, Best, Myk :moon:

 

[shortylickens]

There arent any items I would consider easter eggs but I wish Microsoft would put the following programs in 'Administrative Tools' by default:

Local Users and Groups - lusrmgr.msc
Device Manager - devmgmt.msc
Component Services - comexp.msc
Event Viewer - eventvwr.msc
Shared Folders - fsmgmt.msc
Group Policies - gpedit.msc
Performance Monitor - perfmon.msc
Resultant Set of Policies - rsop.msc

Everytime I install WinXP I have to manually create many of these as shortcuts.
Most of them are available elsewhere. But I like to have the Group Policies available by default.
The first time I found out about these, they seemed like nice little easter eggs.

 

[stash]

Six of those are available through computer management, which is in administrative tools by default.

 

[bsobel]

(I did notice that Explorer.exe, the default desktop shell, is set to "high"

If your suggesting this is the normal or default configuration, you are incorrect.
Bill

 

[bsobel]

change Explorer priority also - this results in loading all processes with "High" or "Above Normal" priority). Hope this helps, Best, Myk :moon:

Yet another poster who doesn't understand priorities. They only have reference among themselves. Suggesting to start all applications as high vs normal just means high is the new normal. Kinda like when we used to have small medium large and super size, and we dropped small and renamed the others small medium and large

 

[MyK Von DyK]

Originally posted by: bsobel
Yet another poster who doesn't understand priorities. They only have reference among themselves. Suggesting to start all applications as high vs normal just means high is the new normal. Kinda like when we used to have small medium large and super size, and we dropped small and renamed the others small medium and large

lol, how many lines of code have you actually written in your lifetime? It's totally obvious that you have no clue to how Windows prioritise processes and how separate processes with same process level get their CPU time. Actually there are 7 different system defined process levels (some confuse them with thread levels - not the same but similar to some extent)...

1. System Idle
2. Lower
3. Low
4. Normal
5. High
6. Higher
7. Time Critical

...and only 6 of them available in Task Manager (There's no "System Idle"). Since only processes run through explorer (you can read "windowed applications" if you'd like) inherit its process priority this does NOT change levels of other processes like Windows Services or any processes run with different credentials. Thus - you're totally wrong! DUH, just 'cos you've written few thousand (obviously moronic?) posts in Anand's forums doesn't mean you know what you're writing about :disgust:

 

[MyK Von DyK]

Originally posted by: bsobel

(I did notice that Explorer.exe, the default desktop shell, is set to "high"

If your suggesting this is the normal or default configuration, you are incorrect.
Bill

And if you had read all previous posts... :laugh:

 

[bsobel]

lol, how many lines of code have you actually written in your lifetime? It's totally obvious that you have no clue to how Windows prioritise processes and how separate processes with same process level get their CPU time.

First off, a few million more than you I suspect. I'm sorry if I misread your intent, it seemed you were suggesting that running all of your apps at 'high' priority will somehow magically make them all faster. I've seen numerous other posts where people think this is some magical formula for making Windows faster (and evil MS just defaults everyone to normal so Intel can sell more hardware )

Since you actually understand the difference, apparently, do you really think you see a difference in functionality when you do this? If so, I'd be curious what kind of work load you have running that would account for it. In most normal configurations, the default priority scheme works just fine. Raising an entire class of apps (in your case, apps sharing the same workstation) tends to just cause all of those apps to balance each other out. There is some 'stealng' going on of course against the other processes running, but not as much as you might think. Many of those system services do their work in response to requests generated by user processes. As such they are only going to have schedulable work at that time anyhow. (The dns client is a good example, your high priority p2p client still needs to wait for the dns client to finish checking the cache and resolving before it can do anything).

Actually there are 7 different system defined process levels (some confuse them with thread levels - not the same but similar to some extent)...

And since you want to be specific. Actually, there are 32 scheduling priorities available in the NT family. The are assigned based on a combination of the process priority class, then the individual threads priority, and finally each threads current priority boost within the process.

DUH, just 'cos you've written few thousand (obviously moronic?) posts in Anand's forums doesn't mean you know what you're writing about :disgust:

I'm happy to post my qualifications, what are yours?

Bill

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: MyK Von DyK

Originally posted by: bsobel

(I did notice that Explorer.exe, the default desktop shell, is set to "high"

If your suggesting this is the normal or default configuration, you are incorrect.
Bill

And if you had read all previous posts... :laugh:

I did, I guess I'm still missing your point. VL said "I did notice that Explorer.exe, the default desktop shell, is set to 'high'" That, to me, says on his system Explorer.exe is running at high priority. What did you think he meant? (or better yet, VL, what did you mean?)

Bill

 

[bjc112]

I'm happy to post my qualifications, what are yours?

Challenge, Challenge!!!

ust 'cos you've written few thousand (obviously moronic?) posts in Anand's forums doesn't mean you know what you're writing about

Bill definitely doesn't write moronic posts' here..He is By far one of the more knowledgeable guys on this forum. Always there to provide some actual solutions.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: bsobel

(I did notice that Explorer.exe, the default desktop shell, is set to "high"

If your suggesting this is the normal or default configuration, you are incorrect.
Bill

Really? That's... strange then. I assumed, that since the initial instance of Explorer.exe, forms the user shell, that MS intentionally set the priority for that instance higher, such that things like the taskbar (itself an Explorer.exe child window), would remain responsive in light of any potentially CPU-hogging processes, themselves operating at "normal" scheduling priority. Given that, a default setting of "high" for the user-shell instance of Explorer.exe, actually does make perfect sense.

Edit: An additional observation - right-clicking on the taskbar, and selecting "Task Manager", opens an instance of, well, Task Manager, and it is by default also running at high priority. Think about it - if it wasn't running at a higher priority than any normal apps, then it would be competing for CPU resources with the very processes that the user was seeking to use that applet to control. Therefore, again, it makes sense that it should be set to running at a higher priority than the rest of the apps.

I was going to make a comment here about XP "feeling different" than W2K, when it came to differences in foreground/background scheduling priority, but then I found this MS reference, which seems to indicate that it might just be a slightly different default setting, since it is configurable. I might play with that a bit.

Hmm, this seems to support bsobel's assertion. I double-checked with Process Explorer, and indeed, it appears that the outmost (parent) Explorer.exe user shell, is the instance running at "normal", but the child instance is the one running at "high". I guess I made an erroneous observation based on the PIDs shown in Task Manager. (XP seems to re-use PIDs, and processes started later on in the session, can take low-valued PIDs, lower than "older" processes, and indeed, sometimes lower-valued than even system services/startup processes. I find that strangely confusing, compared to most monotonically-increasing OS PID models. But that's a different issue.)

Still, that doesn't make sense either, that child Explorer.exe processes, would be running at "high" priority. No wonder shell DnD file-copy operations, cause burn-proof to kick in on my burner, because they automatically get a higher disk IO priority too.

 

[bsobel]

Edit: An additional observation - right-clicking on the taskbar, and selecting "Task Manager", opens an instance of, well, Task Manager, and it is by default also running at high priority. Think about it - if it wasn't running at a higher priority than any normal apps, then it would be competing for CPU resources with the very processes that the user was seeking to use that applet to control. Therefore, again, it makes sense that it should be set to running at a higher priority than the rest of the apps.

No disagreement. I was just disgreeing that the shell, by default, is running at anything other than 'normal' priority and that everything it launches (by default) is also running at anything other than 'normal' priority.

Still, that doesn't make sense either, that child Explorer.exe processes, would be running at "high" priority. No wonder shell DnD file-copy operations, cause burn-proof to kick in on my burner, because they automatically get a higher disk IO priority too.

Ok, before I make any assumptions on your config here. Why is it you have multiple explorer.exe processes running in the same workstation? I can think of two common reasons. One is that you've tweaked the registry and told explorer to launch new windows as a seperate process (IE supports doing this also). This isn't that common to have done. Or you have some malware on the system masquarading as explorer.exe (more common)

Bill

 

[MyK Von DyK]

Originally posted by: bjc112

I'm happy to post my qualifications, what are yours?

Challenge, Challenge!!!

ust 'cos you've written few thousand (obviously moronic?) posts in Anand's forums doesn't mean you know what you're writing about

Bill definitely doesn't write moronic posts' here..He is By far one of the more knowledgeable guys on this forum. Always there to provide some actual solutions.

OK, I guess that question mark went unnoticed and I do apologise for that, and obviously I haven't actually read all bsobel's posts. I still think it would be a huge vaste of my time. Since I wasn't the first to challenge anybody here I don't rally care if you'll accept my apologies...

And as for your comment, bjc112, well you can quote me anytime: Where there is a need for cooperation, only idiots compete.

My qualifications? An overkill for Anand's forums I guess - thus I haven't posted them here, but you have enough info to find them for yourself if you wish to read them.

Oh, and since this thread has gone bad and my fist intention was to find any Easter Eggs in Winbucks XP (guess there aren't any), this is my last post here. If you wish to judge me further for trying to help someone understand something, then please - go ahead. I still think you'd be an idiot,

Best, Myk.