windows xp

Chris Knight's avatar

Well, you do now! But be of good cheer: I’m about to tell you how to fix that.

I’ve had StarCraft II for awhile now, but haven’t played even anywhere close to finishing the first campaign. Among other reasons, I’ve been frustrated by what I have been certain is too slow performance for the high-end rig I’ve got it installed on. And yesterday, I finally set out to find out why (or if I was even right about that).

Turns out that StarCraft II doesn’t like multiple CPUs all that well. Optimally it should be running on two cores, not three or four. So Yours Truly went searching for a way to bring it down to operating on only two processors. Lo and behold: it can be done! Start up StarCraft II from the desktop, then bring up Task Manager (usually done through CTRL+ALT+Delete), go to the sc2.exe process and ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Today is the final day of widespread sales of Windows XP. After today, it will no longer be possible to purchase a new computer from any major manufacturer with Windows XP installed on it.

The operating system first went on sale on October 25th, 2001. So it lasted with full support for nearly seven years: not bad for any software product but especially one from Microsoft, a company notorious for pushing updates on customers.

I was working at a Best Buy store when Windows XP was rolled out. Everyone associated with computers or media sales had to come in one Sunday morning prior to Windows XP’s release for three hours of what I have since come to call “Microsoft religious indoctrination”. We had to learn all about what Windows XP could do, what made it different from Windows Me and Windows 2000 Professional, all that jazz. I remember thinking ...

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