The discovery of the consequences of Windows Vista’s so-called “Multimedia Class Scheduling Service” (MMCSS) is one of today’s big topics in all the computer news gazettes. I just verified the problem myself, and what can I say? It’s true! :)

I booted Vista, started a large (multi-gigabyte) FTP transfer via Gigabit Ethernet and played an MP3 file at the same time, and here’s what the Task Manager showed me:

I have to admit that the first part of the graph isn’t as nice and smooth as Mark Russinovich’s one, but I think that’s because I tested using a real disk-to-disk FTP transfer instead of artificially generated network traffic. However, the sudden decrease of network activity just as I pushed the “play” button in WinAMP can clearly be seen. While audio was playing, I got a quite steady 12% figure in the network graph.
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Not even three months after the Beta 2 version, Microsoft released the first Release Candidate of its forthcoming Windows Vista operating system to the public. My Beta 2 test lasted only one week, because Vista simply wasn’t ready for everyday use back then. But according to numerous other reviews on the net, RC1 made much progress since. I was a bit sceptical about that – how far could they have come in just twelve weeks? So it was time to do another test with the current public pre-release version. The bottom line this time: Vista has indeed become a somewhat usable system. I’m not going to ditch XP in favour of Vista soon (simply because I’ve already installed too much applications on the »old« system), but in a year or so, I think that will be an option.
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Testing, reviewing and ranting about Windows Vista Beta 2 seems to be all the rage lately. Normally I don’t like trends like this, but I’m into eye candy and wanted to see if the Vista Desktop really proves to be usable on my normal desktop system. And I had that 32GB empty NTFS partition on my hard drive that really needed to be filled :)
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It is widely known that large parts of the Windows API are undocumented. However, although I’m a occasional Windows programmer, I didn’t come across such a mysterious spot until today. The source of confusion is the common explanation of how to make a window moveable by clicking into it anywhere (not just the title bar). The code basically looks like this:

case WM_LBUTTONDOWN:
  ReleaseCapture();
  SendMessage(hWnd, WM_SYSCOMMAND, 61458, 0);
  break;

I don’t get the basic principle of how this code works, but that’s not the problem here. What really caught my attention is that numerical constant that seems to be documented nowhere.
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I have to admit that the title of this article is misleading, but I didn’t find a better one. It’s not about DirectSound under Delphi – these two just happen to be the topics I was busy with today.
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