Unspoken Thoughts... (A Letter to a Friend)

To my dear friend,

How have you been? I hope your doing well.

I wish I could say the same, but alas...my circumstances aren't exactly that bright yet, so as to speak. Perhaps when its gotten better, I shall surface from hidden beneath this rock, to once again speak with you. Or that I shall fervently hope...perhaps.

But for now, let us dispense with the formalities and cut to the chase. A burning question that I've been dying to ask, but have always kept hidden...buried beneath the sands of my inner mind.

Have you ever regretted...being where you are in life now? Hmmm...maybe regret might be too strong a word...

Have you ever wondered where you might have ended, if you hadn't met me? Well, I do.

It has always been haunting me for ages now and I've always kept wondering. If you had not known me, your life might have been totally different. Perhaps you might have been a great engineer, had a decent job...and met a great wife? Living a better life, rather than having to go through what you've been through.

And as for me? Fret not my friend.

Despite being what I am now, I do not think that I've ever regretted having met you. The times we've spent together, fooling around, had been an interesting adventure. And I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have wanted it any other way.

Well...except for the part where you flung it.

May your life be every bit brighter.

Yours Sincerely,
- BuLaDiFu -

(The Hermit Beneath The Rock)

Network Icon Slow to Load

Recently, due to me trying to play this next game (that I was planning to feature on my blog), I went to do a much needed update for my graphics card.

So after deciding to do a clean installation just to be sure that it would run okay for the game, I found out that after having installed the drivers...that my network icon became very sluggish to load.

I had to wait about 4 to 5 minutes I think before it came out, during which it caused my whole system to lag when I'm opening folders on my hdd drive or just opening up my browser program. (Everything starts to function properly after the icon finishes loading.)

Initially, I had suspected that it might have been something to do with the graphics card drivers. So after searching through my taskbar processes, I eventually narrowed it down to these two, Nvnetworkservice.exe and Nvbackend.exe (something to do with the whole "Geforce Experience" thingy).

However, after having tried by uninstalling the Geforce Experience program via "Add or Remove Programs" (in Control Panel), I found that the silly issue still persisted. The Network icon was still sluggish to load and my system still lagged because of it. Hence it wasn't the source of the problem...

Anyway, long story short, after continuing my search, I eventually found that this whole thing was caused by one silly program that the graphics drivers did also install - something called the "Microsoft .NET Framework 4" apparently. (Or more specifically, this little fella in the services.msc called "Microsoft .NET Framework NGEN v4.0".)

So following the instructions given in the reference article, I've managed to salvage the system and everything returned back to normal. Well...somewhat I guess, since there's no visible difference now compared to back before I've installed the drivers.

Reference:
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_xp-networking/network-icon-slow-to-load-security-popup/0d036ff8-49b3-46ec-ba61-eccbfc0bf0e2