Realplayer

Why oh why does the BBC insist on using Real formats for their video and audio. Real make the shabbiest software known to man. After installing Realplayer to access BBC radio my pc took an age to load. At the time I didn’t know if it was the Real software or something else as I had installed a fair wee bit. The pc was slow during ‘Loading your personal settings’ but I couldn’t tell what bit of software was slow. Cue golden tip:

Show Verbose Security Status Messages (Windows 2000/XP) This setting allows you to configure Windows so that you receive verbose startup, shutdown, logon, and logoff status messages. This may be helpful to in troubleshooting slow startup, shutdown, logon, or logoff behaviour. Open your registry and find or create this key:- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWARE -> Microsoft -> Windows -> CurrentVersion -> Policies -> System To enable verbose status messages create a new DWORD value called “verbosestatus” and set it to “1”. (verbosestatus REG_DWORD 0x00000001 (1)) An additional value called “DisableStatusMessages” forces status messages to be disabled, make sure this value does not exist or is set to “0”. (DisableStatusMessages REG_DWORD 0x00000000 (0)) Restart Windows for the change to take effect.

*Update – after taking advice from my IT industry colleagues I should point out that before changing anything in the registry back it up and if you don’t know what the registry or regedit is then do what you do with most of this site and ignore this post.