The Widest Desktop On Earth

So here I am, trying to meet another deadline and still maintain my sanity by doing something even remotely interesting. I seem to have at least partially resolved my Rendezvous/ by removing the newfangled P2P "Peer Services", mostly through the age-old process of troubleshooting: Uninstall suspicious stuff, reboot, lather, rinse, repeat.

Among the suspects that fell into the bit bucket by the wayside were Visual C# 2005 Express Edition (the last thing I installed before my ), the VPN Client (I use it on a daily basis, so I know how flaky and godawful intrusive it can be), WinPCap, the custom TAP driver installed by (which got uninstalled too), a couple of drivers I never much liked the look of, support, and, of course, the "Peer Services" thing, which got installed along with SP2.

I got so monumentally fed up with that I put the laptop away out of sight, retreated into my iMac, and thanks to an updated version of Desktop Manager, am now getting some real work done on a glorious 4x20" virtual desktop. Of course I still need (I have a lot of effort put into several detailed diagrams), so I pulled out and hooked it to my laptop (the only way it was going to get a 20" screen). Utterly ridiculous, the fact that I can't use ClearType on top of a 100Mbps connection, but hey, it works.

So, right about now, I have MSN, , , , , , (which turned out to be great for streams of del.icio.us items and Google News feeds - the sort of thing I might want to look at but not keep or forward), and a bunch of terminal windows in a couple of desktops, and two full-screen displays to my and boxes. All working smoothly.

Gratuitous hint: If you want to tile windows neatly (say two windows on a wide screen), resize one window to half the screen size and do a Cmd-N. Presto, an identical-sized clone.