I recently had an intermittent problem where my PC would fail to power-up. The only signs of activity were the spinning of the PSU fan and a solid HDD activity LED.

Since the PSU fan was spinning I assumed it was the motherboard at fault. Replacing a motherboard is a slippery slope that usually ends in the expensive trinity of replacing the RAM and CPU as well as the motherboard. Wishing for anything else to be at fault, I searched the Web for people experiencing the same problem.

Nearly everyone was blaming the power supply.

The power supply is the butler of PC murder—always seen as the most likely suspect, but rarely at fault. I even knew a guy who blamed his power supply for a problem that was ultimately caused by his firewall!

I didn't think the PSU guilty until I read a post by a guy who went through three motherboards before finding out it was the power supply. It is much easier and cheaper to replace the PSU, so I decided to try replacing it first.

Well what do you know? The butler did do it! The computer has been working fine ever since.

The PSU I replaced was the most expensive one I've ever bought—with fancy cabling, heatpipes and PFC. It was also the most short-lived at 18 months of age. Which goes to show that there isn't always a correlation between cost and reliability.

If your photos fail to appear in SkyDrive it's because you've done the right thing and disabled third-party cookies. As pointed out by the user jobo on Neowin, the photos come from livefilestore.com. However there's no need to enable third-party cookies as jobo suggests in order to fix the problem. Instead livefilestore.com can be simply added to your browser's list of cookie exceptions. For Firefox this list is found within the preferences under the Privacy tab and then the button Exceptions...

If "Human" icons are selected, likely in the case of someone upgrading, the NetworkManager Applet will have an ugly black icon representing an ethernet connection. Note that the new 9.10 theme is called "Humanity" which uses a much nicer and smaller connection icon. To use the latter in the place of the former:

Canonical have taken all of the fun out of gdmsetup, reducing it to just two options. All other customisation aside, I can't stand the "Face Browser" at the login screen. At least there's still a way to get rid if that:

The gnome-settings-daemon doesn't appear to be at all tested with remote logins. Currently there's another new bug, in a long line of bugs, that causes the daemon to crash when using the desktop remotely. This has been fixed, but the fix is currently sitting in the "proposed" queue. The solution in the meantime is to disable the xrandr plugin by running gconf-editor and unchecking the following:

It appears that Firefox 3.5 doesn't respect the font rendering set by the user in their system wide settings. I was really annoyed by this, and as a result managed to gather together the following information. This problem will only annoy those people who have selected settings that differ from those already set in the file respected by Firefox. This file is "/~.fonts.conf". My copy of this file had four settings within it: rgba, hinting, hintstyle and antialias. The settings hinting and antialias are boolean, whilst the other two have the following options:

My file was set to: rgba none, hinting true, hintstyle hintfull and antialias true.

Within my gnome font rendering settings I select the standard "LCD" setting. This equates to: rgba rgb, hinting true, hintstyle hintslight and antialias true.

The contents of /~.fonts.conf then becomes:

I just purchased Adobe CS4 Design Premium and have had trouble installing it on a fresh install of Snow Leopard (10.6.1). Whilst everything appears to be fine, the CPU would sit on 60% with every application closed. As soon as I uninstalled CS4 the CPU would drop back to 1-2%. I conducted this test twice—that is installed CS4 on a fresh Snow Leopard twice over.

To be clear this isn't resolved by restarting, as is the solution to one known bug mentioned in the CS4 Read Me.

In my desperation I made the mistake of calling tech support. The tech support guy wasn't very helpful. Even though I told him that I had re-installed both CS4 and Snow Leopard, he had me run the Adobe cleaning utility thingy and reinstall again. After three hours of reinstalling (for the third time) and another 700MB of updates (from my precious download quota) I was exactly back to where I had started.

Then when the updates for Version Cue and Adobe Drive failed to install, it got me thinking. Looking at the box it states that Java is needed for Version Cue Server. That being a unique requirement and the update for that particular program failing, sent me on the search. I eventually found the directory containing Version Cue Server and moved it. I next planned to restart but I didn't have to, the instant I moved the directory my CPU usage plummeted from 60% to 1%.

I've been working on this for days and all I had to do was move the folder "Server" out of "/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe Version Cue CS4/".

*sigh*