llynix.com

Most likely you only have one CPU, yet multiple programs run simultaneously with little to no problems. But what happens when you want to run a program that seems to be stuttering out or that is time critical?

Every program that is run on your computer is assigned a priority to overcome this. Some programs may automatically change their priority. For example many CD/DVD burning programs run in high priority to prevent coasters. Programs are normally started at a ‘normal’ priority and you can adjust their priority via the task manager (cntrl-shift-del).

But what if you want to start a program with a certain priority? Enter Windows cmd.exe.

%windir%\\System32\\cmd.exe /c START /high program.exe

Simply replace program.exe with your program’s name/path and your in high priority heaven. Here are the other priorities copied and pasted from the help (cmd.exe /?).

LOW: Start application in the IDLE priority class
NORMAL: Start application in the NORMAL priority class
HIGH: Start application in the HIGH priority class
REALTIME: Start application in the REALTIME priority class
ABOVENORMAL: Start application in the ABOVENORMAL priority class
BELOWNORMAL: Start application in the BELOWNORMAL priority class

I’ve been trying to clean up the design of Llynix.com and get it looking relatively the same across the major browsers. One thorn in my side was the fact IE6 doesn’t support the max-width CSS property. It may not seem like a problem to you, but if you are lucky enough to view websites on a widescreen monitor the text has a tendency to run on a bit if max-width isn’t set. Imagine reading this entire paragraph in one line of text. It just doesn’t seem right.

So I apply a max-width which keeps things from running too far off the screen. This works for the major decent browsers, but our old friend IE6 doesn’t understand it. So what’s a web designer to do?

Enter the hack. Luckily IE does have a little piece of javascript that can help us out in faking our max-width. Svendtofte.com has the details of the wonderful snippet below.

width:expression(document.body.clientWidth > 800? "800px": "auto" );

This little ‘expression’ does the same job as max-width:800px; But how do we properly introduce it into our CSS? In the old days we’d rely on faulty CSS error control to splice in various pieces of code for different browsers. Today though we wash our hands of all that, and hopefully ignore such horriable code. There is an easier way.

Enter conditional comments.

Conditional comments only work on Internet Explorer browsers. Other browsers will just treat them as an ordinary comment and continue on. But when IE detects them it will include them if necessary. Zoffix Znet has an excellent article on conditional comments. In addition you might want to check out what Microsoft has to say about them.

Here is my max-width fix inside a IE6 only conditional comment.

    <!--[if IE 6]>
    <style type="text/css">
      #header {width:expression(document.body.clientWidth > 1000? "1000px": "auto" );}
      #mainbody {width:expression(document.body.clientWidth > 800? "800px": "auto" );}
    </style>
  <![endif]-->

Now the webpage looks much better viewed in widescreen in IE6.

Posts

Launching Windows Programs in High Priority

Properly Hacking Max-Width for IE6