‘Twas Brillig*

I am a programmer, this may seem irrelevant but bear with me, this means my PC has a reasonable amount of memory - I wouldn’t consider having less than a gig’ of RAM - so when #2 got a copy of the Pingu game from GSP and it started complaining about low virtual memory (”This application requires at least 3MB of free virtual memory to run“) I was, to say the least, surprised. The PC’s virtual memory is set to the default of one and a half times the main memory and should be sufficient for a game which asks for a 64MB machine. After some googling I found that this could be avoided by logging in as an administrator (I’ve got XP Pro), increasing the virtual memory settings, rebooting, logging in again as an administrator and then running the program. Incidentally logging in as another user gives “Application Error: This Application cannot run“. This is obviously a pain and completely circumvents the user security available in XP, but I have now tried another way. A colleague (Ian) told me to change the shortcut to run in Windows Compatibility Mode as Windows 95 and in the main it works - the program’s screensaver feature doesn’t work (I suspect it is trying to change registry settings to which ordinary users don’t have access), but at least the games are now accessible. Of course I probably should have looked at the GSP support site first, but since when has that been fun? Their solution is the hack of virtual memory followed by the windows compatibility mode thing, but I suspect using windows compatibility mode is the important bit. Apparently it is a Director problem so ensuring the latest version of Shockwave Flash is installed may also help.

Two weeks ago we bought our youngest his first pair of shoes, today we are buying his second since at some point while traipsing round Walsall in the torrential rain one of them has gone missing. First person to design shoes that toddlers can’t pull off gets my custom.