Today I had Steam start throwing an error that it is being run in compatibility mode when I had never set such a thing, nor were either the shortcut or EXE itself flagged for compatibility mode. Thanks to a little googling, I found this thread on the Steam forums which finally had a solution.

Open the registry editor (if you don’t know how to do this, you should not be messing around in the registry) and browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers. Look for entries in those keys mentioning steam.exe and delete them. Restart Steam and you’re set!

Just a few seconds ago I finally cleared the checkbox in Adium for my ICQ account. It was my longest-lasting instant message service account, having been active since 1998 or so, and I started using multi-service IM clients like Miranda, Trillian, and Adium entirely because I wanted to keep using ICQ even though most of my friends were on AIM instead.

Times have changed of course, as far as I’m aware I have one contact on ICQ and I haven’t used it to talk to him since AIM started to support offline messages. Looking at my Adium chat logs, since December of 2006 I have not sent a single message on ICQ and the only messages I’ve received are spam. With that in mind, it’s time for it to go.

A week ago, I finally filled the gap I’ve had since giving up my Powerbook G4 back in May and I bought a base model MacBook.

• 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo
• 512MB (2x256MB) DDR2-667
• 60GB 5400 RPM SATA Hard Disk
• Slot Load DVD/CD-RW
• Airport Extreme
• Bluetooth 2.0+EDR
• Mac OS X 10.4

All that and a 2GB iPod for $1049 using the student purchase program. I financed it through Apple Credit, which was a bit of a hassle (more on that some other time), but it allowed me to get this nice notebook for $25 a month rather than forking over $1000 in one shot.

As a two time previous Mac owner, I’m not going to go in to detail about the “switching” process, since I alreay had it planned out and most of my applications were available for Mac anyways.

The hardware that makes up the MacBook is leaps and bounds above the previous iBook models. Coworkers of mine have both second-generation G3 and G4 iBooks, and neither hold a candle to this. It feels like a quality piece of hardware, on par with an IBM Thinkpad or upper-level Dell. The Core Duo is also an amazing chip. When comparing pure CPU performance, this notebook can hold its own against my 2GHz AMD Athlon X2 desktop, though the faster hard drives and quadrupled RAM give the desktop the advantage in all real-world situations.

The unusual keyboard and glossy screen were concerns of mine before purchase, but at this point I can say that neither have turned out to be real problems in day to day use. I’m sure I’ll find some situation where the glossy screen gets annoying, but honestly none of my past notebooks have been very usable outdoors either.

Right now, the only upgrade I an certain to do to this machine is maxing out the RAM to 2GB. Like all modern OSes, OS X loves memory, and 512MB just isn’t enough. It is my opinion that even the lowest of low end computers should have at least 1GB nowadays, and 2GB is a starting point for enthusiast machines (gamers, multimedia, etc.). I am considering a hard drive upgrade, but it seems more likely that I will just upgrade the drive in my desktop and place the old one in a Firewire enclosure to use as an overgrown floppy disk and backup medium for all my computers.