Hey guys, im pretty new here. I must say its been a painful xp-erience reading through all this. I have been here over 6 hours now i figure. So, Thanks for all your usful tweakage. Very nice indeed.
For my contribution, i will try to explain something i noticed. Its not a tweak, but just something to maybe explain why...
Twice in this thread i have seen the menupopup settings mentioned and one individual replyed saying -1 produces a 60 second delay. Actually its probably more like 65.535 seconds. To the explination, if you care
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First a small bit on binary. Hopfully you know what its about but heres a quick basics...
_ _ _ _ <-- One nibble made up of 4 binary numbers, 1 or 0
these 4 spaces can make number. Its done by taking each place, and raising 2 to its position...
3 2 1 0 for the above example of places always start on the right, and at 0, so lets say we had a number that was all 1111, 2 ^ 0 = 1
Add that 1 to 2 ^ 2 and so on...1111= 15, 1000 = 8 and so on. Their is a little more to it concerning negative numbers, but that will be gotten to soon!
Keeping it simple, their are two types of integers. Signed and Unsigned. Whats the difference? +/-. Any number that is Signed has the possiblity of being negative as well as positive, which effectivly cuts the value range in half due to the first bit of the number being the sign indicatior, 1 is negative 0 is positive. So! That leaves Unsigned numbers, which are easier, take the number of bits your using raise 2 to that power, and you have the max value those bits can hold. pretty basic.
Now, onto the relavence, Regedit understands a signed number, it sees -1, so it says, ok, negative one. thats... "1111 1111 1111 1111" So it writes that value to the registry yes? This is assuming you have a two byte value for this particular menu setting, which i half guessed, but its kinda obvious, its a basic integer. When windows comes along at boot time, it says oh, look, a number, only seeing it as positive! Thus, you get FFFF which is none other than 65535! Translate that from milliseconds to seconds you got 65.535 seconds. Wanna see it in action for yourself? Try this....
On my XP system, i load Calc.exe (Calculator).
1) View -> Scientific
2) do the following equation 0 - 1 <enter>
Now you have -1 in the display i hope...
3) Click the binary radio button. lotta ones eh?
4) Click Hex! Now you get the FF's so..you see what i mean...
5) Click decimal, you sure don't get -1! This is the equivalent of -1 in unsigned form for 8 Bytes.
Now, you can type in FF FF to see that it also equals a bunch of 1s, and if its a 2 byte integer, that you are reading, signed it WILL be -1, unsigned is 65535. which is what you are telling windows by using -1. Hope you guys can understand this, as i dont always explain things so well. Sorry its not to benifitial to your tweaking needs, but hey. i hope someone learns just a wee bit from this.
If you need anything clairified, just ask ill do my best. G'day y'all
