How to Disable the Lock Screen

The lock screen isn’t just a pretty picture — it’s also an extra step before you can enter your password or PIN.

Starting with Windows 8, you have to press any key or click the mouse to move past the lock screen. In some cases, this can even slow things down — for example, after waking the system from sleep.

Programming in 1965

Occasionally read a book “Numerical Methods and Fortran Programming with applications in engineering and science” written by Daniel D. McCracken in 1965 and found beautiful example of the punched perforated cards

Hyper-Threading

I ran my own experiments to better understand how Hyper-Threading works internally on Windows, using hand-written assembly benchmarks — from single-register multiplications to SHA-256 hashing.

NUMA and memory performance

If you have a dual-socket CPU, each socket may have dedicated RAM assigned to it. This can lead to performance penalties when a processor accesses memory from the “wrong” memory bank. Below is a simple benchmark and an explanation of how to utilize the full bandwidth properly.