Slow Connection? Sniff your way out!

This is actually mostly for IT personnel but is very useful as well for developers encountering slow connection on LAN.  Speaking as both, one thing that we face most of the time is degradation of speed on the network and the problem is it can be anything such as wrong design in our app, faulty hardware like switches and lan cards, or a malware flooding the network causing heavy traffic.

As an IT Manager, what I do on my end, for lack of proper tools before, is to trace things manually.  Sometimes with the help of IpSnooper tool I shared in foxite, weblogs and blogspot, I was able to pinpoint which machine a specific IP Address belongs to.  But that is if you will be able to trace which IP is flooding the network.

For some cases, like I said, I have to do it manually (with my IT guys' assistance) by observing the speed  of the network or even internet access by unplugging one by one (and reconnecting back) each connection on our switch.  And I was able to trace the units causing the flooding that way.  But...... that is the hard way.

Printer Environment on Report, when to save and when not to!

In earlier versions of VFP (before 9), Printer Environment is by default saved onto the report itself.  But then there are cases where because of that, when our app is installed on a client's machine and that machine has a different printer than what we have when we design the report and compiled the app into exe, the report output on the client machine may generate a much different output than what we are expecting like difference on dimensions, margins, font sizes, spaces, some portion cut-off, etc.  And the solution to those problems is to hack into the FRX and clear out these printer environment from within so it will be free of the settings of a "specific" printer.

For these reasons, in VFP9, VFP team saw the need to reverse the process by not saving printer environment anymore within the report.  They made it optional by adding a checkbox in Page Setup of a report that allows us to save or not printer environment.  And by reverse, I mean the default now is it is no longer saved.

Question is, if saving printer environment results to unwanted outputs that has often led developers in lower versions of VFP to always hack the frx files, why should we tick it then?  Why is this option still given to us?  Why not simply remove this feature?  Is there still any use for this?