I know i was going to post some pics of the new hardware but my cam's decided it doesnt want to upload pictures to my system so that will hav to wait...
I've been researching about optimising VB6 apps with some inline ASM.. its an interesting topic (although somewhat overwhelming at the beginning) but after you stop slapping yourself looking at ASM code you will actually (as i am now) appreciate the complexity that is invovled in writing ASM more than any other language. I've found an *excellent* site on optimising existing ASM routines for the intel x86 line of processors here. Looks like its been updated regularly too and the quality of the articles are very good. If you are attempting to dive into using some inline ASM - Eg for some string functions or subclassing code (Pauls or try Vlads which has several nice “suprises“ included)- its well worth looking into it.
The other fun task i've been trying to get working is to get Mini-Dumps from exceptions thrown via our native exceptionhandler thats apart of HotHTML 3. You can download a primitive (working) prototype of the ExceptionHandler here from PSC i did a while ago. The one in HotHTML 3 is a little cleaner and has several features to return the IDE back to its state after a crash without loosing documents etc but apart from that the skeleton of the handler is there. So far my research has lead me to several CodeProject articles and this MSDN library page. It seems quite trivial to do in VC++ but with VB its a little more complex than it ought to be... that or maybe i'm sniffing my tail too much and not looking in the right direction. In either case i'll delve into what happens with this as time goes on. R&D now into this will mean less headaches when attempting to debug problems on clients machiens in the future...