Posts Tagged ‘Solutions’

This is a common question on XP and even Vista. If you do a basic search with Google or Live you’ll actually get mixed information with many people (including some Microsoft sources) saying that sharing of networked content is not possible. However let it be known that it is possible and this information is available directly from Microsoft’s own sharing FAQ’s.

If you want to share files in a monitored folder that is located on another computer (for example, a folder on a network share), the remote folder must have the appropriate Windows access permissions assigned to it and the computer that contains the library you want to share has remote content sharing enabled. You can enable remote content sharing by performing the following procedure on the computer that contains the library you are sharing.

1.	Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2.	In the registry tree (on the left), expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, SOFTWARE, Microsoft, MediaPlayer, and then Preferences.
3.	Right-click HME, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4.	Type EnableRemoteContentSharing, and then press ENTER.
5.	Right-click EnableRemoteContentSharing, and then click Modify.
6.	In the Value data text box, type 1, and then click OK. If you later decide to disable remote content sharing, you can repeat this procedure and change the value to 0.

For more information, see Windows Media Player FAQ.

I should also note that typically you need to make sure that WMP is monitoring the network share via the UNC path so \\SERVER\Music, while you can certainly have the share mapped to a network drive this will cause issues in certain cases. So if you add M:\ for example, make sure WMP is monitoring and using \\SERVER\Music instead. Issues that come up include the networked content showing up on first use but not being able to play back, and after the machine starts the content not being up to date. For more info check out this post.

This is a mod I did a while ago. I randomly use 24-hour time and sometimes my brain just doesn’t quite associate 20:05 as being 8:05pm and what not. Getting tired of figuring it out (yes I’m that lazy and don’t want to subtract 12) and having a Skagen wristwatch (I rarely wear it now) that has both 12 and 24 on the face, I figured the Clock gadget in Vista should have a 24 hour face as well.

So click here to download it.
Note it is provided free without warranty or support.

I’ve been playing around with other ideas as well for new and modified gadgets so will post updates as they become available. Oh and while you’re downloading this 24 hour clock, also download the uTorrent Gadget… Works great, only thing missing it seems is the ability to set Labels for your torrents.

UPDATE: This gadget has also been tested against Windows 7 and there are no issues to report.

Jon ordered a new Microsoft LifeChat ZX-6000 from Amazon (using some major credit) which arrived today. There’s little information about this headset, I didn’t even really know it existed till he brought it up. So yeah, no real information about the base unit but we figured it was free credit so might as well try. Opened it up and sure enough the base unit reads Microsoft Xbox 360 Wireless Receiver for Windows. Plug it in, Vista sees it, it doesn’t find drivers, Jon downloads the drivers from Microsoft Hardware. Install takes a good 5 minutes for the 3MB setup, totally lame, especially on Vista. The headset worked perfectly, pressed the button and up came WLM8.1, we then tried pairing the Xbox 360 Wireless controller, it paired just fine as well. Then did a short Skype call after setting the input and output to echo123 and that also worked perfectly. So awesome, a good solution to kill two birds with one stone. Only caveat that I can see is that after testing with the Xbox 360 itself I can’t find a way to pair the headset with the 360. Regardless considering the receiver is $20 normally getting a nice headset and a good way to do wireless calls with Skype is worth the $30.

It’s been driving me nuts ever since I started using Vista but it’s finally been fixed. Apparently not caused by Plus! Live for Messenger nor WLM 8.1 itself but some bad bits for the Microsoft wireless mouse I’ve got. The fix went up on Windows Update the other day and since then things have been fine. The KB article for the fix is amusing to me since it talks about the issue possibly being caused by CyberLink software. Cute since this is a clean install and nothing other than WLM and Office 2007 have been installed. Either way the “HID Non-User Input Data Filter” fixes the auto away status in Messenger. My power management for disabling the monitors after 15 minutes has worked fine and the update hasn’t changed that. Jason Tsang also has a bit more information regarding the update.

First an obvious one from the Sidebar… This is a known bug but it’s stupid and annoying. Notice anything in the linked screenshot? According to the Sidebar and according to the Display Settings the gadgets and such should be on the right side of my left monitor. Obviously they’re not. After a restart of the PC the Sidebar ends up in that location. At which point you have to pull up the properties again and set it to the right side of monitor 3.

If you have a sharp eye you might have also noticed something else. This one is a shell bug. Notice the taskbar has a bit more going on than it should? Especially over in that right side there’s just stuff that should definitely be black.

Here’s another example, you can clearly see what’s happening here. The taskbar glass effect is grabbing the wrong portion of the image for the effect. It’s taking the image from the 2nd monitor not the 1st. Here’s the actual background image (converted from a BMP). Jon and I thought the fix would be to just turn glass off then on so I restarted the DWM service that didn’t work. Neither did a restart. So we’re not sure if this is the same known bug we’ve seen during the beta or something else. The fix however is to turn on the auto-hiding of the taskbar. Immediately after doing that the problem is fixed. Disabling the auto-hiding breaks it again .

One other thing you’ll notice from the background image is that it doesn’t quite match the screenshot of the desktop. Well this is more of a feature request and something that can be done with UltraMon but something clearly the shell team didn’t have time nor thought was worthy of doing for Vista. Basically I’ve got 3 24″ monitors at 1920×1200. I’ve got my main monitor 1 set to the middle where I like my taskbar. 2 is to the left, and 3 to the right. The problem is that I’m a bit more of a pixel perfectionist than most and so having one desktop background spread across all 3 monitors is a must. There’s only 2 ways of doing this. First is to use a third party app like UltraMon. And the second approach is to pop open Paint or Photoshop and create an image that’s the right size (5760×1200) in my case. Then paste in the 3 images to create one image to stretch about whichever way you’d please.

Now logic would dictact that WYSIWYG with the background image. You’d expect it to go 123, left, middle, right. Well that’s not the correct logic according to the methods used for the Desktop Background settings in Vista. If you have a set up similar to my circumstances, which I’ll concede many don’t… *cough* stupid speech recognition vulnerability. Then I’m just like some at ZDNet and I’d just be making something of nothing. However, if you also have Aristotle like perfection you’ll want to make sure your multimon background is set up right.

To do this you need to remember that Windows will start the background image from your “main” monitor and you need to have things set to Tile mode. In my case the monitors go 213. So while the start of image should be at the left mine is in the middle. Next you have to make sure the image flows and overflows from left to right, regardless of monitor numbering. To better illustrate this click here. Well, I hope that better illustrates things with the description:

1, Middle monitor = Left side of image in Photshop.
2, Left monitor = Right side of image in Photoshop.
3, Right monitor = Middle of image in Photoshop.

If not then maybe heading over to shellrevealed would be a good idea . Tell them that you want to be able to set a different background image for each attached display and not have to deal with this mess. Finally if you like the backgrounds shown or want to see some other cool stuff head over to mandolux.

UPDATE: Dom and I were discussing how annoying desktop icons have become. I was ranting about how I wish the Recycle Bin were a sidebar thing instead of being the only desktop icon that I’d have floating around. So I disabled it in Personalization. He instead just unchecked Show Desktop Icons from the Properties menu on the Desktop. I gave this a go just for the heck of it since I’ve still got a couple other temporary icons on the desktop that I didn’t want to move and low and behold. The bloody taskbar glass bug was resolved. Obviously there’s something funky going on here and I’m sure it wasn’t really considered to be significant enough to fix since not enough people would hit it. At any rate, just a work around for anyone who wants to know…