Posts Tagged ‘Vista’

Grr. Now I remember my last USB MIDI experience… Last time was with XP in beta, even then it was the same deal. No bloody drivers because XP wasn’t released. Now 7, though its RTM’d isn’t out on the street yet; so no bloody drivers for the just unboxed Axiom Pro 49.

What gets annoying is when you have a phone call earlier in the day where a customer complains about crap not working that used to work or relatively new stuff not working. No drivers, bad drivers, whatever.

I mean come on, it’s not Microsoft’s fault. It’s not like Vista wasn’t in beta for 6 years and 7 for 2+. Hell Microsoft even helps people write their drivers. Still, we get crap drivers way too late which just pisses people off.

I’m not blaming M-Audio here. I’m just frustrated at the statu quo. I’ve not completed my search for updates bits yet so for all I know it’ll be working in 5 minutes. I’m a bit miffed it’s not just a simple plug and play. Or updated drivers off Microsoft Update. My philosophy would be to release early at every point of the process. It’s understandable if the stuff doesn’t work perfectly during the beta. But at least you won’t have customers out in the cold come RTM.

And I do have to say, Vista’s only failure was in its public perception. Yes UAC was overblown, yes they failed to deliver half what they promised at PDC03, but at the same time it was a huge improvement over XP. People will forget that XP was considered crap until SP2 made it what it is. Vista is the same deal. SP2 is amazing most of the time.

Now with Windows 7 people are finally saying it’s what Vista should’ve been, this is rather funny really because even with 7 being as awesome as it is, there’s still a lot left that was still promised and shown at PDC03.

Perhaps Microsoft’s priorities have shifted, for example multitouch wasn’t as huge as it is now. Perhaps Microsoft’s resources haven’t quite been allocated as well as they could be. Or maybe what’s actually being engineered is just a little more complicated than we expected.

I’m still thinking of that amazingly good demo from PDC03 with the millions of photos and albums shown in 3D that was completely fluid, all driven by meta data in a WinFS powered back end. The reality unfortunately is that despite what Microsoft is delivering in 7 and Apple has been delivering in Snow Leopard really doesn’t match up to demos.

Still, 7 is pretty awesome, it’s definitely the best OS Microsoft has yet to release.

You know, it could just be a consequence of trying to move technology so quickly. On both the hardware and software side.

Example, 1080p 56″ LED DLP about 3 years ago was about $3400. Now you could probably find one for $900. LED LCD purchased about two months ago, $3200, at a steep discount no less. Now, $2500, via Amazon.

That’s a pretty fast progression in both price and obsolescence. Maybe everyone just expects too much too quickly .

Maybe Michael Moore has hit on something with Capitalism, I’ve not even seen it yet but I get the feeling we in general have expected exponential growth but have the lack of widespread focus to actually get anything accomplished. And this is due to the current state of Capitalism in the US. It doesn’t seem like everyone is as focused on a singular task as they were when getting to the moon or fighting the Axis powers.

It’s not just technology either, where’s the focus on health, energy, and sustainability? I think Dawkins and Maher might agree that to some extent the lack of focus is exacerbated in part by the lack of reason and the divisiveness of US politics and religion.

But anyway, I just want to make some music damn it .

This is a fairly common problem which leaves a lot of users scratching their heads as to how to just make things work. There are a couple reasons one would encounter this. The most common is because an application or process still has the file open (technically it’s called a ‘handle to the file’). Another possibility would be if the permissions on the file you were trying to delete were invalid. Without getting too in depth into the how and why there are two quick things to check on when trying to get around the problem.

I’ll go over the first reason in this post. In the Windows SysInternals suite, there is a tool called Process Explorer, which is an amazingly powerful app. It will allow you to view what’s going on behind the scenes of most everything running on the system. Just doing quick search will show just how powerful this tool is. For this issue though, what we’ll do is find any open handles on the file we’re trying to access and delete.

1. First, start Process Explorer.
2. Press CTRL+F to open a search window.
3. In the ‘Handle or DLL substring’ field type in a portion or the complete name of the file you are trying to delete and press Enter to begin the search. In my case the file was ”08 mer du japon.mp3″.
4. You should now be presented with a list of open handles. Next double click on the handle in the search window to show the file handle highlighted in the lower pane along with all the other open handles on the system.
5. Right click the row for the handle and click Close Handle.
6. You should now be good to go.

In this particular case it would seem the handle to the .MP3 file wasn’t properly closed by Windows Media Player despite it having finished playing and updating the metadata. Because of this I was unable to move the album folder. By using Process Explorer I was able to find the culprit and close down the handle which allowed Vista full access to move the file and folder. There are some other third-party tools available as well as other tips and ways of doing the same thing. However, I highly recommend the method I just described, as using and further exploring Process Explorer and the other tools available in the SysInternals suite of applications will allow you to gain a much greater understanding of your system.

This, combined with a few good search queries, a deep curiosity through Wikipedia, and the Microsoft Knowledge Base will help turn any enthusiast into a real power user. Check back shortly for part two where I discuss how to take back ownership of your files and folders through permissions in Windows Vista and Server 2008.

I was in a team meeting thing the other day and had my laptop out taking notes. Unfortuantely despite the fact I always run with all system sounds off, I kept on getting the annoying system beep every so often. It was maybe coming from Outlook and holding down the backspace for too long. It happens even if you mute the sound on the system, and heck, even if you disable the “System speaker” device in Device Manager which is listed under the System devices. And man is the beep loud, amusing really, since the mono speaker on my Dell Latitude D430 is barely audible but that bloody system beep is loud as hell and definitely attention grabbing.

So here’s how to disable the Beep, yes that’s actually what it’s called.

1. Press WIN+R
2. Type in devmgmt.msc and press Enter.
3. Click the View menu then click Show hidden devices.
4. Expand the Non-Plug and Play Drivers branch out.
5. Look for Beep and double-click the device to bring up the properties window.
6. Click on the Driver tab.
7. Under Current status, click Stop.
8. Under Startup type drop down switch the driver to Disabled.
9. Click OK

You’ll now have true silence from your desktop or laptop PC regardless of whatever crazy error messages pop up or however much spam gets delivered to your Inbox. Though this won’t help if you if you’ve got a bunch of 80mm fans running at 8000RPM still . But that’s for another post… Tip though, voltage converters for fans or fans with a high CFM and low dB rating work amazingly well as do rubber gromets for fans and HDD’s and not to mention that Dynamat isn’t half bad for noise absorbtion as well.

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.