Archive for the 'Microsoft' Category

Disable Notification Area Balloon Tips in Windows XP

Published
by
Howard
on August 29th 2008
in Future Howard, Hardware, Microsoft and Tech Support
. 0 Comments

I’m rebuilding my new Sony Vaio Z with Windows XP, and as usual there are a load of tweaks I need to make to the OS before I feel “at home” again.  Since the fingerprint reader software on the new build has an annoying habit of popping up info balloons on every boot - regardless of how often I click them - I felt the need to Disable Notification Area Balloon Tips in Windows XP.

Much better.

And sorry Vista, I tried, I really did.  I liked how your hot-swap driver support meant I could switch between stamina and speed modes without a reboot, but I hated your poor network performance against my NAS (even with SP1).  Maybe I’ll try again on the next new laptop.  Oh, and Sony?  Thank you for my XP downgrade CD and drivers.  Lovely.

My 1080p HTPC: Multiple Freeview Tuners

Published
by
Howard
on July 12th 2008
in Cinema, HDTV, Hardware, Microsoft and Software
. 0 Comments

When I originally built my HTPC, I used 2 Freeview cards.  Each Hauppauge WinTV-NOVA-T500 has two Freeview tuners in one PCI card.  By installing two of these (and with some registry tweaking) it is possible to build a device that can record/watch 4 Freeview channels at once.

Out of the box the Vista Media Centre GUI is only capable of setting up 2 tuners at any one time.  This is odd since the underlying tuner architecture is actually quite capable of using as many tuners as you can fit in the machine.  Your limiting factor, really, is the speed you can push the data to your hard drive. Continue reading ‘My 1080p HTPC: Multiple Freeview Tuners’

Disable Windows Desktop Search Explorer Integration

Published
by
Howard
on July 10th 2008
in Future Howard, Microsoft and Software
. 1 Comment

Another post from the “helping future Howard” category.  I use Outlook 2007, which is great, but in order to be able to search your email with decent performance you must install Windows Desktop Search.  Unfortunately when you do this it integrates with Explorer without asking permission to do so.  This means that should you hit F3 to search inside an Explorer folder you’ll be presented with the monstrosity on the left; an entirely useless dialogue box unless you happen to be indexing the contents of your entire machine and network.  I’m not: I only index my Outlook content.

So, to disable this you must open regedit and find:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Desktop Search\DS

and set the ShowStartSearchBand value to 0.  That’ll give you back the default behaviour.

I find it quite irritating that the interface chooses to admonish me that I’m not indexing the content instead of just presenting me with the search functionality that is able to search the content for me.

VMRC Graphic Corruption

Published
by
Howard
on January 30th 2008
in Microsoft, Networking and Virtualisation
. 0 Comments

I’m looking for help here. 

The image (click to embiggen) you see here is a screen capture of one of my virtual machines suffering some form of graphic corruption.  It should look like this.  This happens often enough now that it is seriously irritating.  I can make it go away by closing VMRC and reconnecting to the server, but I’d rather not have to do so several times a day (sometimes multiple times an hour).

I’m running Virtual Server 1.1.603.0 EE R2 SP1, and all my VMs have Virtual Addition version 13.813 installed.  The VMRC client which came with R2 SP1 is version 1.1.603.0.

The same corruption is visible from machines with ATI and NVidia graphics cards, running XP SP2, Vista or Server 2003.

So - why is this happening, and how can I stop it?

Anyone?

Remove Windows Media Player context menu entries

Published
by
Howard
on December 19th 2007
in Microsoft and Software
. 13 Comments

I use Winamp to play mp3s.  I always have done - it’s lightweight, I like the interface and it has the few plugins I need.  I don’t need the bloat of iTunes or Windows Media Player.  However, I seem to have Windows Media Player installed - I don’t remember installing it, and I probably wouldn’t have noticed it was there were it not for the plethora of context menu items it installs.

All I wanted to do was right-click a selection of mp3s and then queue them in the Winamp playlist.  That’s when I noticed a load of entries like “sync to device”, “burn”, “add to library”.  Turns out Media Player had hooked into the shell.  Thankfully, there is a way to get rid of this integration (which added a delay of several seconds to my right-click!).

Here’s the fix, click Start, Run and type:

regsvr32 /u wmpshell.dll

Horrah - a much cleaner context menu.  I wonder if there is any software to allow you to remove specific entries from that list?

Reinstalling XP on the MacBook Pro

Published
by
Howard
on December 7th 2007
in Apple, Future Howard, Microsoft and Software
. 0 Comments

image As I mentioned previously, installing Leopard on my MacBook Pro gave me the opportunity to reinstall Windows XP and the new Boot Camp 2.0 drivers. This time (and again, for the benefit of my future self) I’ve compiled the list of what gets installed on a fresh machine: Continue reading ‘Reinstalling XP on the MacBook Pro’

Apple support Vista on BootCamp

Published
by
Howard
on March 28th 2007
in Apple, Hardware and Microsoft
. 3 Comments

Apple updated BootCamp today and introduced support for Windows Vista, so it looks like I can spend some time over the weekend doing a fresh install of Vista with supported drivers this time.  Of course it also means I get to have some fun removing the Microsoft Bluetooth stack and replacing it with a fully functional Widcom one, but them’s the breaks.  The new BootCamp introduces lots of updated drivers (including the camera on Vista) and hopefully does something about the power saving and suspend/hibernate issues.  Although they may be more to do with Vista itself rather than the MacBook Pro hardware.  We shall see…

OS X Cruft

Published
by
Howard
on September 18th 2006
in Apple, Hardware, Microsoft and Software
. 2 Comments
Gates vs Jobs

You know how after using a Windows PC for a few months it stops being quite so responsive to your clicks? You start seeing the hour-glass more often, it takes longer to boot and log-in, and starting applications that previously opened almost instantly now gives you time to go and make a cup of tea? We call it “Windows-cruft” and it’s universally understood by the Windows community.

I didn’t think that Macs, especially OS X, suffered, but suffer they do. “OS X Cruft” is just as bad as Windows-cruft, and the delays and glitches are just as infuriating. For the third time in as many days I’ve had to hold down the power button on my G5 to switch it off while the spinning beachball of death obstinately refusued to go away. My crime - opening Safari. Or closing safari. Or closing a finder window. Or attempting to click something on the menu, or the dock, or ANYWHERE on the screen!

Sheesh.

“Macs don’t crash.”

“Macs are faster.”

Bull. Time for a rebuild I think…

IE7 Beta 2 brickbats and bouquets…

Published
by
Howard
on April 28th 2006
in Internet, Microsoft and Software
. 1 Comment

Internet Explorer 7The public beta of Internet Explorer 7 has been out for a while now, and like the good Microsoft soldier I am, I installed it this week.  It’s very nice.  If you’ve only ever used IE it’ll be full of neat new toys that you’ve never seen before.  If you’ve been using Firefox or Safari, or most any other browser there will be little that’ll surprise you.  Tabbed browsing is there of course, and the thumbnail previews of all your tabs is a nice feature.  It incorporates RSS feeds (keeping them along with your favourites) which is a feature I’ve been waiting for on Windows for ages.

All good things then?  Well, no, unfortunately.  The first casualty of IE7 was my online banking.  Natwest Online failed to let me log in with IE7 - not that it recognised I was on an unsupported browser, just that IE7 refused to work with the form controls.  Worse than that thought was the realisation that IE7 would not let me log into the Outlook Web Access account I use to check my microsoft.com email address!  Yesterday I actually ended up using Firefox to check my microsoft email.  The irony was not lost on me.

So, I uninstalled IE7, only to find that the problems I’d found had been left behind: HTML form elements were no longer processed in any web page, and after further investigation it seemed that the jscript and vbscript engines had been unregistered.  So from Start->Run I did the following:

regsvr32 jscript
regsvr32 vbscript
regsvr32 /i mshtml

Which seems to have fixed everything. 

It’s a shame, because IE7 looks like it’s going to be great, but right now, on my system, it appears to be quite broken. 

As usual with a beta, caveat emptor: you get what you pay for!

Philosophy majors shouldn’t write technology editorials

Published
by
Howard
on April 19th 2006
in Apple, Games, Hardware, Internet, Microsoft, Software and Virtualisation
. 0 Comments

Richard sent me an email yesterday with a link to this article along with the message “You’ll love this one…”  If you’ve followed the Windows on Mac saga recently go and read it now, if you’re anything like me and Richard you’ll have plenty to say on the subject once you’ve finished reading.

I couldn’t believe that any publication would bother to publish something like that, even as an “opinion” piece in a student paper and even only on their website.  The author, who may be a veritable genius when it comes to philosophy, clearly has no idea what he (she?) is talking about when it comes to technology.  They don’t seem to understand the difference between emulation, virtualisation and dual booting, and have apparently very little grasp of hardware specifics…

When a Mac starts to emulate a Windows platform completely, the computer must provide additional voltage to provide the computing power.

Ignoring the author’s misconception that the Mac is emulating Windows (it is running Windows natively on an X86 chip remember…) what’s this about additional voltage?!  What?!  The intel chip in my MacBook - when running XP - is pulling the same power as when it runs OS X, or the same as the identical chip that runs Windows XP in the latest HP notebook.  Windows XP playing games such as UT2004 on the MacBook causes it to generate as much heat as OS X playing the Universal Binary of UT2004.  It’s hot (really hot), granted, but the idea that Windows is magically making the processor run hotter than OS X will ever allow is false.  It just gets as hot only quicker.

getting a Mac to run PC games will result in heartache - this I can guarantee

The author doesn’t specify exactly what heartache it will result in… My MacBook runs Half Life 2, CountStrike: Source, Unreal Tournament 2004 and Rise of Nations in some cases significantly faster/smoother than my Dell.  What heartache?  Heat-ache maybe, but no worse than OS X causes!

For reiteration, Macs cannot run Windows like PCs can.

Urm, yes.  Yes they can.  That’s rather what all the fuss was about when Apple put Intel chips inside.  INTEL.  x86 chips.  The same instruction set that nearly every PC on the planet uses to run, oh, for example, Windows!  Do you think the author understands the difference between a PPC and an Intel chip, and the reason why a Mac can now run exactly like a PC?

I can’t bring myself to refute the fifth paragraph (”My third point references to the industry.”) as it is so full of misunderstandings of the technology, the businesses involved and the computer industry’s recent history that it’s just not worth it.

Boot Camp crashes and burns?  Hardly.  It’s beta software.  It came with a warning.  Anyone who chose to ignore that warning and install it on a production machine deserves any hassle they get.  That said, my installation of Boot Camp was utterly without problems and I’ve heard lots of other positive reports on various forums.  I’m grateful to Apple for providing Boot Camp and the driver suite - I’d just like some of my minor niggles addressed!

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