I tried, for the first time, to put the computer to sleep. I wanted to start doing that at night, since my computer really isn’t doing anything vital at night, and each computer that’s on 24/7 is probably costing me $25 or so per month in power. And this led to my first Vista BSOD [...]
I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who’s not impressed with the Media Center functionality in Vista. This post on The Green Button summarizes most of my complaints, but in addition I have one more, that annoys me more than any of these. When I hit the “skip 30 second” or “skip back [...]
I just went through a particularly bizarre sequence of creating a problem and fixing it, with Vista, that I thought I’d relate. My freshly built Vista media center was giving me file system errors. From the event log: The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on [...]
If you run into the error “Windows Media Center Extender setup cannot configure the Windows Media Center PC” with error code -109, while trying to add an XBox 360 as a Media Center Extender to Vista, it means you’re not logged in to the Media Center as a user with admin rights. It’s not a [...]
Two executives in charge of Microsoft’s XBox Live Arcade have recently left: Greg Canessa and Ross Erickson. Frankly, I think this is good news. I don’t know these guys, I don’t know their history, but they’ve been in charge of XBox Live Arcade, and that service is doing a terrible job. Ross’s title was “Worldwide Games [...]
ReadyBoost is intriguing and I’ve been wanting to play with it since I first installed Vista, but my 1 gig USB memory stick tests as too slow, so ReadyBoost refuses to use it. While reading part 2 of Mark Russinovich’s excellent series on the Vista kernel, I came across his screenshot of the EMDMgmt registry [...]
This message, “No items match your search”, seems to imply that items were searched, and no matches were found. But, on Vista, it also means “None of the items in the index match your search”. There might be items that match your search, but maybe Vista hasn’t indexed them yet, or maybe Vista is indexing [...]
Another little “what were they thinking” Vista tidbit: The control panel has a search box (as do a lot of places in the OS) which seems like a good thing, but let me tell you, nothing is more frustrating than a search box that doesn’t find things that you know are there. Vista’s control panel [...]
There’s a bit of a thread going on on the Gnome desktop-architects mailing list, where Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, is complaining about the lack of customizability in Gnome. Where this was picked up by other bloggers, it was generally reported as Linus trying to fix Gnome and the shortsighted Gnome guys were [...]
So I’m trying to figure out how to turn off the flying window animation in Vista, because it’s interfering with something I’m trying to do. XP had a dialog that had the various visual effects the OS was capable of, and you could turn them on and off. The equivalent dialog in Vista doesn’t have [...]