Microsoft announced at CES that they’re adding TiVO functionality to the XBox 360. I’d be excited about this if it weren’t for the fact that it depends on support from your cable provider, and that sort of thing almost never makes it to Canada. I’m guessing that behind the scenes it requires CableCard support – […]
Thanks, Microsoft, for the System Stability Chart in Vista. Now, how about some system stability?
A very good article posted by Scott Byer reminded me I wanted to say something about this. There’s this perception that 64 bit is better than 32 bit, the way 32 bit was better than 16 bit, and that it’s just a natural transition the software industry will have to make. But there are some […]
DWM.EXE is the Desktop Window Manager in Windows Vista. When you’re using Aero Glass in Vista, DWM owns an offscreen bitmap for every open window, the size of the window, with a rendering of that window’s contents. DWM needs this so it can quickly show you thumbnails of all the open windows, and so it can […]
I tried to connect to my Vista desktop at work using Remote Desktop, and got this message: The message appeared on the remote system, and I was able to see it. I wonder how the data got to me.
I’ve never really shared the opinion that a released version of Windows was “buggy” in the past. Maybe not everything was perfect – but stuff generally worked, and if it didn’t, often it was because of a non-obvious design or something else that you could explain away. But with Vista, I’ve been finding things that […]
Started to see “You must install WPF/E to view this page” messages? You’ll probably see more of them in the future, as Microsoft employees start pushing the world to install their take on Flash. Check out the top line of simplegeek.com for a gratuitous example. WPF/E is good technology, but suffers from a serious problem: Launch lag. […]
Curious about how much Vista actually uses the .NET framework, I wrote a little Ruby script that walks the Windows directory looking for managed assemblies. Of the 8969 (*.exe|*.dll) files found, 824 of them have managed code in them, or just over 9%. What makes it worse is that most of the managed code that […]
A few interesting things I came across while looking around Vista… digitalx.exe sounds like DRM for software downloads colorcpl.exe lets you configure colour profiles dfrggui.exe is the defragmenter GUI (which now doesn’t have any visualization of the defrag process… bummer) edlin.exe is still there! getmac.exe shows the MAC addresses for your installed network adapters. iexpress.exe is a […]
I found the solution to the problem I’ve been having with the Vista version of Windows Movie Maker. Turns out the problem is the “Vista-Ready” Nero 7 that I installed at some point after installing Vista. Uninstalling Nero fixed Windows Movie Maker.