7 posts tagged “vista”

I'm lucky enough to be able to run a high resolution desktop - 1680x1050. As a result, though, the icons on the desktop look stupidly big, taking up about an inch or more of real space. So I started looking for a way to reduce the size and came across the solution.

Make sure there is nothing open on the desktop. Click on the desktop background. Hold down the CTRL key - you should now see a box appear around the first icon on the desktop. Whilst holding down the CTRL key, move the scroll wheel on your mouse backwards and forwards to make the icons bigger or smaller.

Unfortunately, I don't know how you achieve this trick if you don't have a scroll wheel on your mouse ...

I've just used Vista's "Importing Pictures and Videos" wizard for the first time and I am very happy and impressed with the way it works and the functionality. When Vista detects a camera or a removable disc with appropriate content, the AutoPlay menu appears and one of the options is to import the content using Windows. If you click on that, the wizard brielfy works out how many photos there are and then gives you the opportunity to tag the photos. You can go further and set the import options:

Import Settings

The ability to rename the image file with a tag helps to achieve consistency in your photo collection as it grows.

As the import proceeds, the wizard displays a thumbnail of each photo and a progress bar. This may seem like a slow process compared to, say, dragging the files directly from the camera to the computer, but the flexibility of the renaming, tagging, rotating, etc, means that you get a more consistent result this way.

Importing Pictures and Video

Unfortunately, although I've installed the Canon RAW codec for use in the Image Gallery, it doesn't appear to be used in the import process, so you just get the generic photo icon in the import window. RAW files seem to take even longer to import - it could just be a factor of the file size, or it could mean that Vista is spending time trying to interpret the files - time that is wasted because it isn't doing anything useful.

Of course, to take full advantage of things like the tagging, it also means you've got to import the photos regularly so that you can sensibly assign a single tag to the batch of photos you are importing. Now that I know that Vista works this way, this is what I'll be doing :)

The Microsoft Photography Blog has reported that Canon has released their RAW codec for Windows Vista.

To download it:

• Visit http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/controller?act=DownloadIndexAct
• Category = “EOS (SLR) Camera Systems”, Product Type = “Digital EOS Cameras” and then choose your camera model from the third dropdown
• Click Go
• Click the “Drivers / Software” link at the top of the page
• Choose the Canon RAW Codec  1.0
• Download and run the executable

The codec will support .CR2 RAW files, but not .CRW files.  It includes support for the following cameras:

• EOS-1Ds Mark II
• EOS-1D Mark III
• EOS-1D Mark II N
• EOS-1D Mark II
• EOS 5D
• EOS 30D
• EOS 20D
• EOS 400D DIGITAL
• EOS DIGITAL REBEL XTi
• EOS Kiss Digital X
• EOS 350D DIGITAL
• EOS DIGITAL REBEL XT
• EOS Kiss Digital N

Although the Dreamscene extra for Windows Vista Ultimate is still a Technical Preview (i.e. they haven't finished it yet, it is a beta), Microsoft have released a DreamScene Content Pack through the Ultimate Extras update service

The pack consists of four videos:

• A field of thistle, with a bee gathering pollen
• The rushing water of a forest stream
• A streetlamp reflected in a puddle, with softly falling rain
• Orange wisps flowing in a computer-generated scene

My personal favourite at the moment is the softly falling rain; all it needs is some background rain sounds!

I do wonder, though, just how popular these will be in the long run. The value of an animated desktop area seems a bit limited once you've got lots of windows open covering it.

With my Visa bill arriving with the Dell Precision on it, I could now go ahead and order the X-Fi card. As I had done with the Audigy, I selected the version that had the external control unit - the Elite Pro. Selected next day delivery with Amazon so that it would arrive in time for me to work on it this weekend ... which it did.

First order of business was to finish removing the old Dell from my desk area. Disconnect the last few cables, tidy it all away and I've got some space to work in. Unpack the X-Fi system ... boy, is that control box BIG! It looks really smart but it is also very wide - about as wide as a laptop. That meant shuffling some stuff around my space so that I could put it somewhere sensible.

Installed the card into the one PCI slot in the workstation, connected up the control box, started it up and booted to XP. Installed all of the software and connected the speakers up. Front left works, but none of the others. Check the connections and cannot find a fault. Now front left doesn't work. Reboot ... and get the BSOD. Oooops.

Power off and try again; still get a BSOD.

Power off and try again - this time I notice that the BIOS is complaining that it couldn't allocate an I/O bar to a PCI device. I hadn't noticed that before. Unfortunately, there is virtually nothing on the web that Google could find about it.

Take out the X-Fi card, power up and the system starts, so clearly the X-Fi card is causing something to go wrong. Have I broken the card somehow or was it faulty in some way?

I'm trying not to panic, mainly on the basis that I know Dell sell the X-Fi with the Precision 690 so it must work; the reason I didn't buy it with the system was partly because of cost and partly because I wanted the Elite Pro, which isn't the model that Dell sells ... but I didn't think that a variance in the X-Fi models could be the cause of the problem.

So I tried the only option open to me ... move the card into one of the PCI-X slots. Thankfully, PCI-X is compatible with PCI, so the card fitted. Power up ... and XP starts! XP finds the "new" hardware (well, it had changed slots) and adjusts the drivers to use it. Start up the Creative Diagnostics and run the speaker test ... and it works!

So, clearly there was a PCI bus interaction somewhere. Part of the problem is that a lot of the built-in hardware is also connected to the PCI bus so there isn't a lot you can do but try different slots. Thankfully, that solved the problem.

So, having enjoyed the X-Fi in all its glory under XP, it was time to try Vista. Reboot into Vista and let the system try to find drivers ... which it doesn't. I'm not too surprised by that as most manufacturers seem to be using January 30th as a magic "switch on" date, even though corporates, MSDN subscribers and other customers have had valid RTM copies of Vista for quite some time now. So I don't have a lot of choice but to install the latest beta driver off the Creative web site. They work ... in that they play audio, but they are just drivers. None of the applications are available and it would seem from the forums that Creative customers are getting fed up and aren't actually expecting any deliverables now until some time in Q1.

Time will tell ...

The Microsoft PhotoBlog has just been updated with a posting about how Vista is going to support RAW photo files. It looks like Microsoft have taken a sensible approach to implementing support but it is ultimately up to the camera manufacturers to provide the necessary codecs to interpret their RAW format.

If you've ever used the RAW add-in for XP, you'll know that it was pretty limited and it didn't get updated for newer cameras. Hopefully, by providing the platform and asking the camera companies to do the interpretation, we'll end up with a better solution.

Only time will tell, though. Canon haven't made theirs available yet and the blog suggests that it might be a couple of months yet!

Once upon a time, I decided to get a new video editing computer. I wanted it to have two operating systems so that I could keep the video editing use cleanly separate from normal day-to-day use. My video editing tools and hardware are currently only XP compatible, so that decided one of the OSes, but this was a high-powered computer so I wanted to see what it could do with Vista, and that decided the other OS.

The first complication was caused by Dell: I wanted the computer to have three drives; a 500GB boot drive and 2 750GB data drives. Dell's system wouldn't allow that configuration to be built for some reason, so the account manager had to have it built with the 2 750GB drives and ship the 500GB drive for me to install. No problem, I thought, Dell will have the OS on one of the 750GB drives and I'll "Ghost" it over to the 500GB drive and then install Vista.

The second complication was caused by the fact that these were SATA drives ... and the copy of Bart PE that I've got Ghost on doesn't have the requisite drivers for the SATA hardware so it doesn't see the drives. Ah, but it says to press F6 at startup to install additional drivers! Fine idea, but Microsoft still live in the Stone Age and insist that the drivers come from the A drive ... and my system doesn't have a floppy drive in it and doesn't appear to map my USB memory key onto the A drive.

So what's a guy to do? Well, it occurred to me that the reason I was booting from Bart PE was because the XP partition needed to be in a quiet state in order to be Ghostable. You don't need to run Ghost from Bart PE - you just need XP not to be the active OS.

So I decided to go ahead with the plan to install Vista onto the 500GB drive. That went very smoothly. I created a partition that was about half the size of the drive, installed Vista and a while later, I have a very nice setup with a rating of 5.3, and the full Aero experience. Sweet.

Now to get the XP OS transferred over. Run up Ghost, select the partition, select the destination and go! A while later, I have a copy of the XP partition on the boot drive.

Now the fun really starts! How do I get an OS choice menu working under this situation?

Vista introduces a new boot mechanism that replaces the boot.ini file. As with all things new, information is sparse, sometimes inaccurate and the tools are driving people mad. Some enterprising people have created GUI tools to try to assist with the process but they didn't, unfortunately, help me, Anyway, I'm a bit of a believer in trying to understand how the underlying commands and system work anyway.

The primary tool here is bcdedit. This can only be run as an administrator. Under Vista, this is most easily achieved by finding the Command Tool in the Programs menu, right-clicking and choosing Run As Administrator. I'm not going to go into all of the details of bcdedit (mainly because I'm not writing this on a Vista machine so I can't check my facts); instead, I'll stick to what I needed to do in order to solve my problem.

I'd installed Vista on the first partition of the boot drive, so it was going to control the dual-boot process. The boot configuration store, by default, includes support for a "legacy" OS, i.e. a Windows OS that comes before Vista, but it doesn't appear in the boot loader menu by default, so one command I had to run was:

bcdedit /displayorder {ntldr} /addlast

Quite a lot of postings about the bcdedit tool refer to {legacy} instead of {ntldr}. As far as I can tell, the term {legacy} was used in beta builds of Vista and got changed to {ntldr}. Certainly, if you run bcdedit /enum all, it is listed as {ntldr} although {legacy} works as well :).

So now if I reboot my PC, I get an OS choice, but choosing XP doesn't work. Why not?

That had me stumped for a while. It had been a long time since I had to play around with dual-booting and I couldn't remember how the boot process works for XP. A bit of googling later and I had my answer.

The computer boots and runs the boot loader process, in this case the new Vista one. You pick XP, which is the legacy OS and the boot manager then tries to run the ntldr executable. This needs to be on the boot partition, i.e. in my case the Vista partition. That clearly wasn't going to be the case as I had installed Vista into a clean partition.

In fact, XP needs three files to boot: ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini. (Actually, that is a bit simplified; things get a bit more involved if you have SCSI devices, I think, but I don't so I don't know for sure). So I copied those three files from my XP partition to the Vista partition.

This is where things got complicated again. I made a mistake (which I'm about to explain) and led myself up the garden path before a bit of research got me back to the right place. Looking back, if I'd left things alone, it would have worked at this point, but only by sure fluke, so it is worth understanding the following bits.

boot.ini tells the rest of the boot process where the XP partition lives. It uses a system called ARC paths. An example is:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS

Now, I'm going to ignore SCSI devices in this discussion because, again, it complicates things and I don't have any. In fact, I'm not going to go into this in great detail (other than explaining what I did wrong); instead, I'm going to refer you to an article that cleared it all up for me, particularly my confusion over SATA drives.

You see, I'd installed the 500GB SATA drive as ID 2 on the list (ID 0 and ID 1 being the 750GB drives). My original intention had been to swap all of the drives but then I discovered that you can specify in the BIOS the boot order for all of the drives, so I could therefore make ID 2 drive boot ahead of ID 0.

I therefore thought that I needed to change the ARC path so that rdisk(0) became rdisk(2). In order words, I thought that I had to reference the SATA ID number. If you read the article I've referenced, you'll see that I was wrong. The ARC paths don't use the SATA IDs - they use the BIOS boot order instead! To put it another way, if your XP partition is on the drive that is booting, then rdisk(0) will always be correct.

So the reason why the ARC path could have been left alone and it would have worked is because XP was on partition 2 on the original drive (because Dell install their utility partition first) so, by sheer coincidence, XP was still on partition 2.

Finally, I had XP booting. But the journey wasn't quite over. I was getting errors & failing processes when I booted XP. This, actually, was a relatively easy one to figure out and fix.

When XP was originally set up on my machine, it had drive letter C. After all my fiddling about, the new copy of it booted and grabbed letter F, since drive letters C, D and E were assigned to the other SATA drives & partitions that came before it. If there is one thing I do know about Windows, it doesn't like having the system drive letter changed after it has been installed. I therefore needed to put XP back to drive C. That isn't something you can do in Drive Manager, but Microsoft have a very readable support article on how to do this with some careful registry editing.

Job done!