Laurent Kempé : Vista

Thanks to Vista Roll Back Driver

lkempe — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 20:59:29 GMT

Since the last update two-three days ago of my notebook ATI video drivers I had only crashes! Finally thanks to the Vista Roll Back Driver I was able to go back to the previous version and I don't have anymore crashes when I go in sleep mode.

It would be time that we get something more stable from the gfx card manufacturers!

Get back almost 1GB of free disk space after Vista SP1 installation

lkempe — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 10:32:29 GMT

If you have installed SP1 of Vista you certainly recognized that your drive lost around 1Gb of free space.

The solution is to use a tool that comes with the SP1 to recover your free space at the price of not being able to come back and uninstall the SP1.

This tool is vsp1cln.exe that you can run like this:

Vista SP1 installed

lkempe — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 09:20:05 GMT

After some cleanup on my C: drive to get back to the 7Gb minimum free space needed, an update to the latest drivers of ATI and finally a backup with Acronis True Image Workstation, I was ready to install the Windows Vista SP1.

The installation took a bit more than 1h and was successful!

Update: Take care it really needs 7Gb on the C: drive to install!

Vista SP1 is here!

lkempe — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 22:39:21 GMT

As you can see on this page and on this picture:

Get rid of extra pixels in Vista Toolbars

lkempe — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 13:49:18 GMT

When you use Lock the Taskbar in Windows Vista the toolbars shift from some pixels before locking and it is really annoying!

The alternative is to not lock the Taskbar and add the following registry setting to avoir the possibility of moving the toolbars:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

TaskbarNoDragToolbar
Prevents users from rearranging toolbars. If you enable this setting the user will not be able to drag or drop toolbars to the taskbar.
From http://jalaj.net/2007/11/28/tweaking-registry-for-task-bar-in-vista/

Cannot open new window under Vista !!

lkempe — Tue, 22 May 2007 20:27:05 GMT

I was experiencing for some time a quite strange effect on my no so old installation of Windows Vista. After some dyas of usage without any reboot I sometime was unable to open any new window, it could be an explorer, internet explorer 7 tab, a menu of tray icon, and this without any error message. I first thought it was an issue with the video driver, but after too much annoyance I searched the web and found a post "Max Num. of Open Windows under XP/2003/VISTA - Resolved !' explaining the issue and a possible fix.

From Ohad's WebLog

When I'm working (it happens from now and then...) I always tend to open lots and lots of explorer windows as I Google for answers to questions that come along while coding...

When I used XP and Win 2003 it always bothered me that as soon as I opened 15-17 Internet explorer windows my system got stuck so hard that even right click context menu wouldn't seem to show up.
When I migrated to Vista I though that finally someone in MS will fix this limitation but I was disappointed to find out that it still there...
Well after looking and looking... searching and hacking ... I found the answer !
Its all about the desktop heap !
Following is Desktop Heap Tweak:
Because it is an undocumented registry tweak I take no responsibility regarding implementing this tweak ! It worked for me and if you choose to tweak your system you are doing it on your own risk.
Longtime Windows users are familiar with the desktop heap, a memory space that Windows allocates for desktop objects such as, well, windows.
Each open window or other desktop object uses up a certain amount of the desktop heap. In older versions of Windows the desktop heap was very small, and objects weren't always disposed from the heap correctly.
This was a good part of the reason for the Incredible Shrinking Resource Heap problem that plagued the 16 and hybrid 16/32-bit versions of Windows.
NT fixed this problem by devoting a far larger chunk of memory to the desktop heap -- but the fact that it had a far better memory manager than Win 3.x or Win9x, and a pure 32-bit architecture, didn't hurt either.
The desktop heap limit affects the NT/VISTA family of systems, Hitting the limit is manifested as either a DLL initialization error for USER32.dll or an out of memory error.
Fortunately, the limit it tweakable, the default settings are low enough that the limit is easily hit.
To tweak the limit, take a look in the registry at HLKM/System/CurrentControlSet/Control/Session Manager/SubSystems
(cranked up a bit if you find yourself manipulating a lot of desktop objects.)
Within that key is a subkey called Windows, which contains in it, among other things, the value "SharedSection=1024,3072"
Changing the SharedSection entry to "1024,3072,512" (note the comma and the value)increases the size of the "hidden" desktop heap.
If that doesn't work, try increasing the second of the comma delimited values (e.g. 3072 -> 4096) which is the size limit of any particular desktop heap.
Update: just to clarify for some pepole... on vista your default is 1024,3072,512 changing is to 1024,4096,512 will make the difference

I did the modification and for the moment didn't had any issue, but I will wait one more week to be sure that it works good for me.

Switcher 1.2 - Nice Vista Aero tool

lkempe — Fri, 04 May 2007 21:21:19 GMT

A nice tool for Windows Vista, I will not tell you more you need to try it (especially you Didier ;-)

You can get it from this page: http://insentient.net/

The blog about Switcher is on this page: http://baostuff.spaces.live.com/

Almost finished to install and configure my Vista notebook

lkempe — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 19:42:17 GMT

I still need to have some software installed but the main one needed to work are installed:

Office 2007
Groove
OneNote
Mindjet MindManager
TechSmith Camtasia & SnagIt
Cisco VPN Client
Cygwin
.NET development environment: Visual Studio 2005, JetBrains ReSharper, SQL Server Express 2005, Reflector...
Java develoment environment: Eclipse, Exadel Studio, Tomcat, MySQL...
Acronis True Image Workstation

Start++

lkempe — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 20:38:06 GMT

What I was missing after some use of Vista is the way I was using the shorcuts of Windows Desktop Search in my day to day activities. On Vista I prefer having just to type the windows key to get into the textbox ready to type the query. The bad point on Vista is that it was missing the shortcut part.

Now it is over with Start++ from Brandon Paddock. Great job Brandon, Thanks.

Link to BrandonTools

Going to Vista

lkempe — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 13:01:39 GMT

After several issues using Windows XP with ATI Drivers I decided to update to Vista my new professional notebook, a great HP nw 8440 with 4Gb memory :-). The update went as I thought, I was not able to reboot on Vista, after trying to fix it till 2AM with the tools on Vista DVD, it was without any luck and as I am not a real fan about updating OS, I decided to do a full install of Vista. So my dear friends of ecenter solutions, or what ever ;-), you will have to try yourself the update or to do another full installation. I see your face Bojan ;-)

To restore needed files from the old notebook installation I used Acronis True Image Workstation (offered by Acronis, Thanks). And I have to say that I really liked the way to mount an image and browse the file as read only. A great tool.

The installation and patches went really well and now I am almost ready to go and it is great to see that all my issues with changing the screen resolution went away, even with my docking station. Great. Still needing the Cisco VPN tool for Vista; but it zill qrrive I hope soon:

Btw I had an issue to install a tool I can't leave without: GhostDoc and found the solution on the forum

Create a batch file in the directory where the MSI file resides, containing the following line:
msiexec /i GhostDoc1.9.5.msi
Right-click on the batch file and select "Run as Administrator"