Tag Archives: windows

ToolTipFixer 2.0 Released!

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NeoSmart Technologies first released ToolTipFixer to great acclaim last June, over a year ago now. Since then, the downloads have kept on pouring in – along with a number of suggestions that we’ve taken to heart and hopefully implemented in a way that will please our users.

You can now download ToolTipFixer 2.0 which has a number of changes and improvements based on the feedback we’ve received during the past year. First, for those of you that aren’t familiar with ToolTipFixer, it’s a nifty “patch” for a very frustrating bug in Windows which winds up rendering tooltips behind the taskbar, leaving them unreadable and generally annoying the user to no end:

ToolTipFixer sits silently and invisibly in the background, intercepting this problem and fixing it as it happens – letting you read those tooltips and use your PC the way you should be able to.

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Windows Isn’t For Gamers Anymore

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For the past decade-and-a-half, “Windows” has been synonymous with “PC Gaming” – after all, no other PC platform has managed to satiate the undying hunger gamers are quite famous for. But now it seems that Windows is on the verge of losing its distinction as the gaming platform of choice – with nothing but Microsoft’s own machinations to blame.

Despite PC users’ widely-varying taste and preference in operating systems and platforms, gamers need Windows. In fact, one of the biggest reason people around the globe tend to dual-boot is their undying love for gaming and the fact that no other OS out there can boast the wide range of gaming titles and genres available for their platform like Windows can. The traditional choice faced by most non-Windows users has been to either install and dual-boot Windows or bite the built and buy a gaming console – ask us, we would know.

But this is all about to change, thanks to Microsoft’s reckless abandon for one of its few truly-loyal userbases.

When Microsoft first began its frenzied Vista marketing campaign in 2006, one of the points it focused on most and repeated over and over again was just how big of a gaming revolution Windows Vista was. Gaming was a large part of the Vista WOW campaign, but it has since failed to disappoint. But this isn’t an article about Vista, it’s about how Windows is poised to lose its gaming advantage if Microsoft doesn’t get its act together sometime soon.

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Request_URI For IIS Updated with ISAPI_Rewrite 3 Support

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Request_URI for IIS, NeoSmart Technologies’ compatibility toolkit for IIS on Windows, has been updated to version 1.1, with support for Helicon’s ISAPI_Rewrite 3.x

With this update the installation process has been simplified somewhat, in particular the need modify HTTPD.INI to set the server variables has been eliminated – you just need to install ISAPI_Rewrite 3, configure php.ini to load up request_uri.inc, and you’re set.

Request_URI for Windows 1.1 retains backwards compatibility with ISAPI_Rewrite 2.x for those of you who’d rather not switch to the new (and much-improved) version 3.x.

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Don’t Forget About the Dual-Booters!

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InfoWorld has an article out today wherein Randall Kenney of the “Windows Sentinel” team (a program used to monitor system settings and performance to provide aggregate data for analysis) trashes end-user uptake of Windows Vista by revealing that 35% of surveyed PCs that ship with Vista have downgraded to Windows XP.

While that’s a stunning number of Vista-only OEM machines running Windows XP, Mr. Kenney seems to have forgotten about those of us that dual-boot. As champions of dual-booters everywhere, we’ve got to put our two cents in here.

If you keep in mind the type of people who would install the Windows Sentinel tool and take part in such a geeky program you’ll realize that it’s not too out there for a good number of these people to be the kind that run multiple operating systems on their machines.

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Shipping Seven is a Fraud.

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A blog titled Shipping Seven has gotten a lot of traffic recently for their article about Windows 7 and the MinWin kernel – namely, how they’re actually one and the same. The argument offered by “Soma” is that Windows Vista’s kernel (which is what Windows 7 will be built on) is MinWin ad that it’s already on every Vista desktop out there.

Whether or not MinWin is the very same kernel that went into Vista or not is officially unknown at the moment; but what we do know is that Shipping Seven is either one huge fake, or else that the Windows core programmers at Microsoft are so stupid that they don’t know the first thing about coding, kernels, operating systems and compilers.

The post at Shipping Seven is littered from beginning to end with fallacies, lies, and incorrect deductions that anyone with even the most basic coding skills would know better than to ever post, especially not when attempting to pass it off as the work of some of the more talented coders out there.

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ATi Catalyst 8.5 Drivers Out

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ATi has just released the Catalyst 8.5 drivers for Windows XP and Vista, you can download a copy here (hotlinking to the actual driver page is disabled).

The entire 8.x line has been of sub-par quality to date (8.3 and 8.4 in particular, which seem to crash randomly on a large percentage of Vista machines), hopefully the 8.5 release can provide a much-needed boost in terms of quality and stability.

It’s obviously too early to tell if the 8.5 releases addresses these issues, which are not listed in the release notes, but it’s possible that some of the causes of the problem have been resolved as a result of one or more of the bugfixes in this version.

Want UAC-Free iReboot? You got it: iReboot 1.1 released!

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Back in August of 2007, NeoSmart Technologies released iReboot 1.0 – a tiny application that sits quietly and unobtrusively in the taskbar and is used to select which OS you’d like to reboot into.

iReboot isn’t by any means a major application, but it’s gathered a pretty strong following over the months, mostly by people interested in boosting productivity (or increasing laziness) to the max. But there was one flaw in iReboot that made all the hard work we put into making it as unobtrusive and minimalistic as possible almost meaningless: if you had UAC enabled, iReboot will not run automatically at startup, no matter what you do.

This behavior comes as a result of the architecture that Microsoft used to secure Windows Vista, which doesn’t allow for applications requiring admin approval to run at startup. It doesn’t matter what your application does or if you absolutely trust it beyond the shadow of the doubt, Windows Vista simply won’t let an application that runs in elevated privileges mode to launch at startup – end of story.

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Windows Vista SP1, Adobe Audition, and DEP

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For anyone attempting to install or use Adobe Audition on Windows Vista SP1, you can forget about it. Something about Adobe Audition or one of its dependencies causes it to crash immediately on startup, with Vista informing you that it has "rescued" your system from an attempted DEP violation.

The "good news" is, if you’re on Windows Vista SP1 x86, DEP doesn’t get in the way as often. And for when it does, Windows Vista x86 lets you disable DEP and continue along on your merry way. But Windows Vista x64 isn’t as forgiving – even after you use a program like EasyBCD to disable DEP entirely, you can’t stop hardware-based DEP or exempt software from the protection list on 64-bit operating systems.

Adobe has yet to provide an official (or even an unofficial) response on the matter; but seeing as Adobe hasn’t properly touched the Audition code-base since buying out Cool Edit Pro, it’s probably safe to assume we won’t be seeing an update anytime too soon. (for instance, Adobe Audition 3.0, released in Sep. of 2007, still doesn’t have that omnipresent 3.0.1 patch out yet).

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Avoid notebook sleep issues with a few easy steps

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If you’re a notebook user, chances are you’ve encountered an issue with getting your computer to go to sleep peacefully. Something is either keeping it from drifting off to the land of 0′s and 1′s, or it can’t stay asleep, the hard drive just keeps tossing and turning and you open your bag to find a notebook so hot you could cook an egg on it.

What are the most common causes of notebook sleep issues?

  • A process running on the system does not allow the system to enter sleep mode.
  • A hardware interrupt, such as some peripheral devices for example.
  • An unstable driver which does not properly support sleep states or is just buggy.

I’ve owned several notebooks over the years, and almost every one of them have had an issue with sleep mode in one way or another, and over time I’ve learned a certain "practice" which ensures that sleep mode generally works when I close the lid of my computer…

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Download: Windows Vista x64 Recovery Disc

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Ever since we first made available the Windows Vista Recovery Disc for download back in January, we’ve been inundated with requests for an x64-compatible version. Flash-forward to three months later, and it’s finally here!

If you don’t already know what the Windows Vista Recovery Disc is and what’s used for, take a quick look at the original article – good luck catching up on the half-a-thousand comments there!

Note that this download is no longer free, due to licensing restrictions imposed upon us.

What it does: The Windows Vista Recovery Disc can be used to access a system recovery menu, giving you options of using an antivirus program, System Restore, Complete PC Backup, automated system repair, and a command-line prompt for manual advanced recovery.

What it doesn’t do: You cannot use the Windows Vista Recovery Disc to re-install Windows – it only fixes (not replaces!) Windows.

Why you need it: If you bought your PC from a major retailer, you didn’t get this CD with your hefty purchase.

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