notes worth sharing

To clarify a widespread misbelief among PC tweakers:

The Plug & Play aware OS BIOS option should be set to “No” for all operating systems after Windows 95.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/321779

I just encountered the problem that the Vista photo gallery displayed photos too dark. Everything is OK when Photos are edited, but the default preview was definiteley wrong.

The problem disappeared after I disabled and reenabled Aero. Don’t know why.

I encountered this problem playing around with the ICC profile for my new EIZO S2231, so I can tell you that the Photo gallery uses color management, Paint does not, neither do the preview icons in explorer and the desktop background picture.

The GIMP does after you check the item in the color management settings.

After the installation of the Crysis demo, the installer advised me to install an additional update from Microsoft that is described in this Knowledgebase article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940105/en-us

It seems that fixes problems on systems that have lots of graphics memory. I already encountered problems with Stalker that also seemed to be related to this issue. My GF8800 GTS has 640MB - quite a bit when 2GB is the maximum amount of addressable space.

Since I’ve been using Vista, I’ve been looking for a way to force the refresh rate to 85 Hz. I’m using a CRT and 60 Hz simply aren’t enough for a stable, headache-free image. Circumstances are worse than under XP:

First, the new Vista doesn’t support the old trick of refresh rate locking by simply adding some mode line entries to the registry.

Second, nVidia has “forgotten” to implement the advanced CRT functions in their new, shiny, yet worthless control panel on Vista. I’m still looking for a way to enable doublescan in low resolutions.

Third, as TFTs are taking over the market, game developers don’t need to provide refresh rate settings anymore.

So I’m glad I found a tool that does the trick. It’s rather old, but it works on Vista! This piece of quality software is called RefreshLock and can be found on http://www.pagehosting.co.uk/rl/

It’s a small program that runs in background and resides in your system tray. There’s also a tool by the same author called RefreshForce, but that doesn’t work on Vista.

In the course of my Battlefield problem I wrote a small program that starts a process with a certain processor affinity. The use is simple:

• Copy the starter.exe file to a directory in your path (e. g. C:\Windows)
• Change the Shortcut of the program you want to start with affinity into something like:
  starter 10110 “<myprogram>”

The 10110 is a binary mask of processors to use, so the program will run on CPU1, 2 and 4 (CPU count begins with CPU0). On a dual core system you’ll use 1 for CPU0 and 10 for CPU1.

The program is written in Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition and I have attached the source code in the ZIP file: Download (7k)

I had strange problems using BF1942 / DesertCombat / DC_Final on Vista. Vista detected application problems at the beginning of several levels. Usually the error code was 0xc0000005. I could not identify the cause, disabling multitasking helped a little bit, but then the problem disappeared:

The solution seems to be a manual update of PunkBuster that can be done via the website http://www.evenbalance.com/. I assume that the PunkBuster autoupdate does not work because administrator rights are needed, which you don’t have Vista unless you disable UAC.

This is the first entry in my new blog. My intention of this blog is to spread knowledge about solutions I could not find easily on the Internet. Main topics will be Vista and Kubuntu as the underlying base of all PC related problems ;-)

Language of this blog is English to enlarge the audition of this blog. My native language is German, so you’ll certainly find spelling and grammar mistakes.