Vista

Anyone catch the Foo Fighters reference?

Commonly referred to as Desktop Aurora or Aurora Desktop, this long forgotten early Vista eye candy can be "hacked up" to work in the newer builds. It is not quite like the earlier builds but it sure it nice being able to run screen savers as your background. It was one of the things I always loved about xscreensaver under unix.

Read more about it here and make sure to grab a copy of the AnimatedDesktop.zip program to automate the process for you.

You can also get it to work under XP although I haven't tried it personally. If you want to see some eye candy inside Vista without grabbing any files or programs, just open up a 'Run' prompt and type 'winsat aurora', hit [Enter] and enjoy.

The AnimatedDesktop.zip method is much more elegant though.

I guess Minesweeper was an unpopular game outside of the US due to problems with land mines. Apparently, this short lived version of Minesweeper, called Mimesweeper, caused an even bigger uproar.

It is too bad people are so easily offended these days or maybe I have a twisted sense of humor.
Read about Mimesweeper and other goodies left out of Vista, here.

This seems to show up from time to time in the newer Windows Live Messenger builds but I also suspect due to the bug in the earlier builds of Adobe Flash Player that other applications will also have issues from time to time.

Again, the perils of running betas on betas, but at least this one is an easy fix with a download from here.

I haven't drilled through the dumps from the earlier Adobe builds but I suspect, if you are "lucky", you might get DEP errors under XP, also.

I've been tinkering with Longhorn quite a bit after hours when I get pockets of free time. If you do it right, you can almost convince people you are running Vista on your XP laptop due to how seemless the windows applications look.

If I really wanted to go all out, of course, I could install Vista on the laptop but I'd much rather do it this way for now. Vista sound drivers are still in development due to the API/engine overhaul (for the good) that happened in Vista. It was always one of my biggest pet peeves that there wasn't a decent way for applications to have different volume levels.

I used to "sort-of" get around it way back when with 2 different Sound Blaster 16 cards in one machine, with one output going into the input of the other one, like the old Adlib or Gravis Ultrasound cards. Unfortunately, back then, many programs did not know how to handle the fact that there were multiple mixers and output devices available under Windows.

OS/2 would handle it fine but by the time OS/2 4.0 came out, there were a whopping 10 applications native to OS/2 (just kidding). OS/2 was a great operating system to run a DOS based BBS on if you only had one machine overall. Running a multiline Renegade BBS became possible and tolerable with that OS.

Back on topic though, Longhorn really is looking like it will be a Citrix killer.

I have an older than dirt Kensington USB Bluetooth dongle that is actually a rebranded / relabeled MSI Bluetooth dongle. Due to the way WIDCOMM originally did licensing and firmware, it is easier getting an organ from the organ donation list than it is to get updated drivers and firmware for most Bluetooth devices.

For whatever reason that I haven't looked into yet, the dongle isn't automatically discovered correctly like most newer BT dongles with the default XP SP2/Vista BT support.

In an effort to get something working under Vista, I ended up pointing Vista to my original XP inf directory for initial BT support of the actual dongle to get rid of the 'Unknown device'. To avoid 30 or 40 'unsigned driver' warnings, I edited the local group policy to 'ignore' the fact that the drivers might be unsigned. Sure, not best practice, but I don't mind bending the rules on my home desktop machine. If I break it, I'm the one that has to fix it anyway.

I ran the WIDCOMM setup in XP SP2 compatibility mode and it installed everything correctly as far as I can tell. There are a few sections of the programs that have quirky display problems, but I just wanted some base functionality with this old dongle until I decide to get a newer USB 2.0 Class 1 Bluetooth dongle.

At least I don't have to suffer with the Toshiba Bluetooth stack that installs 40 COM devices on initial install, even if you are only going to use one COM port. A lot of programs still don't handle anything above COM8 correctly.

An unpatched Toshiba BT stack is also easy to crash if you have your system discoverable and in range of someone with exploit code. Sure, not very common in the real world, but given how difficult it is to get updated Bluetooth stacks from vendors, I am sure most people are still running the older versions.

I am hoping Broadcom, who bought WIDCOMM, will do something like what Agere did with their software modems. They released a 'generic' driver for their chips that might not have all the features of the original OEM drivers, but you can at least download and get basic functionality if you lose your original CDs.

This utility modifies the way IE 7 behaves, primarily by mangling the User Agent string to report that it is actually IE 6.0.

User Agent Changer for IE 7.0