Feckoff.net

I’ve been driven crazy over the last few days trying to figure out why the hell my Windows Vista PC won’t go into standby. Every time I tell it to stand by it goes through the motions and then immediately wakes back up again. I had set up various bits of hardware in device manager (network cards in particular) to not wake up the computer. It turns out the problem was my crappy USB keyboard. Even though I never pressed any of its keys after telling the computer to go to standby it would keep waking it up again and again. Disabling its wake up ability in device manager did the trick - I just have to use the computer’s power button to wake it up rather than pressing a key.

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I’m writing this post via Windows Live Writer on Vista x64. I’ve heard people talking it up on podcasts recently so I thought I should have a look and see what all the fuss is about.

First impressions are that it is actually very good. It has full support for WordPress 2.5 and earlier versions and a bunch of other blogging systems. As I edit this post now it is fully WYSIWYG - as I am editing I see exactly how it will be formatted when posted, including the fonts and colours my chosen WP theme uses.

The GUI is very much like Word 2003, including the red zigzag lines indicating that you can’t spell.

Its pretty nice for a free product and is available for Windows XP as well, but not the 64 bit version.

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Windows Vista Service Pack 1 was released to manufacturing during the week, but Microsoft won’t be pumping it out over Windows Update until March sometime. They’re catching a lot of flak from IT tech types (such as me) over that decision. Naturally, its been leaked all over the Internet already. You can even download it directly through Windows Update with a little registry hacking.
I installed it this evening on my 64-bit machine. It took about an hour and several reboots to complete. Straight off the bat I have noticed that LAN file transfer speeds have improved dramatically - I’m getting nearly twice the throughput over my wireless LAN. That alone makes this a must-have update! UAC prompts seem to be far less annoying now - the screen doesn’t go black for 2-3 seconds like it used to, its more like half a second now in my case.
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Since I got that nice cheap RAM the other day, I’ve now got more memory than 32-bit operating systems can address. I’m running Windows Vista Home Premium. Fortunately Microsoft allow you to use your Vista CD key for either 32 or 64-bit (not both at once, obviously), but you have to pay them to get the 64-bit disc, unless you have Vista Ultimate. The fee is a mere €10+vat. What was most surprising is that I ordered it yesterday and it arrived today. From Germany. Via UPS. I suspect that cost them more than my tenner! And that’s after their website said to wait up to 28 days for delivery

I’m going to upgrade tonight, so see you later. Unless it doesn’t work. Uh oh.

Update: That went rather well. Everything seems faster. So much so that I’m beginning to think something was wrong with my 32-bit installation!

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Microsoft in their infinite wisdom/greed (delete as applicable) decided to remove the ability to remotely control the home versions of Windows Vista via remote desktop, as opposed to Windows XP Media Centre which had this built in. This leaves Vista users with the choice of using crappier alternatives like VNC.

Fortunately some smart bastard has hacked Vista Home Premium to run RDP

Read about it and get the relevant files here. I’ve tried it on my own Home Premium machine and it works fine - I can RDP to it from my laptop running Ubuntu 7.04.

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Nvidia have today finally released new drivers for Windows Vista 32-bit (I think there may be 64 bit ones available too, haven’t checked). They are version 158.18.
They have now broken the old unified driver tradition and split them into separate releases for Geforce 6, 7 and 8 series, and then a unified driver for all older cards. Hopefully this will resolve the 8800 series performance problems in Vista. I’m not lucky enough to know, not having an 8800 series card

nVidia release notes:

# Adds support for GeForce 8600 GTS, GeForce 8600 GT, and GeForce 8500 GT, GeForce 8400 GS, and GeForce 8300 GS GPUs.
# Increased performance in 3D applications.
# PureVideo™ HD support.
# Add support for forcing Vertical Sync in DirectX applications.
# Updated NVIDIA Control Panel with improved user interface (Please see the Release Notes for more details).
# Numerous game and application compatibility fixes.
# This driver supports the following 3D features:

* Single GPU support
o DirectX 9 support for GeForce 6/7/8 series GPUs
o DirectX 10 support for GeForce 8800 GPUs
o OpenGL support for GeForce 6/7/8 series GPUs
* NVIDIA SLI support
o DirectX 9 support for GeForce 8800 GPUs
o OpenGL support for GeForce 8800 GPUs

# DirectX 10 NVIDIA SLI support for GeForce 8800 GPUs will be available in a future driver
# If you would like to be notified of upcoming drivers for Windows Vista, please subscribe to the newsletter
# Please read the release notes for more information on product support, feature limitations, and known compatibility issue

Download ‘em here.

Enjoy!
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