There’s a neat feature built into Windows 7 and the Windows 2008 Server R2 variants in powercfg. It performs a fairly simple power audit and will tell you if there are improvements, what your hardware can support, and what device or software is preventing your machine from entering sleep. You simply run “powercfg –energy” from a command line and an html report is created in “c:\users\%username%” called “energy-report.html”.
December 23, 2009
November 30, 2009
making the SoundBlaster XFI actually work with an nforce4 motherboard
I have posted before about problems with the XFI and Nforce4 not working (with my Asus A8n-SLI Deluxe motherboard). Creative says it’s Nvidia’s fault, and Nvidia hasn’t really weighed in either way, but in the end the card just didn’t work, when you tried to play audio, you would get crackling and popping in the audio making it useless. The card was pretty much worthless to me at this point, but in my quest to be cheap, I kept trying and trying. Then the other day I ran across this modified driver and after installing this one… it works!
November 23, 2009
portable movie maker
I do simple video editing of files taken from my minidv camera. This has been a chore since w7 because it did not include a version of windows movie maker, and I found the microsoft live free version very lacking. (And it’s not that I require a huge feature-set either.) Because there wasn’t anything decent that came with w7, I have tried trials of every movie editor I can find, and for what I do, they all suck. It was so bad that I decided to see if there was a way to hack an older version of movie maker to work with windows 7… and someone already did. This version works like a champ right out of the box and gives me the features and interface that I want (without giving me a bunch of junk that I don’t want or need).
October 31, 2009
upgrading from w7 rc to rtm
I usually don’t do upgrades but in this case upgrading from the release candidate to the full release of W7 didn’t seem like the worst idea. I used the instructions at this link and it worked.
September 22, 2009
another w7 UI annoyance: the library
I hate the”library” and never have used it in any MS app, the way windows7 promotes it annoys me greatly. Here is a link to instructions on how to remove it. Of course it is much harder than it should be.
