Installing the Windows 7 Beta
January 11th, 2009Here I am, typing this blog post with Windows Live Writer inside of Windows 7. I had installed the beta once before on my desktop, but it was a torrented copy, and it was installed on a spare hard drive. (Also it as 32-bit, when I want 64-bit.) I downloaded the beta from Microsoft, which included getting a key, and installed the beta today, overwriting my Vista installation.
From my previous installation of Windows 7, I discovered that the installer allows the user to start a “complete” install from within a current installation of Windows, unlike the Vista installer, which requires the user to boot from the install disk. I discovered from this installation that the user still needs to boot from the install disk if he wants to format the drive that the current installation of Windows is on.
Downloading the Windows 7 Beta
January 10th, 2009If you’re curious about Windows 7 beta, downloading has resumed after Microsoft added a few more servers to handle the extreme demand. As far as I can tell downloading resumed within the last 30 minutes. I jumped on the oportunity and am downloading the 64-bit English version now. After specifying those requirements I was brought to a very brief survey page, which asked such things as my name, email address, job, and current OS. After that I was brought to the following page, which was pretty straightforward. (I blocked out the product key, duh.)
DVD Cover Art Finder version 1.0.0.0
December 29th, 2008As promised, here is the first release of DVD Cover Art Finder (version 1.0.0.0), along with the source code. Read on for download links and a usage tutorial. 
Quiet Vista: How to disable the Windows startup sound
October 13th, 2008If you want to be polite in a quiet place while using a computer, you will mute the sound, but what if you need to restart your notebook there? For mobile computers that have a hardware sound controller, preventing the startup sound from breaking the silence is easy, but what about the rest of us? For this problem, Windows has an easy option to disable the startup sound. How nice!
First open the control panel.
View any video format in Windows Media Player
August 28th, 2008I used to use the Combined Community Codec Pack to get a support for a host of codecs on my Windows XP and Windows Vista (32-bit) machines. It seems that development of the pack has fallen behind, and I have noticed that it does not work as well in Vista x64. After some research I cam across the Vista Codec Pack, which supports just about every codec, including MOV (QuickTime). VLC is a good alternative, if you don’t mind (or prefer) a bare-bones media player, but I’m glad to have support for everything that I would want to view right in Windows Media Player.
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