On my Media Center PC, after reinstalling some video codecs, my MKV* video files made Windows Explorer crash regularly when opening a folder with one of these files in it. To solve this problem, I had to disable automatic thumbnail generation in Vista or Windows 7. Disabling thumbnail preview in Windows Explorer can make Vista/Windows [...]
By installing the Media Control Plugin for Vista Media Center by Damien Bain-Thouverez, you can finally play back video files with subtitles, especially files using the Matroska container format (MKV). Multiple subtitles support, multiple audio streams support, FFDShow settings tweaking, and much much more is enabled.
The plugin can even hook on to the remote control [...]
I daily enjoy the possibility to access the files on my other computers at home directly, without having to share the root of the harddisk using normal file sharing. I recently built a HTPC (Home Theatre PC), and as fate would have it, chose Vista for its fresh new Media Center possibilities. Problem? How [...]
If you’re so lucky to have an external hard disk drive that connects to your computer through USB / USB 2.0, then you can get increased performance from your hard disk in Windows Vista. This is because Vista treats your external drive differently than a FireWire (IEEE1394) or eSATA-connected drive, rather more like a USB [...]
Right click on the shortcut for Windows Media Player 11 and click on ’Properties’. In the ‘Target’ field, after the ” ends, type ‘/Task NowPlaying’ (without the single quotes).
Example: If the shortcut looks like ["C:Program Files\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe" /Prefetch:1] change it to ["C:Program Files\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe" /Task NowPlaying].
How to mark a partition as active using the Windows interface:
1. Open Computer Management (Local)
2. In the console tree, click Disk Management.
Where?
Computer Management (Local) > Storage > Disk Management
3. Right-click the primary partition you want to mark as active, and then click Mark Partition as Active.
If you managed to go into Disk Management in Windows XP and somehow click “Mark Partition as Active” accidentally, this could render your computer unbootable. If you are so lucky that you haven’t rebooted yet, here is one possible solution to the problem: mark the partition as inactive using the DISKPART tool:
Open up a command prompt and type DISKPART.
Type LIST DISK
Type SELECT DISK n (where n is the number of [...]