Tommy Nation

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 driver and enable access to customizeable special functions and shortcuts when using a Media Center compatible remote control. There’s even a newly added feature that enables Windows Live Messenger integration. I haven’t tested this one myself yet, though.

If this is just what you’ve been looking for, then head on over to the homepage and download it now! Be sure to read the requirements section carefully before you install it.

Thank you Damien for this great plugin! Please show your support by donating to him if you find it useful.

To be able to access administrative shares and shut it down remotely, I added another user to my media center computer (HTPC) matching my usual username and password. Upon next boot, I discovered that instead of being logged on automatically, I was now presented with a logon screen, where I had to choose between the default (passwordless) user and my newly created “remote control” account.

“There’s got to be a way to get the automatic logon back”, I thought. Of course there is! Following is the simple solution to configure automatic logon in Vista. (Please bare with me, and pretend that the Norwegian screenshots are in English for now.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Even if your Windows Vista user account is a member of the Administrators group, you are still asked to give applications permission to access your system in different ways. To enable the hidden Vista Administrator account, and become free of these hassles, just follow these directions:

1. In the search field of the Start menu, type “cmd” and right-click the cmd.exe suggestion that pops up in the results.
2. Select “Run as administrator”.
3. In the command prompt window, type (without the quotes) “net user administrator /active:yes”.
4. Log out of your Vista session, and - voilà - the administrator account is now selectable.

Even if you consider yourself an advanced Windows user, beware that activating the Administrator account makes your system more vulnerable when you are logged in as this user. It’s the same as being logged in as the root user in Linux, in that applications will now get access to your file system like in Windows XP.

When you have more than one computer in your local network, you may want to be able to access all your files on all your machines, whichever one you’re sitting at. Here’s how you can accomplish that in Windows:

To be able to access all files you will be using something called Administrative Shares. These are hidden shares of your local hard disks and optical drives. These shares are not like normal shared folders, in that they require administrative access to open.

An administrative share always has a dollar ($) sign directly behind it, and do not show up by default when you access a computer through Windows Explorer. To access the C:\ drive for instance, you would type this in the address bar of Windows Explorer: \\Computername\c$

This alone is not enough however, as you still need the administrative access rights. To get this, all you have to do is to create an account on each computer that has administrative rights, and the same username and password. To do this, open Control Panel and go to User Accounts and make the necessary account and/or password changes there.

Now, whenever you want access to your files on your other machines, just open Windows Explorer and type in \\Computername\c$ in the address bar - replacing the letter c with the drive letter of the hard disk you want to access.

There’s an additional administrative share that’s standard on all Windows computers, and this is the Windows folder. To access this share, type \\Computername\admin$. If Windows was installed on a different drive than the C:\ drive, it doesn’t matter when you use this share. Pretty useful when you want to view Windows log files on remote machines.

Windows Vista troubleshooting:
In Windows Vista you will get prompted to enter a username and password. Enter the username and password, and tick the box to remember the password if you don’t want to be bothered again. You may get problems here, being denied access even if you entered the correct username and password. Should this be the case, you should read my previous article on enabling admin shares in Vista.

A few months ago, Futuremark announced their next generation benchmarking tool 3DMark Vantage. Today it has finally arrived.

I like 3DMark because it gives good indicators on where you could improve your system if its not quite up to par, and because its easy to compare your system performance with the performance of other systems like it.

The tests are all new based on DirectX 10, and take physics more seriously than earlier incarnations - which means owners of an Ageia PhysX card could see a boost in their score. I don’t have one, and I doubt you do either, but I still managed to get a score of P5308, which I hope is good. There was only one similar system to mine, not enough to get a detailed report! Time will tell as more results tick in …

Head on over to the 3DMark Vantage website for more information about Futuremark 3DMark Vantage.

The first Beta version of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 has just been released publically.

Improvements include default mode interpreting web pages much more correctly according to W3C standards. A button to “Display as IE7″ is available for debugging.

The big news that MS is touting is something they call Webslices. Essentially Webslices are like RSS feeds - small subscription services, except they can go both ways - output and input. An example of output would be a weather service, while input could be a task manager.

A crash recovery feature is also in place, to recover crashed sessions.

Oh, and it passes the Acid 2 test with flying colors. The Acid 3 test however…

Click here to download the Internet Explorer 8 beta client
(only works on XP SP2, Vista and Server 2003).

PS! I don’t recommend you install this on your main system, as it is beta software and could be unstable.

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 to enable access to admin shares using a local administrator account remotely in Vista?

When you try to do this the same way you could in XP, you get prompted to log in, but get access denied. Apparently, for “security reasons” this option has been disabled. Thankfully, a small registry hack is all it takes to get around the issue:

1. Open regedit (<Windows> + R, type “regedit”).
2. Expand the tree to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft\ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ policies \ system.
3. Create a new key (Right click -> New -> choose “DWORD Value (32bit)”).
4. Name the key “LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy” and give it the value of “1″.
5. Click OK.

NVIDIAs new Crysis-optimized beta drivers 169.01 and 169.04 were picked apart over at Elite Bastards, who could reveal shocking results. Apparently these drivers force removal of certain water/shadow effects, increasing performance at the expense of visual quality.

One can easily deduct that NVIDIA has made this move in order to better benchmarking results for their 8xxx line of graphics cards, trying to make them stand out more vs their AMD/ATI opponents. Elite Bastards conclude that this is not an issue in the official 163.69 drivers, and adds that the difference in performance between the old and new drivers is 7 %.

Users of the new drivers who prefer not to rollback can easily circumvent this game-specific “optimization” by renaming the “crysis.exe” file to “nvidiacheats.exe”.

The Mozilla team has released Firefox version 2.0.0.9. This update fixes a serious Java issue on Windows Vista where Java applets don’t work like they should after Firefox crashes. Four other bugs that were preventing add-ons from working after a successful upgrade of Firefox have also been squashed.

The official release notes for Firefox 2.0.0.9 (external link).

Download Firefox 2.0.0.9 from Firefox.com.

If you already have Firefox installed, click on ”Help” and “Check for Updates…” to upgrade immediately.

You just formatted your Dell laptop and popped in that nice little Recovery CD, only to find your computer full of all kinds of crap you never asked for?

Maybe you will like PC Decrapifier - a handy little app that picks up the trash and takes it out for you too.

PC Decrapifier scans your computer and presents you with a list of highly lightly candidates for removal. You select what you want to remove and what you want to keep, and just like that - the crap is gone!

Click here to download PC Decrapifier (external link).