Brian Chavez - Serial Entrepreneur & Engineer

After using Vista x64 Business Edition for a couple of weeks, my reliability index is now at 4.36.  In Vista's defense, I do have to say, the operating system itself is somewhat stable, just .... the applications on Vista ... aren't.

You might think this is a post about add-ons to Vista's Windows Explorer, but actually, it's a post about how to remove features in Vista's Explorer to make it actually usable and tolerable to work with.

Enhancement #1

Vista Explorer has the most annoying ability to "sniff folders" and try and guess what the file types are in your folder.  If .png, .jpg, or other image related file types exist in your folder, Explorer will switch to a "thumbnail/Large Icon" view, even though you've explicitly set a view to "apply to all" folders.  Here's how to get rid of the annoying behavior.

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/70819-windows-explorer-folder-view-settings.html

Enhancement #2

Vista Explorer forgets size & location.  Make Vista Explorer remember the size of the explorer window.

http://jtbworld.blogspot.com/2007/04/remember-vista-windows-explorer-window.html 

Enhancement #3

Segoe UI is the most annoying font in the world.  Change it here:

http://steve.fsxtreme.com/blogs/2008/01/16/say-no-to-segoe-and-cleartype-on-vista/

Seriously, the Windows Shell Team did a terrible job with Vista and they all need a few basic lessons on usability...

Had a problem come up today while trying to connect to cassini webserver with visual studio.  Firefox was acting really slow when browsing.  Turns out, I wasn't the only one experiencing the problem.  (Thank goodness).

  Here is the fix:

It turns out that the slowness is caused by an IPv6 issue with DNS and can easily be resolved by turning IPv6 support off in Firefox while doing localhost testing. To make the change, type about:config in the address bar, locate the network.dns.disableIPv6 setting and double-click on it to set it to true. This does the trick for the Firefox localhost issue on Vista and everything is running fast again.

Thanks Andreas Kraus and Dan Wahlin.

Ugh.  I've been using Vista for about a week now and it's slowly annoying the heck out of me.  My cool "regsvr32 /u zipfldr.dll" doesn't work anymore.  But thankfully, this post did the trick:

http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article03-202

Simply, remove the following CSLIDs:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{E88DCCE0-B7B3-11d1-A9F0-00AA0060FA31}

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{0CD7A5C0-9F37-11CE-AE65-08002B2E1262}

There's just so much bloat in Vista. :-(

Now, I need to find away to get Vista to quit trying to "recognize" MP3 folders and screwing up the customizing the view with "Album", "Artist", "Song" columns.  *sigh*.

I recently upgraded to Vista 64-bit, and got hooked on the eye candy.  So, I decided to pimp out my IDE with my company's color theme. :)  Still working on some of the colors, but looks pretty good huh? Any suggestions?  I'm thinking I should tone down the save/modify color tracks near the line numbers so it fits in more....