Tag: Vista

Vista was not that bad

So Windows 7 finally arrived. I am really looking forward to it. But I have to say, Vista was not that bad. Especially since Service Pack 2. Ok, you really needed a powerful machine.

One of the small things I really liked in Vista was a small improvement in the Explorer. Not Internet Explorer, but the file manager. When you moved up to a parent folder, the folder you came from got selected. This made a quick navigation in complex folder structures possible.

XP on the contrary always selected the first file in the list which made navigating in folders cumbersome. There was no way around using a third party file manager.

Anyway, nice to see that Windows 7 Explorer does it the same way Vista did.

XAMPP slow on Vista

Just installed XAMPP lite on my Vista machine. The installation went smooth but the web server feels somehow slow. There is often a delay of about 1-2 seconds without any CPU load when I open a web page. I encountered this problem before on other Vista machines but never found a solution for it. Now I found a solution:

  • Open notepad.exe as administrator (right-click Notepad icon -> run as administrator)
  • Click on File -> Open
  • Change the selection Text files (*.txt) to All files (*.*)
  • Open the file C:WindowsSystem32driversetchosts
  • Change the line 
    ::1             localhost

    to

    #::1             localhost
  • Save and close notepad

That’s it.

DVD drive not visible in Vista

Recently my DVD drive on my Vista machine was not visible any more. The device-manager told me that the driver could not be loaded. I had no idea what the reason was. However this is the solution I found on the net:

  1. Open regedit
  2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlClass {4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
  3. Delete all keys named “UpperFilters” and “LowerFilters”

Done.