AkinsTech

In this article, I’ll show you the proper way to upgrade video drivers on your system, as well explain the difference between the various driver options. I’ll also show you a handy tool to assist you in cleaning up old video drivers.

If you have a high performance video card (whether you’re a gamer, graphics designer, Home Theater PC builder, etc) you know how important it is to have the latest video drivers for your specific video card. But HOW you install those drivers can be just as important. Many lockups, crashes, freezes, or other anomalies can be attributed to lazy and sloppy driver installation. I’m going to show you the method I use which has proven to reduce and almost eliminate video driver-related problems on my systems.
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Got me a new monitor and I must say that I am now jaded!  I got the Samsung 245BW 24" LCD, 1920×1200 resolution.  More information here.

Here it is on my desktop.  I set my IBM Lenovo 15.4" laptop next to it for reference.

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While fooling around with Camstudio the other day, I thought “Hmmm, why don’t I actually make a video about something useful?” So I thought about it for a bit, and decided to pick something that I consider really basic, but something many administrators and PC experts overlook. It’s a custom toolbar to hold your common administrative shortcuts. While the actual toolbar creation is nothing earth-shattering, I think the idea of organizing administrative functions into such a toolbar is. I know this because time and time again I am asked “How did you get that toolbar down there?”

Therefore, here you go…a short crude video narrated by yours truly…on how to create an Admin Toolbar, and what I think you should put in it. If you can manage to make it through all my “ummms” and “uhhhs”, and the fact that I’m a bit nasally from a cold, you just might find it semi-useful. Just remember that I did this without any rehearsal, and did it in a single 15-minute take…so if it sucks, don’t send me hate mail! Who knows, maybe one of these days I’ll do another one of these on a more interesting topic, with a bit more preparation.

Video – Creating a Handy Admin Toolbar

Oh, and by the way, if you ever need to put together a PC training video or capture activity on your computer into video, I highly recommend CamStudio. It’s a free open source program and it works excellent. Far better than anything out there in my opinion. Install it and you’ll be making videos in minutes. Check it out.

I’ve never been one to fuss much with the Themes and colors on my PC. (If you can’t tell by now, I’m a minimalist when it comes to PC’s…less is more.) For the most part, I’ve always run Windows XP in Classic mode, with a fairly default color scheme. I’ve done this mostly for performance reasons. Simply put, the more visual goodies there are, the slower your PC will be.

However, within the last year or so, I feel that PC performance has finally caught up to the point where it is possible to run Windows XP with a true “XP” (non-Classic) theme and still get performance equal to that of Classic mode. Add to that the fact that some software refuses to run UNLESS you are running an XP Theme (PCMark 05 is one of them) and I have somewhat (reluctantly) relaxed my “Classic Mode Only” policy.

In 2005 Microsoft released a new version of Windows XP Media Center Edition. While I don’t care too much for MCE, I REALLY liked its theme. It had a more polished look with a blue “glass” color scheme. So while I wanted nothing to do with MCE itself, I copied it’s theme files and installed them on my normal Windows XP machines as my default theme. The theme was called “Royale” and can be seen below.

Well, sometime toward the end of last year, when Microsoft was putting the finishing touches on the new Media Player, they revised the Royale theme to include a black version, likely to have a matching theme for the new WMP….but they never released it. My guess is that it looked too “cool”, and with Vista’s only real benefit being its eye candy, they didn’t want to give XP users any reasons to stay with XP. Anyway, it’s called Royale Noir, and thanks to a Channel9 member named W3bbo for discovering it, it is available for the rest of us to use. It’s been around for almost a year now, but I’m always surprised how many people have never heard of it. Here it is…

I originally used Royale Noir on my home theater PC because it had a very clean look that was perfect on the big screen. Anyway, it sort of grew on me and I found myself using it on all my PC’s. Everyone who looks over my shoulder always comments on it. When paired with the “AquaTint Black” theme in Firefox, it produces a pretty unified look.

I think the theme does a really good job of subduing the graphical elements of XP so that your focus can be on your CONTENT, and not on the GUI. Or maybe I just like the black because it reminds me of my favorite place in the whole world…the Command Prompt.

How to install.

It’s pretty easy. Since this is an approved Microsoft theme, you wont need to patch any DLL’s like you do with other 3rd-party themes.

1. Download the Royale Noir zip file from here.
2. Unzip the file to your C:\Windows\Resources\Themes directory
3. Double-click the file luna.msstyles in the “Royale Noir” directory
4. Select Royale Noir

More “Noir” themes

Zune – Since then Microsoft has produced another theme called “Zune” which is similar to the Royale Noir theme. This theme was to coincide with the release of Microsoft’s Zune music player. Personally, I find it a bit too “brown-black” whereas Royale Noir is more of a “grey-black”. If you want to try out the Zune theme, you can download it from Microsoft here.

Royale Noir Remixed – This is a really nice theme based on Royale Noir which sort of picks up where Microsoft left off. It’s much more polished and professional looking than Microsoft’s version. It is also a complete theme, consisting of new mouse cursors, new sounds, icons, etc. It includes several elements which give it a look similar to Vista. While I like this theme, I tend not to use it for a couple of reasons…1.) I prefer a more basic environment without all the sounds and eye-candy this theme adds. 2.) Being a 3rd party theme, it requires modification of one of your Windows DLL files. While this is extremely easy to do with a simple utility, I prefer to keep Windows pretty much “stock” in that respect. Royale Noir Remixed can be downloaded here. Also you’ll need the UXTheme Multipatcher to patch your DLL.

Give one of the black themes a try…I think you might like them.

How many user accounts and passwords would you say you have? If you’re like me, you most likely have more than you can remember. Between windows passwords, server passwords, network devices, financial passwords, website passwords, online banking, email passwords and forum passwords it can get difficult to manage. Add to that the fact that I need to maintain several “identities”….I have accounts for work, accounts for home, family accounts, and accounts for when I want to remain a little more anonymous. And then emails. I’ll bet I have 20 email addresses….between domains I host, yahoo, hotmail, gmail, work email, etc…it’s a mess.

And how do you remember everywhere you’ve registered? Sometimes I’ll join a forum just to post one question about a problem I’m having, and then never return to that forum again. How do you keep track of this?

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I think we all agree that all Adobe products are garbage…and that Adobe is one of the companies who are contributing to the over-complication and unnecessary bloating of software. We should avoid them at all costs. None of this is news to anybody… So I don’t know why it is that I decided to install Adobe Reader on my system today, and furthermore, why I am surprised by what happened.

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CD/DVD burning software is another one of those areas where I feel that software vendors have taken the wrong approach….providing these unnecessarily bloated “suites” which perform 101 tasks….when all we really need is 1 task: Burning my CD.  That’s it.  I don’t need you to manage my files, keep track of all my “Projects”, print labels, manage my music, so on and so forth.  Just burn the freakin CD and get out of the way!  Further, most of the major systems insist on loading 2 or 3 executables into memory…software update agents, auto disk-detectors, system control taker-over-er agents…you name it.  Nero, Roxio, all of em…they’re evil, evil software. 

Not only that, burning a CD is something that I have always felt should simply be built-in to the OS.  I don’t have to use a 3rd party piece of software to copy files to a floppy…why should any other medium be different?  I could never justify purchasing one of these bloated CD-Burning software suites because I have always felt it should be included with Windows.  Therefore I have always used the OEM versions of Nero, Roxio, NTI CD Maker, etc…the ones that come with your CD/DVD Burner.  Of course these OEM versions are usually just “starter” versions…enough to get you to upgrade to the full version.  OEM or full, CD Burning software has always been pretty much crap.

Well, leave it to the open source community to solve the problem.  InfraRecorder is a nice compact, tight, fast, stable piece of software which performs ONE function.  It burns CD’s and DVD’s!  And it does it well!  Furthermore, you don’t even need to install it.  Just unzip it to a directory and you’re good to go.  This makes it perfect for locating on a shared drive and just dropping a shortcut on your workstations.  Or carrying it on your Utility CD or USB Drive for use in the field.  The installed program occupies a mere 9MB of space, with the core program only at about 1.5MB.

InfraRecorder has all the basic functions you would expect.  Create a Data Disc, Audio Disc, Copy a Disc, etc.  It contains the full program, as well as an “Express” version which provides a simple “What would you like to do?” task-based interface, similar to Nero’s SmartStart application.  Speaking of which, if you’re familiar with the Nero interface, you will be at home using InfraRecorder. 

Here is the full program window….

And here is the “Express” application…

InfraRecorder will burn or create industry standard ISO images.  This is very nice as many times I like to keep a library of ISO images for my important CD’s.  For instance, I keep my Windows XP, Vista,  Server 2003, Exchange, Office CD’s on my server in ISO format.  If I ever lose or misplace a CD I can easily burn another copy from the ISO image.  ISO-creation is very important to me.  Most of the commercial packages (Nero and Roxio, for instance) require you to purchase their “Premium” or “Ultimate” version to get ISO creation ability.  They encourage you, instead, to use their proprietary formats.  This ensures that you will always need their software to work with the images you create.  Very lame.  Adherence to the standard ISO format is reason alone to use InfraRecorder.

Also surprising, InfraRecorder has the ability to create boot CD’s from floppy img files.  Again, this feature is only included in the “Ultimate” version of Nero, so I am glad to see it included in InfraRecorder.  InfraRecorder follows the well-establish “El Torito” boot disk standard.  I hope to do a “How-To” later about creating floppy img files and boot CD’s.

One thing you should be aware of….if you want to make an Audio compilation disc (not copy an Audio disc, but compile one from existing MP3 files) you’ll need to install the MP3 decoder plugin.  This is a very simple task which simply involves downloading the optional MP3 plugin ZIP file, and copying the included DLL file to InfraRecorder’s ”codecs” directory.  For licensing reasons with the MP3 technology, this file cannot be included with the InfraRecorder download.

Also pretty cool…InfraRecorder includes a “cdrtools” directory which contains several command-line tools for reading/writing and troubleshooting CD/DVD’s from the command line.  Since I am the Command Line Nazi, I am very happy to see this. 

I have been using InfraRecorder for about 2 weeks now and am very impressed with it.  I think I may be permanently replacing Nero with it.

Check it out here: http://infrarecorder.sourceforge.net/

If you like it, I encourage you to send the guy a donation, or just simply help the project by getting the word out about this excellent piece of software.  Please feel free to let me know about your experiences with it.

Anybody who’s been working with PC’s since the late nineties probably remembers Paint Shop Pro. Paint Shop Pro was a wonderful graphics manipulation program. At the time, it was a revolutionary piece of software. It wasn’t necessarily that it did anything NEW….but it did it in a way that other programs couldn’t. First it was SMALL. I remember PSP downloads in the 600K range. Second, it was FAST. Paint Shop Pro was highly optimized code that worked on even the most antiquated hardware. Third, it was inexpensive. (FREE). The shareware version of Paint Shop Pro could be used for almost ALL personal photo projects, and if you needed more than that, you could order the commercial version for a mere $39.99.

Over the years, though, PSP fell into the feature-creep trap that I feel plagues most software today. You have to release new versions, and you have to add new features. Merely refining existing features is no longer good enough. People need to see something new. More knobs, more buttons, more toolbars, more add-ons. PSP is now a “Suite” and was recently acquired by one of the worst peddlers of bloatware, Corel. At over a 100MB install, sadly, one of the best pieces of software in PC history is officially dead.

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