I upgraded my vista Ultimate x64 workstation to a dual monitor setup using two 24"DELL 2408WFP displays connected to an ATI HD4850 video card. I immediately noticed that the colors were unnaturally bright and over-saturated. I had a similar problem on another workstation with a 30"DELL 3007WFP-HC display. My original 3007WFP was great, until it started making a high pitched noise, and DELL replaced it under warranty, but they replaced it with a 3007WFP-HC model, and the color difference was very noticeably worse than the old monitor. ...

While shopping on Amazon I noticed that they were offering the Pilot of the Showtime series Nurse Jackie in HD for free, so I decided to give it a try. The install (version 2.0.1.95) went smoothly, and the 1.3GB download also completed pretty quickly, and I watched the show. Ok, now I wanted to stop the Unbox player service from running and terminate the tray icon application, I have no need to have it running all the time. ...

I’ve been a longtime user of Adaptec SATA RAID cards (3805, 5805, 51245), but over the years I’ve become more energy saving conscious, and the Adaptec controllers did not support Windows power management. My workstations are normally running in the “Balanced” power mode so that they will go to sleep after an hour, but sometimes I need to run computationally intensive tasks that leave the machines running 24/7. During these periods the disks don’t need to be on and I want the disks to spin down, like they would had they been directly connected and not in a RAID configuration. ...

I was trying to install SQL Server 2008 on Windows Server 2008 R2 RC. But, when I launch SETUP.EXE, Windows warns me that SQL Server is not compatible with Windows Server. If I ignore the warning, the install proceeds but then fails to install .NET 3.5. After a little searching and experimentation I found a way to install without any problems: 1. Create a slipstreamed SQL Server 2008 SP1 install, follow the instructions here. I set my PCUSOURCE=".\PCU" and that worked fine. 2. Add .NET 3.5 by going to server manager and adding the .NET 3.5.1 feature. 3. Install by running SETUP.EXE. ...

I drive a 2008 VW Touareg with stock 17" Pirelli P255/60R17 Scorpion STR tires. I noticed the VW recommended tire pressure was 2PSI higher than the tire’s maximum pressure rating. The tire pressure sticker on the driver door indicated 46PSI, while the tire wall indicated a maximum tire pressure of 44PSI. Overinflating tires is potentially very dangerous. I posted my findings on the Club Touareg Forum, and other owners of similar vehicles confirmed the same information on their tire labels. ...

I have now moved all old archived content from my website to this blog, the old pages contain links to the equivalent blog postings. I know the copy-and-paste blog formatting is not very elegant, but it will do. I was using the standard Blogger “Tic-Tac” template, but the readable area was not wide enough to fit many of the images I embed in articles, and this would either skew the text, or cut off the images. ...

This post is about Microsoft Debugging Tools for Windows, symbol servers, and symbol proxy servers. You can read my posts about this problem on the Microsoft WinDbg group, and on the Google Chromium group. We run several symbol servers, and a single symbol proxy server that provides transparent access to all our symbol servers, as well as the Microsoft symbol servers. I was debugging a Google Chrome crash, and was looking for symbols for Chrome. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that both Mozilla and Google have public debug symbol servers for Firefox and for Chrome. I added the Mozilla and Google symbol servers to our symbol proxy server list. ...

I bought my first SLR camera, a Canon EOS 20D, and my first wide angle lens, a Canon EF-S 10-22, several years ago. Amongst the many articles and reviews I read, online and in magazines, I came across a product called DxO Optics Pro, a product that would supposedly correct, amongst other things, lens distortion. This seemed like the perfect tool to help me with my wide angle pictures that looked very “fishy eyed”. And since DxO, then version 4, was receiving good reviews, I decided to trial the product. In those days the DxO licensing model was to pay per camera body and per lens module, not a cheap investment, but I really liked the results and so I purchased the product. ...

I am currently importing a few thousand email messages from Outlook 2007 to my email account hosted on Google Apps. Google provides an Email Uploader utility, and it is easy to use, but getting it to work with Outlook 2007 on Vista x64 was less than trivial. The utility installed fine on my Vista x64 system, but it found no mailboxes to import. A little research showed that several other people using Vista x64 and Outlook 2007 have exactly the same problem. ...

How difficult can it be to transfer a .name domain? I was reading an article where it was noted that .name names can now be used for OpenID registrations. With a little more research I found that the sites only supported new registrations, unfortunately they did not support transfers. Several years ago when the .name domains were new and the in thing to do, I registered my pieter.viljoen.name domain and pieter@viljoen.name with Register.com. ...