Archive for the ‘Windows Vista’ Category

How to get Vista to show the “Command Prompt Here” on a Folder List

Sunday, May 18th, 2008
For many years, on many PCs running various versions of Windows NT, 2000 and XP, applying the “Command Prompt Here” Powertoy was one of the first things I would do to customize the vanilla Windows environment (i.e. make it usable). Right-click a folder, select “DOS Prompt Here” or “Command Prompt Here” from the context menu, and voila, a DOS box opens, set to the folder you clicked on:

I was happy to find the same feature already baked into Windows Vista: hold down the shift key, right-mouse click on any folder in the view pane, then select “Open Command Window Here” from the context menu:

But try the same trick on a folder in the Folder Tree, sorry, the command’s not there:


For some reason, in their wisdom the Microsoft UI engineers chose to omit the command from this particular menu.

Quite by chance, I discovered that the choice is available on the File menu in Vista, but it’s not invoked in the same way: instead, select a folder in folder list, hold down the shift key then left-click (i.e. normal click) the File menu:

Vista then displays “Open Command Window Here” at the top of the menu. Okay, happy to have it back, even if it’s in a place I didn’t expect…

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Images missing from Windows Vista Help and Support Pages

Monday, January 14th, 2008

I switched back to Vista a couple of weeks ago, after giving up trying to live in Kubuntu for the second time in a year. I noticed one minor nit after I moved back in, all of the image graphics in Vista’s Help and Support pages had mysteriously disappeared, leaving only little boxes with red x’s behind them. Fortunately, a quick Googling brought me to Ramesh Srinivasan’s solution - a quick registry patch file, courtesy of Mr. Srinvasan, restored the help page graphics to their former glory.

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Getting the Aptana Help Server working on Windows Vista

Monday, October 1st, 2007

Overcame a minor irritation - I kept getting an HTTP 500 internal server error from Aptana’s built-in help documentation server after installing Aptana on my Windows Vista system. After some fiddling around with the Help Server’s host name and port, I found the sweet spot by setting the host name to “localhost” and leaving the port number field blank, allowing Aptana to pick its own value.

Posted in Aptana, Rails, Windows Vista | No Comments »

Windows Vista, Wacom and Logitech Woes

Thursday, July 26th, 2007

**<rant>**I bought a Wacom Graphire4 4×5 tablet for my daughter this week. According to her, the driver and bundled Photoshop Elements3 and Corel Painter Essentials 2 installed with no problem on our Windows XP system.

I however wasted 2 hours attempting to install the bundled apps onto Windows Vista on my laptop this evening. In the end, after googling around a bit, I made an educated guess that Vista just hates the Microsoft Installer packages wrapping the vintage 2004 Photoshop and Corel apps. Also, it appears Adobe has no intention of supporting Vista, so I won’t hold my breath waiting for Wacom to upgrade the bundle…

The Vista version of the tablet driver installer freshly downloaded from the Wacom site *also* seemed to hang up partway through the install process. In the end, it appears to have installed itself, however I now have *seven* annoying popup messages to dismiss when I logon to Windows, each popup informing me that it couldn’t find a driver for this or that USB device - when in fact the drivers for the Wacom tablet and the Logitech wireless keyboard/mouse are installed *just fine*.

Speaking of the Logitech stuff, I still haven’t received a satisfactory answer from them about the annoying popup messages, four months after I first complained about it on their support Web site. Well, at least Logitech attempts to listen to their customers - I found no such avenue for recourse on the Wacom site. Just fire off an email to them and hope for the best.**</rant>**

Posted in Computers, Windows Vista | 3 Comments »