This is pretty easy, and as long as you’re not depending on the autorun.inf to open FlipShare every time you plug your Flip Camera in (and if you’re reading this blog, I’m 90% sure you aren’t), you can just copy the contents of the Flip Icon Zip File to the base directory of your Flip Cam, and it will start showing up in Auto Play (if enabled) and Windows Explorer with this very lovely, very high resolution icon created by Tim Van Damme.

For a preview of what this looks like in Windows Explorer:

Open up Device Manager.

Once there, right click “Dell Truemobile 355 Bluetooth + EDR” and click “Update Driver Software…”

You then want to “Browser [your] computer for driver software.”

Then click “Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer”

Select the bottommost “Generic Bluetooth Adapter” and then wait forever for it to install.  (Yes, this one takes forever for some god awful reason, but it seems to consistently work).

The next step is disabling the “Power Management” feature to turn this device off.  (Since Dell has crappy driver support, this only helps to cripple the usage of Bluetooth).

Right click your new “Generic Bluetooth Adapter” once the Device Manager refreshes.

Click the “Power Management” tab in the properties dialog, and make sure to uncheck “Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power.”  Once you have done that, you should be good to go!  No more Bluetooth Problems on your Dell =)

In this demonstration, I used a Dell Inspiron E1705, though this problem plagues many, many other Dell Laptops running Windows 7.

One of the first things quickly and easily noticed is that it uses its own Window customization.  This really isn’t such a big deal for me.  Sure, it’d be nice if it could do the whole aero thing and fall back on this, but this looks pretty cool, so I’m not really going to fault them for this.

Next is actually mostly a good thing.  Steam has this very nice jumplist for Windows 7, something not a lot of other programs have really taken the time to integrate just yet.  You can see video games I have recently (attempted to anyway) launched from Steam, their own quick links to important parts of their client, and an optional (disabled by default) ability to change your current status from the jumplist.

The one problem I have with this jump list is that the tasks have no icons.  You could easily find some sort of icon for each of their little tasks.  A shopping cart for Store, a generic user-like figure for community, etc etc but there is nothing there.

Then of course, there is my ultimate pickle with Steam.  As I’m sure you can tell from the above screenshot – Steam has NO PRESENCE in the Windows Games Explorer.  This is awful!  The Games Explorer has been around since Vista, and yet Steam has yet to embrace it.

There could (and should) be (at the very least) a high resolution steam icon under Game Providers.  It’s not very difficult to make, and the “News” feed you see from Games for Windows LIVE is a simple RSS feed.  They could either populate this with the news from their site, or just a list of new releases, creating a steam:// URI (if it doesn’t already exist) to open up links in their own client.  Instead, they don’t even touch this.

As for games, I don’t know if they show up in the Explorer or not.  I don’t have any spare cash lying around, so I haven’t been able to check for myself – but somehow I doubt that the games appear there (though, I could be wrong – can anyone vouch for this?).

Hopefully, these issues will be addressed in a future version of Steam, and embraced by Rival companies. (I’m looking at you On Live.  Yes, I expect this from you as well).

What are your thoughts on the matter, anyway?

Either way, I’ve made my Windows 7 (RC) box Blue Screen on me twice – so I’ll share with you how I did it.  Make sure to leave your own Blue Screen of Death stories in the comments below.

BSoD #1 – ATI TV Wonder

My first BSoD is brought to you by the ATI TV Wonder HD 600 USB PC TV Tuner, and yes – it is a very long name for a product.  Aren’t you thankful I didn’t put “Diamond” in front of it?

Over all, this was an excellent product that I’m VERY happy I purchased from woot.com at a price far below its stock value.  It was pretty much plug-and-play (I didn’t run the CD at first because, well, my Sony DVD drive has crapped out on my Laptop and will only read DVDs now.  What the hell, Sony?)  What was interesting about this device (and ultimately lead to the BSoD) was that Skype recognized it as a video source (read: Webcam) and decided I might want to use it.  I thought that was fairly cool, but didn’t dabble any more into it (until later, right before my crash).  So, while I had this thing plugged in and made Windows Media Center scan for channels, I decided “Well, I’m bored – I wonder what happens if I open this thing up in Skype too?  I got my answer with some weird looking static, and then a Blue Screen.  Congrats,  Navarr!  This was your first ever Blue Screen with Windows 7 (RC even!).  And that was the last of that.

BSoD #2 – Lexar 4GB ExpressCard SSD

This is another small device I found for cheap on the internet, and purchased immediately because – well, it could be used with the Windows 7 ReadyBoost and I wasn’t using my Express Card slot on my laptop – I didn’t have any use for it. 

It normally works pretty well.  I’m not sure if the problem I’ve been encountering is Windows, My Computer, the Card, or it simply becoming loose but every now and then it will unmount and remount – so it may just be loose.

Either way, this happening over and over again while the device was dedicated to ReadyBoost has, of course, damaged the file system.  After doing this enough times, eventually my computer Blue Screened on me – once.  It hasn’t seemed to happen again.  I’ve since repaired the file system and got it working again, but I’m not sure how long it’ll stay.

Final

So those are my BSoD Horror Stories for Windows 7.  Do you have any of your own?  Has Windows 7 ever crashed for you?  Tell me all about it in the comments!

Why is this, you ask?  Because Apple is making sweet, sweet love with Windows 7.

As you can see, iTunes has added the ability to pause and skip forward and backward in Windows 7, a feature that (so far as I know) is only supported by Windows Media Player at this moment in time.  But that isn’t all.  The application now loads up quicker, doesn’t usually give off that annoying black background in place of UI elements, and even includes some Windows 7 Tasks!

As you can see very plainly in this picture, iTunes 9 has added tasks involving the iTunes store.

This is all of the secret love making I’ve found so far.  Have you found any?  If so, please, post about it in the comments!

Now, I don’t like going downstairs to use the best non-laptop Macintosh.  Its hooked up to a High Definition Projector system, and it is simply a burden to try to get anything code-wise with it done, without either sitting up close to the screen, or using Apple+ to make it larger, so, I did what any geek would attempt to do.  Get Apple’s Screen Sharing system working with my Windows Box.

I have to be honest with you.  It was a hassle and it was definitely NOT worth it.  Regardless of client side settings, VNC was incredibly slow over the Local Network.

However, as some of you may wish to try this yourself, I’ve included the instructions after the break.

Hi all,

I actually registered on this forum just to post this solution. I hope it will make many others happy!

Motivation for going through these hoops:
I needed to access the desktop of an old OSX machine every now and then from a windows VNC client. Details of that machine are:
Dual G5 OSX 10.4 without monitor/keyboard.

Important:

- Remote Desktop had never been enabled before on that machine.
- SSH access however was available.

So how do you turn on Apple Remote Desktop / VNC Server on a machine where it never ran before? That part was easy to find on the net: SSH as an admin user onto the OSX machine. Then execute this command:

sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -activate -configure -access -on -users admin -privs -all -restart -agent

Try to connect with your VNC client now. If it works, good, you're done. The above command takes care even of restarting the Remote Desktop Service when the computer is rebooted.

But if you're not so lucky (like I was) and the connection fails with a message like:
- "Server did not offer supported security type" (tightVNC)
- "No matching security types" (realVNC)
- "Incompatible Version" (UltraVNC)

you're stuck. What happened in this case is that the VNC password has never been setup properly. Follow these simple steps while still logged in as admin user to set up a default password ("pass" in our case):

- Switch off RDP:
sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -stop

- Go to the Preferences directory:
cd /Library/Preferences

- edit the following files using vi (if you're not familiar with vi, be very careful to follow the instructions to the iota!):
sudo vi com.apple.RemoteManagement.plist

Put the following lines into this file (hint: copy them from here rather than typing them). Instruction for vi newbies:
- copy the text below into your clipboard
- set focus to the ssh window
- press the 'i' key. This puts vi into text insert mode
- paste the text. If you're on windows/cygwin, click to top left of the cygwin ssh window -> Edit -> Paste
- press the 'Esc' key
- enter the keystrokes ':wq', colon tells vi you are about to enter a command, w is the command for write, q for quit.

ARD_AllLocalUsers

LoadRemoteManagementMenuExtra

ScreenSharingReqPermEnabled

VNCLegacyConnectionsEnabled
- edit the file sudo vi com.apple.ScreenSharing.launchd
press the 'i' key and type enabled, hit return, 'Esc' and ':wq'

- set the default VNC password to 'pass' by editing this file:
sudo vi com.apple.VNCSettings.txt
and copy/paste this string (the encoded password) into that file: 6755221D8BA8C5E2FF1C39567390ADCA

- Now the files need to have their ownerships and access rights configured properly. Do this by executing the following commands after each other:

sudo chmod 644 com.apple.RemoteManagement.plist
sudo chown root:admin com.apple.RemoteManagement.plist

sudo chmod 644 com.apple.ScreenSharing.launchd
sudo chown root:admin com.apple.ScreenSharing.launchd

sudo chmod 400 com.apple.VNCSettings.txt
sudo chown root:wheel com.apple.VNCSettings.txt

Now stop and start the Remote Desktop Server, or reboot the machine:

To just restart the Remote Desktop first stop it:
sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -stop

Then restart it:
sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -activate -configure -access -on -users admin -privs -all -restart -agent

or, alternatively, reboot the server:

sudo shutdown -r now

Connect to the server and enter your password we set to "pass" above. Set the password to something else by opening the System Preferences -> Sharing -> Apple Remote Desktop -> Access Privileges and set the password in the "VNC viewers may control the screen with password:" to something else.

:apple:ED

Hope this helped!

Cheers

Balt Indermuehle

(taken from: http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-380251.html )

Tab Previews

In order to better compete with Microsoft’s new version of Internet Explorer 8 for Windows 7, Google needs to add previews for all open tabs on the web browser, allowing a user to quickly select the tab they want right from the Windows taskbar.

Status Indication

When Google Chrome is running in the background with that huge demo version of Adobe Premier Pro downloading, you really have no clue how far the download has gone without checking up on your downloads bar.  A quick fix for this would be easily adding the status in the Chrome icon like Windows Explorer does.

Other Things

What else do you think Google Chrome needs to add in order to fit in with the Windows 7 Operating System that will better improve its functionality?

As you can see, it supports Tasks, Shows you what you recently closed, and gives you a list of your most visited websites for easy two-click access!  And don’t worry about something bad showing up.  If you want to get rid of something, just right click and “Remove from this list.”

You can also PIN any item you wish to the list! 

Good going Chrome!

Why you ask?

Simply because a single simple hardware revision (“upgrading” your computer for example) can make it lose it’s mind.

Would you like to know the modifications I had to make to my computer to get “You may be a victim of software fraud” and “Activate Now” popping up all the time since the first time I activated with a serial code provided from Microsoft?

I had to make one: Attaching a second IDE hard drive that’s less than 20GB.

That one IDE hard drive freaked Windows 7 out like there is no tomorrow.

Luckily, since the Beta is free; I have another key; and have re-validated my version of Windows 7 as genuine.