Suman Chakrabarti - SharePoint and ASP.NET blog : Vista

Surface Computing

Suman Chakrabarti — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 01:42:00 GMT

I've got to say the surface computing stuff is the coolest new invention. I can't wait to see this in restaurants.

Here are some great links and videos (yes, it’s ironic that the best online press is available through Google’s YouTube):

http://www.microsoft.com/surface
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=microsoft+surface

I think it's important to note that under the covers, there is still Windows Vista and the Windows Presentation Foundation.

Going Vista full-time

Suman Chakrabarti — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 20:05:00 GMT

I've decided to go full-time with Windows Vista, now, since I've installed the RC1 build. I've gotta say, in a few month's time the Vista team did an awesome job squashing bugs! Same goes for the Office 2007 team, which I've been running full-time since April.

The major proponent in this decision has been the release of a ton of new drivers that my Toshiba Tecra M5 has been yearning for. Also, since Virtual PC 2007 will be coming soon enough and will offer support for Vista (something the 2004 version does not offer, and I'm not a big fan of running Virtual Server on my laptop).

Now I have to say I'm really excited about the upcoming Vista and Office launch.

Windows Vista Glass with NVidia driver set

Suman Chakrabarti — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 17:06:23 GMT

I was having a lot of problems getting Aero Glass to run on my Vista drive on my Toshiba Tecra M5. It doesn't make any sense because the video card is a 256 MB video card that supports the WDDM driver necessary to run the Glass interface. I've had several friends have the same problem and after discovering a solution, I thought it was worth blogging.

First off, this is by no means a recommendation of Microsoft, just one employee's method to get it working (after reading Scoble's rants on blogging and the media, I've learned the disclaimer is a necessary evil). This information is provided AS-IS and WITHOUT WARRANTY.

Anyways, NVidia has been working to make all of its video cards run the from the same set of device drivers--something called the "unified driver" set (or something like that). Because of this, any driver you select will have the same settings as the one you're looking to get working.

So, to get it working, you will have to do the following:

Go to www.NVidia.com and download the Vista drivers
Extract the driver set to your local machine
Go to Control Panel->System->Device Manager
Right-click the video card from the tree and select Update Driver...
Don't let it select the best driver from the internet. Install from a specific location. Next >
Don't let it search your machine for a driver, you want to select it yourself. Next >
Click the Have Disk button on select the directory where the NVidia drivers were extracted.
Select a driver that has a name similar to the video card you have. I don't think it really matters, but I wanted to be able to see the right video card name in the device tree.
Click OK through all the prompts that say the device won't work. You'll be forced to reboot and at that point, you should see glass automatically. If it worked you can go to the Personalization screen and select Visual Appearance, you'll now be prompted with the Aero Glass color blending screen.

If this doesn't work, you'll probably be prompted with the black screen that asks you if you want to go back to the last known good configuration. If that doesn't work, you can go into Safe Mode and uninstall the driver from the device manager.

Good luck!