Lately I've started noticing people using wild color schemes in Visual Studio 2008, I never was interested in changing the default fonts/colors. However I decided to give it a try and I actually love this particular scheme called Ragnarok Blue by (winterdom.com) with its increased font size makes your eyes happy. I also think it helps increase productivity by reducing eye-strain. After using it for a day I just feel comfortable.

I have come across a free program that can add/remove mp3s from Sony Walkman MP3 Players (It works only with Sony NW-E002,NW-E003,NW-E005,NW-A608).

It does not require sonic stage to be installed, and this nice application can be installed directly onto the mp3 player for use on any computer.

You can download it here:

http://www.drvoid.com/

You can change the color scheme of Microsoft Office 2007 from the default "blue" to "black" or "silver".

1. You will need to open word and click the Office Button and click "Word Options".

2. In "Word Options" there is a selection box to select the color.

Notice the 3 colors.

There you go, now you can make your co worker wonder how special you are.

Acer Aspire One with dual boot XP home and Vista ultimate.

A lot of you may have seen Internet Explorer crash "Internet Explorer has stopped working" when closing the browser in Windows Vista. It happens so very often when you least expect it. More...

I was driving myself nuts while trying to figure out why the flash video would not play on a clients site. Turns out that IIS 6 does not include .FLV MIME Type by default and thus displays a 404 error back to the client.

To add .flv MIME Type:

1. Fire up IIS Manager and right click on the web site you want to configure.
2. Under HTTP Headers Tab, Click MIME Types and Click New.
3. Type ".flv" as the associated Extension and "video/x-flv" as the content type.
4. Click OK.

I created a very short video tutorial:

What Microsoft Windows Vista SP1 Service Pack 1 has in store

Vista SP1 is supposed to bring improvements and fixes to our computing experience. They include security improvements, performance, network/internet fixes, as well as support for new hardware standards.

A list of some improvements/fixes includes:

• Better support for newer graphic cards
• Sleep mode
• OS upgrades from XP to Vista
• Quicker recovery from hibernations
• Quicker file copying/installations
• Internet Explorer 7 performance fixes

To learn more of what is in store for SP1 check out Microsoft's white paper. Many do not want to switch to Vista and some users that are using the OS (Operating System) are dreading the switch. If we go back to when SP2 was released for Windows XP, we had a loss of functionality in many programs. KB884130 was a fix for some of this.

If you decide to install SP1 for Vista once it is released: to avoid some problems, you may want to check compatibility with your software vendor for applications and programs which are critical to you. Some known programs which are blocked by SP1 include:

• Zone Alarm Security Suite 7.1.078
• Trend Micro Internet Security 2008
• BitDefender AV or Inernet Security version 10
  

After several days of HELL on earth I finally fixed it. The SonicStage Crash problem looks like a very popular issue for many people as I did a google search for it. The problem had nothing to do with my Sony NW-E002F device instead it was the fact that a program file for SonicStage was not registered properly in windows.

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Sony Shared\AVLib\Frank.dll

How did i figure this out? Thanks to a nice tool from Sysinternals called "Process Monitor" i was able to monitor the SonicStage process (Omgjbox.exe) and just when I would access the device SonicStage would crash in process monitor i was watching what the SonicStage was doing and i noticed a bunch of NAME NOT FOUND entries that point to a registry key. in regedit I could not find the key. however on my other computer which has SonicStage and working just fine i found those keys so I exported them into a reg file below.

omg2.zip (752.00 bytes)

You can try the above file which contains 2 reg files -- i can not guarantee that this will work for you. however the problem is simple. Just make sure Frank.dll is properly registered in your system.

regsvr32.exe is how you can register the Frank.dll

Sony, if you are reading this, please ad some error handling into your application so we can figure things out better!

And now sonic stage works GREAT!

(Sony SonicStage Version 4.3)

This is a blog for everything by Eltroway.