I bought an extra 500GB SATA HD yesterday and a SATA DVD drive.

My MB is an Abit AN8 32X.

I plugged in the new HD and replaced my old IDE DVD driver with the new SATA DVD drive.

Everything went fine the first boot.
DVD drive worked fine.
I used Windows' Disk Management to Initialize and format the HD. (I choose GPT instead if MBR when I was asked to initialize the disk)

When I was done I shut down the computer and went to bed.

Today, when I booted up the computer, it stopped with the BIOS screen.

When I view the POST messages it halts after it's detected all the drives and the MB displays POST error 75.

I unplugged both the new drives and the computer booted.

When I plugged in the DVD drive it still booted.

When I plugged in the new HD it stopped again.

I unplugged the SATA cables and plugged them in again. Still stops.

I swapped SATA cable with the new HD and the DVD, still stops.

I've tried plugging it into different SATA ports, still stops.

I don't understand why the HD suddenly stops the boot process since it worked the first time I booted it. Does it got anything to do with the initializing?

I tried googling for the problem but couldn't find anything that'd sort out my problem. Some place said that you could get an POST 75 if the HD was too large for the MB. But surely my Abit AN8 32X isn't that old?


There is one thing I just thought of when I type this. My new HD is connected to the same power cable as my first HD. Could this be an issue? Currently they are still plugged in on the same power cable, I've just removed the SATA cable so I could boot the system again.

I was uploading an update to my London Tube Vista gadget and I got an error when I tried to upload the .gadget file.
WC told me to check the file extension, requiring a .zip file. But the .gadget file is a zip file, it's just renamed. So zipping the allready zipped file seems very unnessesary.
If we could upload .gadget files then the users downloading the file could easily install it directly, now they got to unpack it first.

Could the Vista gadget submission please accept .gadget files?

I believe it was said to be released an update at the end of last summer. Any news of this?


Also, I know DX3.5 encountered some difficult issues requiring quite a bit of recoding, but is there some indication to when we can expect DX?

My screensaver Running Matrix WWW Link has an issue under Vista where the settings set in Control Panel isn't applied to the screensaver when it's running.

I used .NET's Properties.Settings to store the settings, but for some reason it didn't work well on Vista. I tried MSDN to find out what it could be, but with no luck.

So I ended up having to reinvent the wheel and write custom code to store the settings on Vista systems.

The beta is here: WWW Link

However, when I tried it on my main system, the thumbnail preview didn't work in the Control Panel.
It did however work on my second Vista system. And it also worked on my laptop running XP. Why it didn't work on my main system is a mystery as I didn't touch the code for the preview.

So I'm asking that a few people try the new beta and post back their experience.

Try it and answer there questions:

1. Your system specs:
CPU
Graphics card
RAM
OS
.NET version
Number of monitors
WB or any similar applications installed?

2. Did it run? If it didn't, did you get any errors?
2a. Did the old version work?

3. Did the little thumbnail preview in control panel work?

4. Did the settings work when the screensaver is started by Windows? (Just clicking the Preview button in Control Panel doesn't count.)

5. If you're running Vista, do you have UAC on? The screensaver on Vista stores the settings in an xml file where the screensaver is located. Which means in the System32 folder, I'm wondering if that might make the UAC to kick in. I've not got around to test it yet. I might move it to the application settings folder instead.


I've just started looking into making the screensaver use hardware accelerated DirectX. But that's for a much later version 2. I got other projects queuing up before that.

Explorer just crashed on me. And then it restarted I found this new icon on my system tray. It's a blue plus sign and the tooltip says "Stardock SideBarPlus".

Right click menu got two items:
* Release All Associations
* Exit

Clicking on it does nothing.

Double clicking opens notepad.

What is this thing?

Didn't see any thread for it yet, so here it goes:

1.) I only just started it and noticed that the DesktopX settings window only got the border skinned. The rest got Classic look.

On my start menu now I got a Stardock folder, a Object Desktop folder and one for ThinkDesk
Then inside the Stardock folder there's yet another Object Desktop folder that contains shortcuts that isn't in the other Object Desktop folder. And there's also an Object Dock folder there.

Could you please create the start menu folder more consistently please?
I move, or remove folder to clean up, but they're recreated on each update.


And also, please don't make settings folder in my Documents folder. Makes it so hard to organise it. I've had to make a separate one because my Documents folder is filled up with these random applicaiton settings folders. Currently it's 21 folder there that's folders applications created to keep their settings. None of them actually contains documents.

I assume quite a few of you have heard of Xion by now. The skinnable mediaplayer that let you create skins by just using Photoshop.

I just came across an application that let you make interactive GUI's with Photoshop. You set up all the elements as various groups and layers in Photoshop which then gets compiled into a interactive screen.

The product page got a movieclip that gives a brief preview of how it's done.

I came across this neat Virtual Desktop Manager for Vista today. Got a really simple interface with some nice subtle effects powered by the DWM. Also, the sourcecodes are available if you are interested. I'm currently running WindowBlinds and ObjectDock and none of them seem to conflict with the manager like some managers do. Check it out!

Came across hits nice little collection of Q&A's about basic scripting on the MSDN site. Have a look. There is quite a few nice little snippets.