Kobi Pinhasov

In case you’re running the RC version of Windows 7, then you already know (at least you should) that starting March 1, 2010 your PC will begin shutting down every two hours. Your work will not be saved during the shutdown. It will fully expired on June 1, 2010.

It means that you should install a new version of Windows 7. But what will happen with all your applications and their settings. You can use existing Windows tools to transfer the essential components (files, photos, music, videos, documents and your account).

In addition, you can and should use the Import and Export Wizard for Windows Live Writer. It will easily help you to export all the current settings. After installing the new OS you will run it again and import the settings again.

I wish you all to have the smooth installation process !

Windows Vista introduced a new native API that allows developers to retrieve system-defined Shell icons: SHGetStockIconInfo. Those icons are stored in %SystemRoot%\System32\ImageRes.dll

You can use various icon management utilities to extract these icons from there and use it in your own products thus providing the same UX for users like the one they used to in Windows. (I believe changing these icons in this DLL file will result in seeing them everywhere in Windows).

Developers should use system API to extract these icons. However sometimes you just want to use an individual icon in one of your applications and you don’t want to have any interaction with the API calls. For your convenience I have extracted these icons for you and they are listed below. Use navigation buttons to see icons in all pages. Each icon can be downloaded in its original format – .ICO

Hope you will find it useful.

I love my laptop HP Pavilion dv2000. I have Windows 7 Ultimate installed on it and every time I want to watch a movie I connect it to my big flat TV monitor and run the Media Center application (sometimes I just run the Media Player only).

While connecting my laptop to other TVs, I’ve noticed that on some of them the played video was darker than it was supposed to be (maybe because the TV was old ). In this case I was adjusting the brightness of the player itself. Unfortunately Media player did not save the setting so I had to do it manually each time I wanted to watch a movie.

I was suffering like this for a while until I’ve stumbled upon the feature in NVIDIA Control panel (the graphics in my laptop is by NVIDIA). It enables users to adjust the video color settings that will allow to fine tune the color settings for video content on the display.

How to configure it 

• Open the NVIDIA Control Panel (within Windows Control Panel or right click on empty place on Desktop and choose it from the menu list).
• Expand the Video & Television item on the right side of the menu tree
• Click on the Adjust video color settings
• On the right side of the window select your TV monitor for step 1.
• For step 2 select the second option named With the NVIDIA settings

  Now you can adjust the brightness of the video so it will be played in natural colors. It is recommended to use the sliders while watching a movie so the result will be seen immediately.

I was very happy to discover this feature and I hope it will be helpful to you as well.

Related Posts

• Switching to external display or projector in Windows 7