Slightly Off Topic - Manual for Chinese 'Nano' Clone MP3/MP4 players

I know quite a few people have bought one of the many Nano-Style MP4 players that have been appearing all over Ebay for very reasonable prices. (Although I'm not recommending any particular supplier - an example can be found here)

Mainly manufactured in China these are pretty good devices and work well to synch music to in Media Center.

One major issue is the manual supplied with them. I mean do you understand 'Grow the play button'. The translation from the Chinese leaves a lot to be desired.

Fortunately I have come up with a solution and as a reader of this blog you can get it at a discount.

Available now:
Garry's 1GB,2GB,4GB 'Nano-Clone' MP3/MP4 Player Manual

Apologies

For the lack of posts. Not been feeling too well. Normal service will resume shortly...

My Vista Decoder utility and UAP/UAC

Vista has this great feature formerly known as User Account Protection (UAP) and now known as User Account Control (UAC) which is designed to protect you from malicious code. Because of my issues with Activation (see post below) I have this turned off so I had forgotten when I wrote my decoder app about a little thing called virtualization.


Now UAC doesn't think its a good idea to let nasty apps write into the Local machine area of the registry (very wisely) and therefore has a clever trick that when they do it redirects that write to another virtual area of the registry. Basically this means that legacy applications do not fail when they write and read the Local machine area of the registry but they don't actually update the local machine setting.

The decoder settings are in the Local machine area of the registry so, suprise suprise, if UAC is turned on you will find my decoder utility doesn't actually do much.

So the bottom line is, for now, you will have to temporarily turn off UAP/UAC using msconfig (details in an earlier post) prior to using the decoder utility to get it to work.

Vista Media Center - Great mini guide tip from Aaron Stebner

Over on his blog Aaron, who is part of Microsoft's Media Center team has a great tip on how to change the direction the arrow keys move through the new mini-guide on Vista.