Archive for Windows 7

Adobe Premiere CS5, Nvidia GTX 470 and Mercury Playback Engine

Built a new PC targeting video editing as I found the video (even @ 720p) with the Canon Rebel Ti was killing my Q6600 based PC. So I build a new PC around a Nvidia GTX 470 because Adobe Premiere CS5 has a new Mercury Playback Engine that uses Nvidia CUDA technolgy. Basically Adobe Premiere CS5 can harness the Nvidia video card for computational matters. Well Adobe does not support the GTX 470 yet, the next round of drivers they should.

But to get around the issue a fellow at Studio1Productions has a very simple configureation tweak that will get many Nvidia video cards working with CS5 while you wait for Nvidia and Adobe to catch up.

Click here to read Adobe Premiere CS5 and Video Cards

It works great!

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June 28, 2010 · Filed under Adobe Premiere CS5, Computers, Digital Photography, Windows 7

Windows 7 Beta and Dell XPS Laptop Gen 1

Since Windows NT 3.1 I have enjoyed installing beta versions of Microsoft’s operating systems, call me crazy. The latest beta I have installed is Windows 7 32-bit. I installed in on my old Dell XPS Gamer laptop that is over 4+ years old. It has a Pentium 4 (3.4) 1 Gig of RAM, ATI 9800 Pro (256 MB) video card and a 60 Gig hard drive.  The installation was super fast, I mean super fast!!The issues with installing Windows 7 on the Dell laptop was 2 fold:

  1. Windows 7 Beta 1 did not recognize the ATI video card and installed the standard VGA driver.
  2.  Windows 7 Beta did not recognize the sound card (Sigmatel Stac 9750).

So off to the ATI web site as I remembered seeing Windows 7 beta drivers there. No luck, only drivers for the newer cards. Well I decided to see if Windows 7 Beta did include them and just did not pick up the video card on install, yes sir I was right. So off to the Device Manager and told Windows 7 to use the ATI 9800 Pro driver and presto, I had 1920×1200 resolution back in full aero mode (which is even nicer in Windows 7 BTW) .

As for the sound card I went to Dell’s support site and downloaded the Sigmatel driver for Vista 32-bit and it installed and worked like a charm. Downloaded Divx and watched a movie on the laptop, very smooth with full audio.

Initial reactions after Day One:

  1. Most stable Microsoft OS beta I have ever used.
  2. I like the new Library feature in Windows Explorer.
  3. It would not create a System Recovery Boot Disc after I backed up to network share. Need to investigate. I think it is a DVD-R driver issue, not a backup issue.
  4. AVG installed smoothly.
  5. The new task bar has a nice visual over haul. (more on that later)
  6. The UAC aggravation is gone.
  7. Wordpad is looking better but stll no spell checker..grrr…
  8. IE 8, not too bad, going to try FireFox 3 on it in the morning

One cool service is called “Adapter Brightness”. If your laptop has a light sensor the OS will dim or brighten your screen as needed. I want to see that!

So Day One is over with Windows 7 beta and it is running on this old machine as fast as the Windows XP it just replaced. I would say this old laptop boots just as fast as Vista on my Quad Core. I am looking forward to this year as this goes from Beta to RTM. As I get more applications installed (VS 2008 and SQL 2008 next) I will report back from time to time the good, the bad and the ugly.

Note: Before you blast me and call me a Windows lover (which I probably am), I have a Linux firewall and a Macbook I use everyday as well.

 

 

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January 9, 2009 · Filed under Computers, Windows 7