Keris

If her copy of Pro Tools is a version tied to hardware (like the M-Powered versions) then no, it will not work in any 64-bit Windows. It has to do with the way Digidesign programmed their hardware communication (ie, very poorly); it seems they're "working" on it, but I wouldn't hold my breath. I'm pretty sure the dongled versions of other [now] Avid software has the same issue. (All my Pro Tools and various Avid video editor experience is with Macs, and even there certain versions will outright refuse to run on certain OS revisions.)Otherwise, baring bad programming practices, anything that runs on Windows 7 32-bit will run on Windows 7 64-bit via WOW64; unless the program goes out of it's way, it can't even tell it's not running on a regular 32-bit OS.

Well, I've found that Windows Live Photo Gallery is a rather good thumbnail maker in this case. Just add whatever directories you want thumbnails of to the library and just kick back and let it work. And, yes, $30 for thumbnails is moronic at best. If more than Windows and a handful of image viewers used the WIC codecs, I could see some value here.

Did your laptop come with an actual Vista OS DVD? If so, it would just be easier to do a clean install from it. Just use ABR to backup the OEM activation before you format. This is a far easier way to remove the huge pile of crap that OEMs slather on. If the laptop didn't come with a Vista DVD, then this would be one of the only times I would suggest searching the internet for a Vista SP1 disc.

I thought I was the only person who cared about that feature, considering how little airtime its removal seems to be getting ...

Well, my own anecdotal evidence shows that burning at max speed on good media yields error-less burns. How do I know they don't have errors? Because when I first open a cake, I leave data verification on for a few burns. It's been a long, long time since I've seen new media in modern drives that fail to burn correctly at max speed.

Another thing to note is the vast amount of extensions to Explorer. If Explorer suddenly went .net, all those extensions would be useless. Microsoft could make a shim that would load the old bits, but that's a app compatibility minefield nightmare. Another concern is that, until .net 4 comes out of beta, there is no way for a .net program to load more than one version of the subsystem. This only matters when you realize that, like programs that lock themselves down to certain Windows versions that are known to work, there are many .net apps that require 1.0, 1.1, or such. It's not like it cannot be done. But it's also not something that's just going to appear without all the groundwork laid out and fully tested to hell and back. While is may seem hypocritical of Microsoft to make WPF, pimp it all over, and then not use it any of their big programs, it's more of a problem of migrating and testing than anything else. The upcoming version of Visual Studio is to have a WPF powered interface, multiple major version after the technology was released. When will we see it in Office or Windows itself? Not in Windows 7 of Office 14. Maybe the versions after. And it's not like Apple is somehow immune to this themselves. It took three versions of OS X before GPU acceleration of the GUI became functional and default. And Apple still have many large programs running on the Carbon API, the API they have been trying to downplay for ages in preference of Cocoa.

Updating from various Windows 7 builds is fully possible and rather painless (what I've done since I got the PDC x64 build). It will probably leave some small bits of beta junk around, but is easier to do than reinstalling everything (curse Adobe and their insane installer). Moving from Vista to 7 should be pretty easy too, due to them being rather close in design. I'd not upgrade from XP, if only due to the minefield of incompatible drivers and such.

Well, due to the magic of WIM image files, you COULD get the original files off the old Vista disc. You would just need to be willing to put in the time and effort to learn how to mount WIM images. I know all the tools are in the WAIK pack, but these tools will make life easier. Once you get the image mounted, the drivers should be hiding out in Windows\system32\DriverStore

Libraries are amazingly cool. For a long time now, I've had my music and movies on my file server. Now, I could always change the shell paths to point there, but that also allows whatever program that decides to take a dump into those folders the directions to do it where I can see it. Now, I can add my things to the library, and just remove the default ones; programs happily dump into the default folders, but now I don't have to see and deal with Adobe, Autodesk, and whatever other folders that respawn if I try to delete them. It's very, very cool. The new taskbar is also rather nice. Mixing Quicklaunch with regular programs seems at first to be messy, but it works in practice rather well. Aero Peak is very handy, because thumbnails aren't enough 90% of the time. I have yet to see the power that Jump Lists portend to have, but at least they make for handy MRU lists for now. My only wish would be that Microsoft allow more than "large" and "small" size icons. Large is a bit much and small is way too small for icon-only use. Overall, the little tweaks and improvements are very nice. There's still a lot of stuff I'd like to see fixed up, but it's unlikely to happen (little snafus in UI interaction, mainly due to the very bolted on approach of UAC). I'd make this my main desktop OS if it wasn't for the hangups of certain programs, Live Mesh being #1 and the broken text rendering in Word 2007 being #2. Oh, and the fact that ATI is being lazy about OpenGL in x64 again.

I haven't tested AntiVir or AVG, but Avast installs and functions without a hitch. Doesn't even complain about the Windows version being wrong or unknown (unlike, say, Adobe CS4).

AllSnap can do this, and it doesn't need anything extra held down to snap.

I would suggest giving madFlac a spin. Works 100% fine for me.

Actually, even the built-in Admin account doesn't have write access to most of the important system files. By default, much of Vista is set up to only allow the TrustedInstaller SID full control. Thus you would still need to take ownership of said files and then grant yourself Full Control permissions. To get things to act just like XP does, copy the code below into a batch file and run it. takeown /F C:\Windows /A /R /D Y icacls C:\Windows /grant Administrators:F /T /C /L takeown /F "C:\Program Files" /A /R /D Y icacls "C:\Program Files" /grant Administrators:F /T /C /L Of course, doing so will negate any security benefits that locking down such files gives you, so do so at your own folly.

I can confirm that you don't need any of the Tablet PC parts for a Wacom to function properly. Just install the drivers and all works just fine. It's how I run my desktop at the moment.

There's always UltraMon, which has more features than most need (for a price, though). But, really now, Windows itself has pretty decent multi monitor support these days; it can't do some things (like span two monitors while cloning one of them onto a third), but if all you want is a discrete picture on each or perfect cloning, just use what the OS gives you.