Tag Archives: Windows Vista/7

New Cursor Lock Live

Posted on July 4, 2013 by Snake

Cursor Lock 2.6 went live yesterday.  Funny enough, I didn’t actually need to change anything but the version number in the lock program itself; that code is proving to be very solid.  But the setup program seems to need constant fiddling since it actually has a GUI.  I’m always trying to make it easier to understand and use.

The biggest change in this version is native support for Windows 7.  I achieved this mostly just by switching to Visual Studio 2008 and compiling for .Net 3.5, but it also needed a small amount of UAC tweaks.  Another major change is to the context-based help system, which used to be in a big, ugly textbox on the side of the window.  Not only was it ugly, but it gave me a limited amount of characters to work with.  In the new version, I’ve switched to a tooltip system that is activated by right-clicking on the feature in question.

And the last big change is something I’ve never done in a program before but became increasingly aware of its need after seeing all the hits and comments on Cursor Lock I get from around the world.  That’s right, it’s localization, or in layman’s terms translations.  I’ve already added a bunch of languages to the installer but have also added support for translations in the setup program.  I’m hoping some native speakers will contribute their translations, but I may do some computer-generated ones if not.  Full changelog below.

  • support for Windows Vista/7 and UAC
  • cleaned up help text
  • added support for translations
  • icons and other UI improvements
  • moved context-based help to tooltips
  • converted project to .Net 3.5
  • logging is now disabled by default
  • updated links
Posted in Programming | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Serpent 4

Posted on June 23, 2013 by Snake
Serpent 4

Serpent 4

About a month ago, I decided that I would upgrade my desktop computer’s core components (CPU, motherboard, and RAM) because Serpent 3 was getting increasingly unstable, and Memtest wasn’t coming to the rescue this time.  At the same time, I figured I should probably “upgrade” my OS to Windows 7 since everything seems to be switching over to it now.  Watch the video below to see the build in action.

So the hardware of Serpent 4 is working out flawless so far, but the operating system is constantly disappointing.  The main trouble early on was that I kept getting the dreaded “display driver stopped responding” system freezes but only when using Firefox.  Googling this gives you infinite solutions, but the one that worked for me was just downgrading the nVidia drivers from 320.18 to 310.70.

In general, there’s too much that’s really annoying about Windows 7 and not enough to actually like.  A few things I do like, though:

  • Libraries are kinda cool, I guess
  • Not being limited to 3.25 GB of memory is very cool
  • Task Manager on steroids–even saves your sorting
  • Pin to Taskbar can be useful
  • WebDAV remote folders work seamlessly
  • Resizing thumbnails in explorer is occasionally helpful

And that’s pretty much it.  As far as things I don’t like in Windows 7, most of them fall into the category of needlessly changing things (e.g. making it more “user-friendly”) such as the entire network connections control panel, not displaying drive free space in the explorer status bar, the lameass search box in explorer, etc.  And the UAC… I really wanted to believe you might be helpful sometime, but after a month of dealing with your bullshit, I couldn’t take it anymore.

But at least I’m getting to play Company of Heroes 2 now, so I guess it’s all worth it.

Posted in Hardware, Software | Tagged , , | Leave a comment