SomeGuyWithA.com

Unlike all of the highly touted features of Vista like UAP, Glass, IE7, and Speech recognition, one of my favorite and IMHO most useful features is probably staring you right in the face and you may not have even known it.   Its called the Vista Audio Mixer and it allows you to customize the relative volume of every application running on Vista.  Before you can use it, however, you have to turn it on as the default in Vista is for sound to work just like previous versions of Windows.  This is easily done just by clicking on the volume icon is the task bar and select the box that says use audio mixer.   Once this is done, the next time you lick the volume icon you will see a separate slider for each application that it currently running.

What does this do for you?   Well if you are like me you run many application and some might have annoying sounds (like a game) and not give you an easy way to control the sound level (other than the general windows volume).   With sound Mixer you can turn down those annoying sounds of cards shuffling in Hoyle’s card games to a whisper and still hear the general effect while listening to Baroque Guitar in Media Player at full volume.

It may not seem like much, but it is a great little feature that make Vista a pleasure to use and explore.   Now if they could just make the user interface consistent, and get more complete and available drivers for 64 bit all would be right with the world.

Anyone that’s done system administration or application troubleshooting on Microsoft Windows platform anytime in the last 10 years has heard of SystemInternals or even if they haven’t they’ve benefitted from the work that Mark Russinovich and David Solomon have done.   And, unless your head has been in the sand for the past 2 months you know that a great advocate of the users of Windows systems has been absorbed by the collective.  A lot of people are still speculating and sysinternals has some answers about whether this is good or bad for the Microsoft consumer.   In the past I’ve learned a lot from Mark’s posts on his blog, and while I’m generally of the mind based on many past experiences, that this is not entirely a good thing.   Only time will tell.  While we’re waiting to find out be sure to read his first post at Microsoft.

I’ve been using Vista Beta 2 and its interim CTP releases as my primary OS for about 2 months now.  It looks like MS is going to ship another beta a release candidate of Vista soon.  This despite the two post Beta 2 interim releases which were still not as baked (IMHO) as any previous OS’ beta 2 I’ve used.   I do have some perspective on this as I’ve been beta testing MS development tools and OS’s since NT 3.0.   I’m a big fan of Vista overall, but relative to what it is promising the product just isn’t ready yet.  I can’t help but think that the Windows group’s definition of Release candidate is somehow out of line with the industry.  Foisting a build that isn’t truly ready for real world apps Allowing us the privilege of using a complete more usable build is a something I am really looking forward to.