Using Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for Windows XP on your Windows Vista machine

Lou Vega — Wed, 16 May 2007 20:35:02 GMT

I installed Vista Ultimate recently on a development laptop and was initially upset to find the handy Virtual CD-ROM which had worked so nicely under Windows XP no longer worked. Having faced such similar behavior under XP with older games I liked to play, I immediately decided to see if using it in Compatibility Mode would work…and it does!

Simply right click the VCdControlTool.exe and select Properties as shown below to change compatibility:

This worked on my machine using Windows Vista Ultimate.Oddly enough, when I went to recreate the original error (to grab a screenshot for this post) the tool still worked even with Compatibility mode turned off…a bug? I dunno, I’m just glad it works.

Being an old school gamer has some benefits ;)

Vista Installation

Lou Vega — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 01:04:00 GMT

Having finally gotten a chance to install Vista on a machine of mine, I was pleasantly surprised at how much cleaner and simpler the install routine for Vista is compared to previous versions. I’ve been installing Windows operating systems since Windows 3.1 and this was by far the fastest and easiest install I’ve had to with Windows. And that’s even accounting for the rather low-end machine I put Vista on…in this case a Dell I used from Code Camp and the one I was playing with XNA on (My Vista Experience score was a whopping 1.0! ;) )

Having installed Vista RC1 on that laptop, I’m next going to procure a couple of machines at BrainThump Labs and work with Vista Ultimate Edition and Vista Enterprise Edition to see what’s what between them.

After that I’m gonna think about what kind of nifty sidebar gadgets I might want that don’t exist so I can try my hand at making one. Since my code-fu won’t depend on me having a spiffy graphics card, maybe my adventures with Vista Gadgets will be more fun than my adventures with XNA so far. Don’t get me wrong, I love gaming and all, but with my current choice of hardware, I don’t have a nice box for XNA development and that’s made it a bit less fun and more frustrating than I had anticipated.