One annoying thing in listening to audio / video streams on computer is that almost every stream, application or site has its own loudness. For some music files you might need to turn the volume up, but then your favorite video channel will just scream out loud.
It’s because with the volume setting you set the maximum possible volume for audio output. And not every source uses the full scale – sometimes there are poorly encoded MP3s, sometimes commercials want to be louder than everything else, and sometimes a ballad will be simply played quietly.
For a regular user it means he/she has to turn the volume up and down constantly. Luckily, in Vista, there’s a feature that will put and end to it: Loudness equalization. It will make all sounds sound with a similar volume. It will always run in teh background monitoring everything you play and adjusting itself. Just turn it on, set your desired volume level and Vista will take care of the rest. And since it’s on the OS level, all sources are equal.
How to do it? Go to Control Panel | Sound | Playback | Properties | Enhancements and turn on Loudness Equalization. That’s it.
I have reinstalled Vista on my primary computer some time ago. I was still missing one device installed – Mustek BearPaw 2400TA Plus – because there are no official drivers for Windows Vista. I’m running a 32-bit Enterprise flavour of Vista, so previously I had the Windows 2000/XP drivers installed with some registry hack and it quite worked. However, when I tried to find that information now, I couldn’t find it anywhere.
Finally, after more than hour of googling, I found a way to do it. I’ll just make a note here for myself or anyone else who would like to do the same trick and find that information faster.
Here we go:
- Download 2000 / XP drivers for your scanner
- Change HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\ProductName registry key to say “Microsoft Windows 2000″
- Reboot Vista and start it in Safe Mode
- Install the drivers, they should now install fine
- Reboot Vista, start normally. After logging in, it will ask you if you want to use an unsigned driver – agree
That’s it – everything should be working more or less normally. I just tried that and it works for me – this trick should work for all XP / 2000 drivers.
My girlfriend just found the most useful Windows Vista feature. Which one? The live taskbar thumbnail.
How can it be that useful? Well, she does her job on her Vista laptop, but sometimes she wants some fun as well. Today I saw her doing some accountant job in Excel, while watching TV in the same time in the taskbar thumbnail. Of course using USB-plugged TV tuner. I would never though it can work as PIP, but the world is full of surprises.
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