It seems that every single day I stumble on another article, newscast, or person, who is brainlessly bashing Vista.  I’m fucking sick of hearing it.

Every single one of these articles I have seen appears to be written by some talentless hack who has either not used Vista, or someone who has no fucking business touching a computer in the first place.

I have been running Vista for nearly 2 years now and am currently running it on both my desktop and my laptop and I have NEVER had a problem with it.  ALL of my hardware worked painlessly and I have not seen a SINGLE software compatibility issue.

It just boggles my mind when I read articles that say “It took me 16 months to get it working”.  I mean… my mind just can’t comprehend what is so god damned hard about it.  Seriously?  What is it?

Yes, it has it’s little quarks and annoyances, but there is no reason to avoid it.  It is a great, fantastic, VERY stable OS.  Anyone who claims otherwise probably doesn’t understand computers and is scared of change.

Rant over.

Apparently with a recent “security” update pushed out by Microsoft, it now causes ANY file you download from the internet and try and open to pop up with a security warning like this one:

Good LORD this has got to be the most OBNOXIOUS WINDOWS UPDATE EVER.  What on god’s green Earth was Microsoft thinking when they pushed this one out?!  Shut the hell up, I know what I downloaded.  I have updated virus protection (I <3 NOD32), so leave me the hell alone about it and let me run what the fuck I want to!  I don’t need you baby sitting my downloaded files as I’m not a moron, thanks for assuming I am though MS.

It finally pushed me over the edge today when I saw this warning pop-up for the 9000th time in one day.  I had to find a way to make it go away and never come back, as unchecking that box simply applies to that 1 file, not ALL files as you might think it would.

Open up your control panel and then open up “Internet Options”.  Yup… Internet Options.  Once again I would like to take this opportunity to thank MS for putting things in easy-to-find, logical places (yeah right).

Click the Internet zone.

Click the “Custom Level” button.

Under the Miscellaneous category, look for “Launching Applications and Unsafe Files”

Change that from “Prompt” to “Enable”

Click OK ignoring what ever security bullshit warnings MS tries to scare you with and close your Internet Properties.

You will now be able to open up any file you downloaded with out that annoying warning box.

The only side effect is that IE will have a warning bar at the top when you fire it up trying to scare you in to enabling it again.  Honestly though no one should EVER have any excuse to use IE as a browser… you should be using Firefox, or ANY other browser out there aside from IE.

Enjoy running downloaded files with wreckless abandon.

In my article here I showed you how to make ISO, BIN, and other CD/DVD Image files mountable by simply double clicking them in Vista.

To accomplish this I used a tool call Creative Elements Power Tools.  It worked fine for what I was doing at the time.

Fastfoward 45 days or more later… I go back to use that tool again to manage some other file extensions in Vista only to discover the tool is now expired and they want $18 to register it.  After promptly uninstalling that bullcrap I went on the hunt for a 100% definitely free tool that would accomplish the same task.

I stumbled upon a freeware tool called File Type Manager that will allow you to manage file types to your heart’s content.  I actually like this tool a bit more.  It’s more “power-user’ish” which I appreciate.  No fluff and stuff bullshit, just a straight-up tool to manage what you are wanting to manage.

Even though it was written in 2001 apparently, it still works perfect in Vista!  Just note that when installing it you will get some warnings about it trying to install old versions of files.  Just be sure you keep the current versions of the files you have on your machine and you will be just fine.

That’s all for this post.  Just wanted to update anyone who may have used that tool in my other post and pass along a free tool I found.

First off, I’ll say I know there is a plugin that sort of does this for Daemon, but it does not associate all the file types and there is no way to add additional types to it and is quite buggy, as well as doing other shit I didn’t like.

I’d been wanting to do this for some time now to simply make it more efficient to mount CD/DVD images with Daemon Tools.  I always felt going through the DT menu from the tray icon was a giant pain in the butt.

In XP this process is different, and actually easier… but at the last LAN I was at every one was one Vista except for one person, so I’m not going to bother with XP instructions… although you can probably figure out how to do it in XP from these.

Vista’s dumb-down feature creates another casualty when it comes to trying to manually edit file type associations.  There is basically no way to do it.  You can change which program a file opens with, but it has to be a program… there is no way to input custom things for file types.  F-you Microsoft.  How do you REMOVE features from your flag ship OS?  Anyway…

First things first, you’re going to need Creative Elements Power tools (not free – 45 day demo):
http://www.creativelement.com/powertools/

(UPDATE: For a truly FREEWARE tool, see here.  I suggest using that one instead… even though steps will be slightly different for using a different tool, the concept/method is still the same).

Download and install that program, then run it.
In the box that comes up, check “Edit file type associations” and click Accept.  You can now close this window.

Now, find your image file, in this example I’ll use ISO, you can also associate BIN, MDS, and any other image file you can mount in DaemonTools, although these 3 are the most common.
Right click on the image file and choose the new option “Edit file type”

“File Type Doctor” will pop up with the file type highlighted.  On the right, click “New”
In the first line type Mount
Next, click Browse and find your daemontools exe file.
In the command line box, type in -mount 0, “%1”

Click Accept.

Now click New again

In the first line type Unmount

Next, click Browse and find your daemontools exe file.

In the command line box, type in -unmount 0

Click Accept.

If you want, click Change icon and browse to the daemontools executable.  This will give the image files you add the mount and unmount commands to a nice icon.

Now one last step is to turn off Secure Mode on Daemontools.  Right click on your dt tray icon, go to Options, and Uncheck “Secure Mode”.  If this is left checked it prompts you every time you try to mount and unmount an image.  It’s annoying.

Now you should see your changes instantly, so you can now test it out.
You can now right click on your ISO file and Mount it or Unmount it.  Mount is default so you can even just double click the file and it will mount.

You can repeat the process for any other images you mount in DT, and the great part is File Type Doctor remembers what you’ve done, so you can just click the down arrows in the boxes and choose what you’re wanting to do.  Takes just a minute or 2 to associate all the image files you use!

Hope you guys will find this as useful as I will.