Here are my settings but, it does that few hours for your eyes to get accustomed with the sudden switch of light to dark theme. Is just like driving in heavy rain using sun glasses. Then again, you can always revert to default settings if you don’t like it.

Settings

Font Used (Windows) : Consolas
Font Size : 11 
Foreground : #FFFFFF
Background : #333333
Identifiers : #0066CC
Keywords : #FF3399
Comments : #808080
Strings : #99CC00

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About a few months ago, I was trying to upgrade my Pentium 4 to Windows Vista SP1, but encounter tonnes of blue screen problem to system hangs on boot up. IT WAS A NIGHTMARE!

Then, I reformatted and stopped the SP1 from auto updating until I resolved this issue. Later, this month - I decided to get a new set with better hardware and hopefully having less trouble in installing to Vista. Prior to that I’ve done some research here and there.

I listed out some of the important pointers one should take before considering about installing Vista on your test machine.

1. Always install on a new hard drive or an empty drive. Backup and put your vital data else where.
2. Get a CD/DVD with latest Vista drivers - especially your networks / WIFI adapter getting online is your main priority after installing Windows Vista. If you mobo is bought few months before Windows Vista, chances are you will also need to update your BIOS for that - prepare that and flash the mobo first.
3. Keep installation simple, no need partitioning. HDD is so cheap these day, I even have my whole D: as back up of C:. Don’t go for RAID unless you are sure, your set is 99% Vista Ready.
4. When your drivers are ready, is time to remove some parts in your PC. Remove extra RAM chips , if you have 4GB RAM onboard, remove 2 GB off, there’s some issue with Vista not being able to detect more than 3 GB RAM unless it’s 64 bit Vista you are using.
5. Remove all PCI cards onboard, yeah you heard it…all the PCI cards including sound blaster, except for network card which you need to connect to the network but then, nowadays network LAN adapter are build in already.
6. Your set should only have basic necessity to run an OS, that is RAM, CPU, mobo with sound card / LAN onboard, DVD-Drive, hard drive and graphics card. This helps you to isolate driver probably which will crop up later.

With the 6 steps prepared, you are basically ready for Windows Vista crash testing. Proceed to the installation.

1. Install Vista on the hard drive.
2. Once Vista started, install latest hardware drivers to enable online connection. Get Vista activated and start downloading updates. Let the update run. You don’t have to install other stuff yet, like graphics and sound card drivers. Our goal is to crash test first to see if your set can take the Vista heat.
3. With some updates downloading, Vista will restart a few times, pay attention to crashes…if your Vista crashes, freeze, and BSOD on you. This is actually bad news, cause your set can’t even stand level 1 of the Vista crash test. Well "touch wood", most of the time almost every set can pass level 1.
4. After a few more updates your Vista will eventually enter SP1.
5. Now pluck in one by one the PCI cards you have. Install the driver. Restart and watch for crashes. If it does crashes, go safe mode, device manager and remove(DELETE!) the drivers. Some of the PCI have services or startup application in them, make sure they are gone too. Take out the PCI card. That piece of hardware obviously have a driver fault. Most of the crash, hangs and BSOD are resulted from faulty drivers…just make sure Windows don’t load them anymore else you will keep getting endless loops of frustration. Repeat till you pluck in all your necessary PCI extension cards.
6. Repeat step 4, but this time with USB devices like printer, and scanners.
7. Once you made it into post SP1 updates (updates after SP1), congratulations you survived your Windows Vista Crash Test with the correct settings and surviving hardware! You may install your extra 2 GB RAM onboard after this.
8. In most cases, I suggest using USB devices than going for PCI because, they are easy to get rid off to do evaluation.

My personal experience was with my NETGEAR WG311T v 5 PCI card (a PCI Wifi adapter) onboard on ASUS P5Q SE…it was terrible after installing their so called "Vista compatible" driver.  It keeps crashing randomly. Knowing that it was my lastest hardware inserted - I removed the driver, uninstall the service and software that comes with it. Frankly, I never experience hardware as badly supported as this.

Luckily for me, my neighbor has a spare USB wifi adapter. With step 5 of Windows Vista crash test, I isolate the card out and toss it away. Word of warning, some of you may thought by disabling the hardware in device manager help.

IMHO, it DOESNT help at all in solving Windows Crashes, because the driver too faulty to even to be inside the HDD. GET RID OF IT! ASAP!

I’m now happily using my Windows Vista Compatible D-LINK DWA 120 USB Wifi adapter.

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EventListener EVENT.ENTER_FRAME as we all know is useful to trigger function you want to check up on conditions for a indefinite period of time. e.g. A check for game over state in a flash game. However, to control the flow of the your flash projects, usually we build only one of these and employ it to the stage trigger various function to have a better control over the code.

However, I noticed that ENTER FRAME does have some setbacks. I list them accordingly below:-

1. Cannot be used as a consistent timer intervals.
   ENTER FRAME is not very good at managing actual timer intevals, to do that best use timer interval script which fire every actual seconds. Try not to use Timer Interval or any Tween Scripts inside ENTER FRAME, it will screw things up.
2. If you nest an ENTER FRAME function within a function the variables are not passed in. Use a global variable. e.g. see like the code below
3. Is a good practice to set a boolean on top of the first condition checker of the ENTER FRAME function, it helps when you are doing some hitTest and you only want it to return one value after the first Hit. See second code below.
4. Try to Remove Listeners once you do not need them anymore. e.g. If you are developing a game and it’s game over etc.

	function MySuperEnterFrameFunc(myvalue){
 
	   stage.addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME,fireRoutineFunction);
	   function fireRoutineFunction(evt:Event){
                trace("hello"+myvalue);		
	   }

Explanation : Scenario Script 1

I’ve noticed you cannot pass in a internal variable inside a enterframe function within a function. You will most probably get values but, are highly volatile because of the EnterFrame nature, use a more global variable which is declared once.

	function MySuperEnterFrameFunc(myvalue){
           if(isOK){
	      stage.addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME,fireRoutineFunction);
	      function fireRoutineFunction(evt:Event){
                   trace("hello"+myvalue);		
	      }
            }

Explanation : Scenario Script 2

Adding a isOK boolean trigger which is a global variable help save up alot of CPU time and have your codes slightly more optimize. It basically does fire a EnterFrame function when there’s no proper boolean value.

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Two possible situation as listed below.

1. Forget to import flash.display.* which is necessary for all display objects on stage.

Flash Actionscript IDE does not debug or trace for errors on real time coding so, most of the time the programmers will forget what’s happening.

2. Do not add function Brackets for Class

This is very common but surprisingly this is the most common mistake I do every time I script a package document class. Note: This error is hard to spot as the class is very near to the method functions. Just remember the syntax no function like brackets for class. e.g. like samples below :-

package{
//REMEMBER : Add import associated with the display.
import flash.display.*        
 
//REMEMBER : class does not have () like method functions.
      public class docClass extends MovieClip{
	      public function docClass(){
		     trace("Class Loaded Successfully");
	      }
      }
}

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To fit the album art into your compilation, first start iTunes and open up your playlist. Shift click and select all the songs you wanted to compiled as one album under one album art for e.g. My Classical Collection 2008. Simply edit one of the selected album in the playlist (while songs are selected, rename just one and all the selected file album will be renamed accordingly). Next you may want to assign an album art for it by dragging images from the folder which I’ve mentioned to the album artwork section in ITunes located at the left hand corner.

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