The test shots were taken using a Nikon D300.

Nikon Lens was the AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm 1:3.5 – 5.6 G ED with VR

Sigma Lens was the Sigma DC 18-200mm 1:3.5 – 6.3 D

In all test shots Normal VR was active and the camera was hand-held.

For the first test, I took two pictures of a flower, one with each lens.

The second test was a photo of a clock tower in the distance.

I have cropped all 4 photos to show specific detail of the photo.  You can click the photos to open up a larger image.

The Flower Photos:

Nikon Lens Model: NIKON D300 Date & Time: 2009:05:12 12:20:12 Exposure Time: 0.003125 F Number: 9.0 Exposure Program: program normal Bias: 0/6 Metering Mode: multi-segment Light Source: auto Flash: No Focal Length: 200.0 ISO: 200	Sigma Lens Model: NIKON D300 Date & Time: 2009:05:12 12:20:46               Exposure Time: 0.003125 F Number: 9.0 Exposure Program: program normal Bias: 0/6 Metering Mode: multi-segment Light Source: auto Flash: No Focal Length: 200.0 ISO: 200

The Clock Tower Photos:

Nikon Lens Model: NIKON D300 Date & Time: 2009:05:12 12:20:17 Exposure Time: 0.0025 F Number: 10.0 Exposure Program: program normal Bias: 0/6 Metering Mode: multi-segment Light Source: auto Flash: No Focal Length: 200.0 ISO: 200	Sigma Lens Model: NIKON D300 Date & Time: 2009:05:12 12:20:50 Exposure Time: 0.002 F Number: 11.0 Exposure Program: program normal Bias: 0/6 Metering Mode: multi-segment Light Source: auto Flash: No Focal Length: 200.0 ISO: 200

I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions, but from these and a few other test pictures I have taken the Sigma lens focus is better on close objects at 200mm, while the Nikon is easily better at the distant object and focal length of 200mm.

I was editing video the other day, and wanted to voice over the existing sound – my wife was making a racket in the background :O)

I recorded the new audio using a Sennheiser microphone plugged into my M-Audio Fast Track Mixer. The sound was only recorded in one channel.  What this meant was my video was only going to have sound coming out of one speaker – not what I wanted at all.  Fortunately, armed with one-channel audio, it is relatively easy to put the same audio through both channels in Sony Vegas.  The video below shows how to do this.

Watch Sony Vegas Tutorial: Converting mono to stero  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

The process is simple:

1. CTRL + left click and drag the audio to a new track.
2. Make one audio track right channel and the other left channel.
3. Bingo.  Simulated Stereo (at least you have sound coming from both speakers).

A lot of websites use Flash movies to help sell their products.  Flash movies can be created using a number of different tools, but to watch them, you need the Flash Player installed on your computer. 

Usually you’ll click the play button to play the video, and the video just wont play, or it will play without sound.  Worse still, you might get a message saying that you must download the latest Flash plugin for your browser, even though you know it is already installed.  When you go to update the plugin, you may then be told that you already have the latest version.

Sound familiar?

The problem seems to be the Flash Player.

When you go to a site that requires the plugin for the the first time, an “on-demand” version is installed. This on-demand version is not updated properly, and can cause the problems discussed above.

Here is how to fix the problem

1. Uninstall the Flash Player via the Control Panel.

2. Download the complete Shockwave Installer:

Download Shockwave and Flash Player (Complete Standalone Installer)

3. Install the player.

That should solve your problems.

Let me know if you try this and it works for you.

My laptop has Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit installed as the operating system, but looking at Google, the problem affects any version of Vista.  Here is how the problem manifested on my machine.

1. I install Office 2007 on the machine.  The machine does not have any previous version of Office on it.
2. When I run Word, the installation screen comes up and takes a minute or two configuring Office.  On closing Word and restarting it, the installation routine runs again.  In fact, it runs every time I run Word.
3. When I run Excel, I get a rather unhelpful dialogue box popup saying merely “stdole32.tlb”.   On clicking the close button for this dialogue box, it closes and Excel and the installation routine runs to configure Office 2007.  Again, this happens EVERY time I want to run Office 2007 applications Word and Excel.  The other applications appear to work OK on my machine.

The problem is down to registry problems, and I want to thank Brian Peek for the solution.  However, since my operating system is in Spanish, and not English, his instructions needed a little modification.  Here is a complete walk-through to solve this problem that gives you the info you need if your Windows Vista is in another language.

DISCLAIMER: If you follow these instructions, I take no responsibility for any problems you may subsequently have.  You are using these instructions at your own risk.  Also, this has not been tested on 64-bit Vista or any other version besides Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit.  Of course, if you do decide to go ahead and try this fix, you should backup your registry and your important data.

REQUEST: If this solution works for you (or even if it doesn’t), please consider adding a comment at the end of this page so that I can see whether this fix works for the majority of people trying it.  Thanks very much, I appreciate it!

The first step is to check that your computer is indeed suffering from the permissions “bug” in Vista.  Click the Windows Start Button, and type regedit into the search box and hit return.

This will open up Windows Regedit tool.  Right click on HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT, and select Permissions:

This is what you should see in the resulting dialogue box:

Permissions should be set for a variety of users.

If your dialogue box looks like the following screenshot, then you have a problem:

As you see, no permissions have been assigned to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.  This is cause of the Office 2007 installation problems, as well as potentially a lot of other problems you are having with installing products.

The very first thing you need to do is backup your registry.  There is a good walkthrough of doing this here (thanks Adam).

Next, you need to download a Microsoft tool called SubInACL and install it.

If your computer is the same as mine, it should install into the following folder:

c:\program files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools

Open your text editor and paste in the following code:

subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CURRENT_USER /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f /grant=restricted=r /grant=YOURUSERNAME=f /grant=restricted=r /setowner=administrators
subinacl /keyreg HKEY_CURRENT_USER /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f /grant=restricted=r /grant=YOURUSERNAME=f /grant=restricted=r /setowner=administrators

subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f /grant=users=r /grant=everyone=r /setowner=administrators
subinacl /keyreg HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f /grant=users=r /grant=everyone=r /setowner=administrators

subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f /grant=users=r /setowner=administrators
subinacl /keyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f /grant=users=r /setowner=administrators

Save the file in the same folder as SubinACL.exe as “officefix.cmd”.

Now, edit the file by replacing the following text:

YOURUSERNAME – replace with your computer username.

You can find this by going into the control panel, and opening up User Accounts.

In my case, I replace YOURUSERNAME with Andy

NON-ENGLISH Vista additional instructions

Now, here is where you have to add an additional couple of steps if you are using a version of Windows Vista that is not in English.  You also need to replace these:

administrators & users – needs to be replaced with the equivalent in your language.

If you are unsure what these equivalents are, you can find this information by looking at the properties of the hard drive on your computer.  Open Explorer, and right click the C: drive and select properties:

In the dialogue that opens, click onto the Security tab.  You should see both the administrator and the users equivalent words on that tab:

If you do not see these users listed here, look at the properties of files or folders on your hard disk until you see these users and you have the equivalent words in your OS language.

Look at the table below to see what you need to substitute in your officefix.cmd file if your OS is in a non-English language (If you can supply this info in another language, please post a comment at the end of this page):

NOTE: Raymond who provided the German translation above, added the following piece of advice:
“If the user name contains a space, it should be written in quotes (“”) in officefix.cmd”

OK; you are now ready to run “officefix.cmd”

Open Windows Explorer and navigate to the folder where SubInACL.exe and your officefix.cmd files are located. This is probably:

c:program filesWindows Resource KitsTools

Double click the officefix.cmd file.  A screen should open and you can see the progress of the operation.

You can now go and have a coffee.  The process may take several minutes.  When it is complete, try running Word and Excel again.  This fixed my problems.

Since fixing my installation of Office 2007 (or should I say the Windows Vista Registry permissions), I have looked into other problems caused by the same registry bug.  Here is a great post on Aaron Stebner’s blog showing how to reset your Windows Vista registry.  His fix also addresses permissions in the program files folder and the windows directories.

I have since applied this fix over the top of the one I described above, and have had no problems with my machine since (except an annoying Adobe Updater issue, but I suppose I cant win everything).

Please feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of this page if you have found this works for you (or if you have any problems with it).  If you are using a different language, please post the words you need to substitute for administrators & users to help others trying to fix this Windows Vista problem.

I’m not sure why Sony have the upgrade policy that they do, but it does mean that you can get Sony Vegas Pro at a very considerable discount, at least in the UK. 

Here in the UK, the full price of Sony Vegas Pro is £425.95 for the DVD or £415.95 for the download version.  However, you can get the upgrade from Movie Studio 9 to Sony Vegas Pro for just £254.95 (DVD) and £229.45 (download version).

Since Movie Studio starts at £28.95, that means you can get Sony Vegas for just £229.45 + £28.95 = £258.40.  That represents a saving of £157.55 on buying Sony Vegas Pro from the outset.

I have checked the UK Sony site, and these were the correct details on 21st December 2008. 

The savings in the US are less, but then the US pays less for Sony products anyway.

In the US, Sony Vegas Pro is $549.95 (download).  The upgrade from Vegas Movie Studio costs $425.95, and Movie Studio costs $54.95 giving a total cost of $480.90.  That represents a saving of just $69.05.

Getting Sony Vegas Cheap

To take advantage of these savings, her is what you need to do.

1. Go along to the Sony Site and make sure you have your country correctly selected in the top right.
2. Buy a copy of Movie Studio.
3. Go back the this page, and click on the link to “Upgrades” in the right hand menu.
4. Buy an upgrade from Movie Studio to Vegas Pro.

When you go to buy the upgrade, you will need to type in the qualifying serial number before you can proceed:

Just enter the serial number for Movie Studio, and you’ll be able to purchase Vegas Pro.

Camtasia Studio 6 has been released and boasts the following new features over version 5:

1. H.264 format HD-quality video for the web.  H.264 is an industry leading format with small file sizes.
2. New production presets including Youtube, HD and Screencast.com) that can use the HD format for output.
3. Audio and video tracks can now be edited separately.
4. 7 Customizable hotkeys.
5. You can now edit .mov files in Camtasia Studio.
6. 3dTilt Effect on your videos.
7. Better precision (1/10th of a second) with timing of callout fades and transitions.
8. Free Screencast.com account with 2GB storage and 2GB bandwidth per month.
9. New recorder.  Not just an upgrade, but completely new.

And when it is recording, it looks like this:

You can view a complete list of changes on the TechSmith Website.

I bought a Pavilion HDX 9000 laptop running Windows Vista over a year ago, and since the very beginning I have had an intermittent problem with the Quick Launch buttons.  On occasions, they simply stop responding to being touched.  This can be quite annoying when you need to turn the volume down, disconnect from your Wireless router or eject a DVD.  My wife has the exact same problem on her Pavilion HDX 9000 as well, and when I was looking for a fix, I found a whole stack of people with this same issue on forums around the world.

REQUEST: If this solution works for you (or even if it doesn’t), please consider adding a comment at the end of this page so that I can see whether this fix works for the majority of people trying it.  Thanks very much, I appreciate it!

The solution to the Quick Launch Buttons problem is more of a quick fix

Ensuring I had the latest versions of the drivers from HP made no difference as the problem persisted.  What made this particularly annoying was that it seemed to strike at random.  The only solution I have found to this problem is as follows:

1. Close down Windows.
2. Unplug the electrical plug.
3. Remove the battery.

You can then put the battery back and plug it into the mains.  On restarting, the buttons work again.

If anyone knows of a permanent fix to this, please leave a comment below and let us know.