XP – Page 5 – bloggingIT

Graceful Gradient

So, here we are!

Windows XP has shocked me by developing an unexpected ‘feature’.

As I was in a bid to design a pretty backdrop – I thought I’d save a 4 pixel image and save it as a bitmap. When previewing it as a Windows backdrop – I forgot to set the bitmap to tile instead of stretch. What I expected to happen was that some nasty pixilated blocks would appear on the screen.

But no! Instead a pretty gradient graced my monitor.

Obviously there’s limits to what kinds of gradients you can have – but it’s nice that it happens nevertheless.

USB XP Woes

Having been involved in a few Windows XP/2003 suite installations now – there seems to be a reoccurring problem with people and their USB devices.

Simply put – if you’re not an admin user of any sort, then the machine will not allow you to add or remove USB devices.

As a security issue, this is fine – especially when you don’t want people faffing around with your systems on a corporate level. In a school where you’ve just installed 30 computers – half of which don’t have floppy or CD drives in – USB is quite desired.

I finally got around to carrying out a serch on the web and found someone mention KB 823732. A jolly helpful article on how to disable a users ability to remove the said privilege. I haven’t tried it yet – but I imagine that the opposite is true to allow users. I’ll put up an additional note if it works.