Windows 7 Aero & Fireworks CS3 Brush tool just don’t work well together, when using the paint brush (or a number of other similar tools, such as the erasor) it may seem as if the program is really really lagging, a lot. If you’re having this problem, don’t worry about bad system specs or lack of RAM, or needing to upgrade your software, all you need to do to get this issue fixed is change from the Aero theme to a Basic theme. The two steps are illustrated below for clarification, and don’t mind the Swedish language, everything is in the same place regardless of textual preferences.

Step 1 – Right click on your desktop, and select “Anpassa”, or “Preferences” in English.

Step 2 – Select the Windows Basic theme, or any of the themes within the basic category (though Windows 7 basic does look best).

Step 3 – Have fun with fireworks! Make amazing artworks with the brush tool with nooooo problems at all!

There, problem solved, nice and simple. Now that I have this issue fixed I can get to doing what I was planning on doing with FW CS3 in the first place, draw a couple of neat illustrations for the next blogpost today.

No doubt you’ve heard about the Windows 7 GodMode hack, so there’s really no reason for me to tell you about. What? You haven’t? Ok then, I’ll let you in on this neat secret feature recently revealed. If you’re running Windows Vista (32 bit version only, don’t try this on the 64 bit VISTA version or things will crash) or Windows 7 (either 32 & 64-Bit), just create a new folder and label it:

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

Actually you can change the GodMode to anything you like, it still works fine, but without the GodMode it really doesn’t seem so stunning anymore. So, give it the name:

YourStunningTitleOfChice.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

and POOF it suddenly gains a nice blue icon and you will find links to every single setting on your Windows system upon opening the folder. None of these links are secret, they can all be accessed by the standard control panel and other varied subdirectories, but it might still be useful to have everything gathered in one location, maybe, not really. Anyhow, I think a quote by Steve Sinchak fits in nicely below, so here you go:

The feature is not actually even called God Mode but All Tasks.  Since the All Tasks feature is simply a shell folder you can access it a few different ways.  The most direct method is to open up Explorer and type in shell:::{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} in the address bar and hit Enter.  Alternatively, create a folder and name it anything.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}.

There, that’s all the information you need.

Free entrance, a big piece of a nicely aesthetically pleasing Windows 7 cake with lemon and strawberry filling, lots o candy, coffee, a Windows 7 T-Shirt, a backpack, three pens, four capsule openers and about twenty keychains is what todays main event brought with it. The road there was twistful and filled with obstacles, big traffic jam by bus & a wrong turn by foot (found my way thanks to some helpful pedestrians though) complicated things a bit. I walked in on a big EU meeting someplace in midcity, where police had blocked all roads and one of them asked me to step aside while whomever was there entered the building. I walked past the entrance again on the other side of the road while travelling back towards where I should have been going.

The Windows 7 demonstation itself wasn’t such a big hit. All the main computer dealers were there speaking about their systems and there were a bunch of laptops with Win 7 installed ready for testing. I haven’t tried Win 7 before (though I use a Win 7 theme on my XP, looks exactly the same) so I gave it a shot, and the first thing I opened – Chess Titans – crashed the computer. Whoops! Other than that it looks about the same as Vista,with a few new cool gadgets and one feature I will learn to love – support for old Win XP programs. Great. Now I won’t have to worry about my 10k collection of old DOS and other games not working when I do upgrade, not to mention all my cool utilities that barely work on XP, much less the now not so new OS Vista.

I met up with my buddy bear there and got a ride to Jakobsberg (not far from my home), trip didn’t take more than a rough three hours, travel time included. All in all it was a good occasion, will munch on the brought-home snacks while watching movie(no s) tonight. Have a good day peoples!