Damn it Bill!

Ok, so after spending most of the day yesterday getting Windows 7 re-installed and working, I wrote up the experience this morning and was all happy. For a while. Then, I rebooted.

Goddamnit Bill Gates. It's MY computer, let me use it!

Ok, it turns out that Rivatuner does something interesting with regards to it using a device driver, and that under a 64-bit version of Windows (Vista, 2008 server, and Windows 7), unsigned drivers are not allowed. Nor are drivers that are signed by an untrusted source.

*sigh*

In looking around for a solution, my roommate pointed me at a procedure to create your own signatures and push them into the local system's list of approved keys. That might have worked, but it's a mess.

I found another utility that would do what I needed Rivatuner for, namely to adjust my graphics card's fan speed as the temperature ramped up. This one is called MSIAfterburner, and the same guy is working on it. The good news, it works without a driver. The bad news, because it doesn't use a driver, it has to be left running. Ok, no biggie... it can sit in the taskbar and be quiet.

Ok, UAC annoyance now hits... trying to start it from the registry "Run" entry, UAC pops up a requester at login. Very annoying. More searching and I found a way around it.

To run a program as administrator (and thus avoid UAC) at login, you have to make a task entry for it using the task scheduler.

Note: This only works if you are an administrator. You cannot cause an administrative program to automatically start on a standard user's desktop.

1.Click start
2.Type: task scheduler
3.Press enter
4.Click create task in the right
5.Type a name for the task
6.Put a check next to the box that says 'run with highest privileges'
7.Click on the Trigers tab
8.Click New
9.Click on the dropdown next to "Begin the task", select At log on
10.Put a check next to 'specific user or group'
11.Click OK
12.Click the actions tab
13.Click New
14.Click browse
15.Find the program you want to run
16.Click Open
17.Click OK
18.Click OK

Wheeeee! So far so good. I'm gonna reboot once more to be sure and then make a system restore point!