After reinstalling the Creative drivers, it worked just fine.

Unrelated picture

After I downloaded and installed Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista Home Premium (x64), it could no longer play sounds. If I for example tried to play an mp3 file, WinAmp would start, but the song wouldn’t begin.

I reinstalled the drivers for my Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatal1ty card, and sound now works as it should.

There was nothing about sound card drivers in Windows Update (possibly because they weren’t really new), and I found no errors in the Device Manager.

Creative sound card drivers: http://us.creative.com/support/downloads/

I have had no other problems after installing SP1 — yet.

On a semi-related note: I recommend using a program called X-Fi Mode Changer, which makes changing modes (Entertainment and Gamer) less of a headache.

After doing some research on e-mail encryption (OpenPGP, GnuPG, etc.) I accidentally came across PasswordSafe, by Bruce Schneier. It was a neat program designed to store usernames and passwords securely. I added some of my passwords to try it out, backed up the encrypted file …

Then, a couple of hours after trying PasswordSafe, I stumbeled upon KeePass, another open-source program, similar to PasswordSafe, except that it most notably packed more features. Instead of using Blowfish, it uses AES or Twofish, which doesn’t say that much to me, but these algorithms are supposedly very good, so it makes little difference. After trying out these two programs, I can wholeheartedly recommened them both, but I think KeePass is superior, because it has more options available to you. My only gripe with it is that the developers refuse to add an e-mail field. A shame, really.

I got two KeePass databases now: One for the accumulating website usernames/passwords I have gathered throughout the years, and another core database with only a few, very important passwords stored inside. I only have to write down the master password for the latter and I got it all covered. Just remember: if you want to do this, to make a long and complicated master password, write it down, and back up the encrypted database file on a removable disk!

Download KeePass for Windows (unofficial ports to other OS, like Linux, available).

Of course, then I had to reinstall Windows XP, all the games and software, patches, hacks and fixes, and customize and tweak everything so that it would be like it used to, lest I’d go crazy. The task was so daunting, however, that I just installed Windows, and let the then-new hard disk collect dust for a couple of months … till I stumbled upon HDClone.

HDClone lets you make identical copies of your hard disk for free. At least there’s a free, stripped-down version of it: you can only copy from small drives to a bigger ones (not the other way around) and SafeRescue and verifying mode is missing.

Copying everything (free version copies 0.3GB/min) took over four hours, but it was well worth it, because everything worked like I expected it to. Of course, you could argue that I should have formatted, because of all the junk that accumulates in Windows over time (I’ve had the same installation for about three years), but since I’ve had so few problems with it, and that it would take so long to reinstall everything, I decided I could easily live with it

By the way, Hitachi Deskstar hard disks are even more silent than Seagate Barracuda, so I can definitely recommend them if that sort of thing is important to you.