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Well, I finally got a new PC and decided to leave XP behind and proceed to Windows 7. The first impression was good, everything looks nice, well structured and the newly set up system runs considerably fast.

However, as it turns out, Microsoft took out the \"Open with\" option for multiple files... for some reason?! OK, while this seems to be an immensely stupid idea to me, I could in theory live with that. Usually I used it for media files, primarily for music, because I used to use different media players (winamp and VLC). So - not a big deal - I\'ll just use Winamp for everything now. NOPE! After installing winamp and restarting the PC there is no \"Enqueue in Winamp Playlist\" option (or however it is called), although Winamp explicitly told me it was going to add just that option during the installation. Not sure if that\'s a problem of the Winamp installer or of Windows though.
Now, ignoring that problem, a new one comes up. When I select a few mp3 files within the Windows Explorer and hit Return, it opens them up in Winamp as expected (actually not even that, it opens all but one of the selected files, but again, probably a problem of Winamp (although it doesn't do that on XP)). However, as soon as my selection contains more than 15 files, Windows changes its mind and opens them with Windows Media Player instead - because, why not?!

Well, there are a few more problems, like my system occasionally freezing for a few seconds for no apparent reason, strange problems with the graphics drivers (again, probably not (solely) Windows 7\'s fault) and the fact that everytime I start DBPro I waste a few seconds due to that \"Do you really want to allow this software to do stuff\"-dialog.. all in all nothing that serious. But what it comes down to is that, all things considered, right now Windows 7 seems like a downgrade to me. A lot of small but highly unnecessary problems due to mysterious design decisions of the developers. On the plus side, it\'s shiny. Yay.

In case any of you has an explanation or even solution for one of the problems described above, please let me know. Otherwise, just consider this a pointless rant.
And now excuse me, while I desperately try to listen to some music...

Could be because one of those files is of a format that is set to be opened by WMP by default.

As for VLC, you can just select all the files you want it to open and then drag them onto its window. It will play them in alphabetical order I believe.


Turn off UAC, it serves little purpose other than to annoy in my opinion.


It takes some getting used to, but Windows 7 is in fact quite great (imo). One area where it defenitively excels over Windows XP is file search speed. Oh how I remember that yellow dog barking about, waving his tail, proudly reporting that he "couldn't find any such files" after nosing about in the trashbin for the better part of the last hour...

I still can't search and delete thumbs.db in Win7 with ease as in XP, have to use FAR. Also "search in subfolders" is not handy often, but disabling it is not handy too. And I hate image thumbnails when small icons - I have "file type" icons set for images (like in acdsee and others), but Win7 think else.

Alter the folder permissions to allow all access for all users. DBPro performs the cardinal sin of writing data to its "Program Files" folder, which Windows 7-compatible programs shouldn't do. You should only ever see the UAC prompt when you're running low-level software or a program wants to update itself or install.

Thanks for the quick replies!



They're all mp3's, and opening them individually always opens them in Winamp. It seems to depend solely on how many files are selected.



Haha, yes, this is certainly true.



Had no effect unfortunately. I guess I'll have to do what they say on the site: "This method is not working for most users. Since many folders and files are locked, the only way to access them is to first unlock them using LockHunter."


And another interesting phenomenon just appeared. When opening several code tabs in the DBPro IDE (Synergy), I get this when clicking on the tgc/DBPro icon in the status bar:



Apparently each tab is also registered as an individual window, which leads to this fancy stacking of constantly loading preview thumbnails. Usually when working on bigger projects I've easily got 10 to 15 files open at once... which results in quite a mess when Windows goes mad with the thumbnails.
However, when using Alt-TAB, windows suddenly seems to know that there is only one Synergy window, instead of 6 (as in the screenshot). Again... not a big deal, but is there an easy way around that "way too many thumbnails" thing?

Edit: As it turned out, that behaviour can be prohibited by changing the Synergy settings. Maybe I should have checked that beforehand.

Restart your computer so that no folders are locked. Change permissions on the DBPro folder. Locate the editor and compiler exe's and right-click them to view their properties. Uncheck the "run as administrator" checkbox on both of them. That should do it.

It indeed did, thank you very much, kind Sir!

Regarding multiple files not "Open[ing] With", select a single file of the relevant type/extension and select "Open With". The last option on the sub-menu should be "choose default program". Make sure you've checked the "always use this program for this filetype" box in the "Choose a Program" dialogue.

If that doesn't work, you can always manually edit the registry. You can always use the ASSOC command from the CLI if you know the filetype for VLC files, eg:


Otherwise you could add one to the registry with:

then:

*Please note I don't recall the CLI parameters for these commands as it has been long and I just pasted this from an old project of mine so I highly recommend you look them up first to be sure.

Hope this helps.

True, that's what I did - and mp3 files are in fact associated with Winamp. Which works flawlessly, but only as long as I select and open less than 16 files at once.

I investigated the registry entries for a while. I don't really know how everything works, but "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mp3" has a standard value of "Winamp.File.MP3". When I look into "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Winamp.File.MP3", the icon is defined as well as the shell commands (Enqeue in Winamp, Play with Winamp etc.). However, Windows seems to ignore these values for some reason, or maybe they haven't been written into the registry correctly, because the icon of mp3's is wrong and all the context menu entries are missing, despite being defined there.
Which is strange, because .m3u files (Winamp playlists) work fine, they got the right icon and also the respective menu items (Play with Winamp, Enqueue etc., as defined in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Winamp.Playlist which is referenced from HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.m3u). So... I really don't know what's going on, but apparently the installation of Winamp (and possibly other software as well) went along with a few serious problems.

Hmmm... Perhaps try removing those .mp3 reg entries (always make a reg bkp first) and then reboot. Then open Winamp and go Options -> Preferences -> General Preferences -> File Types and re-associate them before rebooting again? Not sure what else to suggest. Perhaps a re-install of Winamp at the worst.