Hands on: How to change the Windows startup screen

Colours and calculations for XP 

I've found a couple of new freebies from Microsoft. We are nearly all digital photographers these days and photo-quality printers have never been cheaper.

Once you get the image-tweaking bug and progress from the automatic fixes to tweaking histograms and colour balance, you’ll probably come across the problem that the colours you see on the screen are not what you get from the printer.

This issue cannot be solved completely, as the range of colours (known as a gamut) visible on-screen is usually greater than what can be reproduced by the printer.

However, good colour management can make the best of what is possible.

Every device you use – such as monitor, scanner or printer – should have a colour profile stored in an ICM or ICC file. These usually come with the device driver files, but image professionals use special hardware/software utilities to create their own.

If you dig deeply enough into the properties of your display or printer, you should find a ‘Colour Management’ tab that shows which profile is associated with the device, and lets you change it.

The new Microsoft Colour Control Panel Applet gathers all this for one-stop control of the various devices. It also adds a few goodies, such as a 3D colour model of each device’s gamut.

This lets you compare two devices to see what colours can be faithfully reproduced between the two. Although the applet is free, downloading and installing it is rather long-winded.

First you need to be running XP SP2. Next you need to download and run the ‘Genuine Windows Validation’ tool. If your installation passes this, then you can download the applet.

If you don’t have the .Net Framework installed, this will be downloaded automatically when you install the applet; another 10MB or so. Finally, I found Windows Update kicked in with a Hotfix for the .Net Framework.

The other new gadget is Calculator Plus, which is not the same as the XP Powertoy Calculator that has been around for a while and offers graphical plots of functions.

Calculator Plus is based on the standard Windows Calculator, but offers several extras. First it has a new view, with oval buttons and a garish blue shaded background, but you can, thankfully, switch to the ‘Classic’ calculator view in the Windows system colours.

One improvement is that the symbols on the keys are larger, so it is much easier to tell the difference between the decimal point and the minus sign.

But the big plus is the conversion feature, also available from the view menu, alongside the standard and scientific view.

Select a category – weights, areas, temperature, pressure and many more – choose the ‘from’ and ‘to’ units, enter a number in the calculator and hit the ‘convert’ button. You will find practically every unit you can think of, and many more you’ve probably never heard of.

It’s interesting to note that there’s a 20 per cent difference between the Chinese and Taiwanese jin weights, but this pales into insignificance when you compare the UK and US volume measurements.

A UK gallon is around 20 per cent bigger than a US liquid gallon, but 24 per cent bigger than a US dry gallon. A US fluid ounce is slightly bigger than a UK fluid ounce, but they only have 16 of them to the pint; unless, of course, it’s a dry pint, which has 18.6.

The calculator also has a currency converter. At first sight this is less than impressive, as it only lets you convert between euro and the former currencies of the euro-equipped nations – rates that were set in stone in January 1999.

But if you take a look at the Edit menu, you’ll find you can import the current exchange rates of the European Central Bank online. Unfortunately, this still will only let you convert from euro to the target currencies.

So if you want to find out, say, how many US dollars you’ll get for a pound, you’ll have to get the euro-pound rate, then the euro-dollar rate and work it out from there.