Another commenter noted that this kind of utility is all over the place. Yes, true, and good on the maintainers for publishing contrary views. My own 10 minute experience is it’s great and I don’t have to fumble with all those bloody settings from, say, nVidia! So I like it very much. Here’s why…

My current client just shoved a very expensive laptop down my throat. If money was gonorrhoea, these guys would be a petri dish at your local health office! But in fact this US$4500 laptop sucks, with all it’s Vista ‘er, ‘ah, “stuff” and 17″ monitor shinier than the hood of a brand new Bentley. Hell, I’d be more comfortable with an old DEC VT100 monitor (one of which I still own, BTW)!!! I usually work from home, a modest sized Nord sailing cruiser with wonderful lighting, presently inhabited and cared-for I pray by a sweet young thing from southern California. Sad for me they want me on site and are willing to pay quite a bit for it.

This bunch use cheap, over-bright florescent lamps in what seems like every 3 feet! Add to that the office (I should say ZOO) is filled with a very few very good local developers worthy of the title, a project manager who can not find her rather cute ass with four hands, a map, PERT-Chart and torch. Nothing new there, though Brit/Ausie/NZ’re are usually far better PM’s than in The States. Oh well.

Much, much worse are what seems like 100’s of 23-year old freshly minted MBA (US)/MSc (GB) types. They line up at my cube, and thank gods at other developers cubes like jets inbound to Heathrow, Frankfurt or Loz-Angeles spaced 5 minutes apart at dusk, so many fireflies strung across the sky. Each has something terribly important, brilliant, funny, witty, to say/ask/bestow upon TheOldSageOne (hay, everyone has to market himself). Try as I might, focus is lost every bloody time.

Combined with the bad lighting, it’s all bringing back to me why I quit writing code for a living in 2001… precisely the same thing. Took a nice job teaching snivelling brats of New England’s Good and Great – even had a Bush several hashes removed. The work was refreshing but pay packet was heartbreaking. Besides, New England is ball-up cold in winter; I missed my usual 3 months in Thailand (north or south, depending mood and season) for rest, renewal, and cultural exchange.

So there it is. This little video focus tool not only keeps me, well, focused and able to cope with the Bentley-On-Glass monitor attached to an overpriced huge laptop, it enables me to put up with the interruptions whilst re- re- re-finding the terminal focus quickly. More, this little memoir gave me an excuse to leave my little bit of hell for a moment; praise to whomever developed a lovely little tool, VisionSuite, who ever that might be, hopefully entertain the reader, and … resist the temptation to knock out some of these lights and batter one of the new graduates into the mass of uneducated protoplasm from which he sprang!! Thanks for the moment. -TheOldCodeToad

I tried it in trial mode on both Vista Ultimate X86 and XP Pro X86. The software looks nice, and can be useful. Regretfully, the key.txt file was simply not accepted on two different computers with two different Windows installations….

I do allot of graphics editing, and would have liked to have been able to use this application in more then a Trial mode.

Thanks Giveaway of the Day and VisionSuit Software. Looking forward to future application (hopefully those will work).

Make sure the Menu bar is available (Tools, Menu Bar), then click View, Status Bar. Then you’ll have access to the Zoom tool…much better than enlarging the font! Clicking the number increases the zoom up to 150%, clicking the tiny arrow on the right side allows you to zoom up to 400%.

If you don’t need zoom and image processing, I much prefer dedicated screen-capture utilities, which let you capture an application’s windows, objects, and selected screen regions.

DEP exceptions aren’t Vista-specific, whether you need a DEP exception depends upon whether you have DEP enabled.

Vista Aero doesn’t have any impact on performance if you have any kind of useable video card. I have a relatively crappy video card, and I notice zero performance impact from enabling full Aero. I did take advantage of the Labor Day sales to purchase a better card, although it’s still a generation or two behind (and I’ll have to purchase some connectors and adapters). While better video and 3D performance will be nice, mostly I’m hoping that its drivers will be better. The video card manufacturers seem to put the most effort into fixing the drivers in their higher-end cards, because that’s where the money is. But once newer models come out, you can get the older models cheap.

Seems heavy on resources – 60-99% on MS XP pro SP3 on older Athlon 1.44 system. I set it to 100% (=no magnification) 900×900 fixed and turned down the red to get a big bluish overlay for those glaring websites that consider their white background very !important (like GOTD, Google Reader etc.) so a bookmarklet can’t change it. Too much glare for some midnight surfers. :-)