If you are using build 383, and got prompted to get newer version, please download the release version from download page. The nightly debug build of 383 will display upgrade message, while official release build won’t. Sorry for the confusion.

I’m back from a great vacation!

And finally decided to upgrade to Vista on my machine.

Then found it’s not as easy as I thought…

After 2 days of struggle I finally figured out the root cause of the problem:

If you have a Dell Dimension 9200 / XPS 410, and got BSOD “worker_thread_returned_at_bad_irql” during setup, or you worked around the setup problem but your Vista pauses for 15 seconds every 5~10 minutes, here is how to fix it:

Open your dell machine case, check where the DVD/Burner are connected. Most likely you will find SATA0 is connected to the only hard disk, and SATA1/2 is connected to DVD/Burner. Disconnect DVD/Burner and reconnect to SATA4/5. Mission accomplished!

It seems Vista’s RAID driver has a hard time to figure out a DVD driver is very different from a hard disk…

I’m heading out for a vacation for several weeks. I will turn off comments at this blog temporarily to prevent spams.

Have fun everybody!

Over the weekend, GreatNews website has been migrated to a new hosting company with much greater bandwidth and storage. Hopefully this will address download problems some users reported. Here are top level domains collected at the new server. If you still see the “Moving Website” message at the front page, you are still accessing the old site. The DNS change can take 2~3 days to propagate.

Here’s the most detailed GreatNews tutorial I have seen on the web. Thank you!

Some users found a serious bug in build 381. If an article is updated, GreatNews will update unread count but fail to save updated content. This bug was fixed in build 382. Thanks everyone who helped!

It is the year of the Pig. Good luck, good fortune, and much happiness throughout the year!

I uploaded a new build 376 to address display style issues reported with the original build. Besides updated style files, this new build added a hidden flag. If you put the following lines into greatnews.ini:

[Advanced]
LegacyBrowser=Y

All existing user styles should be displayed correctly. But then GreatNews will not utilize the new IE7 features.

The updated style files can also be downloaded here.

Since IE7 is now included in Windows update, Build 376 switched html DOCTYPE to support new IE7 css features. Consequently some old display styles are broken. If you see overstrikes over text, please check if you are using “Default” display style. This style was replaced by “Simple” a while ago. Please select “Simple”, then delete Default.css from GreatNews Media directory.

I’m working on a fix to display styles and will release this weekend. If you have other issues like font size is too small, you can try download a copy here .

In the mean time, please check out user-supplied styles at GreatNews Style board . Some of them are even better than the built-in ones.

Rich Hoeg made 2 video tutorials on how to use GreatNews. They aim at beginners but are very professionally done. I found myself watching the whole video over.

Thanks Rich!

Update: Rich made another tutorial on “Create a RSS Feed Using Google Blog Search and GreatNews“