Hi.

I don't like XP, and the more I use it the less I like it. The only machine in the house it's on is a new laptop I got recently, and the very first thing I did (after downloading six weeks worth of patches and upgrades, a mere 39MB) was turn off all the fisher-price extensions to try and get it looking like a real OS. Networking has given me no end of grief, wireless is oddly unreliable, and it took ages to persuade it to use xvid and divx codecs.

Anyway, the thing I STILL can't work out is how the hell do you persuade XP to use a decent image browsing program and not the built-in image viewer? I like ACDsee classic, and installed it on the laptop first thing. Note that one of the main uses I have for the machine is as an adjunct to a digital camera, so I use image viewers a lot. The problem is that even though ACDsee is registered as the program of choice to use when opening any graphics file, it is always the XP viewer that actually runs when I click on a file. It only seems able to have one instance running at a time, so I can't have several pictures onscreen at the same time. I can't find any way of telling it to sod off. 'Opens With' is set to ACDsee for all the relevant file types but it simply ignores those settings. How do I make it work the way I want it to?

pca

im not sure whats up
home or pro?
i use acdsee for all my image browsing and i have never had a problem with xvid/divx/etc codec installs.

xp pro on my machine

It's XP pro.

pca

then im at a loss
every issue you mentioned works perfectly on my pro machine. sorry im not much help

This any help?

http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/r1014758503

Gareth

That's it, thanks. Why on earth did this behaviour change between 2000 and XP?

pca

I use http://www.irfanview.com this seems to set itself up Ok as the default picture viewer in XP Pro for me

You can change the associated file extensions in the properties of the program, it never fails for me. There is also an option to have one one instance of the program running or as many as you want (ie a new instance launches everytime, leaving the previous one in the background) Hope this helps.

Cheers

Cris.