Alex Scoble's IT Notes - An Information Technology Blog

Microsoft Camera Codec Pack

If you are a digital photographer that takes most of their pics in RAW format like I do and you do most or all of your photo editing on a Windows system, you simply must get the Microsoft Camera Codec Pack.

It enables Windows users the ability to view their RAW pictures as thumbnails when in Windows Explorer, which is super helpful when trying to move pictures between folders or choose which ones to move to your hard drive from the flash stick.

Sadly, GIMP 2 does not use this functionality.

Uninstall Windows Live Essentials using command line on Windows 7

As you may or may not know, Microsoft is discontinuing support for their MSN Messenger/Live Messenger service in favor of Skype soon.

Since Live Messenger is no longer needed on my system and this is part of Live Essentials, I tried to uninstall Live Essentials using the uninstall option of Programs and Features.

This repeatedly failed with error code 0x8007064c.

I did some searching and found this page which supplied the following solution:

Below are the steps on how to uninstall Windows Live Essentials via CMD line parameter.

a. Go to Start->All Programs->Accessories
b. Right click on Command Prompt and select Run as Administrator
c. Run the following commands to uninstall Windows Live Essentials:
· (64 bit) "c:\program files (x86)\windows live\installer\wlarp.exe" /cleanup:all /q
· (32 bit) "c:\program files\windows live\installer\wlarp.exe" /cleanup:all /q
d. A dialog box shows status until uninstallation has completed
Note: The uninstaller for Windows Live Essentials 2011 can also be downloaded fromhttp://g.live.com/1rewlive4arp/wlarp.exe if the local copy is corrupted.

The command worked successfully.