Since I had switched to Macs more than a year
ago I spent really little time on managing my Lenovo X200s notebook. It was
still running the original - Microsoft supplied - video driver. You know, if it
ain't broke, don't fix it. I was really happy with its color, as I figured out
how to set it up so that Windows loads display calibration properly. As you
might guess, up until now...
Enter SP1
Windows 7 SP1 came out, and yesterday afternoon I
had a little time to kill and decided to do the upgrade. There was also an Intel
video driver upgrade available - and I decided to install it alongside the
service pack. Everything looked OK util I had rebooted the machine. Then, just a
split second after Windwos loaded the calibration curves, something swithced the
monitor back to the uncalibrated state. First I thought that Microsoft screwed
it up, but further investigation revealed the truth.
In my former article I blamed Microsoft for not
understanding what color management is all about. Although they finally seem to catch
up, there are a lot of hardware manufacturers who does not care about all this
stuff.
Intel is among them.
Rant: I still do not understand why PC hardware
manufacturers feel that they have to load a bunch of crappy software alongside their drivers. Start with a fresh Windows installation, download all the
latest drivers and your machine is full of useless applications. I can't
remember a single event when I used any of them (and I used Windows PCs since
the earliest days of Windows). That's one of the reasons I'm using a Mac now.
Yes you're right, one of the crappy apps Intel
ships their Graphics Media Accelerator video driver with was that killed the
calibration. The app is called "Persistence Module". It's name seems like a joke
as it is THE module who does not allow calibrations to be presisted...
How to Remove Persistence Module?
There is a really handy tool, Autoruns,
written by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell, which can be used to show the hordes of apps that
Windows loads at startup - and more importantly to disable any of them.
When you download and run the app it will display
something similar to what you see on the following screen shot.
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