Nikon RAW file codec for Windows Vista

This morning I copied a few Nikon RAW .NEF files to my computer and browsed over to Explorer to try and view them but they weren’t linked to any application. So off to Google where I found this post regarding a codec Nikon released for Windows Vista RAW file support. I’ll admit I had never actually run the Windows Photo Gallery application that comes with Vista since I don’t look at photos much on this machine but as soon as I launched it I was prompted for an update (as indicated in the blog post) which directed me to Nikon’s download page for the codec (that’s the English version).