All Entires In Tech Category
By I was typing up an application letter this morning when I happened to notice the amount of gunk under my keys. After finishing the letter I decided to do something about it.
I unplugged the keyboard, removed all the keys and soaked them in some soapy water whilst giving the rest of the keyboard a good brush with a stiff brush and a good rub with a damp cloth. The keys easily popped out by applying a little bit of pressure underneath them with a flat-headed screwdriver. After cleaning, drying and reinserting all the keys in the correct places it looks a million miles better than it did.
If you're not sure that you can get all the keys back into the right places a couple of suggestions include referring to another keyboard if you have one, refer to the box if you kept it and it has a picture on it, call up a website with a keyboard layout on it before you start; you can either leave it on screen or print it out, and finally, take a picture of the keyboard with a digital camera, or camera phone, before you start.
When you browse or download from the internet in XP a small portion of your bandwidth is reserved for quality control purposes. In most cases this is a throwback to older systems and is really not required.
This tip removes that reservation and helps speed things up slightly.
Open up the Group Policy Editor (Click on Start->Run type gpedit.msc click ok) and then browse down to the following branch on the left hand side.
Local Computer Policy, Computer Configuration, Administrative Templates, Network, QoS Packet Scheduler
After you've highlighted 'QoS Packet Scheduler' in the left window you can double click 'Limit Reservable Bandwidth' in the right window.
Click on the Enable radio button and set the figure to '0%'.
I put the new DVD and HDD in my sister's PC last night. After spending an age formatting the drive into 2 partitions I copied over her old Games partition and then deleted it and expanded the Windows partition to take up the newly freed space.
After rebooting I decided to install some proper defragmentation software but kept up coming across a Windows Installer error. Trying other packages I kept on coming up with the same error. I eventually decided to do a full reinstall with a slipstreamed version of XP only for Windows to hang 3 times in a row whilst trying to install the sound drivers. I finally went back to a Vanilla copy of XP and it installed fine. I then reinstalled AV, Firewall, CD/DVD and a variety of other software packages before calling it a night at about 5am.
I've now got a few other bits and pieces to install and then make a start on installing her games.
When you browse a network in XP you may find a considerable delay in viewing shared files. This is because XP searches the remote computer for 'Scheduled Tasks'. To speed up the process you can make a tweak to the registry.
Open up the Registry Editor (Click on Start->Run type regedit click ok) and then browse down to the following branch:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Explorer/RemoteComputer/NameSpace
Under this branch there should be at least two entries. The one you want is:
{D6277990-4C6A-11CF-8D87-00AA0060F5BF}
This is the key that searches for 'Scheduled Tasks' on remote systems.
Please feel free to delete this key. You can also export this key for your own piece of mind so that you can re-import it later if you so wish. You should see an instant improvement; no reboot is required.
This tip also works on Windows 2000.
Please take care when making changes to the registry. I take no responsibility if you trash your registry.
Yesterday, I ordered a new hard drive and dvd writer for my sister's PC from CCL. Because my sister wasn't in a hurry for the parts I selected the Economy 5-7 day economy courier service. They were delivered this morning. So, that's another job I need to sort out.
I created an ISO image this morning of a CD for a friend, burnt it and then deleted the ISO. However, it transpired that the CD wouldn't read and I couldn't extract the data back off it.
A quick browse of the internet and I discovered NTFS Undelete, a free and open source solution that allows you to recover deleted files. I downloaded it, ran it and told it I was looking for a deleted *.ISO file and it soon found the file I needed. A couple of clicks later and I had the ISO file back and could burn it again at a lower speed.
OfficeRecovery.com offer a similar free product called Free Undelete, that caters for FAT16 and FAT32 file systems alongside support for NTFS. I haven't tried it but it appears to offer very similar functionality to NTFS Undelete.
GetDataBack for NTFS and FAT, from Runtime Software, is another package that I have successfully used in the past to recover accidentally deleted data. Although, unlike the other two, this is not free software.
Dad's PC decided not to access the internet at all yesterday afternoon. It would still access all the network shares but Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera all refused to browse the net. It wouldn't even let me update ZoneAlarm or Spybot Search & Destroy. After spending about two hours trying to diagnose the problem and come up with solutions I was still stumped. Nothing I tried seemed to work and some of the options that I wanted to try I couldn't access. I'd run checks with ZoneAlarm, HijackThis and Spybot S&D to no avail..
I finally decided that I would back up the documents, pictures, music files, video files and downloaded items he wanted to keep and reformatted. XP reinstalled a breeze and after installing a few other bits and pieces such as Avira Antivirus and Comodo Firewall I reconnected the network cable and all was good again. Started downloading updates from Windows Update and after a reboot prompted by Windows Update I again ran into problems.
As soon as Windows booted and Explorer opened nothing else would run. No matter what program I tried I would get an "inaccessible or insufficient permissions" type error. I couldn't diagnose that problem without going into Safe Mode and disabling Simple Sharing. In fact it said I didn't even have enough permissions to shut down the PC; I had to use Task Manager for that.
Anyway, in Safe Mode, all the file permissions had been blanked and this appeared to be the reason that nothing would run. After changing all the permissions back to what they should be and re-enabling Simple Sharing I rebooted into XP again, only to have the same problem. A visit back to Safe Mode revealed the permissions had again been wiped. Reset them and left Simple Sharing disabled while rebooting into XP.
The same problem was persisting and checking the permissions in XP revealed that my latest change had taken and everything should be working. A quick check of the m$ knowledgebase, thanks to a link provided by a friend, provided me with instructions on how to use the in-built security editor to reset all permissions back to their default values. Nope, still no luck; even after another reboot.
Deciding that since very little had been installed I would once again reformat and reinstall. After reinstalling, installing AV and Firewall protection and downloading updates from m$ again everything finally seemed to be working. I left the PC defragging the drives and went up to bed just after 3am; a full 11 hours after I had gone downstairs to originally see what the problem was.
Got up this morning and the PC seems to be working okay still. Dad has spent most of today reinstalling his games. What would normally take me about 2-3 hours; depending upon how much extra software I installed, took almost half a day and I didn't install a lot of the stuff that I would normally install for him. Bloody PCs!
One of my friends, Greg, has decided to give Linux a try on an oldish PC that he has. After seeking some advice, from yours truly, he decided to install Ubuntu. Apparently, he used the Live CD and installed via Windows. Everything was fine until he rebooted and deleted the Windows partition.
The system still booted fine but wouldn't find his CD, DVD or external Hard Drive. The system knew they were there but wouldn't mount them. Unfortunately, with me not being physically there, it proved a bit elusive and time consuming to troubleshoot what device references Ubuntu was using.
After spending a fair while browsing forums on the net we eventually managed to come up with a foolproof method of detecting the device references and it was then a pretty easy case of making a few alterations to a key configuration file.
The strange thing was that the system was detecting his usb pen drive fine but whenever it was rebooted it would detect the external hard drive on any 1 of 4 possible ports. Easiest solution I could come up with was to tell the system to mount all 4 on boot; 3 would fail but the other would be the right one.
It's probably neither an elegant or particularly smart solution but it works.
Evil Mozza mentioned a couple of weeks ago that he has a load of VHS video tapes that he wanted transferred over onto DVD. Now, there is quite a few DVD/VHS combination units on the market but most don't allow dubbing from one format to another. However, further research would no doubt point out that some of them may offer that ability. This would involve buying another rather clunky unit that would take up valuable space and probably be used sparingly. On top of which a decent quality one could run well over £100.
Anyway, I've found a slightly more elegant solution; totally by accident as it happens. As I was stumbling through the web I came across Blackmagic Design and their USB Video Recorder dongle. A nice, elegant usb solution that uses existing video hardware and records onto PC or Macintosh ready for later storage on CD, DVD or even BluRay with the right burner. The dongle does the encoding legwork so it doesn't take masses of time.
Further delving and I've found a couple of UK resellers that will start selling the product for £59+VAT.when it launches in September. The companies are OneVideo and Holdan Limited. There may well be other USB solutions in a similar vein but I haven't really delved too much further. In fact Camera4Sports carry a similar dongle but I think the encoding is done by the PC rather than the dongle.
A final option which is probably not going to incur much extra cost beyond purchasing some decent length cables is that a fair number of the more recent ATI and nVidia cards have either AVIVO or PureVideo included. A suitably equipped card with video in abilities would make transcoding from VHS a breeze.
I received a phone call from Colin last night to say that his newly upgraded PC wasn't displaying a picture on his monitor when he took it back upstairs. I talked him through a couple of checks before agreeing to pop in and have a look.
It turns out that once connected to the monitor upstairs it wasn't posting. It wasn't a problem with the monitor because his other PC was working fine on it. After opening it up and noticing that everything seemed to be running okay he mentioned the fact that his mousepad was lit up without the PC switched on. I incorrectly suggested that shouldn't happen and unplugged his mouse and keyboard. The PC then proceeded to boot fine. It transpires that the little green adapter he was using to convert his usb mouse into a ps2 mouse was preventing the system from booting. I plugged the mouse into a normal usb port and the PC is working fine.
It's another little thing I can suggest when people say their PC won't boot.
Oh, and I took the opportunity this morning to open up my PC and turn the hdd led connector the right way round so I have led indication of hdd activity. Unfortunately, the power led connector on my case is 3 pin and is only 2 pin on the motherboard so I still have no visible led indication that the PC is switched on.
Evil Mozza (Colin to some) recently decided to upgrade his 2nd PC. It was an old Athlon 1400 or thereabouts and he decided to ask me to point him in the right direction. Getting an idea of what he wanted to use it for I decided rather than looking around everywhere I'd just go to one of, in my opinion, the most reliable PC suppliers in the UK; CCL Computers.
He just wants the PC for surfing the internet and transcoding AVIs. He didn't need any top-notch graphics ability and was happy just to use his existing optical drive and hard drives. Rather than faffing around selecting different motherboard, processor and ram I decided to recommend their motherboard bundles. So, not needing a top notch system I pointed him in the direction of their mid-range Intel and AMD bundles, along with a suitable case and system cooling. The AMD bundle came in at just under £190 with the Intel bundle just under £200 He's a bit of an AMD fan and opted for the AMD bundle. He got a WinFast motherboard, an AMD Athlon X2 5200+, 2gb of 667mhz DDR2 memory, a decent tower case with a 500 watt power supply and 3 case fans to go in the case; although he ended up only needing 2 since it came with one pre-installed. The motherboard has fairly standard on-board sound and a GeForce 6150 on-board.
It took less than an hour to put the system together and transfer the drives out of the old case into the new one. Unfortunately, XP kept on blue screening when we tried to boot it. This was probably due to the upgraded hardware. Unfortunately a repair install over the top of the old OS kept on hanging in the middle of installing devices so we ended up wiping the C: partition and doing a fresh install of XP. I also set SP3 off installing before I left. All he has to do now is reinstall the software he wants on it. All his old data is safely included on the 2nd hard drive we installed. He can even put a few of his slightly older games on it if he wants.
I am currently experiencing a rather severe speed issue with my broadband connection. Normally I connect at about 8000kbps Downstream and 448kbps Upstream which works out to an exceptionally good 8mb connection. I'm lucky and live within a couple of hundred yards of the exchange.
Anyway, since Thursday evening I've been experiencing some really awful download speeds; sort of in the realms of old ISDN speeds. After changing numerous router settings, cycling the power on the router and the PC I ended up checking the BT forums. It had been reported that a lot of people were experiencing problems across the network and a problem in one of BT's main network hubs had been identified as a possible cause. I went to bed on Thursday thinking it'll get sorted sooner rather than later.
I got up Friday morning and discovered the problem was still persisting. A check on the forums indicated that the problem most people had been experiencing had been resolved. Obviously, my problem was unrelated. Further changes to router settings and other tests carried out and all to no avail.
Checking the BT Speed Tester website; which I didn't even know existed until yesterday morning, gave me an indication of the problem:
The Performance Tester is now testing Broadband connection. Your configured download throughput speed for this service is 135 k.
Test1 comprises of Best Effort Test: -provides background information.
IP profile for your line is - 135 kbps
DSL connection rate: 448 kbps(UP-STREAM) 7968 kbps(DOWN-STREAM)
Actual IP throughput achieved during the test was - 83 kbps
Digging around a bit I discovered that this figure should usually be about 500 less than your normal Downstream. 135k works out just under 17k/sec and is about 2% of where it should be. 7968k works out at a theoretical maximum of 996k/sec; although in practice I've only rarely seen over 800k/sec a few times.
BT's support site states that the IP Profile is set at the local exchange level and is used to help manage data coming down your line to ensure that it doesn't try to deliver too fast for you to handle. Further reading in the forums also suggested that this was a method that BT employed to cap users that had fallen foul of the Fair Usage Policy (FUP). Although this tended just to be managed during Peak Hours.
I could understand if I had fallen foul of the FUP. I do a fair bit of downloading; mainly TV shows form the US that I hate waiting to watch in the UK. Other people in the house also use the internet and I have an XBox 360 that is also connected to the net.
What I can't understand however is that if I have fallen foul of the FUP then BT never gave any indication that I had and may have just capped my service without informing me first. It seems a bit harsh that if they have capped me then they've done so very severely. I've seen posts on their forums that suggest caps ranging from 750 kbps to just under 2000 kbps but none as low as a permanent 135kbps cap.
I've sent an email to their Tech Support people and will await their response.
If you've ever noticed really slow browsing speeds that bear no correlation to your actual connection speed then you may have problems with your DNS setting. DNS, Dynamic Name Service, is a method by which the address you type into the browser address bar is converted into numbers that help the browser route you to the correct website.
Most ISPs will assign these automatically or give you a couple of sets of numbers to type into your network connection settings or your router.
OpenDNS is a free, independent service, that replicates this service. Where OpenDNS triumphs over a regular ISP's DNS provision is that if your ISP has a problem with it's DNS servers then you can't browse the web. OpenDNS has a network of DNS servers and their system automatically uses the closest working server to you. If they have problems they have multiple DNS servers that just automatically take up the load.
The website has instructions on how to set up various routers. Be sure to print out or make a note of any existing settings before you start so that if things go awry then you can reset the settings back to their originals.
Less than nine months after launching Leopard, Apple have just released a third update for their latest OS. OS X 10.5.3 claims significant improvements to Spotlight searching, wireless connectivity, the Automator, Spaces, and Time Machine, plus a number of other core and standard applications.
By comparison, Windows XP was released in October 2001 and it's only now getting a third major update in the form of SP3. Windows Vista was released in November 2006 and has only recently had SP1 released for it.
It begs the question of was Leopard fully finished when it was released 8 months ago or are Apple really that keen to continually update their products. I would hope the latter.
Mozilla released the rc1 version of Firefox 3 last weekend. It's a lot more stable than the Beta versions and is significantly quicker at rendering web pages than Firefox 2 ever was. I've been using it side by side with Firefox 2 on my main PC since Sunday evening and although not all of my existing extensions work, I'm happy enough with it.
It is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux from here.
The elder of my sisters mentioned to me that she was thinking of getting a new hard drive for her PC because she kept on getting warnings about her C: drive getting full. I couldn't remember what motherboard she had nor what size or interface her hard drive was. I advised her to download and run Belarc and bring me the results on a usb stick.
From that information I was able to determine what motherboard she had and what hard drive she had, and then suggest suitable upgrade paths. She currently has an 80gb IDE hard drive which is partitioned into 2; 1 for Windows and Applications and 1 for Games. What I've suggested is that she moves all of her Games over onto a new larger SATA drive and repartition the 80gb as just a single partition and use it as her boot drive. She can get a decent Maxtor 320gb SATA drive for less than £40 and a good Samsung 500gb for less than £45. I suggested paying the wee bit extra and getting the Samsung.
She also mentioned getting a DVD Writer; because she only has a DVD-ROM drive and a CD-RW drive. She can get a 20x Samsung DVD-RW for less than £15. Although she will be able to fit the new drive in without taking anything out I think it might be an idea to remove one of them; probably the CD-RW.
She'd also mentioned previously that a lot of her games were failing to run thanks to a Direct 3D error. I took the opportunity to download the latest Catalyst drivers for her; she has an ATI Radeon 9600 Atlantis, and put them on the USB stick. I told her to install them when she got home and give me a ring if she had any problems.
She later phoned to say that the installer had come up with an error whilst trying to install the Catalyst Control Center. It appeared that it thought it had a new version of CCC installed. I told her to just carry on and then reboot. When she rebooted the ATI drivers wouldn't initialise so I told her to go into Add/Remove Programs and remove the CCC in there. I then told her to go into the ATI install folder and just install the new CCC. It installed fine and we thought the problem was licked. However, after another reboot the graphics were still underwhelming so I suggested just reinstalling the whole driver set again over the current installation. After yet another reboot everything looked hunky-dory and her 3D games were working.
As an aside, there's quite a number of people with AGP versions of ATI's graphics cards that are reporting errors whilst trying to start 3D games. AMD, who now own ATI, have a link to a hotfix on their website that resolves the issue. It's available from here. From my past experience with the errors I was getting prior to upgrading to my new motherboard and processor I think the problem is with nForce 2 motherboards.
One of my friends has just bought a new PC through his catalogue. It's based on an Intel E2180 dual core processor and has 2gb ram, 250gb hard drive, 17" LCD monitor and comes with Windows Vista Home Premium pre-installed.
There's no documentation with it beyond the quick set-up guides and there's not even any paperwork relating the the system warranty. It gets better though; the only discs with it are the Foxconn motherboard disc and a copy of Nero Essentials 7. Windows Vista doesn't have a disc with it and would appear to be only available as a recovery partition on the hard drive. I don't know about anybody else but I've always thought providing the OS just as a recovery partition on the hard drive as one of the stupidest innovations ever. I understand that all you actually pay for is the licence as part of the purchase price of the PC but just for a wee bit of penny pinching why not also provide the disc?
I know that if you have a problem with the PC the recovery partition is available without having to hunt for it. But, what happens if there's a catastrophic failure of the hard drive? How would you go about reinstalling Windows if the drive is so badly shagged that even the recovery partition is unusable? Or if the drive is so badly shagged that it needs replacing?
Since, he already has a licence I'm going to hunt around and try and find an untouched copy of Vista to download and burn for him.
Anyway, one of the main reasons he bought the PC was so that he could play Oblivion and he can't. It would appear that the integrated Intel graphics is not powerful enough to run it. But, I've found a little utility called Oldblivion which purports to help get Oblivion running on older unsupported graphics hardware. However, it doesn't support the Shivering Isles expansion. I am going to pop round later, after the football, to try it out for him.
I'm not the world's biggest Star Wars fan; in fact you could even say I'm not really a Star Wars fan. I enjoyed the movies for what they were but that's about as far as it goes. Anyway, after watching the GeekBrief this morning there is now one piece of Star Wars merchandise I would love.
The R2D2 DVD Projector is just that; a DVD projector built into the body of a remote control R2 unit. It retails in the USA from NikkoAmerica for $2999. It's available in Europe for €2799; which equates to just about £2199, from ExclusiveStarWars.com.
Although Windows XP SP3 is due to be officially released through Windows Update tomorrow it is available for download from Microsoft's website today. I've just downloaded and installed it; took about 15 minutes to downloaded the 300mb or so and it installed in about the same length of time..
I made a point of creating a restore point prior to installation; although SP3 creates a system restore point anyway. Everything went okay with the update and the system rebooted afterwards. It seemed a wee bit quicker to boot back into windows although setting up personalizations for Outlook and Address Book took a while.
So far, the only thing that's complained is Style XP which seems to think it's incompatible with the SP3, although the style/theme I previously set seems to be working okay anyway.
Those awfully nice people at Avanquest and VNU have teamed up to give readers of Computer act!ve magazine a free copy of VCOM Fix-It Utilities 7 Express.
The download is available from here and then you will need to visit here to register with a valid email address.
Computer act!ve also provide a variety of other software downloads which can be perused here.
The newest version of Ubuntu, version 8.04 or Hardy Heron to it's friends, was released this week. Rather than waiting for my new discs to come through the post I decided to use the inbuilt update manager to upgrade. It would be a good test of how Ubuntu handled things.
I set it off at about 6:30pm yesterday evening and it had finished downloading and installing the upgrade by about 4am this morning with only minimal interaction from me; regarding obsolete software that it wanted permission to remove. The reason it probably took so long was that when the laptop is running then the net connection is shared between 3 pcs and the fact that it was in the other room and I only checked it occasionally, so I have no idea how long it had sat waiting for my input on the 2 occasions it needed it.
One reboot later and everything is tickety-boo. Nothing is broken and to be honest I think it boots a wee bit quicker. The next big step software-wise is Windows XP SP3 which is officially released this coming Monday.
Okay, not quite, but it did sound like it had; or at least got shot. Actually, it was a CD shattering in one of my drives. I've heard stories of discs shattering in drives before but never came across it either with one of my drives or any of the myriad of friends and family that own pcs.
Anyway, I powered down the PC; took the drive out and then took it apart and emptied out all the bits of cd that were scattered inside and spent a good 15 minutes going over it with a fine brush to ensure there were no remnants left. I've put the drive back together and it's still reading and burning discs okay. Lucky escape methinks.
If I ever find out who is responsible for writing the Vundo trojan...
The merger of Vivendi Games with Activision has gained approval from the EU. Amid claims that it could prove to be anti-competitive the EU has argued that the combined company would still face stiff competition in the marketplace from the likes of EA, Sony & Nintendo amongst others.
Under the terms of the deal, Vivendi would hold a roughly 52 percent majority of the merged company by contributing Vivendi Games, valued at $8.1 billion, including Blizzard Entertainment, and $1.7 billion in cash. Activision would then be renamed Activision Blizzard and continue to operate on the Nasdaq as ATVI. Within five days of the deal closing, Activision Blizzard would launch a $4 billion all-cash tender offer to purchase up to 146.5 million Activision shares at $27.50. Vivendi has agreed to purchase up to $700 million of new shares at the same price.
- Current Activision CEO Robert Kotick will be president and CEO.
- Bruce Hack, current CEO of Vivendi Games, will serve as vice-chairman and chief corporate officer.
- Mike Griffith will be president and CEO of Activision Publishing (including the Sierra Entertainment, Sierra Online and Vivendi Games Mobile divisions in addition to the Activision business).
- Mike Morhaime will continue to serve as president and CEO of Blizzard Entertainment.
- Thomas Tippl, currently CFO of Activision, will become CFO.
- Jean-François Grollemund, currently CFO of Vivendi Games, will be appointed chief accounting officer of the new company.
The new company will be the largest of the third-party games publishers ahead of the likes of EA, Ubisoft and Take Two, with an estimated value of approximately $19 billion.
Back in January 2006 I blogged about wanting a new keyboard; the Optimus Maximus. Well, it's now officially available.
Unfortunately, it's a wee bit out of my price range and I can't see too many everyday PC users buying one. If you had £800 spare would you spend it on a new keyboard for your PC? No? Neither, would I! I think I'll stick with my current Cherry keyboard until I can get around to buying myself a Saitek Eclipse II instead.
£800 for a keyboard; I could build a decent quad-core PC for that...
I installed Ubuntu on my laptop about a month or so ago and have been dual booting it with XP ever since to see how things worked out. After a month of using Ubuntu I haven't once had to drop into XP on the laptop and am considering the test successful. There's been nothing I've wanted to do on the laptop that I haven't been able to do in Ubuntu and the next step is to upgrade to Hardy Heron, the next version of Ubuntu, when it's released in a couple of weeks.
However, having said all that, I'm still not going to install it on my main PC; for a number of reasons:
- I still have a lot of Windows based applications and games and really don't want to have to mess about with Wine or other software to get them running under Linux.
- If somebody phones, emails or IMs me looking for some PC advice it makes life much easier having XP in front of me so that I can walk them through the problem.
- The desktop is left switched on virtually constantly; it's only ever switched off if there's a need to reboot, so dual booting would be a waste of hard drive space.
- And, the main reason I'm not installing it on my desktop is that I like the way my PC is currently set up and am very comfortable with it. Even with having to reinstall XP once or twice in the last 3 or 4 years I've still ended up using the same sort of settings and the same little utilities I've always used.
However, I can happily say that if you don't like or just don't want to use XP or Vista I can recommend Ubuntu as a very good alternative. Just be aware that although support for Ubuntu is very good, it's nowhere near as widespread or accessible as it is for the Windows platforms, and gaming suffers similarly. There is a vibrant community out there and members are more than happy to help others out.
In summary, Ubuntu is brilliant and I've no intentions of removing it from the laptop. I might even go the whole hog yet and remove XP from it totally. But, I like XP on my desktop and am not going to give it up.
My internet connection is currently busted. BT are sending out an engineer tomorrow morning.
Today, I have been mostly troubleshooting PCs.
First off this morning my sister phoned me with some problems so I ended up talking her through installation and running of some Anti-Spyware software. Dad's PC had a similar issue just after lunch and I spent a good hour or so sorting that too.
Scoot phoned mid-afternoon to say he was having problems with his PC. The screen resolution had downgraded to 800x600 and anytime he tried to change it back to 1024x768 it came up with an error. Ended up popping down and finally decided that a reinstall of Windows was in order. He's been running Win98 and had only done 1 reinstall in the last 10 years. Anyway, I had a spare copy of XP which I gave him and installed that for him. Installed a few other bits and pieces and set the hard drives off defragging to help out as much as possible. Couldn't do any software updates for him since he isn't connected to the net.
I got home and my sister asked me to help her out on The Spiderwick Chronicles. I spent a good hour or so trying to help her out and ended up giving up.
I came back upstairs, plugged the laptop's lead in and got a nice white flash from the extension. Quickly unplugged and took the lead downstairs to change fuses. The fuse that I took out happened to still be fine and powered up a CD player. I put a new fuse in anyway and took the lead back upstairs. Moved a couple of plugs about and everything, including the extension that had flashed and my laptop, is still fine.
I thought I'd broken iTunes last night.
The Apple Software Updater stated that there was a new version available so I let it download and install it. Part way through the process it came up with an error, during the QuickTime portion, regarding not having enough privileges to install. So, I cancelled the install, got it to retry another 2 times with no luck and then told it to just download and I would do a manual install. Still popped up with the same error.
By this time iTunes was unusable, so, I went to Apple's website and downloaded the full package from there. Still no luck. Next, I decided to try a different route and install QuickTime first and then iTunes. Still no luck. So, I decided to change the default install location and managed to get QuickTime installed. Next, iTunes. Still, no luck, kept on coming up with the error regarding privileges.
I then decided to admit defeat and try to reinstall the old version of iTunes. Still no luck. Right, restore point. Nope, Windows refused to roll back. Further delving and I finally figured out what was going wrong.
I've previously had problems with the PC sharing files properly over the network and had tried all sorts of things to solve it. One of which was to disable Simple File Sharing and use NTFS security settings. Looking at the security settings for different drives and folders I had managed to change some of the settings so that nobody other than the Administrator had rights to certain folders. So, when the installer tried to install it came across the problem that not even the System had rights to write to a directory. Restoring the security settings solved that problem.
I started the iTunes installer for about the 15th time and it installed QuickTime fine but then kept on coming up with an error concerning the iTunes.msi file. Pointing it to the file didn't work. Reading the error closely I realised it was referring to the version of iTunes that I had previously had installed. I pointed the installer at the old iTunes.msi and everything was fine from then on.
As a nice added bonus I've finally got file sharing working correctly all across the network, including Dad's PC and my laptop under Ubuntu. I can even browse the network using my phone.
Moral of the story is that even when you think you know what you're doing, you probably don't!
Nokia's N-Gage site has finally gone live. Currently, only the N81, N82 and N95 are supported. Support for the N73 and N93 is coming soon. However, it only works with the latest version of the N95 firmware so I had to update my firmware first.
Previous experience has taught me that updating the firmware on the N95 blanks the phone's settings, contacts and stored messages. I made sure I backed up the phone first and, after having something to eat, the phone's firmware was updated. I restored my backed up content and installed the N-Gage application onto the phone. There's not that many games available on N-Gage at the moment but it looks promising.
Some of the extra icons that were previously proliferated around the interface have been removed and integrated into other menus with no apparent way of restoring them back to the way they were on the old layout. An annoyance rather than a problem though.
One of my mates asked me to sort out some free Anti Virus software for his sister a couple of weeks ago. I finally got around to doing so today. Rather than just sorting out 1 for her I've put together a CD with a few choices for her to pick from:
- A-Squared 3
- AVG Anti Virus Free Edition v7.5
- Avast Home Edition v4.7
- Aviva AntiVir Personal Edition v7.06
- BitDefender Free Edition 10
- ClamWin Antivrus v0.92
- Comodo AntiVirus 2.0 beta
- PC Tools Antivirus 4.0
I've also included 4 choices of Firewalls:
- Agnitum Outpost Firewall Pro
- Comodo Firewall Version 3.0
- Sunbelt Personal Firewall
- ZoneAlarm® Free Firewall
4 online scanners in case she ever runs into something the Anti Virus software can't sort:
And I've also added:
I've also left a note on the CD recommending either AVG or Avast as the AntiVirus I would use if I was going to use a freebie. I've also suggested that any 1 of the 4 Firewalls would be a good free choice. And, finally, I've recommended that she install Spybot.
Cybernet, not the late-night ITV video games show, but rather a company based in Irvine Spectrum, California, make a range of space saving PCs. They produce 2 distinct versions; the i-One LCD PC, a PC inside an LCD monitor, I suppose a wee bit similar to how the iMac may have evolved and the Zero-Footprint PC, a PC inside a keyboard; harkening back to the days of the Amiga 1200.
The lowest priced i-One starts at $999 and the lowest priced ZPC starts at $629. Both are fully customisable and are definitely aimed at customers who have limited amounts of space. One of the testimonials on the site is from a company which uses the ZPC in a Class 1 Clean Room. The ZPC has allowed them to replace their previous rack-mounted solution with the much less space consuming ZPC.
Ultimately, as nice an idea as they are I think they've only really got a niche-market. Although, I don't doubt some geeky(ish) home users will like the idea and go out and buy one.
I've been receiving a rather large amount of spam on a daily basis for at least the last couple of years. It started off with about 150-200 a day but has recently peaked at a regular figure closer to 1000. In fact, once or twice it's been closer to 1500. Anyway, with broadband I never really concerned myself too much about it and let my email client and the filters I had set up within it sort them out. However, it still wasn't sorting them all and I'd still have to trawl through at least 100 a day to make sure there wasn't any genuine emails getting caught.
Anyway, I finally decided to try and sort it out a bit better; with the intention of stopping the spam even getting as far as my inbox. I had a poke about in my domain control panel and thought I'd figured it out. Rather than redirecting all unqualified domain addresses to the main account I told it to filter them first; searching for certain prefixes. Anything that didn't match the prefixes would be bounced. Testing seemed to back me up.
However, thanks to Mondrak, I managed to discover that it was blocking all emails except the ones I had originated from my own PC, either via the email client or via any of the web mail services I have access to. After further tweaking I managed to eventually solve that problem only to run into a different one. The way the filters have been designed means that as well as allowing bowch@ as a valid prefix it would also allow notbowch@ or fakebowch@ or any other prefix ending with bowch@. Setting filter options that would solve this wasn't working. Everytime I set it to read "Does Not Equal" it would change to "Equal" for no apparent reason.
I have ended up setting up extra email accounts and telling the server to forward them to my main account. Any unqualified emails will now get bounced back with a failure message. Valid email addresses now only include bowch (at), blog (at), useful (at), webmaster (at) and yahoogroups (at) with everything else bouncing. I've set them up with relatively low disk quotas and will hopefully not need to change much. I'm going to keep an eye on it over the next couple of weeks and make sure that it forwards okay and isn't eating up valuable space on my domain server.
Retired Columbia University Professor, Gertrude Neumark Rothschild claims that Sony violated her patents that involved methods of using light emitting diodes to read data off of discs. (The full details are: U.S. Patent No. 4,904,618, "Process for Doping Crystals of Wide Band Gap Semiconductors," and U.S. Patent No. 5,252,499, "Wide Band-Gap Semiconductors Having Low Bipolar Resistivity and Method of Formation")
Rothchild's complaint filed with the US International Trade Commission (ITC) on February 20th claims that some 30 companies, including Sony Corporation, Samsung Group, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd., LG Electronics, Pioneer Corporation and others, are violating a patent she owns for light-emitting and laser diodes.
Professor Rothschild has requested that the 30 companies be issued a cease and desist order, preventing them from manufacturing and importing anymore units into the US.
The ITC has agreed to investigate the matter, and it's worth noting that Rothchild has already successfully tested the legislative waters with a lawsuit against Philips, which was settled out of court in February.
I've recently installed the latest version of Ubuntu (7.10) on my laptop and I'm dual booting it with Windows XP Professional.
There's no specific reason as to why I've installed a Linux distribution on the laptop other than just as a test platform. I'd gone through a period about 10 years ago where I had given serious thought to installing Linux (SUSE 6.4) on my main desktop but ended up not bothering; the install routine was quite daunting. Anyway, I've used older versions of Ubuntu Live CDs in the past and been most impressed. Just after the New Year I ordered a couple of Ubuntu CDs (x86 and x64 versions) and thought I'd give it a try.
I've been really impressed with the ease with which the Ubuntu installer resized and created partitions and with only the minimum of interaction installed and set itself up. The only info I had to enter was name, username, password and time zone settings. It hasn't grumbled about any of my hardware and even recognised my Wireless card. After entering my WEP key I was up and running on the net in no time. I must admit there's been significantly more updates to download than with a Windows XP SP2 install but it's not been too great of a hardship.
I'd almost go as far as to say that the new version of Ubuntu has brought Linux goodness into the reach of the not so tech-savvy general public. Firefox on Ubuntu, unsurprisingly, looks and feels exactly the same as the Windows version. Evolution, the email client was a breeze to set up. OpenOffice is a free, and pretty good, alternative to MS Office and Pidgin is a nice multi-format IM client in the style of Trillian. There's nothing I've come across so far where I've missed a Windows client or application. About the only downside is the lack of serious game support but Wine can help in that respect.
I'm going to play about with it for at least another month or so and then give some serious thought to adding the x64 version to my main desktop PC.
I've had an iPod for a month now and it's almost become an extra limb. Prior to winning the iPod I had never bothered with podcasts and got most of my tech news and such by browsing the web. Now, although I do still browse the net a fair bit, the main source of information has become a variety of different podcasts.
I originally started off listening to just 2 or 3 podcasts but am now subscribed to over 20. These include:
- 5 different podcasts from The TWiT Netcast Network
- 3 different podcasts from CNET.com
- 3 different podcasts from GameTrailers.com
- 3 different podcasts from Escape Artists, namely:
- the sci-fi based Escape Pod
- the horror based Pseudo Pod
- the fantasy based Pod Castle; due to launch April 1st
- 2 different podcasts from BBC Radio
- The trailers podcast from ScreenRush
- The video podcast from DL.TV
- The video podcast from Kerrang
- The EPL (English Premier League) podcast from ITN
- The 1Up Radio podcast from 1Up.com
- The audio fiction series The Metamor City Podcast
After rumours of Flash coming to the iPhone persisting since July 2007 it would now appear unlikely. According to Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, Flash just won't cut it on the iPhone, or more accurately, the mobile version of Flash won't cut it and the desktop version would run too slowly.
The main problem is that the iPhone's embedded ARM processor is designed to use power far more efficiently than a desktop or laptop processor, cycling down when not needed in order to both conserve power and to limit heat production. Adobe's proprietary software would need to be recompiled and optimized for the ARM architecture, which isn't something Apple could do without Adobe's input.
Another problem is that the iPhone's OS X environment is designed to run from a relatively small disk image stored in NVRAM and Adobe's Flash, which isn't designed with memory conservation in mind, has memory leakage problems and would tend to use up more RAM than the iPhone's other apps are likely to use.
Couple Jobs' comments with Nokia's decision to go with Microsoft Silverlight on their next generation of phones and it leaves you wondering "Where does this leave Adobe's Flash?"
Well, okay, secondhand printer.
The HP Laserjet 4100N that I ordered off eBay arrived this afternoon; almost a week later than I had expected. It was very well packaged although I had to take it apart to ensure that there was no polystyrene pieces stuck inside it. It's actually a 4100 with a jet direct network card installed but that's no major difference. The biggie is that the listing stated it had a duplex unit with it, but it hasn't; again, it's not a major problem because I already had a duplex unit anyway. Suffice to say with the time taken for delivery, the lack of communication and the inaccuracies in the listing I've left neutral feedback.
Anyway, after installing extra memory in it out of my old printer and fiddling with a few of the settings it's up and running fine. I did have a small problem with paper jamming in the duplex unit but changing the paper tray has solved that.
My network printer; a HP 4100n, has died. It still prints out test pages from the printer's own control panel but won't print out anything over the network or even if connected to one of the pcs. I've changed the network card in it and still no luck. This is the second one I've had; the first one died within 7 days of me getting it off eBay, but the vendor was nice enough to send me a replacement he had. So, I've had a look on eBay and found a replacement for £19 plus £14 postage plus vat; so under £40 for a nice network printer; which is an unbelievable bargain. Until the new printer arrives I've taken my HP 1100 out of mothballs.
With thanks to Dom Ramsey over at Money Blogger I am now the happy owner of a funky blue 8gb iPod Nano. I must also thank Pewari for posting about Dom's competition on her blog. Without her post I wouldn't have known about Dom's site or the competition.
Datamancer, to use his own description, is a dweeb. He builds wacky stuff and dabbles in a little bit of everything.
One of the highlights of the site is a Victorian Steampunk Laptop which features an elaborate display of clockworks under glass, engraved brass accents, claw feet, an antiqued copper keyboard and mouse, leather wrist pads, customized wireless network card and turns on with an antique clock-winding key by way of a custom-built ratcheting switch made from old clock parts
Freaking News is the top News Photoshop Pictures site on the web. Actual news stories fuel their Photoshop picture contests with scores of wacky doctored pictures. Members get cash for participating and winning the daily contests.
Crazy and Fun is a site about some of the crazy and fun stuff that you can find on the internet. There are many funny pictures, videos, stories and news stories. You can also find sports material and music for all.
Gadgettastic is another of the myriad of sites that aim to bring you the latest news on gadgets and technology from around the world. If your looking for the latest gadgets, gizmos, and geek stuff you will find it Gadgettastic.
Although some shops do manage to sell blank cds or dvds at reasonable prices the best deals are still to be found online; especially if you're buying in bulk.
I tend to check about 5 or 6 different sites before purchasing blank media and two of the sites that I use more often are:
Both have a large selection of media available and tend to be cheaper than the others more often than not. They also sell a number of other PC and general entertainment related items.
Consumer Electronics Show 2008
The biggest electronics show of the year has recently taken place in Las Vegas and you can check out various reports of what we can look forward to below.
I ordered a new Sapphire X1950 Pro 512mb ATI Radeon X1950 Pro gfx card for my PC from CCL Online. Paid via Google Checkout and now wish I hadn't.
My bank has issued payment but Google are saying my card has been declined and haven't forwarded the order to CCL.
Once I get it sorted I'm going to go back to using either Paypal or the vendor's own checkout process.
Currently awaiting some form of response from Google.
The Copeland area is the first in the UK to move over to digital tv.
Added a new graphics card to my system.
Got a tape stuck in my video recorder the other day and thought "Just pull it out; it'll snap and I can splice it."
Had enough of PlusNet over recent months and decided to change ISPs. Selected Eclipse Internet. Will see how things progress.
I want one of these.
Reinstalled my PC last night.
Just recently changed the processor in my PC.
BT upgraded my local exchange yesterday. So, a quick phonecall to PlusNet and 2mb broadband goodness for free, well £21.99 actually, which is £8 less than I was paying for 1mb.
Just added a 3rd hard drive to my system.
Came across a techie blog yesterday; whilst searching for a code for Sky+ on the One-For-All handsets. It's called Tech Digest. Pretty good reading.
Bought myself a couple of new Sony DWD-22A 16x Dual Layer DVD writers, which have replaced my old Plextor drives. They seem fast enough doing CDs although I haven't done any DVDs yet; I haven't even got any 16x media to test them with.
Hmm; Norton Speed Disk caused havoc with my PC yesterday.
Installed SP2 today on 2 of the 3 PCs. All seems good. So far...
Had the router back for 3 days now and it's working fine; so much so in fact that I've finally gotten round to putting the cabling in to share the broadband connection with my dad.
Well, D-Link have sent my router back to me; complete with a note stating the problem has been identified and fixed, and that they are confident it works fine.
We shall see...
Got my TV back; they had to replace the tube; all is good again...
And sent my router off again today; hopefully for a replacement, rather than a test, possible repair and return...
My TV is bust...
I spoke (or typed in this case) way too soon. After only an hour back in service the router has developed the exact same fault; looking closer at it I realise now that it's the same bloody one... I shall be having words with D-Link in the morning.