0 Excellent utility to fix Epson printers

Published on 14^th June 2011 by Jon Scaife in Misc Hardware. Updated 1^st October 2011.

I had a problem with an old Epson Stylus Photo R200 printer. Despite being loaded with paper and fresh genuine ink cartridges, the unit refused to print. The 2 red warning lights on top were flashing alternately. After considerable googling I discovered that this error code is related to the ink cartridge cleaning well. Apparently it gets full of ink after a certain number of head cleaning cycles. As usual with cheap inkjet printers, the warning is based on a counter, not on the actual fullness of the cleaning well, and the error can be bypassed by resetting the counter in the printer. The good news is there is a utility which will do just that. Although it doesn’t list support, I can confirm that the utility does work fine on Windows 7 x64, so I believe it should work on every version of windows since Windows 95!

0 Comparison of HTPC GPU’s

Published on 13^th June 2011 by Jon Scaife in Media PC Hardware, News. Updated 1^st October 2011.

Anandtech has an excellent article comparing 4 bottom end GPU’s for HTPC’s. The article is extensive and does a good job of explaining issues of framerate timing, cadence detection, telecining and pulldown as well as comparing the 4 GPU’s. As we don’t believe in reinventing the wheel – we recommend anyone building a HTPC setup read the article before setting out.

0 Fusion E-450 coming

Published on 13^th June 2011 by Jon Scaife in Media PC Hardware, News. Updated 1^st October 2011.

SemiAccurate has news that AMD are to imminently release a new Zacate member of the Brazos platform. According to previous information on Anandtech and Hexus the E-450 is clocked at 1.65GHz (up from 1.60GHz) and has graphics clocked at 600MHz (up from 500MHz). It will also reportedly support higher speeds of DDR3 memory, and feature some kind of turbo.

0 ffdshow DXVA fixed

Published on 12^th June 2011 by Jon Scaife in Codecs, News. Updated 4^th October 2011.

DXVA in ffdshow, which was broken for the last few builds, appears to have been fixed, at least in the 3878 x64 build from 11th June.

2 Upgrading an original Arcam Alpha

Published on 9^th June 2011 by Simonty in CD Players & DACs. Updated 17^th January 2012.

Background

This old stalwart dates back in design to about 1989 and I believe mine was made in 1991. The Arcam Alpha uses one of the first DAC chips around, the famous TDA1541(A). Here’s a good page dedicated to players featuring this chip: Lampizator guy. The author of that site is famous in DIY circles but misses a few important tricks when modifying CD players. (more…)

0 PSU Efficiency 4 – Modern gaming PC

Published on 5^th June 2011 by Jon Scaife in Misc Hardware. Updated 24^th January 2012.

This article on PSU efficiency for a modern sandy bridge gaming PC follows on from 3 previous articles, about PSU efficiency for a medium power server, a medium use very high power gaming PC and a low power server or HTPC.
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0 Power Supply Efficiency: worth the upgrade? part 3

Published on 2^nd June 2011 by Jon Scaife in Misc Hardware. Updated 24^th January 2012.

This is the third installment in a series of articles addressing PSU efficiency. Article one focused on a theoretical new server, article 2 on a typical desktop PC. This article will focus on a current real server, and introduces a new PSU – an 80+ platinum model.
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17 Dual-Tuner Mini-ITX Build?

Published on 1^st June 2011 by Jon Scaife in Media PC Hardware. Updated 9^th October 2011.

After discussions on a recent article I wondered if it is possible to build a set-top box sized HTPC with dual-tuner cards inside. To achieve set-top box size means going Mini-ITX, but with the release of a range of Mini ITX AMD Fusion boards this is the easy part. Mini-ITX normally only includes 1 expansion slot, so to include 2 tuners requires a creative solution.
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0 The ultimate TV tuner card?

Published on 26^th May 2011 by Jon Scaife in Media PC Hardware. Updated 24^th January 2012.

Whilst looking for drivers for my Pinnacle 3010ix freeview tuner I noticed Blackgold have a new TV tuner due on the market. The Blackgold BGT3630 looks provisionally to tick all the boxes for me. It supports DVB-T/T2 AND DVB-S/S2 as well as Analog and Cable DVB-C! So everything and the kitchen sink. The card is also supplied with low and full profile brackets and fits a PCI-E 1x slot. I suppose the only thing lacking is that it seems to only be a single-tuner for each format. Of course 2 cards solves that (if you have 2 pci-e slots free in your HTPC)
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