Posts By: Jon Scaife

0Serial Key LogoReplacing an invalid Win XP key with a genuine key

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

If you’ve ever been asked to fix a PC and have sub­sequently dis­covered it has a non-genu­ine or inap­pro­pri­ate Win­dows XP key installed, and you wish to update the key with a legit­im­ate key, for example when a second hand laptop has been installed with a cor­por­ate key and needs updat­ing with the OEM key from the stick­er still attached to it, you may have run into prob­lems switch­ing between OEM, Volume and Retail ver­sions of windows.
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0Freesat HD LogoExtra Freesat channels

Published by & filed under Freesat. Last updated .

Update: ITV-HD has changed. See this new­er article

It seems that Win­dows Media Cen­ter 7 does­n’t find all the chan­nels that are FTA on the main UK Satel­lite group, the Astra 2D group at 28.2º East. I ima­gine many Freesat boxes wont either. Here are the fre­quen­cies for a few fully Free-To-Air Eng­lish lan­guage chan­nels avail­able on this satel­lite cluster…
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0Microsoft Security Essentials LogoFree Anti-Virus from Microsoft

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

Microsoft have released (a few weeks ago) a free Beta of their new Anti-Vir­us / Secur­ity product Microsoft Secur­ity Essen­tials. Unfor­tu­nately as a UK res­id­ent when I vis­it the offi­cial Microsoft page I am told “This beta is avail­able only to cus­tom­ers in the United States, Israel, China and Brazil”. A quick google search quickly turns up a down­load link on Soft­Pe­dia which works. There are down­loads of x86 and x64 ver­sions of Secur­ity Essen­tials for Win­dows XP, Vista and 7

0AMD Radeon Graphics LogoInstalling Mobility Radeon drivers from ATi

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

Update: Cata­lyst Mobil­ity drivers are now avail­able for many cards from ATi. (as of Cata­lyst ver­sion 10.3)

It seems to be very dif­fi­cult to obtain reas­on­ably up-to-date drivers for the ATi graph­ics chips in many laptops. This is because the OEMs have asked ATi not to provide gen­er­ic drivers dir­ect to the end user, ostens­ibly to reduce sup­port requests from users with drivers not tested by the OEM’s. This seems per­fectly reas­on­able, but the sad fact is most OEM’s only update the drivers for a new laptop mod­el a few times and soon aban­don it as they con­cen­trate on the next gen­er­a­tion release. For those people try­ing to update their drivers to address a prob­lem or to gain access to new fea­tures there are no clear options. For­tu­nately there are ways around this problem.
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0PC Hardware CPU RAM UpgradeDon’t use too much TIM!

Published by & filed under Misc Hardware. Last updated .

A quick note of warn­ing about apply­ing Thermal Grease / Heat­sink Com­pound to CPU’s. Don’t use loads! Not only will it not work very effect­ively, if you really go over­board it can leak over the sides of the cpu and get under­neath as it has in the image. This CPU (A pen­ti­um 4) was giv­en to me as “I think its broken”.
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0PC Hardware CPU RAM UpgradeOld K7S6A motherboard Mod

Published by & filed under Misc Hardware. Last updated .

OK, so this tip wont prove use­ful to many people, but as the ori­gin­al site seems to have dis­ap­peared I’m post­ing it to keep it alive.

If you have an Élite Group (ECS) K7S6A mother­board for AMD Sock­et A and you want to upgrade to a “Thor­ough­bred” Ath­lon XP Pro­cessor it is pos­sible by remov­ing a single small com­pon­ent from the motherboard.
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0Freesat HD LogoGet free-to-air HD Satellite TV for under £100

Published by & filed under Freesat. Last updated .

I recently got fed up with my poor TV recep­tion and inab­il­ity to get BBC via Freeview and decided to invest­ig­ate Freesat. Look­ing at the high street the best deals I could find were £70 for a view­er box + £80 for install­a­tion (a total of £150). For record­ing facil­it­ies this rises steeply to over £300 for the box + install­a­tion. This looks to me a bit like an early-adop­ters-tax so I decided to search for altern­at­ives. The out­come of my research was that it is easy and rel­at­ively cheap to obtain and install all the neces­sary equip­ment to set up Freesat on a PC. As it hap­pens I actu­ally already had a media PC so this solu­tion was ideal for me.

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0Internet Explorer 9 LogoUnattended IE7 & IE8 during Windows XP setup

Published by & filed under Windows. Last updated .

Over the years I’ve cre­ated quite a few unat­ten­ded Win­dows install­a­tion disks. One of the toughest prob­lems to solve has been how to install Inter­net Explorer 7 (and now 8 ) dur­ing setup without caus­ing post-setup prob­lems. The prob­lem is caused by the way the install­a­tion routine cre­ates files in the dllcache which get over-writ­ten by win­dows setup.
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0Internet Explorer 9 LogoHow to launch HTML based programs fullscreen

Published by & filed under Web Technologies. Last updated .

I was asked recently if I could copy a teach­ing resource from a CD-ROM onto a laptop com­puter. This par­tic­u­lar pro­gram is mostly HTML with some embed­ded videos. There were 2 prob­lems with run­ning it from a loc­al shortcut.
1. Inter­net Explorer secur­ity warnings
2. The full-screen win­dow is launched by a par­ent browser win­dow which then sits on top of the full screen win­dow and has to be closed when the full screen win­dow is exited
Both of these are only annoy­ances rather than crit­ic­al fail­ures, but a com­plete solu­tion involves fix­ing these kind of things. Find­ing a solu­tion was a little tricky, but once the solu­tion presen­ted itself it was very simple.

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