Posts By: Jon Scaife

0Ultrabook logo laptop vaio sonyRepair HP Laptops and other hardware cheaply

Published by & filed under Misc Hardware. Last updated .

I was recently asked to look at the touch­pad on a HP Pavil­ion DV2000 laptop which had a faulty left but­ton. Spares and repairs for laptops are often hard to come by so I was pleased to find the HP Ser­vice manu­al as a PDF, which included all the part num­bers, and then very pleased to find that HP offer an extens­ive dir­ect sales ser­vice for most parts via the HP PartSurfer. Suf­fice to say this laptop is now fixed, for a very low price. Good move by HP — I won­der if oth­er major man­u­fac­tur­ers provide a sim­il­ar service?

0Google Earth LogoGoogle Earth: How to fix poor quality overlays

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

I’ve recently had some prob­lems with dis­play­ing large over­lays (gen­er­ated from NASA SRTM data) in Google Earth. Although the over­lay data I expor­ted was very detailed google earth was dis­play­ing a blurry mess which was imprac­tic­al for my inten­ded pur­pose. Search­ing around on the ‘net did­n’t reveal any­thing use­ful so as a last resort I tried switch­ing from “Dir­ect X” to “Open GL” mode (under tools: options).
… Read Full Article

0NoScript logoImprove your browsing security without crippling lots of sites

Published by & filed under Web Technologies. Last updated .

I always recom­mend that people install an altern­at­ive browser to Inter­net Explorer. Per­son­ally I prefer Fire­fox to the oth­er altern­at­ives (Chrome, Opera, Safari) as I find the huge num­ber of addons on offer give it an unas­sail­able advant­age. I’ve recently exper­i­mented with the NoScript addon, which enhances secur­ity by block­ing act­ive objects and scripts unless expli­citly approved. How­ever I found that I was forever hav­ing to grant per­mis­sion to every site I vis­ited for it to work correctly.
… Read Full Article

2Haali Matroska logoUninstall Haali Media Splitter x64

Published by & filed under Codecs. Last updated .

There is a beta (or maybe its Alpha) installer for Haali Media Split­ter x64 out and about (for links to the installer see my pre­vi­ous post on win­dows 7 x64 codecs). Sadly the unin­stall seems to be broken, which can cause hav­oc when try­ing to dia­gnose codec issues. To remove Haali com­pletely you need to unre­gister the fol­low­ing files manu­ally using regsvr32 /u filename (from a com­mand prompt run as administrator)
… Read Full Article

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.
… Read Full Article

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…
… Read Full Article

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.
… Read Full Article