Posts By: Jon Scaife

0DVD Shrink LogoAutomate DVD Ripping on Windows 7

Published by & filed under Misc Media Software. Last updated .

With my recent HTPC pro­ject now work­ing really well, I want to rip my col­lec­tion of DVDs to my media serv­er for more con­veni­ent play­back in Win­dows 7 Media Cen­ter (and all the addi­tion­al bene­fits asso­ci­ated with Media Browser, par­tic­u­larly the meta data on rat­ings, syn­op­sis, etc). Rip­ping DVDs, whilst straight­for­ward is rather tedi­ous. I found an excel­lent meth­od of auto­mat­ing the pro­cess was to modi­fy my auto­play set­tings with Auto­Play Repair, and point the auto­play to a pro­gram called DVD Rip which auto­mates the rip­ping of DVDs with the well known DVD Shrink.
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0Windows Media Center eHome LogoFixed: Media Center 7 behind taskbar on startup

Published by & filed under Windows Media Center. Last updated .

I’ve had a very irrit­at­ing prob­lem with my new Win­dows 7 Media Cen­ter HTPC setup. I have 7MC set to load full­screen on star­tup (as the PC is a ded­ic­ated HTPC), but some­thing I changed at some point was caus­ing the taskbar to show on top of Media Cen­ter (i.e. Media Cen­ter did­n’t have win­dow focus) and there­fore my remote con­trol did­n’t work until using the mouse func­tion to click on Media Cen­ter to refo­cus it (at which point the taskbar disappears).
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0Creating Windows 7 DVD from digital distribution

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

I got my copy of win­dows 7 via digit­al pur­chase, and after run­ning the down­loaded EXE was left with the con­tents of a setup CD in a folder. Now i want to do a clean install so I need to cre­ate a boot­able DVD. A bit of googling revealed the way to do this. Down­load and install WAIK for win­dows 7 from microsoft. Install it, and then use the com­mand line as follows…
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0Inside HDD LogoSpeed up SSDs, especially in netbooks

Published by & filed under Storage. Last updated .

I recently upgraded the SSD in an Asus eeePC 901, and whilst the size and per­form­ance were both bet­ter, the per­form­ance upgrade still was­n’t on par with even a 5+ year old laptop HDD. The prob­lem with most SSDs, espe­cially the cheap­er ones, is that they usu­ally have very poor write per­form­ance with small files. This can make win­dows very slug­gish and unre­spons­ive at times.
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0Microsoft Office Outlook LogoGet rid of the outlook reading pane

Published by & filed under Web Technologies. Last updated .

One of the most irrit­at­ing things in MS Out­look is the read­ing pane. Not only is it turned on by default, but accord­ing to Microsoft there is no way to change this default. Well, I beg to differ.…

Below are spe­cif­ic instruc­tions for Out­look 2007. Oth­er ver­sions of out­look will no doubt dif­fer slightly, but it should be pos­sible to find the same settings
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0Windows Media Player LogoSwitching the default WMP to x64 in Windows 7

Published by & filed under Misc Media Software. Last updated .

One of the strangest things in Win­dows 7 x64 is the pres­ence of both x86 and x64 ver­sions of Win­dows Media Play­er 12. Even stranger is that des­pite Win­dows Media Cen­ter being 64bit only (and there­fore requir­ing 64bit codecs) Microsoft saw fit to set the default WMP12 ver­sion to the x86 edi­tion. For those of us who don’t wish to main­tain 2 sets of codecs it is desir­able to change this default status. How­ever, Microsoft do not appear to have provided a simple way to do this as yet. So here’s how…
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0Inside HDD LogoUpgrading the SSD in an eeePC 901

Published by & filed under Storage. Last updated .

I’ve recently been asked to upgrade the SSD drive in an Asus eeePC 901. Rather than write about it in detail here I’ll just say that the oper­a­tion was pain­less and a great suc­cess, mostly thanks to the excel­lent guide provided at Bit­Tech

I replaced the default 4gig SSD (leav­ing the 16gig one intact) with a sim­il­ar speed 16gig drive which cost £43 from ebay

0Windows 7 empty “all programs”

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

I’ve been using the RC1 (7100) build of Win­dows 7 and have been largely very impressed, enough so to con­sider buy­ing upgrades for all my cur­rent PC’s. How­ever, I recently had an issue with the “All Pro­grams” menu going blank for no obvi­ous reas­on. As usu­al a bit of dig­ging with google offered the fol­low­ing tem­por­ary workaround.
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0Nokia 6101 logoGetting a Nokia 6101 working via CA-42 cable with PC Suite

Published by & filed under Misc Mobile. Last updated .

I’ve had some real issues con­nect­ing an old Nokia 6101 to a laptop via a genu­ine Nokia CA-42 cable. Des­pite repeated attempts to get help from Nokia the prob­lem remained unre­solved until recently. The pro­ced­ure which appears to have resolved the issue is as follows

  1. Remove the nokia cable driver sup­plied with PC Suite. This can be achieved by down­load­ing the installer for the cable driver, run­ning it, and choos­ing to remove. This leaves PC Suite intact. but removes the driver for the CA-42 cable which did­n’t seem to work.
  2. Down­load and extract the altern­at­ive cable driver, avail­able on the down­loads page
  3. Plug in the cable and when win­dows detects it and prompts for a driver, point it to the extrac­ted altern­at­ive driver

0Windows 7 Autologon

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

A very quick tip for how to enable auto­lo­gon for Win­dows 7. Press the win­dows-key and R to open the run menu (don’t use the search/run bar at the bot­tom of the start menu) and type con­trol userpasswords2 and press enter. Untick “Users must enter a user name and pass­word to use this computer”

Cred­it to Sarah Perez