Posts By: Jon Scaife

0Ultrabook logo laptop vaio sonyGetting inside an Asus A2xxx

Published by & filed under Misc Hardware. Last updated .

I recently had to get inside an old-ish Asus A2500 laptop to invest­ig­ate an issue with the CD-ROM drive (and to upgrade the memory and add a wire­less card). Most laptops have a cov­er above the key­board that pops off, but on this par­tic­u­lar laptop it did­n’t seem attached in the usu­al way.
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0Windows Media Player LogoOutputting WMP Videos to second display

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

When using a PC with a second dis­play (for example a laptop with a data pro­ject­or) it is often a com­mon prob­lem to find that a video played with Win­dows Media Play­er will only dis­play on the primary dis­play, and not on the sec­ond­ary output.

There are vari­ous dif­fer­ent con­fig­ur­a­tions which con­trib­ute to this beha­viour — Win­dows set­tings, Win­dows Media Play­er set­tings and Graph­ics Card driver settings.
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0Microsoft Security Essentials LogoMicrosoft AntiVirus updated

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

Microsoft have now updated their free anti-vir­us to ver­sion 1.0.1500 which is avail­able from win­dows update if you have the pre­vi­ous ver­sion installed (see my pre­vi­ous post). If you want to install 1.0.1500 without installing the old ver­sion first it can be down­loaded from Microsoft. If you’re in a coun­try where its unavail­able then you can down­load it from Soft­Pe­dia

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).
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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.
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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)
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