Posts Categorised: Misc Hardware

0Sony VaioDrivers for Windows 7 on Sony Vaio FZs

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This is just a quick post to men­tion an excel­lent guide I recently used when installing Win­dows 7 on an old Sony Vaio VGN-FZ31Z laptop. I was hav­ing sig­ni­fic­ant dif­fi­culty installing sev­er­al drivers, in par­tic­u­lar those for the nVidia GeForce 8600M GS (hard­ware ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0425&SUBSYS_9005104D&REV_A1) which was stub­bornly remain­ing a “Stand­ard vga adapter”. Sony don’t provide any Win­dows 7 drivers, and the gen­er­ic nVidia drivers don’t recog­nise the hard­ware ver­sion in the Vaio, instead offer­ing the unhelp­ful error “The NVIDIA setup pro­gram could not loc­ate any drivers that are com­pat­ible with your cur­rent hard­ware.  Setup will now exit.”  There is no good reas­on for this — the drivers have been dis­abled in soft­ware purely because OEM’s like Sony don’t want users installing drivers from nVidia that they (Sony) haven’t checked on their spe­cif­ic hard­ware con­fig­ur­a­tion. This would be under­stand­able if Sony actu­ally bothered to provide sup­port for their old hard­ware, but since they don’t this situ­ation really isn’t acceptable.

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0PSU LogoEfficient PSU Upgrades: HuntKey Jumper update

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I spot­ted a much cheap­er 80+ gold PSU in the ebuy­er xmas sales, and decided to look up some reviews.  I found a review on anandtech which I must have some­how missed in the past.  In light of this dis­cov­ery, I’ve updated my pre­vi­ous art­icles about PSU effi­ciency to include the HuntKey Jump­er 300G (aka R90).  The price of this PSU changes the con­clu­sions of 2 of the 4 scen­ari­os I’ve pre­vi­ously detailed, and I have in fact ordered one at the dis­count price of £20, for use in my cur­rent serv­er!  After tak­ing into account that my cur­rent serv­er PSU (an Ener­max Nois­e­Taker 475 from 2004) is approx­im­ately 80% effi­cient rather than the 70% worst case I use in the art­icles, I’m hop­ing to net sav­ings of around £20 per year.

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72Canon CanoScan LIDE ScannerGet your old scanner working with Windows 7 x64

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In recent months I’ve encountered sev­er­al prob­lems where people have con­tac­ted me ask­ing for help get­ting their USB scan­ners work­ing on new PCs.  In each case the new PCs have come with Win­dows 7 x64, and the scan­ners have been USB devices pro­duced by Can­on and Nikon.  Both of these ima­ging spe­cial­ists have ser­i­ously dropped the ball on sup­port­ing products, includ­ing some quite expens­ive premi­um kit from not all that long ago.
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0Ultrabook logo laptop vaio sonyBetter than an ultrabook?

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Intel have announced a new ini­ti­at­ive to push laptops sim­il­ar to the Mac­Book Air.  The ini­tial require­ments are a weight of up to 1.4Kg, thick­ness of 20mm and bat­tery life of 5+ hours.  For man­u­fac­tur­ers to qual­i­fy for intel mar­ket­ing money ultra­books also must have no optic­al drive, an SSD, and CULV processors.

I have been recently been look­ing for a sim­il­ar type of laptop — I was asked to find some­thing with excel­lent per­form­ance, 5+ hours bat­tery, under 2Kg, with at least a 13.3″ screen, USB3, Optic­al drive, HDMI and VGA.  A dock­ing port would be a bonus.  The faster, light­er, longer-bat­tery-life the bet­ter.… Read Full Article

2Inside HDD LogoFix for problems with Seagate Momentus XT

Published by & filed under Misc Hardware. Last updated .

I’ve had prob­lems with the new Seag­ate Momentus XT hard­drive in my new­est HTPC.  The PC was lock­ing up every 48 hours or so (which may have been related to standby), was occa­sion­ally jerky, and upon reboot would often refuse to boot with an error about a miss­ing boot device, which could only be fixed with a hard power cycle.  There is a firm­ware update for the drive to SD25 but this did­n’t resolve the issue.  How­ever, after I changed the power man­age­ment set­tings in Win­dows 7 to nev­er spin-down the hard­drive, the prob­lems all went away.  Success!

Update (14-Sept-2011).  Seag­ate has released firm­ware SD28.  There are reports that this fixes sev­er­al issues and is a worth­while update.

0Dell 3130CN LogoExcellent utility to fix Epson printers

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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!

0PSU LogoPSU Efficiency 4 — Modern gaming PC

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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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