Posts Categorised: Misc Software

0Ultrabook logo laptop vaio sonyBluetooth drivers for Sony Vaio unknown device

Posted by & filed under Misc Software.

I was recently asked to look at a Sony Vaio VPCSB which was detect­ing new hard­ware on every Win­dows boot.  The machine was oth­er­wise work­ing well.  Upon inspec­tion I dis­covered that there were sev­er­al unknown devices which seemed to be related to Bluetooth.  I rein­stalled the latest drivers from the Sony web­site but this failed to clear the unknown devices.  The search was on.….. Read Full Article

0adobeRestoring Adobe Application Manager updates

Posted by & filed under Misc Software.

In a recent update to Cre­at­ive Suite 6 Adobe have changed the func­tion­al­ity of the Applic­a­tion Man­ager.  This used to launch the same Applic­a­tion Updates win­dow that is avail­able when select­ing Help: Updates from with­in any Adobe App, but it now launches a login win­dow for Cre­at­ive Cloud, which not all CS6 users have or want.  A simple change will have the ori­gin­al func­tion­al­ity restored

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0MS Office LogoBatch convert old MS Office documents

Posted by & filed under Misc Software.

I’ve been try­ing to sort out an enorm­ous (100+GB) or teach­ing resources that I’ve built-up over the years.  After the obvi­ous steps (delet­ing empty, temp and duplic­ated files) and sort­ing the big files (e.g. videos, applic­a­tion installers) I was left with a large num­ber of office doc­u­ments.  I am slowly work­ing through these, but many of them are 2003 or even older format doc­u­ments — some as old as Word 6!  Every time I open one of these files I am promp­ted with vari­ous secur­ity warn­ings.  Whist these can be turned off (see below) it is more secure to leave them on, and I wanted to con­vert all the files to office 2007 (docx, xlsx etc) formats.  Batch con­ver­sion was def­in­itely the way to go.

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7Microsoft Office Excel 2010Conditional formatting for grades v targets

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

So, in my oth­er life I’m actu­ally a sci­ence teach­er, and as it usu­ally gets round that I’m “good with com­puters” I usu­ally get asked to have a look at a few things.  Twice in the last few months I’ve been asked if I’d set up con­di­tion­al format­ting in excel to col­our code stu­dent test res­ults com­pared to their tar­get grades.  Whilst not exactly related to the core con­tent of this site, it is still DIY tech­nic­al help so I decided to pub­lish a full set of instruc­tions here. Enjoy…

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0Settlers IIResurrecting a very old post: VGA fix for Settlers 2

Posted by & filed under Misc Software.

Thanks to a request by dhd in a com­ment on the down­loads page, I decided to go look­ing through backups of my old web­sites.  Below is a pos­ted I wrote around 2003⁄04 about how to fix prob­lems with run­ning the game Set­tlers 2 on Win­dows XP.  I’m pretty cer­tain the same wont work on new­er ver­sions of Win­dows sadly, but for those XP users still out there who want to play your (very) old copy of Set­tlers 2 — enjoy…

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0AMD Vision Fusion Premium LogoFixed: AMD E350 crashes & invalid boot device error

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

I’ve had an AMD E350 sys­tem for over a year, which I use as my primary HTPC. How­ever, in that time I’ve always had oca­sion­al Sta­bil­ity issues where the sys­tem would lock up, reboot, and fail to find the primary HDD. At first I put this down to the HDD — a Seag­ate Momentus XT, which was known to be unre­li­able when it was first released. Since Seag­ate released update firm­ware how­ever the drive has seemed to oper­ate fine, although I could­n’t rule it out. I also updated the BIOS of my Asus E35M1‑M Pro and updated all the drivers I could find, without fully resolv­ing the issue.

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