Posts Categorised: Computing

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

Published by & filed under Misc Hardware. Last updated .

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

Published by & filed under Misc Hardware. Last updated .

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.
… Read Full Article

0PSU LogoPSU Efficiency: worth the upgrade? part 3

Published by & filed under Misc Hardware. Last updated .

This is the third install­ment in a series of art­icles address­ing PSU effi­ciency.  Art­icle one focused on a [int­link id=“76” type=“post”]theoretical new server[/intlink], art­icle 2 on a [int­link id=“77” type=“post”]typical desktop PC[/intlink].  This art­icle will focus on a cur­rent real serv­er, and intro­duces a new PSU — an 80+ plat­in­um model.
… Read Full Article

0Wordpress LogoFixed: Comments area disappearing in Mystique theme

Published by & filed under Wordpress. Last updated .

I recently had a prob­lem where the entire com­ments area was miss­ing from all the posts on this blog.  When I switched back to the default twentyten theme they reappeared and at first I thought it was a prob­lem with the mys­tique theme.  I switched back to mys­tique and dis­abled all of my plu­gins and the com­ments came back!  A simple pro­cess of elim­in­a­tion iden­ti­fied the cul­prit — The WP SEO Pager Plu­gin.  This plu­gin isn’t really neces­sary with the mys­tique theme, so I have simply removed it.  If you encounter the same prob­lem with mys­tique, check you haven’t got this plu­gin enabled.

0IcoFX LogoExcellent free icon utility

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

Just a very quick post to recom­mend the util­ity IcoFX.  In a nut­shell IcoFX is a free icon extract­or and edit­or.  I was impressed with it because the oth­er free icon edit­ors I tried were unable to sup­port full alpha trans­par­ency, Win­dows 7 x64, or 256 x 256 icons.  IcoFX worked flaw­lessly in all respects.

0Serial Key LogoRetrieving serials from Windows

Published by & filed under Windows. Last updated .

I am fre­quently giv­en PCs to repair that require a rein­stall of win­dows.  These often don’t come with a full list of seri­al num­bers for the soft­ware installed on them.  To avoid the hassle of ask­ing the own­er to dig the seri­als out, it is easi­er to simply pull the seri­als from the old install before wip­ing.… Read Full Article

2Mozilla Firefox LogoFirefox 4 fixes MSN Messenger bug

Published by & filed under Web Technologies. Last updated .

I was so pleased upon upgrad­ing to Fire­fox 4 to no longer have Win­dows Live Mes­sen­ger crash­ing the browser every time I opened Hot­mail and had an act­ive con­ver­sa­tion win­dow.  I don’t know if it was Microsoft or Fire­fox at fault but the prob­lem seems to have gone away now.

I’m less pleased, how­ever, that two of my plug-ins for the pre­vi­ous ver­sion aren’t yet sup­por­ted.  Then again, one of those is old and sel­dom used and the oth­er (IE Tab) should fol­low in time.