Posts Categorised: Computing

0Inside HDD LogoCloning a system disk

Published by & filed under Storage. Last updated .

The next job on my fest­ive tech­nic­al sup­port rounds was to upgrade my old man’s laptop HDD to a new SSD. In the past such upgrades have usu­ally involved oth­er com­pon­ents and neces­sit­ated a fresh install of win­dows, but with this upgrade being just one com­pon­ent, to a Win­dows 7 PC, I decided time was ripe for a fresh invest­ig­a­tion of the pos­sib­il­ity of clon­ing the old drive onto the new
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0Karoo ADSL settings

Posted by & filed under Web Technologies.

Hav­ing com­pleted the migra­tion of the site to the new serv­er, and with the fest­ive sea­son upon us, I’m back being the fam­ily tech­nic­al sup­port. First chal­lenge of this year was to restore ser­vice to my grand­fath­ers broad­band which has­n’t been work­ing since he mis­takenly pressed the reset but­ton on his wire­less router.
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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

0Asus E35M1-I Deluxe Wi-Fi AMD Fusion Mini-ITX MotherboardFixing stability issues with Asus E35M1‑M Pro

Posted by & filed under Misc Hardware.

The basis of my main HTPC is an AMD E350 Brazos in the form of an Asus E35M1‑M Pro. I had quite a lot of prob­lems with the sys­tem when I first built it, which were caused by issues with the Seag­ate Momentus XT stor­age drive I used. These were fixed a good while ago via firm­ware update from Seag­ate, and since then the sys­tem has largely worked without any issue.… 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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2pale moonPale Moon: Firefox enhanced and in 64bit

Posted by & filed under Web Technologies.

I’ve been look­ing for a 64bit Fire­fox for a couple of years now, pretty much since Java and Flash play­er became avail­able in 64bit.  Moz­illa seem in no hurry to pro­gress the mine­field night­lies into a full release, but sev­er­al third parties have taken the open source code and com­piled it for 64bit.  I’ve looked at sev­er­al of these and the best sup­por­ted and most reg­u­larly updated seems to be a build called Pale Moon.

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1CoolerMaster Elite 335 PC CaseThe end of regular PC price drops?

Posted by & filed under Misc Hardware.

I reg­u­larly build PCs for people, and have recently been look­ing at a high end spec for someone.  I star­ted, as I often do, by look­ing at what I’d got for a high end sys­tem about a year ago, to see if it was worth mov­ing up the the new gen­er­a­tion, or if a sub­stan­tial drop in the older spec made it tempt­ing to repeat.  In the past the year old sys­tem has always been sub­stan­tially cheap­er, so I was quite sur­prised to find that this time it was­n’t.  … Read Full Article

2Wordpress LogoFixing Rich Snippets Testing Tool for Microdata

Published by & filed under Wordpress. Last updated .

Over 2 years ago I pub­lished an art­icle on how to fix prob­lems with Word­Press themes which did­n’t pass the Google Rich Snip­pets Test­ing Tool. Since then lots has changed — Word­Press and most themes have bet­ter sup­port, HTML5 and CSS3 have arrived, and Google, Yahoo and Bing got togeth­er and decided to focus on Microdata, via schema.org. At the time micro­formats seemed the easi­est way to mark up pages, and the test­ing tool had the most com­pre­hens­ive sup­port for these. The move to Microdata and the changes to Word­Press required a new art­icle: this is it!

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0Internet Explorer 9 LogoIE10 for Windows 7 finally arrives

Posted by & filed under Web Technologies.

Anoth­er item that we’re a bit late to cov­er is the arrival of Inter­net Explorer 10 for Win­dows 7 (and Serv­er 2008 R2).  As with past releases, older OSes are being left behind with no sup­port for Vista or XP, which are stuck on IE9 and IE8 respect­ively.  If you have Win­dows 7 we recom­mend upgrad­ing (even if you don’t use IE) and of course there is no harm giv­ing it a try.  We’ll prob­ably be stick­ing with Fire­fox and Chrome ourselves, but IE some­times has its uses.

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