Posts Categorised: Misc Software

0GigaByte Dynamic Energy Saver LogoAudio issues with gigabyte power saver

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

I’ve been suf­fer­ing from audio dis­tor­tion issues when play­ing back movies on my recently rebuilt HTPC. After much test­ing I dis­covered a solu­tion — dis­abling (in my case by unin­stalling) the giga­byte dynam­ic energy saver util­ity. I am not sure if this tool only causes prob­lems because of my spe­cif­ic con­fig­ur­a­tion of codecs, but it cer­tainly did cause prob­lems across a range of hard­ware and media play­ers. Dis­abling it imme­di­ately resolved the problem.

0Creating Windows 7 DVD from digital distribution

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

I got my copy of win­dows 7 via digit­al pur­chase, and after run­ning the down­loaded EXE was left with the con­tents of a setup CD in a folder. Now i want to do a clean install so I need to cre­ate a boot­able DVD. A bit of googling revealed the way to do this. Down­load and install WAIK for win­dows 7 from microsoft. Install it, and then use the com­mand line as follows…
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0Windows 7 empty “all programs”

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

I’ve been using the RC1 (7100) build of Win­dows 7 and have been largely very impressed, enough so to con­sider buy­ing upgrades for all my cur­rent PC’s. How­ever, I recently had an issue with the “All Pro­grams” menu going blank for no obvi­ous reas­on. As usu­al a bit of dig­ging with google offered the fol­low­ing tem­por­ary workaround.
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0Windows 7 Autologon

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

A very quick tip for how to enable auto­lo­gon for Win­dows 7. Press the win­dows-key and R to open the run menu (don’t use the search/run bar at the bot­tom of the start menu) and type con­trol userpasswords2 and press enter. Untick “Users must enter a user name and pass­word to use this computer”

Cred­it to Sarah Perez

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 [int­link id=“10” type=“post”]my pre­vi­ous post[/intlink]). 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

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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0Serial Key LogoReplacing an invalid Win XP key with a genuine key

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

If you’ve ever been asked to fix a PC and have sub­sequently dis­covered it has a non-genu­ine or inap­pro­pri­ate Win­dows XP key installed, and you wish to update the key with a legit­im­ate key, for example when a second hand laptop has been installed with a cor­por­ate key and needs updat­ing with the OEM key from the stick­er still attached to it, you may have run into prob­lems switch­ing between OEM, Volume and Retail ver­sions of windows.
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0Microsoft Security Essentials LogoFree Anti-Virus from Microsoft

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

Microsoft have released (a few weeks ago) a free Beta of their new Anti-Vir­us / Secur­ity product Microsoft Secur­ity Essen­tials. Unfor­tu­nately as a UK res­id­ent when I vis­it the offi­cial Microsoft page I am told “This beta is avail­able only to cus­tom­ers in the United States, Israel, China and Brazil”. A quick google search quickly turns up a down­load link on Soft­Pe­dia which works. There are down­loads of x86 and x64 ver­sions of Secur­ity Essen­tials for Win­dows XP, Vista and 7