Posts Tagged: windows

0Windows Media Player LogoWindows volume control of HDMI output

Published by & filed under Amplifiers, Misc Media Software, Windows. Last updated .

I recently swapped out my old home cinema audio sys­tem (a Yamaha DSP-E800 and a Den­on ste­reo receiv­er) con­nec­ted via USB DAC and 6 chan­nel ana­log for an Onkyo TX-SR605 which has HDMI audio con­nec­tions. In most ways this was an instant upgrade but one issue really frus­trated me — volume…
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2Updating firmware on Conbee II stick for Home Assistant

Published by & filed under Home Assistant. Last updated .

I use a Con­Bee II USB stick for my zig­bee mesh in Home Assist­ant. I wanted to update the firm­ware and found it is easi­est to do this by shut­ting down HA, unplug­ging the stick and using a win­dows machine to update it, then put­ting it back into the HA sys­tem and boot­ing HA back up. There are full instruc­tions for the pro­cess in Win­dows on Dresden Elektronik’s website

0windows 8 logoscript to create and name network shares

Posted by & filed under Windows.

When updat­ing or repla­cing a home PC I use Win­dows Deploy­ment Ser­vices (WDS) to rein­stall Win­dows. It means I only have to main­tain a single up-to-date source for all the little free apps I use (Fire­fox, 7zip, Kodi, etc) and makes a new setup much more pain­less. One of the few bugs that has irrit­ated me for ages is the net­work drive map that I cre­ate has always had to be renamed manually.
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0windows 8 logoWindows shares not connected after wake fixed

Posted by & filed under Windows.

I’ve had a very long stand­ing prob­lem where mapped drives on Win­dows PCs are shown as dis­con­nec­ted after a PC wakes from sleep or after a reboot. Click­ing to open the drive res­ults in a delay of sev­er­al seconds and then the share opens. I had this prob­lem with Win­dows 7 right through to Win­dows 10 1909. Today, thanks to a dif­fer­ent issue, I finally cracked it.
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0Storage SpacesFree up disk space on Windows

Published by & filed under Windows. Last updated .

Most PCs that I encounter have drives that are full. This was the case in the days of HDD, and with mod­ern SSD typ­ic­ally being smal­ler it is even worse. A full drive will slow your PC down, as well as the annoy­ance of run­ning out of space at a key moment. Here are a good range of ways of free­ing up space
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2Set up “home assistant” on a windows PC

Published by & filed under SmartHome & IoT. Last updated .

As I’ve writ­ten about before I have a range of “smart home” devices that I’ve been gradu­ally exper­i­ment­ing with. One of the greatest frus­tra­tions of link­ing some of them is that many force you to go via “the cloud” which even with high speed inter­net can lead to delays of mul­tiple seconds for some tasks (“ok google, mute kodi”) for example. I’ve decided to give the free “home assist­ant” a try. As usu­al with any­thing linux based, get­ting it up and run­ning just isn’t straight for­ward. Here’s how…
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0Enable access to the c$ share on Windows 7 and newer

Posted by & filed under Windows.

I have a range of HTPCs run­ning win­dows around the house, which I largely admin­is­ter via remote desktop. Occa­sion­ally it is use­ful to access the root of the C drive remotely. Win­dows has always catered for this by cre­at­ing some default admin­is­trat­ive shares, which are hid­den. The C drive is accessed via \\remote-pc\c$ for example. In win­dows 7 I found I was­n’t able to access these shares by default as they have been restric­ted (under­stand­ably). I needed a way to make them access­ible again.
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1Fixed: Media Center PC wakes in wrong resolution

Posted by & filed under Windows.

Since I upgraded my HTPC to an AMD A5400 series (from the old E350) I have had a prob­lem where on wake from sleep the res­ol­u­tion would be set wrong (1024×768 I think) instead of the full 1920×1080 that the TV sup­ports. Exit­ing media cen­ter would trig­ger a res­ol­u­tion cor­rec­tion and then media cen­ter could be reloaded without issue. This was not sat­is­fact­ory as a solution.
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11Windows Update IconFix Windows Update or Service Pack error 80073712

Published by & filed under Windows. Last updated .

It’s that time of year again, and as always, when I vis­it the fam­ily over xmas there are vari­ous PC issues to resolve. This year there were blessedly few issues, but there was 1 prob­lem that it took me quite a while to track down and resolve. One of the fam­il­ies PCs was fail­ing to install Win­dows 7 ser­vice pack 1. It’s a fairly new PC and came with an OEM install of Win­dows 7 x64 Home Premi­um, all legit and activ­ated. It also has up-to-date anti-vir­us pro­tec­tion, and oth­er than the SP1 install prob­lems it seemed to be in excel­lent work­ing order.… Read Full Article

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