Posts Categorised: Computing

0Flash Flv LogoPlaying downloaded FLV’s

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

I recently had a prob­lem with 2 PCs which appeared to be con­figured identic­ally, but whilst one would play a FLV down­loaded from you­tube, the oth­er would fail. Some oth­er FLVs played OK on both sys­tems. After much fur­ther invest­ig­a­tion I dis­covered that the act­iveX ver­sion of flash play­er on 1 of the PC’s was up-to-date, but on the oth­er was not.
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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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0Inside HDD LogoSpeed up SSDs, especially in netbooks

Published by & filed under Storage. Last updated .

I recently upgraded the SSD in an Asus eeePC 901, and whilst the size and per­form­ance were both bet­ter, the per­form­ance upgrade still was­n’t on par with even a 5+ year old laptop HDD. The prob­lem with most SSDs, espe­cially the cheap­er ones, is that they usu­ally have very poor write per­form­ance with small files. This can make win­dows very slug­gish and unre­spons­ive at times.
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0Microsoft Office Outlook LogoGet rid of the outlook reading pane

Published by & filed under Web Technologies. Last updated .

One of the most irrit­at­ing things in MS Out­look is the read­ing pane. Not only is it turned on by default, but accord­ing to Microsoft there is no way to change this default. Well, I beg to differ.…

Below are spe­cif­ic instruc­tions for Out­look 2007. Oth­er ver­sions of out­look will no doubt dif­fer slightly, but it should be pos­sible to find the same settings
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0Inside HDD LogoUpgrading the SSD in an eeePC 901

Published by & filed under Storage. Last updated .

I’ve recently been asked to upgrade the SSD drive in an Asus eeePC 901. Rather than write about it in detail here I’ll just say that the oper­a­tion was pain­less and a great suc­cess, mostly thanks to the excel­lent guide provided at Bit­Tech

I replaced the default 4gig SSD (leav­ing the 16gig one intact) with a sim­il­ar speed 16gig drive which cost £43 from ebay

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

0Ultrabook logo laptop vaio sonyGetting inside an Asus A2xxx

Published by & filed under Misc Hardware. Last updated .

I recently had to get inside an old-ish Asus A2500 laptop to invest­ig­ate an issue with the CD-ROM drive (and to upgrade the memory and add a wire­less card). Most laptops have a cov­er above the key­board that pops off, but on this par­tic­u­lar laptop it did­n’t seem attached in the usu­al way.
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