Posts Categorised: Windows

0Windows Media Player LogoWindows volume control of HDMI output

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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0Remove driver preventing windows from booting

I recently tried installing AMD StoreMI on my Win­dows 2022 serv­er. Big mis­take — it imme­di­ately failed to boot with a BSOD. And this was just after installing — I had­n’t even run the pro­gram. So the first les­son is not to trust AMD’s soft­ware — abso­lutely shocking!
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3Enable windows desktop slideshow with a script

I’ve been updat­ing my unat­ten­ded win­dows deploy­ment setup recently, and one of the things I wanted to enable was the slideshow wall­pa­per with the loc­a­tion set to my wall­pa­pers loc­a­tion on my serv­er. This isn’t as straight-for­ward as it ought to be, but after bit of fid­dling around I figured out how to do it fairly simply.
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0Batch script to rename PC based on reserved DHCP name

I use WDS on a stan­dalone serv­er to set up new PCs and to reim­age PCs when they have ended up mangled bey­ond repair. With a good num­ber of PCs in my own house it is use­ful to reim­age them oca­sion­ally when swap­ping or upgrad­ing hard­ware. Most of this pro­cess is now auto­mated by an unattend.xml file but one step the unat­ten­ded pro­cess does­n’t seem to sup­port is renam­ing PCs back to their ori­gin­al name.
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0windows 8 logoscript to create and name network shares

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

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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0Canon CanoScan LIDE ScannerGetting old scanners working with Windows 10 64bit

Many years back I wrote an art­icle about how to get old scan­ners work­ing with Win­dows 7 x64. I recently upgraded the PC con­nec­ted to the scan­ners to Win­dows 10 and was faced with the same chal­lenge all over again. Amaz­ingly the same tricks worked and both scan­ners are now work­ing! Below I detail pre­cisely how to achieve this.
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1Sony VaioTouchpad settings on Sony Vaio VPCSB

My old man has a Sony Vaio VPCSB laptop, a 13.3″ mod­el that is now about 10 years old but thanks to an SSD and extra RAM is still more than adequate for today’s demands. I recently upgraded it to Win­dows 10, des­pite no help at all from Sony, and ran into an issue with the touch­pad hav­ing all the silly Win­dows 10 swip­ing and scrolling turned on by default with no obvi­ous way to turn it off.
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0Windows Update IconWindows 7 to 10 upgrade error 0x8007001f

I was recently try­ing to upgrade a Win­dows 7 PC to Win­dows 10 but after sev­er­al reboots the win­dows 10 install­a­tion was fail­ing with an error “The install­a­tion failed in the SAFE_OS phase with an error dur­ing REPLACE_OC oper­a­tion” with code 0x8007001f — 0×20006.
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0windows 8 logoMore WDS errors solved

WDS really is quite an unfriendly sys­tem. Clunky, fiddly, and prone ot fail­ure without help­ful error inform­a­tion. After updat­ing some of my unat­ten­ded files I was no longer able to carry out unat­ten­ded install­a­tions, but have even­tu­ally solved the series of mis­lead­ing errors
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