0Inside HDD LogoUpgrading the SSD in an eeePC 901

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”

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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0Nokia 6101 logoGetting a Nokia 6101 working via CA-42 cable with PC Suite

I’ve had some real issues con­nect­ing an old Nokia 6101 to a laptop via a genu­ine Nokia CA-42 cable. Des­pite repeated attempts to get help from Nokia the prob­lem remained unre­solved until recently. The pro­ced­ure which appears to have resolved the issue is as follows

  1. Remove the nokia cable driver sup­plied with PC Suite. This can be achieved by down­load­ing the installer for the cable driver, run­ning it, and choos­ing to remove. This leaves PC Suite intact. but removes the driver for the CA-42 cable which did­n’t seem to work.
  2. Down­load and extract the altern­at­ive cable driver, avail­able on the [int­link id=“741” type=“page”]downloads page[/intlink]
  3. Plug in the cable and when win­dows detects it and prompts for a driver, point it to the extrac­ted altern­at­ive driver

0Windows 7 Autologon

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

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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0Windows Media Player LogoOutputting WMP Videos to second display

When using a PC with a second dis­play (for example a laptop with a data pro­ject­or) it is often a com­mon prob­lem to find that a video played with Win­dows Media Play­er will only dis­play on the primary dis­play, and not on the sec­ond­ary output.

There are vari­ous dif­fer­ent con­fig­ur­a­tions which con­trib­ute to this beha­viour — Win­dows set­tings, Win­dows Media Play­er set­tings and Graph­ics Card driver settings.
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0Microsoft Security Essentials LogoMicrosoft Security Essentials final

Microsoft have updated their free secur­ity essen­tials pack­age again. The soft­pe­dia link from my [int­link id=“20” type=“post”]original post[/intlink] now offers ver­sion 1.0.1611.00 to download.

-update-

This appears to be the final release and is now avail­able dir­ect from Microsoft

0Microsoft Security Essentials LogoMicrosoft AntiVirus 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

0Ultrabook logo laptop vaio sonyRepair HP Laptops and other hardware cheaply

I was recently asked to look at the touch­pad on a HP Pavil­ion DV2000 laptop which had a faulty left but­ton. Spares and repairs for laptops are often hard to come by so I was pleased to find the HP Ser­vice manu­al as a PDF, which included all the part num­bers, and then very pleased to find that HP offer an extens­ive dir­ect sales ser­vice for most parts via the HP PartSurfer. Suf­fice to say this laptop is now fixed, for a very low price. Good move by HP — I won­der if oth­er major man­u­fac­tur­ers provide a sim­il­ar service?

0Google Earth LogoGoogle Earth: How to fix poor quality overlays

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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