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

Published by & filed under Misc Mobile. Last updated .

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 down­loads page
  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

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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0Windows Media Player LogoOutputting WMP Videos to second display

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

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 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 my pre­vi­ous post). 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

Published by & filed under Misc Hardware. Last updated .

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

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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