0Dial-Up LogoWindows 7 dial-up connection autodial

Published by & filed under Web Technologies. Last updated .

Over the xmas hol­i­days I was asked to look at a few issues with a fam­ily PC. One of the prob­lems was a minor annoy­ance related to the modem-based DSL inter­net con­nec­tion. The dial up box has a tick box which says “con­nect auto­mat­ic­ally”. Although this box was ticked, when the PC was restar­ted when a con­nec­tion was required the same dia­log box would show up, with the option unticked.
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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.

0DVD Shrink LogoAutomate DVD Ripping on Windows 7

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

With my recent HTPC pro­ject now work­ing really well, I want to rip my col­lec­tion of DVDs to my media serv­er for more con­veni­ent play­back in Win­dows 7 Media Cen­ter (and all the addi­tion­al bene­fits asso­ci­ated with Media Browser, par­tic­u­larly the meta data on rat­ings, syn­op­sis, etc). Rip­ping DVDs, whilst straight­for­ward is rather tedi­ous. I found an excel­lent meth­od of auto­mat­ing the pro­cess was to modi­fy my auto­play set­tings with Auto­Play Repair, and point the auto­play to a pro­gram called DVD Rip which auto­mates the rip­ping of DVDs with the well known DVD Shrink.
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0Windows Media Center eHome LogoFixed: Media Center 7 behind taskbar on startup

Published by & filed under Windows Media Center. Last updated .

I’ve had a very irrit­at­ing prob­lem with my new Win­dows 7 Media Cen­ter HTPC setup. I have 7MC set to load full­screen on star­tup (as the PC is a ded­ic­ated HTPC), but some­thing I changed at some point was caus­ing the taskbar to show on top of Media Cen­ter (i.e. Media Cen­ter did­n’t have win­dow focus) and there­fore my remote con­trol did­n’t work until using the mouse func­tion to click on Media Cen­ter to refo­cus it (at which point the taskbar disappears).
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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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0Windows Media Player LogoSwitching the default WMP to x64 in Windows 7

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

One of the strangest things in Win­dows 7 x64 is the pres­ence of both x86 and x64 ver­sions of Win­dows Media Play­er 12. Even stranger is that des­pite Win­dows Media Cen­ter being 64bit only (and there­fore requir­ing 64bit codecs) Microsoft saw fit to set the default WMP12 ver­sion to the x86 edi­tion. For those of us who don’t wish to main­tain 2 sets of codecs it is desir­able to change this default status. How­ever, Microsoft do not appear to have provided a simple way to do this as yet. So here’s how…
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