Posts Tagged: windows 7

0Internet Explorer 9 LogoIE10 for Windows 7 finally arrives

Posted by & filed under Web Technologies.

Anoth­er item that we’re a bit late to cov­er is the arrival of Inter­net Explorer 10 for Win­dows 7 (and Serv­er 2008 R2).  As with past releases, older OSes are being left behind with no sup­port for Vista or XP, which are stuck on IE9 and IE8 respect­ively.  If you have Win­dows 7 we recom­mend upgrad­ing (even if you don’t use IE) and of course there is no harm giv­ing it a try.  We’ll prob­ably be stick­ing with Fire­fox and Chrome ourselves, but IE some­times has its uses.

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0codecsComplete codec setup guide for Windows 7⁄8

Posted by & filed under Codecs.

Win­dows 8 is fin­ished and will soon be avail­able for retail sale. With that in mind it seemed a good time to write an updated guide to get­ting codecs set up for a fully oper­a­tion­al HTPC for both Win­dows 7 and 8. For this guide I’m using a new fea­ture of HTML5 which cre­ates expand­able instruc­tions. At the time of writ­ing this is only sup­por­ted by chrome and safari 6 but hope­fully oth­er browsers will add sup­port in the near future.

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0Disable startup repair

Posted by & filed under Windows.

Occa­sion­ally my HTPC gets bogged down doing some­thing and in frus­tra­tion the less tech­nic­al of the house­hold may choose to press the tempt­ing reset but­ton to get things going again.  Occa­sion­ally this upsets Win­dows 7 which attempts to launch “star­tup repair”.  Des­pite the name, ‘star­tup repair’ has nev­er repaired any star­tup prob­lems for me, but instead often causes prob­lems by chan­ging set­tings or repla­cing files I don’t want replaced.  So, I’ve decided to dis­able it

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0Sony VaioDrivers for Windows 7 on Sony Vaio FZs

Published by & filed under Misc Hardware. Last updated .

This is just a quick post to men­tion an excel­lent guide I recently used when installing Win­dows 7 on an old Sony Vaio VGN-FZ31Z laptop. I was hav­ing sig­ni­fic­ant dif­fi­culty installing sev­er­al drivers, in par­tic­u­lar those for the nVidia GeForce 8600M GS (hard­ware ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0425&SUBSYS_9005104D&REV_A1) which was stub­bornly remain­ing a “Stand­ard vga adapter”. Sony don’t provide any Win­dows 7 drivers, and the gen­er­ic nVidia drivers don’t recog­nise the hard­ware ver­sion in the Vaio, instead offer­ing the unhelp­ful error “The NVIDIA setup pro­gram could not loc­ate any drivers that are com­pat­ible with your cur­rent hard­ware.  Setup will now exit.”  There is no good reas­on for this — the drivers have been dis­abled in soft­ware purely because OEM’s like Sony don’t want users installing drivers from nVidia that they (Sony) haven’t checked on their spe­cif­ic hard­ware con­fig­ur­a­tion. This would be under­stand­able if Sony actu­ally bothered to provide sup­port for their old hard­ware, but since they don’t this situ­ation really isn’t acceptable.

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72Canon CanoScan LIDE ScannerGet your old scanner working with Windows 7 x64

Published by & filed under Misc Hardware. Last updated .

In recent months I’ve encountered sev­er­al prob­lems where people have con­tac­ted me ask­ing for help get­ting their USB scan­ners work­ing on new PCs.  In each case the new PCs have come with Win­dows 7 x64, and the scan­ners have been USB devices pro­duced by Can­on and Nikon.  Both of these ima­ging spe­cial­ists have ser­i­ously dropped the ball on sup­port­ing products, includ­ing some quite expens­ive premi­um kit from not all that long ago.
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0Customise Windows 7 install disk

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

This is just a quick post to draw atten­tion to the “RT Se7en Lite” tool which can be used to update, slip­stream, tweak and modi­fy a Win­dows 7 install disk.  A full guide to using the tool for vari­ous dif­fer­ent PC’s is upcom­ing in the next few weeks.  In the mean­time, if you are inter­ested in cus­tom­ising a disk for a HTPC, take a look at this guide on thehtpc.net.

2Windows Media Center eHome LogoFull 7MC codec setup

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

I’ve pre­vi­ously pos­ted sev­er­al times about codec issues on 7mc, but I’ve now got a solu­tion that is com­pre­hens­ive, fairly simple and works con­sist­ently.  With a few free codecs and util­it­ies you can have full decod­ing sup­port, DXVA, sub­titles and fant­ast­ic flex­ib­il­ity work­ing in 64bit (or 32bit) Media Cen­ter.  The fol­low­ing instruc­tions are spe­cif­ic to the x64 edi­tion, but should work just as well on the 32bit edition.
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