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  • WPF and Lenovo

    When I get a new laptop (or any PC) if it comes pre-loaded with software then I wipe it and start again as, generally, you can get stuck with what now seem to be called (cr)applets from someone who pre-installed the OS for you. When I got my OS up and running on my Lenovo T61p, I installed the drivers from Lenovo and then I found that I ended up with a bunch of applications that look something like this; and initially I thought that I'd somehow managed to install the wrong software but, over time, I've come to like these applets. Why is it that I like them? They seem to have a certain aesthetic to them and a responsive way of behaving that I don't expect from basic, driver-installed applications like this. I expect them to be dull and boring but these ones seem to have nice UI and nice effects when I interact with them. Today I got to puzzling over how these things are built and so off I went into Process Explorer and found that they're actually built with WPF. I then took one ( PWMUI.exe ) and dropped it into...
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  • PC Speakers

    I seem to be working my way down Cnet's review of PC speakers . In my office, I have these; which I've had for quite a long time and really like and I just got myself a set of these below to attach to the Media Center ( deliberately trying to avoid ending up with a big sub-woofer under my TV or going back to the 5.1 setup I've had in the past which takes over the whole lounge ); and, so far, they sound very nice ( I went for the 30W rather than the 40W ).
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  • Shuttle D10 with Touch-Screen

    Hmm, speaking of Shuttle caused me to go looking at what they're currently selling. This looks really interesting to me . If you go with a "living room" Media Center then one of the odd things about it is the idea that you need to switch on your TV in order to listen to some music. You switch on the Media Center, switch on the TV, choose an album and then probably switch off the TV as that seems a bit wasteful. Having the touch-screen on there seems like a nice idea. I know there are various other cases that do this but this one looks pretty nice and I'm quite keen on Shuttles. The downside looks to be that there's only one card-slot in there. A single PCI-E card slot to take a TV tuner which is fine as long as you never want to replace the integrated graphics ( e.g. to get an HDMI output or perhaps to take on Blu-Ray at some point ) although you could perhaps drop to an external USB tuner to free up a slot. Mmmm.
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  • GeForce 6200 in my Vista Sp1 Media Center

    One of the very best things about Vista is Media Center. You never really hear people talk about Media Center when they talk about Vista but Media Center is one app that I can easily put hand on heart and say that, for me, in Vista it's 100% better than it was in XP. It runs my TV and it does it really well. It records the TV I ask it to and it does it around 99% of the time I'd say whereas with XP (on the same machine I hasten to add) it was about 65% of the time. It was always coming up with excuses about why it'd failed to record some series or other. So, I thought I'd give my Media Center a bit of a treat and get it a new graphics card. It'd been running with an FX 5200 with (IIRC) 128MB or RAM in it and I'd like to give it a stunning card but; They're noisy. This box is under my TV. They're expensive. So I bought another cheap card - a 6200 seeing that nVidia actually mention the 6 series on their website whereas they long since stopped mentioning the 5 series which made it tricky to find a driver beyond...
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  • Vista Complete PC Restore, 0x80042401, DiskPart, WbAdmin

    I picked up a new laptop, a Lenovo T61P to go alongside ( or, more likely replace depending on the "powers that be" ) my existing HP NC8430. I wanted to kick start the process of moving from one machine to the other or of running the two in tandem by imaging my existing hard-drive to the new machine. My existing hard-drive is a 200GB 7200rpm disk and the new one is a 160GB 7200rpm disk. I have about 50GB free on my existing hard-drive so that doesn't seem too limiting. I used the Vista "Complete PC Backup" feature and that worked a treat on the source machine in terms of creating the image. However, then the fun and games started. I booted the new PC from a Vista DVD ( note - this was a Vista RTM DVD as I don't have an Sp1 DVD and that might be the root cause of the problem I encountered ). I went into the "Repair my PC" screen and then tried to restore the complete image backup. No dice. I kept getting error 0x80042401 which is in many online forums and says something along the lines of "You have too few disks...
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  • Dell Hybrid

    Dell's got a (reasonably) nice looking little machine that might make a nice Media Center. I run ( Vista ) Media Center under my TV on a Shuttle box ( search the blog for Shuttle you'll find the specs ) every day and it works extremely well. For me, Media Center is one of the bits of Vista that it's very easy to point at and say "This is way better than it was on XP". However, I think it's true to say that I spec'd the Shuttle for XP and not for Vista. Whilst it runs Vista well enough it doesn't quite zing when it comes to the Media Center UI ( I think I turned off a bunch of transitions way back ) and I was using one of these Sony boxes in a shop the other week and it highlighted to me that my performance with Media Center could be better. Hence...the look at the Dell Hybrid. I'm not sure it'll quite work for me though as; I'm not sure whether the integrated graphics will cut it or not. It looks to accept no internal cards so I'm not sure how I'd get a TV tuner into it. I guess I could find one of those USB tuners...
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  • Fire :-)

    Following on from this I've had a couple of incidents now where I've closed the lid on my laptop ( which is set to Sleep when I close the lid ). I've then dropped it into my bag only to find ( say ) 20 minutes later that there's a lot of heat coming from the bag ( to be fair, the bag is padded and things warm up nicely in there ). I pull the laptop from the bag to find that it hasn't actually gone to sleep at all, it's sitting in there gradually melting until ( I guess ) the CPU will finally shut itself down due to overheating. I didn't use to have this on XP although I didn't used to run this particular laptop with XP so it's not perhaps a fair comparison - I guess I need to get Vista Sp1 and every driver and BIOS update and see if that improves the situation ( or maybe get another laptop ).
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  • LinkSys USB200M

    My media center PC has a problem. It's a Shuttle PC, I've blogged the specs on this website before but I think the base spec is SN85G4V2 if I remember correctly. It's all fine and Media Center works better with Vista than it did with XP for me so that's a good story too. However, the box has one problem and it always has had since I bought it. The network card (which IIRC is all part of the nForce 3 chipset) is rubbish. I've always had problems with this card. It would never (under XP or Vista) run at 100mbps. It would only run at 10mbps and, even then, I've been suspicious that it was actually running at much, much lower speeds. This has always meant that transfers from the media center to other machines in the house have been problematic (i.e. slow). Also, Nvidia don't support nForce 3 for Vista so you have to use the MS driver. I don't know how good/bad this is but it exhibits the same problems as I had running with the Nvidia drivers under XP so I think I have to blame the card. Because the PC is a shuttle...
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  • Looking for a NAS

    I've been looking for a simple home NAS box and I'm realising that there's a heck of a lot of choice out there and quite a lot of devices have arrived in the last 6 - 12 months (and at the recent CES). I never thought I'd buy a NAS for home. The primary reasoning behind not buying one was I've never trusted my network at home. It's always been rubbish so I always thought that buying a NAS would just make things worse in that I'd have a bunch of files on the NAS and I'd need to reboot numerous devices every time I wanted to access those files. However, since Wi-Fi and I parted company I now trust my home network. It's rock solid. It works. Everyday. I hardly ever reboot the router any more. So...the whole idea of a NAS comes back into play. When it comes to a NAS, I don't want anything fancy.I want a box at the simple end of the spectrum. Something that's small, cool, quiet and needs zero admin and simply offers some network-shared disk space to PC/Mac clients. I also don't need a tonne of shared space. Most of...
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  • Compaq nc8430, Vista, ATI, Driver, Blue Screen

    My laptop is an HP Compaq NC8430. It's got a T7400 running at 2.00GHz, 4GB of RAM and a 200GB 7200 rpm disk in it. It's a nice laptop and one of the better ones that I've had although the screen could definitely be brighter and (like all changes of laptop brand) getting used to the keyboard took time. It's only problem (when running Vista) is that it seems to be challenged by sleep/hibernation. I'm not sure if this is a Vista problem or a driver problem but I suspect the latter. One symptom; What frequently happens is that after sleep the display output refuses to be sent to any monitor so you're stuck with a working laptop but with no display. If you're lucky, you can unlock it "blind" and restart it ( IIRC the key combination is START->3 right arrows->3 up arrows->ENTER :-) ). Today, I caught it blue-screening in the ATI driver coming out of hibernation. Vista came up after it re-started and told me that it had spotted a crash in the ATI driver. Good stuff. I go to ATI. They say "sorry, we don't do...
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