Broken — Tag

Just checked the weather and hit upon the lows for tonight and tomorrow night,

Yeah, I’m afraid. Metservice

I just got myself a Microsoft Windows Media Center remote. When I opened up the box from the courier, I noticed no CD. Oh well, I thought, I’ll just download the drivers from the Microsoft website.

Wrong. There are no drivers available to download from the Microsoft website, even though there is a link on the page above saying “Download Software.” The drivers come pre-packaged in Windows XP Pro and MCE. So what do you do?

Search the internet! And I came upon this:

You can get them with the following procedure.
1) Download the Windows Update “Update Rollup 2 for eHome Infrared Receiver for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (KB912024)” from microsoft. It is available from this page (Microsoft.com).
2) run the downloaded executable. When the Hotfix install wizard appears on the screen… STOP!! do not continue with the installation wizard.
3) run notepad, and open the file named kb912024.log that is located in your windows system directory (usually c:\windows\).
4) on the fourth line of this file you will find the path to the update executable (ie: c:\0d5602f37f532d2198a162164df6\update\update.exe).
5) Open Windows and navigate to the root of this path (ie: c:\0d5602f37f532d2198a162164df6). There you will find SP2QFE. Navigate to this directory.
6) In the SP2QPE directory you will find the irbus.sys file. In the “ip” directory will contain the irbus.inf file.
7) Copy these two files to a temporary directory of your choice.
Go back to the Hotfix install wizard and select CANCEL. The wizard will ask if you are sure… answer yes. The wizard will clean up after itself.

Thank you Cybrmage your method worked a treat!

Then all I did was check a box in MediaPortal and it worked. (Yes, I switched to MediaPortal over the weekend).

Hibernation is my favourite power saving method – I press my power button and my computer powers down. I press it again and it starts up again, but with everything exactly the way I left it. Sleep never gave me the same satisfaction of reducing my power usage. But Windows XP gave me troubles with this upgraded machine of mine. I’d press the power button, Windows will proclaim it’s about to hibernate, but everything goes horribly wrong, the screen cuts out, comes back in, with a nice little balloon telling me

Windows - System Error: Insufficient system resources exist to complete the API.

How can their be insufficient resources? I have 220GB+ free on my hard drive! The system logs tell me nothing either.

Well, it appears that Windows does have troubles from time-to-time when your RAM exceeds 1GB. Go to the Knowledge Base article 909095 and download the hot fix patch there (you won’t find it in Windows Update). The problem should now be fixed.

Excellent.

[Tip: Tales from the Crypto]

The more information in the KB article says:

To prepare the computer to hibernate, the Windows kernel power manager requires a block of contiguous memory. The size of this contiguous memory is proportional to the number of physical memory regions that the computer is using. A computer that uses lots of RAM is likely to use more physical memory regions when the computer prepares to hibernate. Therefore, a larger amount of contiguous memory is required to prepare the computer to hibernate.

Additionally, the number of physical memory regions varies according to the programs, services, and device drivers that the computer uses. Therefore, the hibernate feature occasionally fails.

That still doesn’t explain why it failed on my machine… oh well.

Neowin, NVNews have reported that a new patch has been sent out to testers fixing many, very annoying performance and reliability issues in Vista. Included in the fixes are the problems that drove me back to XP:

938979 Vista Performance and Reliability Pack
This update resolves a number of individual issues which may be affecting some computers running Windows Vista. These issues have been reported by customers using the Error Reporting service, product support, or other means. Installing this update will improve the performance and responsiveness for some scenarios and improves reliability of Windows Vista in a variety of scenarios. Some examples of the improvements contained in this update are:

* Improves performance in resuming back to the desktop from the Photo and Windows Energy screensaver.
* Resolves an issue where some secured web pages using advanced security technologies may not get displayed in Internet Explorer on Windows Vista.
* Resolves an issue where a shared printer may not get installed if the printer is connected to a Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 system and User Access Control is disabled on the Vista client.
* Resolves an issue where creating AVI files on Vista may get corrupted.
* Improves the performance in calculating the ‘estimated time remaining’ when copying/moving large files.
* Improves performance in bringing up Login Screen after resuming from Hibernate.
* Resolves an issue where synchronization of offline files to a server can get corrupted.
* Resolves a compatibility issue with RAW images created by Canon EOS 1D/1DS Digital SLR Camera which can lead to data loss. This only affects RAW images created by these two specific camera models.
* Resolves an issue where a computer can lose its default Gateway address when resuming from sleep mode.
* Improves the performance when copying or moving entire directories containing large amounts of data or files.
* Improves the performance of Vista’s Memory Manager in specific customer scenarios and prevents some issues which may lead to memory corruption.

938194 Vista Compatibility and Reliability Pack
This update resolves a number of individual issues which may be affecting some computers running Windows Vista. These issues have been reported by customers using the Error Reporting service, product support, or other means. Installing this update will improve the reliability and hardware compatibility of Windows Vista in a variety of scenarios. Some examples of the improvements contained in this update are:

* Improved reliability and compatibility of Vista when used with newer graphics cards in several specific scenarios and configurations.
* Improved reliability when working with external displays on a laptop.
* Increased compatibility with many video drivers.
* Improved visual appearance of games with high intensity graphics.
* Improved quality of playback for HD-DVD and Blue-Ray disks on large monitors.
* Improved reliability for Internet Explorer when some third party toolbars are installed on Vista.
* Improved Vista reliability in networking configuration scenarios.
* Improved the reliability of Windows Calendar in Vista.
* Improved reliability of systems that were upgraded from XP to Vista.
* Increased compatibility with many printer drivers.
* Increased reliability and performance of Vista when entering sleep and resuming from sleep.

Some minor annoyances that I had (such as the no sound when going into hibernation while something is making a noise) aren’t in that list, but still, this is very promising from Microsoft. See the link for the downloads.

Will it send me back to Vista? No, not yet. I’ll wait until SP1 thankyouverymuch. I’ve had my pre-SP1 fun - that’s for sure.

Speaking of computers, it seems mine is playing up tonight, but I think it has something to do with the powerboard I’m using, or even the power supply (need to get that replaced soon anyhow). I dunno though, there were times when not even the graphics card BIOS would start…

I have TVNZ.co.nz as my homepage. It’s neat, compact and lets me know what I’m missing on TV as well as the news. Of course, if you are one to have it as your homepage you do see how often the website breaks. Usually, it is just single sections, for example, when they update the news block you get the “an error has occurred” message in that section.

Rarely, though, do you see them completely screw up.

I haven’t seen a website that does this so regularly. Maybe they should divert cutting staff at TVNZ Interactive (as far as I’m aware, they are already tight on staff anyway).

The website is long due for an update - all the other news websites have in the past six months.

Vista, I tried to like you but you aren’t giving me as much joy as I had hoped.

I recently bought a new graphics card, a GeForce 7900GS. I was happy to finally have a powerful graphics card to play games smoothly. However, when I played City of Heroes, I got low frame rates. Like, really low. About 10 FPS. Disappointed, I installed XP again. And the increase in performance was big, I could now muster 25 FPS. Sure, not what I was hoping for, but much better. I had been told by the fellows at the City of Heroes boards I need at least 2GB of RAM - especially on Vista. I thought, fair enough. Then I checked out task manager.

Notice how not alot of my RAM is free. And also notice how most of the pagefile (which it decided to be 2.2GB) is also taken up. What gives?

Sure, I haven’t shut it down for a while (I hibernate) but still. I have Windows Media Player playing music, and Firefox running. There is a lot to like in Vista, but for now the cons just keep weighing my experience down with Vista.

I might flick over to the old bootloader soon Vista if you don’t behave.

Telecom cried that it was going to go the fastest it could, uncapped (except during peak times). However, a major botch up to the traffic shaping as meant everything, including normal web traffic, was being shaped. Today Telecom has had to refund 60,000 customers $7.5 to 8.8 million. The credit for those who have been on the plan since the beginning (December) will get up to $160 back.

Telecom are no longer accepting new sign ups to the plan until an internal technical review is completed.

The plan was launched in December in response to being forced to uncap bandwidth. It provided a list of services that were going to be shaped, including peer to peer (P2P) applications.

This is going to hit them where it hurts.

• Read the press release

I finally got my copy of Windows Vista (Business) and installed it last night. The “wow” lasted for about five seconds until I had to grapple with Creative’s lack of Live! 5.1 drivers. Unfortunately, they will never ever be produced. So I’ll have to upgrade my sound card.

I tried the kX drivers at first, but the version downloadable from the site didn’t work correctly with Vista (it sort of does, just the Mixer didn’t work). I then tried the modded drivers and they didn’t work at all. I then took out the sound card and tried the onboard sound. No luck with any of the drivers I downloaded (from Gigabyte, Intel or Realtek). I then found newer kX drivers on the forums (Version M), so I put back in my sound card and tried those. It works, not perfectly (full Vista support will be in 3539, not 3538), but it’ll do.

I think I might just upgrade to an Audigy card, as my current card is getting on and I’m hearing pops and clicks every so often.

So now starts my Vista.

Looks like Microsoft still need to update the Live.com search dictionary.

If you are like me, a poor student who can’t afford really expensive graphics packages such as Photoshop and CorelDRAW, you’ll probably use The GIMP to do your drawing.

If you are also like me, and use Windows Vista, you may have noticed a little problem. It hangs when it is querying Fonts. When you force it to close, Windows Error Reporting gives you a report back saying that a Microsoft analyst looked at the problem and it was an “Unknown Error.”

Well, don’t fret. In fact, just hold up a tick. For some reason, GIMP takes a long time in querying fonts in Vista. It’ll eventually continue on in its normal fashion. Next time you load it up, the fonts will be cached, so it won’t take as long next time.