I have been having some problems with my new Samsung Series 9 Ultrabook (NP900X1B-A03UK), whenever on battery the wifi performance was terrible when used with a Netgear WNDR3800. After much investigation I finally tracked down a solution. Go into control panel, select the power profile and click advanced - now turn the wifi to max performance when on battery. Has been great ever since...
My PC speakers stopped working this morning - not bad seeing as they are over 15 years old. Having real trouble finding suitable replacements though - have settled for some cheap Logitech ones until the perfect set finds me...
My old HP ran out of ink again, which was the perfect time to get a new printer :) The MG6150 is faster to print, can do duplex printing and is totally wireless - plus it gets rid of all the HORRIBLE HP software from my computer!!!
I bought a new mouse today having seen it in WIRED magazine. The RAT 9 is totally customisable to your hand...and looks, well, like some kind of robotic snack :) The base station also doubles as a charger and weight carrier (yes, weights so you can alter the feel of the mouse). Totally OTT - I love it!!!
Got this message recently when trying to start outlook (Office 7, Win7 x64)..
"Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. Cannot open the Outlook Window"
Fixed it with start -> run -> Outlook.exe /resetnavpane
I've been having some problems this week with my Home Server - every time I try to back up one of my machines it returns an error saying that a file is in use. I tracked this back to server error logs complaining of an IO error. Chkdsk returned nothing - but when trying to open the names file I got errors. So, it seems like a corrupted DAT file - problem is that these particular files are not mirrored or backed up. In the end I worked around it by removing the backup config for that machine, and then reinstalling the home connector software. A bit of a worry though if an old backup corrupts - there is no way I can see to recover it.
There have been some price cuts on the top end Broadband services today. As such I've upgraded to the 50MB/s tier. It actually saved me £3 as I pay £5 a month for cloud storage which is included free with this top-end service. Install date is next Thu :)
Oh dear - out of the blue (excuse the pun) I got this - seems some sort of Avast AV issue. Let's hope this is nto a sign of things to come and that they fix the issue quickly. To be fair though, this is the first and only one I have seen.
My new laptop came yesterday and today has been spent installing all the various bits and pieces needed on it for work. You forget quite how much you have until you have to set it all up again!
In an attempt to speed up video transcoding (I'm putting many of my DVDs on iTunes) I bought a new processor for my main machine today. I am upgrading from a Core 2 Duo 2.4 to a Core 2 Quad 2.88 (Q9550). Should be here early next week...
UPDATE: It's here - it's fast!
The lovely chaps at Dell are replacing my Latitude D620 with a brand new E6400 as the old one keeps crashing due to heat. They say it will be with me very soon, am hoping it comes on or before next Thu so that it coincides with Win7 being released on MSDN.
K got a slightly early wedding anniversary present yesterday - a shiney new 13" MacBook Pro. Took 6 hours to transfer her info from the old one to this and most of today for its first timemachine backup. Seems nice though - I like the backlit keyboard!
After 10 years it is back: http://www.telltalegames.com/monkeyisland
If you are quick you can order the special edition pack ;)
I've been encoding some old 720x576/1.25 AVIs in order to get them on my AppleTV. This has taken a few attempts - here's what I've learnt (I'm using Handbrake):
- max resolution is 1280x720
- max framerate is 24fps
- max bit rate is 5Mb/s
I'm using the H.264 codec and am using Handbrake's 'decomb' filter to remove the interlace artifacts. They show up in the ATV as HD content and actually look pretty good.
Just had a call from Virgin Media. Special offer to long term customers. Upgrade from 10MB to 20MB broadband, add-on free calls evening and weekends to any UK land line and all free as long as I sign up for another 12 months. Was not going to change anyway - so thanks!
I now have 20MB down and 750K up :)
UPDATE: another £5/month gets you unlimited online storage, so I'm going to quit my S3 account and will use this instead (nearly half price for me and I get to backup everything - not just my 50GB of photos).
After 2 days of getting my machine just the way I wanted it I was quite happy with a nice new and fast OS again. This morning I booted up and noticed some windows updates. I duly applied them and restarted. On start up I got the familiar 'stage 3 of 3' update notice. However, instead of booting it appeared to enter a boot loop :( Safe mode also affected. In the end I had to run recovery from the original Vista install disk and restore to a previous image. Not happy...
Fix: uninstall all .net components. Run an MS cleanup util and then re-install .net in order. Took forever!
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923100
