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Archive for the ‘Windows’ Category

Don’t touch that dial!

Friday, June 18th, 2010

VideoLan (or VLC as it is otherwise known) is a great piece of software. It’s capable of playing a plethora of video and audio file types. It’s also capable of converting files, streaming files over the network, and viewing live TV via any TV cards you might have.

Because of the way it works, it’s possible to take any input, and spit it out in any way pretty much. Some time ago I’d seen a discussion on a mailing list about using VLC and a digital TV card to broadcast live TV over the network (using multicast). I’d had a quick play, but never got it working. A discussion popped up on the Multiplay forums, so I thought I’d try and get it working again. Last night I was successful, so I thought I’d blog it up in case it’s useful for others. VLC is documented, but the documentation is a bit hit and miss in places – always the problem for many Open Source projects.

Read more after the jump.

Continue Reading…

Posted in Computers, General, Networking, TV, Windows | 1 Comment »

7 into 2133 does go

Friday, August 14th, 2009

I’ve been running Windows 7 on my main PC all this week, and I’ve very quickly found myself getting used to it. Even the new Start Bar is growing on me daily.

I decided today to see if my little HP 2133 netbook could take it. The HP has no optical drive, and I have no external USB drives. I had a IDE-USB converter thingy I’d used with an IDE CD drive in the past, but I’d blown the PSU on it. I needed another solution.

I’ve installed Linux from USB drives in the past, and I knew it was possible to install Windows onto HP Proliant servers using Smartstart and a USB drive. I was vaguely aware any PC could do it, you just needed a method.

A quick google turned up this blog entry:

HOWTO: Install Windows Vista from a high speed USB 2.0 Flash Drive – Windows Live.

I reasoned that Windows 7 is basically Vista so the theory was probably the same. I got my 4GB SanDisk USB drive, downloaded the Windows 7 Home Premium ISO from Technet, and started setting up the disk.

After plugging it into the netbook, I powered up, and selected it from the boot menu. Imagine my surprise when it worked! Not only that, but it booted, and installed perfectly fine. I wondered if it had done something stupid like installed the boot loader on the USB drive (had that happen before) or messed up the drive letters, but no, everything is where it should be.

What impressed me the most was that during the setup, it found my wireless controller, and set up my connection to the AP. Next it activated with Microsoft (although oddly told me it had expired, and must be activated), and I was in. Windows Update was already showing activity so I had a look and found all the other drivers waiting to be installed. Once they had installed and rebooted, I have a fully set up Netbook!

The start bar looks like it could be very useable on the netbook, and it seems pretty nippy. I’d run XP on it before as I decided Vista was a pointless excercise. Don’t get me wrong, I rather like Vista, and had been running it for some time, but it really doesn’t get on well with low-end hardware. This little machine seems to be OK with Windows 7 however, so I’ll have to see how it goes.

Posted in Computers, Links, Rave, Windows | Comments Off

Now UAC it. Now you don’t.

Friday, December 12th, 2008

I’ve been using Windows Vista’s User Access Control (UAC) on my computers for some while. When I first started using Vista at home, I turned it off, but then turned it back on just to see how I’d get on with it.

Roll forward two years, and I’m now running Vista Ultimate 64-bit and 32-bit on my home desktop and laptop PCs respectively, plus Vista Business Edition on my work desktop and laptop PCs. I was seeing UAC prompts ALL DAY at work. Opening Active Directory Users and Computers would cause the prompt to appear. Going near any sort of management tool would cause it to appear. I was getting fed up with seeing it!

So I decided I’d had enough and turned it off on both my work PCs. I also switched it off on home laptop. In each case, it quietly went away, and that was that. My home PC wasn’t quite so straight-forward.

Vista has a rather nice new feature whereby it will re-direct any files and folders being dropped into Program Files or the Windows directory to a folder in the current user’s application data folder (C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\VirtualStore – it’s hidden, so you might not see it). This, however, only happens if you have UAC enabled. So having switched it off, I rebooted, and found some of my applications suddenly thought they weren’t registered or setup.

I went into the VirtualStore folder, and found this:

virtualstore

Oddly enough, Dream Aquarium, DMT and Objectdock were all the apps complaining at me about licences and lost configs. The fix was quite simple. I basically copied the contents of those directories into the corresponding directories in C:\Program Files (x86)\ (as it’s vista x64). Restarted the apps, et voila, they suddenly work.

It’s a shame turning off UAC doesn’t give you the option to merge the virtualstore back into Program Files, but then again it could make things even more confusing if you turned UAC back on, as suddenly applications wouldn’t be able to write to those files, so would fail miserably. I’ve had a few things do that randomly in the past.

So if you’re going to turn off UAC, it’s probably best to do it when you first install Windows.

Posted in Computers, General, Windows | Comments Off