Archive

Cleaning the Windows

Published
by
Chris
on January 14, 2008
in Software
. 6 Comments

One thing that annoys me with Windows is how easily useless stuff builds up and never goes away until you stumble across it all. Sure you can trudge through it all and find uninstallers or manually remove it, but I usually find the best way is a simple reinstall of Windows. Oh, and by the way, I’m not talking about windows on your house, I’m talking about WindowsXP. :p

Over the past year I performed a number of hacks and mods, most of which can’t be removed. Two big ones I done were to add Media Center 2005 to XP Pro and add the sidebar from Vista.

So now, I’m currently going through Windows Setup (formatting at 25%), then comes the fun of installing drivers, updates and then finding all the programs that I use daily.

On the upside, this gives me a chance to look at what I use and see if there are any alternatives out there that may be better.

Some may wonder why I don’t just install Ubuntu (or other linux flavour), but the reason behind it is that I can do things much faster in Windows, I don’t really have time to tell Ubuntu who is boss trying to work it out, and I have a heap of Windows only programs that I use regularly and I don’t want to fart around with virtual machines, oh, and I stream to my Xbox360 and my wife doesn’t like Linux.

Reader Question: For you Windows users out there, how often do you do a fresh install of Windows and why? Any hints or tips I should take note of for next time?

Back to 2 colums

Published
by
Chris
on January 9, 2008
in Asides and Site Related
. 0 Comments

As much as I have loved the single column layout provided by K2, I have found it to be rather annoying having to scroll to the bottom all the time, and I have grown to love my sidebar, so I have gone back to the default 2 columns. This also allows me to show a few things on my sidebar when someone visits this blog like my Facebook status and my Xbox Live gamercard.

Alienware Curved Display

Published
by
Chris
on January 7, 2008
in Hardware
. 1 Comment

Alienware curved display

 

How cool is this? This is running Crysis at a resolution of 2880×900!! It’s on display at CES2008. More info over at Engadget. I’ll have one thanks.

Xbox Live Issues

Published
by
Chris
on January 6, 2008
in Gaming
. 0 Comments

Xbox LiveI’m really starting to get sick of all of these problems that Xbox Live is currently having, but come on, it’s been almost 2 weeks and things still haven’t improved. Well, from my end, things haven’t changed. Call of Duty 4 is probably the only game that I’m interested in playing at the moment, along with another 500k people.

I’ve just spent the best part of about 30 minutes trying to join games, invite friends, and even host a private match, and I keep getting errors say that I must have an active network connection. Funny thing is that I’m chatting to a friend over Xbox Live right now.

I don’t know the ins and outs of how things are done with the Xbox Live servers, but I’m sure it couldn’t be too hard to add a few more servers in here and there to cope with demand. Gee, just yesterday they announced that they have sold over 17.7 million consoles and that signups to Xbox Live managed to crash the signup servers.

I know that Microsoft have said that they are going to give a free arcade game to members, but I think that they really need to pull their finger out and get this sorted out ASAP before people start to loose faith and move to another platform.

Anyway, I’m just have a bit of a rant about this whole thing.

I ♥ K2

Published
by
Chris
on January 4, 2008
in Site Related
. 3 Comments

Since I came across the K2 theme for WordPress back in the day when it was still in Beta 1, I haven’t used any other theme. Since then, I’ve learnt a heap about CSS and PHP, though I still have a long way to go, but I have managed to do a few mods and hacks to my blog over the years. One mod that I’ve been wanting to do is a single column layout with possible some content on the bottom. I’ve tried over the years to do this, but I always seem to loose interest and don’t end up doing anything.

Today I installed the latest release of K2, Release Candidate 3, and to my surprise in the settings there was an option for 1 column. I tried this out and instantly thought, that’s what I’ve been wanting!! The other good thing is that having this built into K2 is that I can now use the K2 module system for the sidebars.

I don’t know how long this single column feature has been implemented into K, but it was a nice surprise.

Restarting… New blog in 3… 2… 1…

Published
by
Chris
on January 2, 2008
in Site Related
. 3 Comments

Ah, here we go.

First of all, I’d like to apologise for anyone that has come here looking for something specific. The old database for my blog has started to get a tonne of errors, so I decided it was time to start fresh. The old database has lasted since day one when I started this site, and has seen 3 different servers in it’s time.

I’m planning on going through a backup of my database and collecting some of my more usefull posts and adding them back into this blog, as well, as a few visual changes, but for now we will have to live with what’s here for now.

Vista Sidebar for XP

Published
by
Chris
on June 11, 2007
in Software
. 0 Comments

Please note that some info in this post may be out of date. Please use this post for reference purposes and a point in the right direction.

Ever since I first used the Vista back in the early days of when it was still in Beta, I fell in love with the Sidebar that it had. Sure enough it’s not a feature rich as Desktop Sidebar, but I but I still like it.

For the last little while, I’ve been looking for a sidebar project that is able to use the gadgets for the Vista Sidebar, but I was starting to think that this didn’t exist. The closest that I’ve found is a sidebar project from thoosje.com, but it has it’s own library of gadgets, so I was still out of luck. Then I stumbled upon this post over at joejoe.org.

Vista Sidebar in XP

As you can see from this screenshot, I’ve got it working, and it works great. Adding gadgets isn’t the same as in Vista, you have to add them manually, but the how to is in the read me in the download.

If you’d like to try this out, head on over to the post at joejoe.org (linked above), and click on the big green image at the bottom of the first post. It says something like “Vista RTM Sidebar for Windows XP”. For anyone that is confused or doesn’t understand what’s going on, all you need to do is install VIAOXP/2003, make sure you have IE7, WMP11 and KB918997 installed, and follow the rest of the instructions.

Convert XP Pro to MCE

Published
by
Chris
on April 2, 2007
in Software
. 5 Comments

Since the 2007 Fall Update, I no longer have a need to run MCE on my PC. The main reason I done this was to get Transcode 360 to convert video files so they would play on my big TV.

Yesterday I helped a friend of mine, Daz, set up Windows Media Center Edition 2005 to work with his Xbox360. After a bit of stuffing around thanks to Microsoft doing such a outstanding job as they always do, we managed to get it all working after a few hours.

There were 2 main issues that we came across. The first was that when installing MCE, it would ask for the WindowsXP Service Pack 2 CD, but what it really wanted was Disc 1 from the install disc set. We finally worked that one out only to find that Update Rollup 2 wouldn’t install cause it wanted MCE 2005 which we had. A quick google search found a registry hack to fix that. After that it was pretty much all fine an dandy, except for a few network tweaks.

I must say that I’m pretty impressed with the Media Center feature on the Xbox360. So much that I’ve decided to have a go myself, so today, I went on a hunt to find a *cough* copy *cough* to experiment with.

Well, I didn’t think it was possible to convert WindowsXP Pro to Media Center Edition 2005. Not an upgrade, but more like installing a program. Basically what I found was a disc image which basically does a few hacks to WindowsXP Pro so that it thinks that it’s MCE, and then you install the MCE software and the updates, and if your lucky, you should have MCE on your PC.

I gave this a go and installed it on an old hard drive I had laying around that still had an install of WinXP. I went through all the steps and done everything exactly as the instructions say (it’s pretty strict), and after about an hour I had MCE on my PC. Pretty simply. I then proceeded to install Update Rollup 2 (required for the Xbox360) and there I started to run into a few issues. Pretty much the same error as Daz was getting, though the solution wasn’t the same. I had a browse through the UPDATE.INF file with the rollup and made sure that all the required registry settings were the same. I found a few for the .NET framwork that weren’t the same, so I fixed them up, and away we went, Update Rollup 2 was installing. I was pretty happy then.

I added the Xbox360 extender software and now my 360 has MCE working on it.

Since I done this on an old HDD, now I have to go and do it on my main hard drive. Though I will backup all my data just in case something does happen to go wrong. I read about a few people that have lost everything due to a bad burn of a disc and things like that.

Oh, I forgot to mention that I am still using my legit Windows product key. This was one of the main factors of this task.

If any one is interested in this, let me know either by leaving a comment here (make sure you leave your email address), or via my contact page.

Please do not ask me for info about this. The site that had the links is no longer online. Here is a possible source that may do the same, but I haven’t tried this so I cannot confirm. If this source has worked for you, would you please mind leaving a comment below.