Archive for the 'blog' Category

Hello anyone,

I haven’t actually dropped off the face of the earth… just practically. The last 6 months have been insane – I got my drivers licence, crashed another car, bought one for myself, and got a new job in and am shortly moving to Sydney. I’ve been kind of focused more on staying alive than updating this blog, which hopefully nobody will mind terribly much.

Speaking of the blog: New content from here on in is going to be a little different. My new job is an internal helpdesk role, not so much raw computer servicing, so there’ll be fewer random hacks and tweaks and funny screenshots. I still have a couple of how-to ideas kicking around in my phone’s todo list, and I’m working on a pretty in-depth review of my new GPS, but I’m not working so much with consumer gear anymore, so that’s probably going to be it for that stuff for a while.

In future I’d like to concentrate a bit on hardware reviews, overclocking, things like that. I’ll still be poking the driver guide and laptop page from time to time – those two projects are still getting a ton of traffic, so I’m not just going to close them down and walk away – but any updates will have to come from you, my readers.

I owe a massive apology to everybody who’s emailed me in the last few months, and not had a reply. I do read everything sent to me, but have been a bit too overwhelmed by life to give every message the attention it really deserves. I plan to reply to each and every email from now on.

Another apology and huge, huge thanks to everybody who’s kindly donated some of their own hard-earned money towards the cause of my laptop manual page. It’s really made all the difference in helping me keep up with that, and I am a terrible person for not thanking each of you individually, but again I’ll try to do better in future.

I’ve finally had the time to finish my F6 driver guide. I’ll eventually augment it with as comprehensive a list of F6 drivers as I can build and host, but for now it’s just an absurdly detailed walkthrough.

Yeah, most people have moved on from using 2000/XP/2003, but I think that’s all the more reason to have this information still kicking around – this bit of knowledge is slowly dropping out of the working memory of most geeks simply because it’s no longer needed most of the time, which means finding people who know about it will get harder and harder.

Anyhow, have a read of it if you’re so inclined, and let me know if there’s much I could improve about it – everything on that page is perfectly clear to me, but it may not be so for others, and I’m only one of the people I’ve written it for.

More than two years after I wrote this first blog entry dealing with the subject, having come up against this problem time and time again without being able to fix it, I went and did some experimenting on a PC at work to see if I could find a solution.

Short version: Instead of trying to swap the drive letters around by renaming the \DosDevices\ registry keys, I’ve discovered that if you delete the lot of them, Windows will recreate them when it next boots (as many of them as you have discrete disk drives plugged in at the time), and on the machine I tried it at work today it worked flawlessly: it reassigned the boot drive as C:\, the CD drive as D:\, the four card reader slots as E:\ through H:\ and everything was fixed.

Longer, more helpful version: If you’ve just added a hard drive to your PC (typical scenario: it’s the ex boot drive of an older PC you’ve just decomissioned, and you want the data off your old XP install) and Windows no longer boots, getting stuck instead just before the welcome screen with just the windows XP logo showing and no “Please wait” text below it, it’s very likely that XP’s suddenly developed an identity crisis of sorts and is referring to the new drive as C:\. It’s stupid, really quite illogical, and basically poleaxes that install unless you’re willing to play chicken with the registry.

Fortunately, this game of chicken is reasonably tried and true, and it’s easy enough to figure out if you’ve got even a bit of technical familiarity with your PC (as you probably are if you’ve just opened it and plugged another hard drive into it).

Hit Windows + R to bring up the Run dialog (probably you can also get to it by clicking your Start menu and then “Run…”), type regedit and hit enter. This will load the Registry Editor, which is basically a precision scope that lets you look inside your operating system’s brain. This particular registry key – HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE / SYSTEM / MountedDevices – lists the mapping between various disk drives on your computer and their respective drive letters as visible in My Computer.

What happens is that it sometimes gets confused about how to refer to your boot volume, and if your boot volume’s drive letter changes after you install XP, it will probably get stuck partway through starting up and hang just before the Welcome/login screen.

The information here might also be of interest/use to you if that drive letter was D:\ or E:\ or something else other than C:\ from the moment you installed XP, and you want to change it back to C:\ without having to reinstall again.

The fix: Deleting each of the \DosDevices\ values shown in the registry in the above screenshot will cause Windows to recreate and reassign the drive letters in your computer. If XP’s not booting anymore, obviously you can’t just run regedit like above, but there are ways around it. There do exist commandline tools you could run from a floppy disk or something, but by far the easiest way is to grab a registry-editing liveCD of some sort. I use Mini XP on Hiren’s BootCD, but this tool should do the trick easily enough for most.

This procedure has so far worked to bring Windows XP back to life on both a customer’s PC at my work, and on my own laptop at home (on which I dualboot XP and 7 for just this sort of messing about). If you try this method, leave a comment or email me and let me know how it went!

Update 10/2: If you have programs installed to drive letters other than C:\, be aware this could wreak havoc with those. Windows may be intelligent enough to reassign the driver letters with respect to installed programs, or it may not be. I haven’t tested this, and being a rare set of circumstances I doubt I’ll ever have the opportunity to. Your best bet in that situation would be trying the old manual renaming method. Remember you could delete the DosDevices entries to fix things enough to make it bootable again, and then swap drive letters D+ to your heart’s content to get your other programs to work without reinstalling those.

Haven’t had a chance to update much lately – work’s been flat out, I’ve just had all four wisdom teeth out (with almost no pain, fortunately), and every other second of my spare time has been spent racking up hours on my Ls (nearly done!).

My laptop service manual page has nearly quadrupled the number of visits to my site – I’m getting close to 15,000 page views every month now, and that number is steadily increasing. To celebrate I thought I’d share a few oddities I’ve found while searching for various manuals.

This is the service manual for Radio Shack’s TRS-80 Model 100 computer. This was way before my time, and I don’t think I’ve actually seen one in the flesh.

This (click for full size) was the full list of screws used to hold one of these together. While modern, intelligently designed laptops are built with maybe four or five different sizes maximum, back in the day Apple liked to make things as hard as possible (I suppose they still do) with this mix of nine Torx screws. I’m glad I never had to disassemble a 550c.

These images are from the service manual to the original Mac Mini. Where some companies recommend a flat-head screwdriver, and Apple themselves have previously included handles, the official tool for separating the two halves of a Mini is a sharpened putty knife. They include instructions to make your own, or you can order the official part – number 922-6761.

On the side of a machine that rents trailers at a servo:

Airport Krispy Kreme:

Guess the restaurant:

What a dead pixel (and a very small portion of the fileserver at work) looks like:

The Windows XP boot menu is determined by the contents of C:\boot.ini, a scary little text file that nevertheless is pretty important to know about if you fix computers. Microsoft changed how the boot menu works in Windows Vista and 7, helpfully removing the Edit button as you can see in the screenshots above.

You’re meant to use the even scarier command-line-only tool bcdedit, but I can’t be bothered learning how that works just to fix the incredibly basic problems I usually see (duplicate entries due to messed-up OS installs or repairs, or tweaking dualboot systems properly).

I’d like to share a lazier solution: VistaBootPRO gives you a perfectly good GUI for boot menu editing. The personal edition sells for US$10 on their site, but there appears to be a free version available here if you’re only going to need it once or twice.

It gives me a slightly scary error message on startup about Vista not being detected (I’m running Windows 7) and that I may “experience minor problems”, but it’s worked fine for the basic things I’ve done with it. YMMV.

• I had two weeks off work. It was good.
• I’ve majorly reorganised the laptop manuals. Whole sections were disappearing and reappearing as I sorted/renamed/uploaded them again, but it’s all done and should be a whole lot more readable now.
• An independant game studio is remaking Mechwarrior. Check out the interview with the two guys behind it, and the teaser gameplay video they made. Looks perfect so far.
• I bought a Bluray reader. Review coming soon. It’s weird.
• I painted my room. It’s nice in here now.
• Llama llama duck.

Way to go, digg.

It’s very nice of you to say you think my articles are well-written, and that you feel the author knows the subject matter very well. It’s lovely that you’ve so carefully considered the relevance of my website to yours, and decided to enrich my website with a link to your own.

Be that as it may, the utter generalisation of your statements, combined with the fact that both your home URL and your name appear to be “best payday loans”, it’s kind of obvious your entire reason for visiting my blog is to attempt to spam it.

Just FYI, it takes me far less time to mark your comment as spam than it does for you to copy/paste your tripe to the comment box and solve the captcha puzzle and post your comments to my moderation queue. Please re-evaluate the return on your investment here, and kindly go away now.

Thanks.

You’ve all heard of it. Some of you even know what it looks like. But who’s actually used the Opera browser?

I’ve tried, a couple of times. My opinion’s always been “holy crap it’s fast”, “holy crap it’s configurable”, “can’t be bothered switching to it because Firefox has Adblock Plus and Net Usage and I couldn’t find equivalent plugins that were as simple and obvious to use”.

Here’s an interesting article – “8 Browser Innovations Started by Opera“. Apparently we’ve had tabbed browsing since the year 2000, but nobody noticed. I suppose it would’ve been irrelevant until the majority of people had dialup and could stand to load more than one page at once.

That article makes an interesting point about market share. Obviously Internet Explorer is largely popular in graphs because it’s the first program tons of new computer users actually see (and trying to conceptually separate Internet Explorer from “my Bigpond Explorer”, “my email”, and “Windows” can be hilariously difficult), but I’ve played with IE8 on the few occasions I’ve actually sat down to use it, and it’s actually not terrible.

I’d like to share some statistics about my own blog here, courtesy of Google Analytics. Here’s a glimpse of what information I collect about you:

Here’s the breakdown of web browsers used by every visitor to a page on tim.id.au/blog in the last 90-odd days. You’d expect a huge amount of IE users (drivers are usually the first thing to go on a freshly installed PC), but Firefox reigns supreme. Chrome is more popular than Opera, and there’s some Safari in there too.

The Opera Mini hits are concievably all my own fault – I use that on my phone, having never bothered with Sony Ericsson’s default K850i browser. I’d never heard of Camino before looking at this myself (hello, Mac users! What are you doing here? *waves*). The rest are weird little devices, probably random hits from bored friends of mine. Who I could probably identify from those devices. You guys are bored.

Operating systems. Windows takes a good 7/8ths of the cake, while Linux makes up most of the rest (Hi to anybody who set up their own Ubuntu DHCP servers or whatever from my walkthrough!). A small number of iPhone OS hits (Hi Nathan and Bohdan!), SunOS and UNIX are probably from universities, and surely whoever’s responsible for the OS/2 hit is taking the piss.