Plug & Play Computers PC News Blog

We’ve been recently working with the different standards of DVI and just thought it would be worth pointing out what they are all about.
Wikipedia has a great article on DVI – DVI-A, DVI-D and DVI-I (yes they couldn’t make it easy on us and have just 1 standard…). Just be aware there are not converters for the difference formats (as such) – since you are actually not only physically changing pin configurations, but also from Analogue to Digital, Analogue to Dual Link etc – which is electrically a different thing as well. It will work in some combinations depending on what hardware is present at either end.
Have a check out of the tech article HERE

One of our staff (David) found this good document on Toms Hardware on the built in tools in Windows 7 for checking on software and hardware faults – have a read here – http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-7-troubleshooting,2504.html

Good way to give your system a check over when things are not working right.

James

Heres a link you may find useful – a good set of training and quick start manuals for all recent versions of Office (including Word,  Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook).

Mouse Training Guides

Here are some shortcuts that will make your Windows life a lot easier-

• F2 – rename a file
• Windows + E - open explorer
• Windows + F – search files
• Windows + M – minimize all windows
• Windows + F1 – help
• Windows + Pause – Windows Device Manager
• Alt + F4 – Close current program
• Ctrl + Z - back one step (or erase last thing you did)

Recently I was moving my photos off my hard drive and onto a network drive for storage – but then I discovered when I looked at the folder in thumbnail view (View->Thumbnails from the menu) the picture would flash on then go to a standard icon for all the images. After hunting around it seems this is BY DESIGN for Vista – so heres how to turn thumbnails on –  Click Start, type gpedit.msc and press ENTER. Go to the following branch - User Configuration | Administrative Templates | Windows Components | Windows Explorer.  And then set the following to ENABLED - Turn off the display of thumbnails and only display icons on network folders. Log Off (or Restart) – and you are done. 

The press has decided to run with the latest security flaw in ie and make a large deal of it – note security updates to fix issues in MS software is nothing new and happens on a regular basis – so DONT PANIC. The flaw can be exploited if you go to infected websites (mostly adult pages) or click on virus attached files in emails.  So Keep you AV software up to date. Most auto update these days but open it up and check the date of the last update.If you want to install the Microsoft patch that closes the flaw you can use the Windows Update website to download the Critical Update (960714) – or if you have Automatic Updates ON then you will have the patch already installed (assuming you have downloaded the latest updates). 

With the release of Vista Microsoft also released a new version of Office – they add on product that includes word, excel and outlook. Graphically it is very different to the previous versions, but it also includes a new file format that it saves in by default (eg. docx for word – rather than doc). This has caused a few problems for people with the previous versions of Office (2003, 2002/XP ). Microsoft have released a compatibility pack that enables older versions to read and write in the new format to accommodate this issue.Go to the following link from Microsoft – download and run the update, and then you will be able to support the latest file formats! DOWNLOAD HERE

We’ve now had new daylight savings changes in NSW again – and many servers and workstations are out of sync again. Here are some steps that will help in getting your Windows Servers and Workstations correctly setup.

1. Download the December 2007 DST Updates from Microsoft:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942763/en-us 

2. Edit the registry settings on your PC (run regedit) – navigate to HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\Parameters, and update the following:
NTPServer – time.windows.com,0×01 time.nist.gov,0×01 my.time.server.com,0×02
TYPE – NTP

3. Do a restart on the w32time service from a command prompt:
net stop w32time
net start w32time

Hopefully then after about 30s your time should show up correct !

This year NSW has extended daylight savings by a week – so PCs and phones that have not had the latest patches in NSW changed this morning back 1 hour – which has caused a lot of confusion! Just set it forward 1 hour to get back to the normal time – BUT remember to set it back 1 hour next sunday !!

Microsoft have a great AV product called Windows Media Centre which has a remote control driven front end to watch and record TV, play DVDs, and play media files (movies and music) all from a PC. So it can be a Set Top Box (SD and HD), DVD Player, Media player etc. all in one. So lets put it all together and see how good it is! There is a bit a trial an error here so have a read of how we made it all work step by step.
We got a PC with a 3Ghz HT Intel CPU, 512MB DDR Ram, 128MB x300 PCIx and a 160GB hard drive, XP MCE (now replaced by Vista Premium) and an analogue TV Tuner card. Many of these bits were just not up to the sort of system being built so parts that got upgraded were -
We replaced the CPU fan for a simple silent model, the Analogue TV Tuner was replaced with a AverTV Duo Hybrid card (using PCI-E – see our catalog) which is a DUAL DIGITAL TUNER card – allowing us to watch live one channel and record live another channel at the same time (like having 2 set top boxes). The RAM was upgraded to 1.5GB as per the TV tuner card box, and then some time was spent on the video card.
Since the x300 TV picture was not great, trial an error got us to end up with a MSI ATI 2600PRO PCIx card (see out catalog). The latest ATI software has a slightly better set of options than NVIDIA for TV position, size and brightness. Also we used the S-VIDEO connection since that give a much better picture than the RCA option (its going to a rear projection standard TV). OK now for the software.
We had the Microsoft MCE keyboard, IR Receiver and MCE Remote (see out catalog) which have all the functions needed for the PC and Media centre. Dont wast time just getting the Remote – there will be times you want to do things in normal windows and for that the remote is useless.
For XP MCE (not Vista PREM) you need to log on to the net and download all the latest updates for windows – one of which is a MCE update that allows the MCE keyboard to work outside of Media Centre. Once thats done you can start playing with the keyboard (which has a trackpoint like mouse on it to navigate) to do any work you need. We downloadeed the latest ATI drivers, played with the TV settings until the right position, size and bright was fixed, then ran MCE and had a play with all the settings. Its fairly intuitive – go into the settings, scan and tune the TV, and away you go. After all the prep work the unit ran very well – only the TV Guide does not work out of the box (not sure why – ask the Aussie Free To Air TV stations and Microsoft) so the last bit was to find a TV guide. There is a great FREE one at: http://www.epgstream.net which has some software to download and a simple walk through on how to setup the channels. Once this was done – we had a great working PVR/HD STB/DVD/TV/Media player that was also able to surf the interent, record TV programs off a TV guide – all on our TV, and stream movies from another server PC.
AND if you have an LCD TV or plasma – the quality would be even better…