Antec Fusion Remote HTPC Case – Audio Control Doesnt Work

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Just upgraded my media center case to an Antec Fusion Remote.  Now its a very well made case and has 120mm fans in them with variable speed control which is why it took my fancy.  It has full size slots as well as my older case could only take half height cards which is always a problem finding them.  I bought the silver one, disappointment here is that only the front is silver the rest of the case is black which is fine if you stack your machine with a silver av receiver that is silver as you wont see the rest of the case but if your like me that has them side by side its a little annoying that they didnt choose to do the whole case in silver but I guess its all because of cost and to be honest its way cheaper than say a zalman htpc case so I guess thats why.

I run an asus p5e-hdmi micro-atx board in it.  It isnt one of the latest micro atx media boards because i have had it hanging around at the house for nearly a year now.  I then push the audio out via coaxial to a sony av receiver running a 5.1 tanoy speakers.

The only problem I had with it was that the remote and variable control on the front of the case didnt adjust the sound / audio.  Having researched the Antec support area, they suggested upgrading the latest driver software for the vfd (lcd panel) and your motherboard.  Both of which still didnt make it work.

Then I saw that on the Asus support site that there was a realtek driver for the audio.  I then replaced the microsoft standard driver for the audio with the Realtek one and bazaaam it all works.

The only outstanding problem I have is that Microsoft Media Center doesnt control the audio when playing a dvd, but I have had this problem on my older media center so think Media Center cant control it as the ouput just seems to off load it out the coaxial audio cable to my av receiver.

The results are outstanding just need to upgrade my lcd tv to a full HD (1080p) one now rather than a HD-Ready (720p) but that will have to wait.

Front USB Ports not working on my Shuttle running Vista x64 Ultimate

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After taking the Cypress update my front usb ports stopped working.  How did I fix it well if you go to the device manager (right click the computer icon in file explorer, click properties then click device manager [left hand side]) under Universal Serial Bus Controllers (right at the bottom) there is a device shown now called HX2LP kit (3.03.0000.2) I believe this is what causes the problem so I just uninstalled mine and rebooted.

After the reboot I get a generic USB hub appear and the front ports on my shuttle SD37P2 are now working.

Also when I run windows update again I dont see that update any more.

Dollar Accounts and Barclays Bank

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Just had a webchat with Barclays Bank, and it must be them embracing different ways to chat to customers that browse their website.  So thought I would ask about dollar accounts and why not after all it popped up and they asked me.

So here goes the conversation

Customer: ok can you give me current exchange rates on dollar accounts that you offer please
Customer: ??
Sarah A: I am sorry, Paul, we don’t have that information.
Customer: what ??? you dont have the information and your the bank !!!! never mind I will look around thanks for your help good afternoon
Sarah A: You’re welcome, Paul. Thank you for using Barclays Webchat Service.

Well again a corker from Barclays Bank – they are the bank and they cant even tell me what dollar rates they have !!!

Reminded me of the time I went into a branch and asked how much it would be to pay off an existing loan with them.  The girl behind the desk said well i’m not really sure its approximately ….  cant write a cheque for approximately …. eventually a supervisor came over and told me the exact amount.

Gosh they do make me laugh.

Got my Suzuki GSXR750 K7

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Last weekend took delivery of my Suzuki GSXR750 K7 it is very nice. Bit frightened have to be honest of it at first but after 2 bends I was smiling very big wide smiles its excellent. Unfortunately it broke down 2 days after getting it, the regulator went on it but Portman Motorcycles are fixing it. But until that time I didn’t get above 3rd gear and was doing about just under a ton.

Suzuki GSX-R 750

Suzuki GSX-R 750

Getting Rsyncd, Vista and Backuppc to work

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Recently upgraded to vista and for the life of me couldnt get the vista to work with rsyncd running from cygwin.  Would always stop with a code 12 error and not alot else.  I just run rsyncd or rsync with the daemon option as I dont belive the cwrsync works as a service yet on vista. 

Now in the backuppc config options for rsyncd and rsync there is a hard link option I just removed that and it seems to work not sure why vista cant deal with that option but if you remove it, everything works as it did before on windows 2000 / XP.

Returns / Warranty From Seagate

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Well I sent back some drives in April 2007 and they say they never received them.  Basically they were some old IDE drives that were just in warranty so I wasnt too bothered.  Then this weekend May 2008 got an email saying they were sending me one of the drives repaired under warranty.  The other they say they never received even though the drives were boxed together.

So let me get this right they took 13 months to repair and return one of the two drives I sent them, and lost the other.  Must be a record !!!

Broadband Slamming – www.broadbandchecker.co.uk

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Well just when I was thinking of moving my broadband thought I would have a look around and tried a site called broadband checker on www.broadbandchecker.co.uk, only used that site and about a week later I got an email from my existing provider saying that I had been slammed.  Basically there had been a manual cease put on the line from what seemed to be from Tiscali, now my existing provider eclipse internet said they couldnt do anything which really worried me.  After contacting Tiscali they said that a 3rd party reseller had initiated it but wouldnt tell me who. 

Talked to Ofcom and they said that there had been quite a lot of this happening lately.  So after getting them invovled BT wholesale agreed not to cancel the line and luckily its back on now although it keeps training the line now.

It all seemed too much of a coincidence that this happened when I had tried out the broadband site so I would urge everyone use the site as it is a good one lots of info but what ever you do dont put your phone number for the search only use the postcoe option.

Hopefully moving to bonded adsl with www.upstreaminter.net  so will blog about my experience of that soon….

Scythe Kama Connect 2

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Ok bought the Scythe Kama Connect 2 device from Quiet PC yesterday.  Took delivery and at the same time as ordering it bought a Samsung 500GB SATA 3Gb/s hard drive to connect to it.  The reason for buying this little baby is that I hate opening cases everytime I want to configure a new drive. 

Before buying looked everywhere, did my research to see if any compatability issues with SATA and didnt appear to be so bought it.  Open it all up out of the box, nice little device plug in the Kama Connect 2 and power up my PC which is a shuttle running VISTA ultimate 64bit.  Straight away doesnt recognise the drive !!!  Scour the manual and finally find above the SATA diagram

“This product supports the reading/writing for S-ATA and S-ATA II devices, but not supporting the optional functions such as NCQ or 3Gbps”

great, looked back on the Quiet PC site to see if they had any mention of this none says supports SATA !!!

Next day got onto Quiet PC (Paul Lee) who were very helpful, got one out of the box and it worked for them so what was I doing wrong.  Borrowed another drive off my client and still couldnt read that.  Then thought about it a bit more and noticed there was no light on the power supply brick then looked at the two pin plug and the converter.  Thought about it for a minute what an idiot I had only plugged the plug into the earth socket ie. vertical rather than horizontally into the converter.  Switched it round and all worked as it should.  The disclaimer above about the 3Gb/s is just that it cant get to those speeds due to limitations on USB 2.0, I just thought it meant didnt support them full stop.

It really is a good little tool to have.  I fully recommend it and because Quiet PC were so understanding and helpful (as usual) I even recommend that you buy it from them

http://www.quietpc.com/gb-en-gbp/products/components/kama-connect2

 

DBDesigner4, Windows and MYSQL 5

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Ok thought I would have a look at DBDesigner4 as MyWorkbench seems to be taking a long time to get into beta.  DBDesigner4 looks a great product but couldnt get it to connect to mysql 5 then realised that it the designer was designed for version 3 mysql and lots of the old mysql products need to read the myql.user table for id’s etc.

Tried the old trick of using the OLD_PASSWORD function and seems to work what you need to do is this….

1. Open the mysql command prompt.

2. SET PASSWORD FOR 'root'@'localhost' = OLD_PASSWORD('rootpassword');

UPDATE mysql.user SET Password = OLD_PASSWORD('rootpassword') WHERE Host = 'localhost' AND User = 'root';

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

all in one line – hit return. 

3. Try dbdesigner4 again and you should now be able to connect.