Now I keep forgetting the key combination for getting the hash key on my MacBook Pro. Now this is as much for me as everyone else.
Wait for it, its ….
Alt + 3
Hash (#) Key On The Apple Macbook Pro.
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Tag Archives: Hardware
Zotac ION-ITX-F Wi-Fi Dual Core 1.6GHz Atom N330 Mini-ITX Motherboard with PCI Express x16 With Windows 7 Home Premium
After putting a power meter on my home entertainment system realised that my equipment was using a lot of power 350 watts at peak. So thought I would do some investigation into a recent low power mini-itx board from Zotac. I chose this one because it was dual core and it has a pci-express card on it which is good for a cable tuner I am looking at to use in it for when I am in the USA.
Ordered the board from mini-itx.com as they are the only people I could find doing this board. It came and everything looked fine except that the fan isnt fitted and there are no holes for it on the cpu heat sink. After talking with mini-itx they told me to screw it to the heatsink even though it doesnt have any predetermined holes. I also noticed that the manuals that came with it – the quick installation and the main manual werent for this board. Which was a great start.
I had already converted my old system from Vista to Windows 7. I then put the new Atom board into my case and started it up. Immediately I was getting checksum errors and just stalled. I was like oh dear must be memory related so twiddled about a bit with the memory until I found the culprit. From going from 1 board to the other, one stick of my 2Gb DDR2 had decided to die.
Not a real problem as really 2Gb of memory should be ok for what that board needs to do. So once over that everything came up fine. I use this as my media center so mainly playing music and watching tv (SD & HD blu-ray).
Initial reaction was that its great. So lets put it through its paces, watching blu-ray with fast moving action – didnt phase it at all everything was running fine at 17% cpu and wattage was about 270 watts so it was already saving me about 70 watts of power. I then decided to get it to record two tv stations and watch a recorded program at the same time.
It did this as well although cpu was about going from about 50 to 75%. And when navigating through the menu it was a bit sluggish although livable. All in all it is great because it will save me money and the Windows 7 media center is a little better than the old Vista one.
FURTHER UPDATE: having recently bought UP on blu-ray I have noticed something that is important for this board. Some of the later blu-ray’s are recorded in MPEG4 – I have tested UP and The Taking Of Pelham 123, they are both recorded in MPEG4 unlike I Am Legend which is VC1.
MPEG4 is currently running at around 47% cpu usage which is fine on its own but if (like I was at the time of trying to play UP) you are recording tv at the same time its just a bit too much for the little NVIDIA ION board which then runs at 100% and frames and audio drop on the play back of the blu-ray movie. Its a shame because its a great board and just what I want when the machine is on all the time but its a trade off between performance and cost of running the equipment.
Overall I am still impressed even though there are these obvious trade offs.
Started To Sell My Stuff On Ebay
Ok so I have decided to start listing all my stuff that I have lying about the house that isnt being used. There is quite an extensive range. So keep coming back to look at my sidebar to see what im selling.
Going to start with a pair of digital freeview tv tuners which I bought back in 2005 and have never used them. So get bidding if you want them…
[Ebay 260547177386] [Ebay 260547177560]
Vista, Windows Media Center, Windows Media Player And Blu-Ray DVD's
My last upgrade of my media center included a blu-ray media player, it was a cheap LG player although wasn’t as cheap as they are today. This was bought a few years back when they first came out but didn’t install it for some time until now.
Well I thought Vista was bound to support blu-ray and didnt think anything of it until I started to buy loads of new dvd’s and found windows media center and windows media player couldnt play them. So what are the options, well currently they are
- Cyberlink PowerDVD (current version 9)
- Roxio CinePlayer DVD Decoder
- Arcsofts TotalMedia Theatre
Well my experience is this, Roxio forget it wouldnt even register properly and looking on the NET couldnt find one person that had installed it successfully on Vista so got a refund straight away. Arcsofts TotalMedia Theatre was the same installed but didnt play at all. Now the board I have in my media center has the INTEL Graphics G35 chip so could be because of that as its not really that good enough to play Blu-Ray discs.
So I know a lot of people dont like it but the PowerDVD was the only thing that played the blu-ray movies for me on Vista with a motherboard that uses the Intel G35 chip.
And that concludes my findings now to buy a micro ATX motherboard that uses the NVIDIA 9400 chipset.
Nikon D5000 – First Images
Decided it was time I got myself a digital SLR and saw the reviews on engadget of the new Nikon D5000. The price was good and I have been fed up with the camera on my HTC mobile, especially as I have been taking a lot of photos on my visits to the states.
Jessops this weekend had a sale on so bought the camera, extra lense, 8gb SD card and you got a free bag as part of the deal. I ordered the GP-1 unit for it as well (although have to wait 28 days for that) so that I can store the gps position of the photo as this seems to be the latest fashion in the world of photography.
I even negotiated about 50 pounds off the sale price. 🙂
Found Some Old Computer Photos
Was looking through my pictures and found two of my very old machines that I built a few years back.
Antec Fusion Remote HTPC Case – Audio Control Doesnt Work
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
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.
Taking Delivery Of A MAC Powerbook G4 15 inch
Took delivery of my new machine yesterday. Rather swiss, this is my first Mac, they tell me once you taste Mac you never go back !!
First thing I needed to do was to get it on my encrypted wireless network ugh oh !! Couldnt for the life of me get it on, I use a manual 128 bit key and have my passphrase in key 4, did a bit of reading and realised that the Mac only reads passphrases from KEY 1 so had to move my phrase into that on my existing wireless access points and yes it all works…
Other problem I had was that I couldnt get the Mac to see my shares on the windows 2003 domain controller. It could connect via ip address and share name but the file finder couldnt browse the list of shares. Tried for ages to get it going and at last seem to have cracked it. Basically having read a lot of articles on the subject on the web I realised that in my local policy I had the network client talk securely (if server agrees) disabled as some articles say so made that enabled and just disabled the always talk securely and enabled send smb passwords unencrypted and this appears to have fixed it although I not entirely too confident about that. But its all working now 🙂 the linux, windows and mac boxes can all talk together and share files no probs. Can even pass files to my mac laptop which is just great.