Today we start a new weekly appointment, a nice video from YouTube (or somewhere else) to relax and start enjoing the week end.
The choice of this first (very short) video is related to the Macintosh’ 25th birthday that Apple celebrates this year (since 1984): here’s a fast compilation of all the startup sounds that were included in Macintosh machines, from the first Mac 128k to today.
If you bought both Lips and Guitar Hero World Tour (or Rock Band) for this Christmas, you could encountered an annoying problem with the 2nd wireless mic bundled with Lips: lights stopped working during songs; in addiction of this, some sync problems appeared: videos and karaoke words became jerky, audio delay increased. read full post »
The screenshot you see here on the left shows a Mac OS X (Leopard) window that pops up when a new usb keyboard is connected. It asks user to press the key on the right of (left) shift, to detect the correct international map. Yesterday I had a problem with the keyboard of a Mac Mini I have in my office network: “<>” and “\” keys were swapped.
In the italian keyboard, “<>” is the key on the right of left-shift, and “\” (the backslash) is above the TAB key. read full post »
Let’s speak about EASEUS Partition Manager, a new product for Windows. The first element I noticed is… the price: the home edition is free for personal use, this is a good beginning Anyway the version I tested is the Server edition, that supports also Windows Server family operating sytems; in addiction of this, it is able to operate also on 64-bit editions and it offers the possibility to create bootable CDs/DVDs to boot and operate on dead systems (these last two functions are included also in the Professional edition, as stated in this comparison table). read full post »
Today I fixed a new problem with my test installation of Windows 7 (first public beta): Avast! Free – my “default” antivirus, was causing random system crashes. After some tries, I understood that blue screen of death was occurring during internal network activity. To be more precise, the problem is located in the use of shared folders (aka “samba shares”, for Linux users) and it involves the tdx.sys file, that seems to be often a protagonist of BSODs. read full post »
I’m currently testing the first public beta of Windows 7 on a desktop and a notebook, so I installed Live Messenger through the official Live installer provided from Microsoft as optional pack of the operating system. While there wasn’t problems on the notebook (connected to the LAN via Wi-fi), the desktop gived me 81000306 error trying to connect to Messenger service. After a lot of tests, including activation of uPNP on the router and forwarding the typical Messenger ports to the desktop’s IP, I finally discovered that the problem was in a feature of Windows 7 (also included in Windows Vista), the auto tuning of TCP stack. To disable this feature (that seems to be also the cause of network slowness on some LAN), you’ve to execute a simple command as Administrator:
click on the Windows logo in the bottom-left corner of the screen (the old “start” menu);
type CMD.EXE and wait a second: the cmd.exe program will appair in a list;
right-click it and choose “Run as Administrator”, then confirm the action in the request that will appair;
you’ll see a black window; type the following command: netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled
now just close the window and try to connect with Windows Live Messenger (it shouldn’t be necessary to restart the computer).
Note 1: I suspect that this problem is linked to my hardware (a Netgear DG834G router and a Atheros PCIE Gigabit LAN, on a ASUS M2A-MX motherboard).
Note 2: If you want to restore the auto tuning feature, you’ve to repeat the above process with the following command: netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal
Today I discovered that French autoroutes have added this strange notice to every toll gate: “5€ and 15€ are not accepted”.
I thought that 5€ and 15€ were only banknote. It seems I’m a inattentive european
WARNING: After some tests, it seems that Windows Live Messenger contact list have problems after change of email login. So do this at your risk.
This problem always plagued Windows Live (aka MSN) users: you signed up for a Microsoft Passport account since 2002 with a custom e-mail as login, then you changed the e-mail address but you can’t change your Live Messenger login (this was my case).
About a year ago I tried to directly ask Microsoft, but they answered me that this wasn’t possible; they suggested me to sign up for a new Live account.
Now I discovered that it’s possible to do it easily. read full post »
Post updated at 13:50 (GMT+1) on June, 17th 2009 – Now Windows 7 RC1 is public and available to everyone.
As anticipated by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at CES (Las Vegas), Windows 7 first public beta is now available for free download.
Windows Vista users are free to get and install it on their computers as update.
The download isBeta licenses are limited “only” to the first 2,5 million of users.
This version will expire on August, 1st 2009.
The Aspire One is a netbook from Acer, very similar to the Asus Eee PC. It’s sold at about EUR 200 in Italy, and it offers an 8.9″ display (1024×600), a 1.6Ghz Intel Atom CPU, a 8Gb SSD drive, with integrated Wifi, Mic and webcam.
It’s a nice product, but the Linux operating system with it is shipped is not so good (it’s a personalized and branded version of Linpus – a Taiwanese distribution for low-resources PCs).
I tried a couple of alternative OS (for example Ubuntu Netbook Remix), but none of them fully fit on it: too weight, drivers problems, etc. read full post »
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Today I fixed a new problem with my test installation of 
Post updated at 13:50 (GMT+1) on June, 17th 2009 – Now Windows 7 RC1 is public and available to everyone.
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