Category: Tech stuff

At 23:30 last night we, the street and most of the environs lost power.  I cursed at the DVD that was 99% through burning from the USB attached disk that had just lost power and went to bed. Pixie didn’t come back though. So apologies for the users of the site. Luckily in the vast TARDIS-like loft I have two spare 250w power supplies so Pixie has arisen once more. If you sent us mail and it bounced, please send it again and we’ll get it this time.

No, not another weather-related entry. I thought I’d update everyone on my Vista experiences.

I got hold of a Corsair TurboFlash stick to try out the performce boost possible with Windows “ReadyBoost” and it does seem to work. My issue with it though is that Windows seems to forget what the stick is and warn about “unrecognized USB device” or some such rubbish after about two days of use. So I only tend to lob it in during gameplay.

I’m still scouring ebay.co.uk for a new TV card so that Media Center will work. It seems a bit silly as the PC sits in the study and I don’t watch TV on it except in a little window whilst doing something else but I would rather move to a card for which Windows has proper drivers instead of the “jsut about working” drivers we have with the WINTV card. I’m basically looking for something like the PVR-150 or one from this list.

Whilst playing Half-life2:episode 1, the sound was very choppy. I have already used ebay to source an Audigy 2 sound card to replace the SB Live5.1 that Vista had decided to demote and was curious that it might be that. The Creative forums though point to it being motherboard related. My motherboard is (don’t laugh) an Asus A7V333 which is basically a VIA Apollo Kt333/VT8233A chipset board supporting Athlons upto 2600. So I stuck in the latest VIA Hyperion all-in-one driver set and things improved a little. Come to think of it though, that is when the Corsair stick started playing up – but that could be coincidence.

But that isn’t all. It seems there is a quiet uproar in some corners that the nVidia drivers are a problem too. I switched to the beta drivers 101.41 and things improved again.

So needless to say that Vista is a stable platform let down by ropey driver support. I can’t blame Microsoft as my hardware is getting a bit long in the tooth. Hardware manufacturers such as Hauppauge deserve recognition for getting pretty much all the legacy hardware running. Others like Creative have used it as an opportunity to end-of-life a load of older stuff and you can’t blame them for that.

I did get thoroughly sick of Internet Explorer 7 and switched back to Firefox 2.Browsing the web was suddenly very quick and stable without loads of annoying warning boxes.

Creative have snuck out a very minor update to the sound card drivers so I’m off to load those up….

So I’ve added a blog to the site. This should at the very least urge me to post comments more often than the “very occasionally” that I have managed upto now.

Thanks go to the people at www.apachefriends.org for their excellent xampp tool. I’ve basically spent ages just trying to get PHP and MySql to work on “pixie” (the server on which this is all hosted) and didn’t get very far. Xampp solves all of that. If you have n old server or desktop PC and you want a fully-featured webserver, and mailserver quite simply this is the thing to use. It employs the rather excellent Mercury mailserver which is a project that needs support simply because the developer, David Harris has made Mercury as good as it can be but free. This sort of project costs in time though and subsequently bills need paying. If you do use Xampp or mercury, throw some coins in the hat at the Pegasus/Mercury website.

Of course the other bit of software that makes this all happen is wordpress.

OK. I got it working thanks to a neat load of scripts called XAMPP. I recommend them for getting Apache, mySQL and PHP loaded with no hassle on any platform. Fantastic.
With PHP finally loaded I can start doing cleverer things with the website now and fix some broken things I have kludged to get working….

Apologies for not writing too much recently and for the site appearing a bit unstable.
I’ve wanted to do a few things to improve the site for a while and they all tend to need me loading PHP support to the site. It doesn’t seem to like me very much.

Please be patient with me!

Installed Vista last night. Went quite smoothly other than a few driver wrangles showing me just how old all my hardware is. I have used a second hard drive and an OEM build so that I can migrate over at my own pace and continue using XP until everything works. Julie will have to learn how it all works too.

It turned my 5.1 soundcard into a 2.0 one, the DVD drive refused to work until I stuck in a beta Adpatec driver for the trusty old 2940UW that runs it. My TV card kind of works but I’ll be scouring eBay for a new one sooner or later.