This weekend my 12 year old brother came over to stay. We had a good time. We played on the laptops and shared some movies and overall it was really good. I got to introduce him to the classic comedy series “Bottom” that he seems to really enjoy. I sadly couldn’t take him to our sisters as it was raining and he had this really thin wind jacket that would of just got him soaked, so i am sorry to Suzanne for not bringing him over. Whilst he was here I cooked him some nice food including a lovely home made pizza and although he didn’t eat all of it, i certainly ate all mine. Overall it was a quiet but good weekend. 
A Nice weekend with my brother
16
Aug
The Graphics Card Saga
02
Aug
Well i thought i would write about my graphics card saga on my computer. On Saturday i went to move the mouse on my PC to wake it up to check my messages and nothing came up on screen. I thought the PC had simply crashed. So i rebooted the PC and nothing came up on screen. This was a little worrying. I went through the usual diagnostics of removing all onboard cards and stuff and narrowed the problem down to my PCI-E graphics card. This card was fairly new and i bought it on eBay over a year ago. I managed to plug the LCD screen to the onboard graphics card and i was surprised to see that was also damaged. The screen was jumping all over the place and their were tons of lines all over the place. I knew this wasn’t at all good. I looked closely at the motherboard to find there was 1 tiny 6.3v 1000Uf capacitor that had blown. Basically the top of the capacitor was rounded and should be nice and flat. This wasn’t the most ideal of things to find on a computer. I took the motherboard out of the chassis and placed it down. I fetched my soldering equipment and looked through my stock of spare capacitors and found i had an exact match which was great. I set about removing the old capacitor and replacing it with the new one. After about 5 minutes repairing it i hooked it back up and powered it back on and success it was working. I also tried the PCI-E card but alas this wasn’t working still which is pretty annoying. After further inspection i believe the graphics card was made of sub-standard quality as the solder points were oxidised and had turned slight green. This is sure sign of shoddy workmanship when it comes to soldering. There could be many reasons for it from acid from fingers touching the soldering points before they were soldered to substandard working practices.
After checking all the BIOS and making sure things were still working normally, i put the motherboard back into the chassis and powered it all up and success the onboard graphics were once again working – but sadly only to a point. Once windows booted up it decided it wanted to repeatedly reboot itself – i eventually narrows that down to the drivers that were installed. I removed the drivers for the ATI card and also the onboard card because for some reason it doesn’t like its own drivers. The system is now thankfully fully working again but with the windows inbuilt graphics driver – which is not too bad – it still runs at 32bit at 1024×768 without any problems.
The idea of just repairing the motherboard instead of throwing it out and getting a new one is the fact i have no money to do that and i have to basically use what i can to fix problems at this current time. If it does go again though i will have to save about £100 for a new computer as i still need one even though I use my laptop daily.
Well that is my little Graphics card saga
Growl for Windows Live Messenger
27
Jun
Finding scripts to work with Growl or Snarl is not the easiest thing in the world. I re-wrote a simple script to show most of the variables of msn messenger for use with Growl.
Two ways to install
1: Complete Growl Script Here
2: Or do the following.
Get Growl Notify here: http://www.growlforwindows.com/gfw/help/growlnotify.aspx and you’ll also need an icon, i took a generic msn icon and just placed it in the windows folder. Using Msn plus just add a new script and paste this code in and it should basically work.
var shell = new ActiveXObject("wscript.shell");
var Growlexe = ‘"’ + MsgPlus.ScriptFilesPath + ‘\\growlnotify.exe"’;
var GrowlIcon = ‘"’ + MsgPlus.ScriptFilesPath + ‘\\icon.png"’;function OnEvent_ContactSignin(Email){
var cmd = Growlexe + Email + ‘" signed in " /t:"Windows Live Messenger" /i:’+GrowlIcon+”;
shell.Run(cmd);
}function OnEvent_ContactSignout(Email){
var cmd = Growlexe + Email + ‘" signed out " /t:"Windows Live Messenger" /i:’+GrowlIcon+”;
shell.Run(cmd);
}function OnEvent_ContactBlocked(Email){
var cmd = Growlexe + Email + ‘" has been blocked " /t:"Windows Live Messenger" /i:’+GrowlIcon+”;
shell.Run(cmd);
}function OnEvent_ContactUnblocked(Email){
var cmd = Growlexe + Email + ‘" has been unblocked " /t:"Windows Live Messenger" /i:’+GrowlIcon+”;
shell.Run(cmd);
}function OnEvent_ContactPsmChange(Email){
var cmd = Growlexe + Email + ‘" has changed PSM " /t:"Windows Live Messenger" /i:’+GrowlIcon+”;
shell.Run(cmd);
}function OnEvent_ContactNameChange(Email){
var cmd = Growlexe + Email + ‘" has changed Nick name " /t:"Windows Live Messenger" /i:’+GrowlIcon+”;
shell.Run(cmd);
}
Stop viruses attacking from within installer files
14
Jun
Here is a nice little tip for those who like to install software. Recently unscrupulous people have been building windows installers that although look genuine are not – they can contain viruses. A little tip is to get hold of 7zip (http://www.7-zip.org/) and then right click on the installer and then select open under the 7zip folder. You should be able to open the installer file up and see what it inside. Below is a picture for a DivX installer and as you can see there is a file in there called “new.exe” – this is a virus and my virus detector never saw it coming. I just extract the real installer and then check that too – if it looks clean i continue to install the application.
Fig1. Contains a virus.
Fig2. Pulled the real installer out and opened it to check it
After you have installed the application, you can breath a sigh of relief that it wasn’t virused.
HardLink Shell Extension (Vista & Windows 7)
14
Jun
Here is a complicated but great advanced tip for windows. If you are someone who has to regularly re-install your computer and you find you loose important things such as Windows Live Messenger Emoticons (like i do) then this should help keep them in place if you do loose the rest of the system. Hardlink Shell Extension is a graphical add-on to an already well established Windows Function called Symbolic Links. You can essentially move the MSN emoticons cache system to a protected area on the disk, in this case a hidden partition. What i have done on my laptop is created a new hidden partition and then moved the emoticons cache to that and then using hardlink shell extension i have created a symbolic link back to the original location – this allows any updates, changes or added icons to be put in the correct location but that “actual” files are stored elsewhere.
Illustration 1 is the original place for the msn messenger cache files (the purple means its a symbolic link)
Illustration 2 is the new location and yet windows see’s this as transparent and therefore the above picture is what windows uses to store its files.
What does all this mean. Well if you accidently mess windows up – your files are still there upon re-install and just need the paths altered to the new place once again using hardlinks and then all your updated emoticons are all in place and ready to use
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