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Cyker

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Everything posted by Cyker

  1. Yeah, just turn them off! I have my own custom MechWarrior and C&C sound themes on my Win98 box but alas - No way to export them! (Plus, due to the WAVs originating from my Win3.11 box, none of them play on anything newer than Win98 due to unsupported Codec!!)
  2. Hey all, I was trying to copy a 15GB archive from a Kingston DT 101 USB stick to my server via my Thinkpad x121e and it took like, 2 hours Now, at first I was thinking it must be the network, so I tried copying it to the Thinkpad's SSD first - Same deal: Took two hours! Assumed it was the USB stick, so I plugged it into my Windows 2000 box and copied it across the network to my server - It took 15 minutes!!!! Just for the sake of completeness, I tried it on my Linux box - Took about 15 minutes too! Cue my look. Clearly something isn't right here! I don't know whether it's a problem with my setup, or some fundamental issue with Windows 7 itself, or even the AMD USB hardware in this laptop! The laptop is running Win7 Pro with 6GB of RAM and an OCZ SSD but other than the extra 2GBs and the SSD it's pretty much stock. Isn't even much in the way of software installed; It's up to date with Windows patches but the only driver updates have been Catalyst drivers! Has anyone else come across this? Or, better yet, know of a fix?! I had a gut feeling that it was some power saving thing that's doing something odd but sitting the laptop in Sod The Kittens And Rainforests mode (All clocks at max, all power saving features fully off, everything at max performance mode etc.) I still get this problem It seems like it's stuck at transfer speeds around 1-3MB/s while '2k et al hit 10-12MB/s right off the bat! Edit: Wrong box XD
  3. Yup - Win+Pause -> Device Manager -> View -> Show Hidden Devices And on Win7!
  4. Does anyone know of any tweak utilities that can hack the VariBright thing found on AMD notebook chipsets? I normally have it off as it's incredibly annoying (Screen brightness constantly fluctuating depending on how much white/black is on the screen) but with it on the lowest screen brightness is significantly lower than if it's off. I'd like to be able to set that low level of screen brightness normally and without the varibright system giving me a migraine
  5. Only superficially; It seems an order of magnitude more involved and seems to depend on SCCM for a lot of stuff. From what I've gleaned so far, the entire deployment procedure would need to be changed from the PXE server setup onward :/ I don't mind admitting that I find the whole thing quite daunting
  6. If the long test detects errors, the hard disk is damaged and needs to be replaced
  7. What you're grabbing is actually what is there Most video playback softs are accelerated - They provide a chroma-key'd draw area and the video card fills that in that area with the decoded video. (This is why sometimes if you have a video playing in the background, you can see bits of it filter through on the current window if the chroma key colour is something stupid like one of the 16 base windows colours) That's how the Overlay render option works with things like Media Player Classic and how many DXVA players like PowerDVD work. If you want to be able to grab the frames, you need to use a frame-grabber than can intercept the overlay, or tell the video player to use a different render system. Non-accelerated or 3D surface renders should be capturable with normal frame grabbers. IIRC Win7's DWM isn't compatible with the 'normal' overlay acceleration (Which we've had since Win3.1!) and most videos are rendered to 3D surfaces instead which is why they're capturable. Flash is a tricky thing; It doesn't support rendering to overlays at all, but they've kludged video acceleration through a different path which frankly I don't quite understand. It needs special driver support which is why it's such a bugger to get it working, but when it's fully working it seems to act a lot like an overlay in that the video is rendered off-screen and doesn't get grabbed. However, Flash video is almost never fully accelerated so it should be capturable most of the time... (AFAIK, only full-screen flash video is render-accelerated and decoding-accelerated; For windowed stuff I've only ever seen the decoding of the video be accelerated.) Normal vector flash animations will always be capturable because that doesn't use the video acceleration render surface.
  8. Hmm, wonder why I don't have it...!
  9. Dude, I totally feel your pain. Everything I knew about windows networking and deployment has been thrown out with Win7 and 2k8; I may as well be deploying Linux considering how much prior knowledge is now transferable. My next fun task is how Microsoft aren't even supporting Group Policy software deployment with their own products anymore; The amount of crap we've had to go through to deploy Office 2010 compared to Office 2003 is just ridiculous. It's like Microsoft have designed their stuff to be used by huge enterprise corporations with no thought given to low resource small businesses and schools.
  10. Are you sure? I have MSE installed and have no such driver...
  11. I'm still using the stock ones; Last time I checked there weren't any updates in the ThinkVantage thing but I haven't checked lately... Is your one a Broadcom too? If so, where did you find the manufacturer drivers? I couldn't find any 'generic' WiFi drivers on the broadcom website at all (To be fair, I'm not even 100% sure it is a Broadcom chip; The specs just list it as a "ThinkPad 2x2 11a/b/g/n" - It's only because of the mention of broadcom in the drivers and config panels that I think it is a broadcom device! )
  12. Thanks I also have a similar problem with the WiFi, but only if it's been in use for a fairly long time. I've noticed if I run a continuous ping, you get little twitches (e.g. a stream of 1ms with the odd 2ms), but as time goes by the 2ms twitch gets bigger and bigger until it's in the 400's and that's when I start getting the weird speed/connection drops. To be fair I have had this in other Broadcom and Intel WiFi-equipped laptops too so it's not just a Lenovo thing. Also, I did discover that the x121e actually does have modifiers for things like the insert key: Fn + I = Insert Fn + P = Pause Fn + B = Break Fn + S = Scroll Lock Embarrassingly, this is apparently in the manual that comes with it! Less embarrassingly, mine didn't come with a manual (I found this out via notes for the BIOS update that fixes Fn+I! ) I still MUCH prefer the keyboard and touchpad from the x120e tho' - I do wonder I could swap them out on my x121e but even on eBay they are not cheap parts so I don't want to risk it...! Also, one AWESOME utility for anyone with a Zacate system: http://code.google.com/p/brazostweaker/ I was able to undervolt the x121e's E350 with this and then used the AMD Fusion thing to force the laptop to run at 800MHz when on battery and I can now actually get 8 hours of run-time out of it! (And as a nice side benefit, it shut the bloody fan up ) The bizarre thing is you can still play full screen 1080p MP4's smoothly at this speed, but I had to give XMPlay a 5MB buffer to stop it skipping while I was websurfing
  13. Win2K can only take drivers from the floppy; It might have been XP that added USB key support IIRC, butI never got that to work either. We had this problem in the past before I learned how to integrate AHCI drivers into XP disks by reverse-engineering Dell and HP XP boot disks, but the USB floppy option did work for us. However, for some bizarre reason, it ONLY worked with TEAC USB Floppy drives and some Panasonic/Matsus***a ones. SONY USB floppy drives did not work at all. And I'm talking about the brand of the actual floppy drive component, not the brand of the USB floppy drive.
  14. Depends on your compatibility requirements; If you want to run older stuff (Esp Win2k-era or older) then Win7 64-bit will just cause headaches. If you won't be touching older stuff, go 64-bit - Aside from backwards compatibility, it is better than 32-bit in all areas.
  15. Nice! I'd actually prefer the x120e but they didn't do them with UK Keyboards! This one is pretty cool, but is a bit bigger because the battery is flush and is missing the Insert key I'm just trying to get the boot times down; I stuck an SSD in here and it still takes about a minute to boot (A far cry from the 10 seconds the SSD-equipped T420 gets in the Lenovo advert!) so something's not right! Most of the (useless) services I've disabled have stayed disabled, but it's just these two that WON'T DIE!! It's very perplexing; Never had this problem before except with viruses! I haven't removed all the Lenovo stuff as it's been semi-useful (That and I need some of them so things like the WWAN and GPS work!) so I really hope the Lenovo softs aren't responsible, or tracking down the culprit will be nigh impossible!
  16. Not on a domain, just mostly stock Win7 Pro 64-bit on a Thinkpad X121e. I haven't even installed much stuff on it yet (MSE, OpenVPN, WinRAR, TightVNC and some lightweight games like Cogs and Darwinia!) I should note this is my first Win7 machine so I'm probably unaware of most of it's idiosyncrasies... Does anyone here want to try stopping disabling those services then rebooting to see if it happens to them too? That way I could at least isolate whether it's a Win7 thing or something else (Maybe a Lenovo thing, although why Lenovo would enable that stuff...?) Edit: Just tried to rename the SearchIndexer.exe but got blocked by something called TrustedInstaller??!
  17. I'm trying to disable the Offline Files and Windows Search services vut they are somehow reverting themselves after a reboot. I'm using the Services config (Right Click Computer -> Manage -> Services and Apps -> Services) to stop and disable both, but after a reboot they're both back up and at their default service settings (Offline Files: Manual, Started - Windows Search: Automatic (Delayed), Started) as if I had done nothing! Offline files isn't even enabled in Control->Sync Centre and I've tried to disable all the other indexing options where I can find them, but the services are still being loaded Is this known behaviour? Is there a workaround? I even tried hacking permissions for the registry keys for those services so that Everyone is Deny'd Set Value rights to the keys in both ControlSet001 and ControlSet002, and they STILL got overidden! Edit: In fact after rebooting, it's locked out the keys and I had to take ownership of them to reset the permissions to get access to them...
  18. Eventually people will be forced to because of drivers. THAT and OEMs are the biggest drive of upgrades to Win7. But there will still be some hardcore types who will hang on to it; Hell, I'm still using Win2000 and Win98SE (Mainly because I'm boycotting anything that needs online activation) and it hasn't bothered me
  19. @Trip - Yeah; It's nice to see that some companies still have competent coders! I actually think the game looks amazing; The model faces are nowhere near as well done as Valve's, but lightyears ahead of Fallout 3 for instance Textures and architecture are nicely done and there's lots of nice shader effects and lighting tricks. Anyway, success! I got it working in the end. Had a little stumbling block with version detection but a bit of RTFM sorted that out. All you need are the USER32.DLL AND KERNEL32.DLL from the API Wrapper pack v1.9 (And their ORG counterparts of course) and to trick the DX3 version checker, need to create an ini file named win2k_xp_kernel32.ini with these lines: I'm running it on an Athlon64 4000+ and a GeForce 7950GT - It is just about playable - Framerates are okay (15-50) but there is a horrible texture load (or something) problem where the game jerks like hell when you first see new things. e.g. at the start of the game, as soon as you start looking around the whole thing freezes for several seconds, maybe throwing a frame at you now and then, but once it gets it out of its system it's pretty smooth (Until you look up or down, then it does it again!) The mediacows youtube walkthrough displays the same problem so at least it isn't just me! I get the same thing in Borderlands too... It is a bit annoying as when I get to a new area I have to spin around 360 degrees like a crazy person until it settles down or risk it happening it right when I hit a timing critical section (And since this is a first person sneaker, there are many of those! ) For s***s and giggles I tried it on my x121e (E350, Radeon 6310) and it has the opposite problem; Framerate is barely high enough to be playable (10-20fps) but it's constant and smooth; No sudden jerks when you're looking around at new things. Also, there is a slight input lag which is not present on my desktop machine. On both I've obviously turned ALL video settings as low as they can go
  20. Has anyone tried getting this to work in Win2k yet? With the win2kgaming site down I am missing their expertise I suspect I will have to somehow decouple it from Steam first as that seems to bring a whole set of its own problems...
  21. Seconded! That site was a godsend! ... Could it be hosted here as a subforum of the 2k forum...?
  22. Hi all, Am a Win7 newbie and am already running into weird problems! I am trying to map a shared drive (Z:) to my samba server, but for some freaky reason it refuses to accept the password. BUT, and this is the really bizarre part, if I type the password into Notepad, cut it and paste it into the password box... IT WORKS!!! I am fairly sure I have not been typing in the password wrong every single time! The thing is, *sometimes*, after repeatedly typing in the (correct!) username and password, it'll suddenly let me in! I go through a similar procedure on my Windows XP and Windows 2000 systems and have never encountered such weird behaviour! It's very possible I'm missing something really simple, but if anyone has any ideas or has heard of such a thing... let me know! This is on a brand new Thinkpad x121e running Windows 7 Pro x64, if that makes any difference... Edit: Interesting discovery: If I tick "Remember these Credentials" then it works! The problem being that I don't actually want it to remember these credentials... It also works just fine if I create the network map from the command line (e.g. with "net use")
  23. Finally got my hands on one of these lappys \o/ First impressions are it's very smart-looking, surface finish has that nice rubbery Thinkpad feel. Screen is very sharp and MATTE! Big plus points for no lame-a** glossy screen! The laptop isn't too heavy but not as light as I'd expected; Holding it on an arm and using it with your other hand would get tiring pretty quickly. Battery life has so far been acceptable for laptop of this portability; Well short of what Lenovo rather unrealistic lists on their website (8 hours? Yeeeeaahhhh), but still getting me through most of a day without charging. I have had lots of minor annoyances with it tho'. Right from the off, I wanted to put in an SSD but there is no installation media and attempts to clone the 320GB drive to a 240GB SSD failed miserably with the classic "unable to load winload.exe error". This is the first Windows system I've had so no spare Windows 7 DVDs around to attempt a repair; Borrowed one off a friend but it complained that it wasn't compatible and refused to load the recovery tools. This is not a cheap laptop, so such lame cost-cutting measures really irk me. In the end, I had to go through the whole startup-first-run sequence on the 320GB drive and burn my own recovery media. I wasted best part of a day screwing around with this, but at least the DIY recovery media worked! Next is the lack of a hard disk light or indicators for WiFi, Bluetooth, WLAN, Capslock (It has no numlock or scroll lock) - The only lights are on the side to indicate charging, the camera light and the power light, which has been doubles as the dot in the Thinkpad logo's 'i'. Why do they do this? It can't save that much money and there is plenty of space either side of the battery to put such LEDs. Is it aesthetics? People do not buy Thinkpads for aesthetics! I've found the lack of them annoying enough that I've actually had to download tray icon utilities for them! My biggest gripe at the moment is the keyboard; The x100e keyboard was great, but this one really sucks. Not the feel, which is excellent; Keys are well balanced and provide good feedback; Typing is very comfortable. Problem 1) is the arrow keys - They are a bit intermittent; You can press them down without them registering; You have to push down that bit harder for them to actually trigger, which makes it very easy to accidentally trips the adjacent PgUp/Dn keys. Lenovo really should have moved the block down and made them full-sized. Problem 2) is glaring omission of some keys. It has 84 keys and there are several keys which I was feeling the loss of right from the get-go, most notably: The Insert key which is used extensively in Linux apps like Midnight Commander The Menu key, which I actually use for accessing some menus rather than moving the mouse cursor over and right-clicking The Pause/Break key which I use for accessing Windows System properties quickly (e.g. for domain swapping) and also is used as my VirtualBox break-out key! My Eee900 has more keys than this thing and it's a 9" laptop! At the very least they should have utilised the Fn key to double up some of the missing keys! I'm trying to find out whether the x100e UK keyboard will work on the x121e; That had a much better key layout and less omissions (If anyone knows, let me, well, know ) Next big gripe is the trackpad; Thank smeg this thing has the track-point or I would have sent it back by now! The problem is you can only use the bottom 2/3 of the trackpad; The top third is slightly curved and doesn't register input at all; I don't know if this is a fault or whether it's supposed to be like this, but it's bloody stupid. Next, it advertises itself as a multi-touch pad, but two and three-finger tapping does not work. Even one-finger tapping is iffy as the pointer will 'jump' when you tsap, making it very hard to click on smaller buttons. I've had to turn the sensitivity fown to one short of max to combat this. One odd thing is, aside from the universal tap-to-click, the whole pad also acts like a big button, and you can right click by pressing down the right-hand side or by pressing down with two fingers, but it requires a lot of force and is basically unusable if you're using it on your lap or anything other than a hard surface. Like with many Synaptics pads, two-finger dragging appears to be faked; You can't use it to perform right-mouse button drags, e.g. for mouse gestures in Opera or right-dragging a file - It only scrolls, and the scrolling is really iffy too; I often have to do it a few times to get it to 'catch'. I may have been spoilt by the Eee 900's multi-touch pad, which was a real multi-touch pad and worked excellently; You only needed one hand to to all pointer manipulation, whereas the Thinkpad really needs both.
  24. Neat, didn't know about the Alt+X thing Right, we're getting somewhere - The characters in the doc are coming back with F-codes, e.g. the first two chars are T and O, which should be 0054 and 004F respectively, but in the wrong document they are F054 and F04F. If this was Linux I'd say it feels like a Unicode locale problem, but I don't know how this could come to be or how to fix it in Windows/Word! ( Thanks for your help so far! )
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