And now I’ve found the setting to enable the Aero theme (transparent window parts, thumbnailed taskbar icons and the excellent, pretty, but pointless 3D application selector). Excellent!
Posted In: Geek, Technology
Archive for June 23rd, 2006
Okay, everything’s working, though sadly with only 2Gb (which is not enough, honestly!)
I have played a bit of Day of Defeat before the football, just to check it works 
and then managed to get the TV card (not my Compro one) working by the 24th minute of the game.
And may I just say, Windows Media Center [sic] is the best piece of media software I’ve tried, and I’ve tried a few in the last few months! Showshifter, Media Portal, Compro’s PCTV, MSI’s PC-TV, Pinnacle’s PCTV — they’re all poor cousins of Windows Media Center.
For example, when you pause TV in any of the others, the PC chugs for a few seconds meaning you lose some of the programme — Media Center pauses instantly and resumes instantly too (assuming, that is, that the additional memory isn’t helping a little). Media Center’s user interface is accomplished and stable — it never crashes whereas all the others (except MSI’s PC-TV) crash at periodic intervals. Best of all, though, Media Center stores the last five or ten minutes of TV so that you can rewind and, because it’s stable, you can do this several times in a row without losing any viewing and as quickly as you could hope for (instantly).
AJD asked, why not get a Mac? The reasons are these:
1. I am a geek (hence the category) so I like to be able to download and play with all sorts of software; my PC is not a tool, it is a toy. My father uses Macs at his printing firm and they are great, especially OS X, but they are limited in the software available.
2. I want to be able to dual boot if possible. Now that Bootcamp is here, I am just waiting for Windows Vista to support the replacement for BIOS, EFI. When this happens a dual boot quality Mac and PC will be possible.
3. There isn’t so much hardware available for the Mac
4. Windows is getting better and better
5. I play games, and few reasonably priced Macs sport suitable graphics cards even when (2) happens.
Posted In: Geek, Technology
I’ve discovered that there are no longer enough IRQs to run all my hardware. I’ve tried switching off BIOS allocation of IRQs, disabling devices and all sorts and still the PCI to PCI Bridge cannot find enough resources.
Ultimately I suspect this is why there is no graphics card in Device Manager — and the ATI drivers will not install unless a Generic VGA card has been found… which it hasn’t. It makes me wonder how an image can be displayed at all.
My next course of action is to remove 2 of my 4Gb of RAM (which are new) to see whether that’s the problem as I hear that the last 512kb have some affect on IRQs anyway…
More later.
Posted In: Geek
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