Strange WiFi

I was fustrted for an hour this morning because the WiFi on my laptop refused to connect to my WiFi router even though it can detect the router with maximum signal strength. Finally I figured out the solution: explicitly set up a network setting under Wireless Network Properties. And it finally worked. I was just wondering why the automatic way worked before but not now, but at least I got things working.

Switch Quicktime Alternative 1.77

Quicktime Alternative 1.77 allows me to watch the ads on Apple web site without the anonying "do you want to upgrade to QuickTime Pro" kind of crap. Good stuff.

Stupid XP forced me to reinstall my OS

I was reinstalling Windows XP on my laptop today. It wasn't a planned installation but a semi-accidental one. All started with this morning when I was trying to test the VLK Product ID (from my work machine in the office) on my laptop, and I was shocked to find out that it was rejected. In fact, even the non-VLK Product ID from the office was rejected. I was very pissed, and turned out reinstalling the OS on laptop using my VLK SP2 WinXP disc. It worked very well, and now I have my laptop activated (because it's VLK) and able to do all the Windows update including the IE 7. Pretty cool.

This also proved that the kind of installation disc you used to install XP dictates what Product ID can be used by your XP OS environment.

However, I still don't understand why all my other retail product ID failed... I mean, they are legit :-< ....

After using Retail reason of Vista for about 2 weeks...

The fact Vista failed me on the following items made me switch back to WinXP (thank goddness I still keep it in another partition:

- Failed to run any of my disc burning software properly.
- Lack of anti-aliasing on Photo preview.
- Sluggish Aero glass performance (yeah I know, but I don't' want to update my 5200FX)
- Cumbersome UI
- Constantly bitching me for security crap.

Enough.

Certain port certain speed

I chatted with my colleague and we both experienced this problem in various of machine setting, that something when using 2.5 inch removable hard disk connected to USB port, the system may recognized the USB 2.0 device as something slower, and thus prompt a message about the speed degrade. This is totally irritating, and I am still finding ways to resolve the problem.

Why microSD not being able to have BartPE installed

I was kind of frustrated by the fact the all (actually two) of my microSD cards are failed to start with BartPE, a self-contain scale down version of windows bootup environment that allows you to bootup your machine under emergency. The brands of the microSD card i tried was Trendcent (a 1Gb card) and KingMax (a 512Mb card). And I used them on several SD card enclosures and card reader, and they all failed while the regular SD card succeed to boot BartPE with the same SD card thumb drive enclosure.

I spent a darn night to came up with the conclusion, and boy I was pissed.

So as of now I am pretty much give up on having the smallest thumbdrive that support Windows bootup with microSD. Darn. Oh well, I can always put windows 98 with DOS support of them.

Tortured by a MiniDV camcorder

My friend lend me her Canon Camcorder MV830i yesterday so that I could convert the DV video into DVD or VCD. I also tried to took this opportunity to test drive a miniDV and see if I should buy one. And then I sucked into this nightmare of experiment trying to figure out WHY IN THE WORLD that my PC does not seem to recognize the Canon Camcorder. In fact, it's not just my PC's Firewire card not recognizing it, but also my laptop's Firewire card.

I always wonder why most of the DV I was dealing with usually not working. This time is no exception unfortunately.

And it wasted me almost 12+ hours on this stuff. Darn.

SD card price continously dropping

I went to Golden Shopping Center today, and once again found the price of Toshiba blue 2Gb SD card dropping. It's selling at HK$129. Someday these cards will be as cheap as floppy in old days. Scary ...

But something puzzled me. I saw the Toshiba 4Gb SCHD card selling at HK$399, which the 8Gb was selling at HK$799. Too bad that they are most probably incompatible with my Dell PDA as described here. Guess I may need to buy multiple SD card instead ... so inconvenient.

Continously seeing people buying Nintendo DS Lite. And then Wii. A lot of Wii :-I .... tempting.

8Gb CF seems disappearing from the shopping center. I wonder why.

Buy a new graphic card for HD video

Think about getting NVidia 7600GS(AGP).........$850
For playing back HD content

[Info]

Some app that I never have time to try out

Here's some apps that I was told pretty well, but don't have time to try out:

FinalBurner
http://www.protectedsoft.com/download.php


HotKeyz 2.6.0.0
http://www.skynergy.com/hotkeyz.html

Try Firefox 3.0a

pdfMachine Whith
http://www.broadgun.com/genp/download.shtml


Folder Locker
http://www.softpen.com/folder%20loker.htm


WebPage count
http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=home
www.alexa.com


FLV Player 1.3.3
http://www.martijndevisser.com/blog/article/flv-player-updated

Delete hard to delete files
DelinvFile
http://www.purgeie.com/delinv/

Finding Product ID

I was told that there are two kinds of Windows XP installation disc, one for VLK (volume License Key) and one for Retail/OEM. Each kind of Installation disc can only accept a Product ID from it's kind. So a legit Retail XP Product ID won't work on a VLK XP installation even when it's legit.

Why do I care all these? Because we got some development machines WITHOUT any installation disc. So first I need to use some freeware to retrieve the Product ID of each machine. But then I found out that not all the Product ID I retrieved worked on a XP VLK installation, and thus the above research result. The search result has not been totally proven, though.

And in case you didn't know, there are freewares out there that allows you to retrieve Product IDs:
- WindowsXP Product Key Viewer.exe
- SIW (System Information for Windows)

Both gave me consistent Product IDs.

Vista on VMWare once again

Once I know that time stopper thing, I couldn't help but gave Vista again tried on VMWare, and turned out that it worked pretty well. Granted that it's not particularly fast on my VMWare, but at least I can use it to do testing.

Other Tidbits:
- I used the Internet update and got the Sound driver (Creative AudioPCI (ES1371, ES1373) (WDM)) and it works pretty well (in fact I am using it to listen music now). By the way, the music that comes with Windows Vista actually sounds pretty nice.

- After timestopper, Genuine Advantage checking can still be passed for download like DirectX Feb 2007 edition.