All posts filed under: Hardware

Two good reasons to finish DVW

Published by Matthias Gall

I bought my first Samsung SyncMaster 204b about one and a half years ago. Although I had some problems with it, I decided to complete my set and get a second one. As you might recognize, I did not get the colors to match exactly yet, but I’ll try twiddle with that later. The wallpaper is from mandolux.com. If you ever need excellent dual monitor wallpapers, this is the place to go. I have downloaded some of them, and while I’m writing this, I have already changed my wallpaper again because I cannot decide which one I like best. The actual reason for buying a second 20″ was to have a little more screen space for programming again after my CRT smoked away some time ago, so: happy coding!

BlackBerry 8800 woes

Published by Matthias Gall

I have a BlackBerry 8800 for work which is generally a good thing. I can read and write email, notes and calendar entries from anywhere, surf the web, get a route calculated from my current position and so on and so on. Still, it’s a work gadget, so it would be just half the fun if it hadn’t a micro SD card slot and wasn’t capable of playing music and videos. So I installed a 6 GB card and copied some music on it. When I reinserted the card I was presented a message box saying, “Media card has been inserted that contains errors. To correct the errors please use a disk error checking utility on a computer.” (or “Es wurde eine fehlerhafte Medienkarte eingelegt…” in German). In case you ever run across this message, make sure that your files on the media card have no spaces in it. The BlackBerry obviously can’t deal with them. Moreover, I removed all special characters from the files as a precaution. It worked for me then.

Enabling StereoMix with SoundMAX drivers

Published by Matthias Gall

Since my posting on the SoundMAX BSOD issues has become quite popular, I have decided to write another posting on my more recent experiences with the drivers in Windows XP. The problem was that it did not crash anymore but it did not let me record my cards output (which is called “StereoMix” or also “What You Hear” as a recording device). Here’s how to fix it.

Samsung SyncMaster 204B

Published by Matthias Gall

I promised I would open a new category Hardware, so here it is… To the left, you see the upper right corner of my Samsung SyncMaster 204B. When I started my computer this evening, I recognized this strange color effect. Yesterday I just told Julius that I never had any problems with this TFT and he bought one today, and I was thinking about buying a second one, too. And now this! The bad thing is that this TFT has a pixel fault class II. Now I was wondering what would happen if I would get an alternate device with a pixel fault? I would find this much more annoying. This little color bug is merely invisible when you’re sitting right in front of the TFT, it only gets more obvious if you look from the perspective I took the photo from. So what? :-/

Farewell adidts.sys BSOD

Published by Matthias Gall

I promise, if this isn’t my very last posting on hardware and hardware driver issues (todays topic), I will add an own category. But since I finally found a solution for my last PC problem, namely BSODs caused by adidts.sys, I feel the urge to blog about that. adidts.sys is the SoundMAX high definition audio driver for the onboard audio which came with my ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard. The driver version available on the ASUS homepage, where I went frequently to check for an update, is still V5.10.1.4530 dated 2006/07/10, but now I learned that there are actually two newer versions available on the ASUS FTP site. I tried 1988b_32bit_510014560.zip and it worked like a charm. I just updated the driver from the hardware control panel instead of using the setup.exe, and finally, my last woe was gone. Update: Although this fixed my BSOD troubles, I recognized that I did not have a stereo mixer available to record the output of my sound card. I tweaked around a bit to handle this, too. Let me …