Windows 7 and WAV Files

Years ago (exactly how long ago in a minute) I recorded a short WAV file that I used as an announcement that my daughter had gotten on AIM.

When I upgraded to Windows 7 I set this as a pidgin Buddy Pounce. But it didn't work!

Oddly Windows Media Player would play it but Media Player Classic wouldn't nor would Windows 7 play it as a system sound. Hmmm.

Off to Google.

It wasn't on the first page but on the second page was this link.

That held the key and the solution to the problem.

I had recorded that WAV file using Windows 98's Sound Recorder application.

I fired up AudacityPortable and opened the old WAV file. Then I exported it as a WAV but obviously Audacity used a different codec.

That fixed it.

Windows 7 and ThinkPad X100e

I've made good use of my Asus Eee PC 1000H. Recently upgraded to Windows 7, it has been my "in the car" laptop for months.

But it's still not a ThinkPad. Lenovo recently came out with several new models that piqued my interest, the Edge and the X100e. I started lurking around Lenovo's outlet site and finally found a deal on an X100e.

The specifications for the refurbished X100e that I got are:

Processor	AMD® Athlon™ Neo MV-40 (1.60GHz, 512KB L2)
Operating System	Genuine Windows 7 Professional 32 - English
Keyboard/Pointing Device	UltraNav (TrackPoint and TouchPad)
Total Memory	2GB PC2-5300 DDR2 667MHz SDRAM SODIMM Memory
Hard Drive	250GB, 5400RPM Serial ATA 2.5" Hard Drive
Display	11.6” WXGA HD (1366 X 768) LED, W/ 0.3 MP Camera
Graphics	ATI™ Radeon™ HD 3200
Ethernet/Wireless	11b/g/n Wi-Fi wireless
Bluetooth	No
Integrated Camera	Yes

The outlet price was 50% of list and since it was very slow to ship, Lenovo gave me an 10% "sales concession" (credit) so the price was very good.

Although Lenovo doesn't put a lot of crapware on their PCs, I wanted it running Windows 7 64-bit so I reformated and loaded Windows 7 Pro 64-bit. I had let Windows Update install all the drivers it had and then went to Lenovo to get all the rest of the drivers.

The only issue I had after the reload was that when running Google Documents using the new document format, highlighted text was barely discernible when on battery power. As you can imagine, that took a while to figure out what all the conditions were.

I turned to my favorite problem solver Google and came up with a solution. What had happened was that Windows Update installed a standard ATI driver but the Lenovo driver had the Catalyst Control Center included. This solution uses the Catalyst Control Center to turn off the Vari-Bright feature. With this off, the contrast is back to normal.

Just for fun, I installed Office 2010 64-bit as well.

Windows 7 and Asus Eee PC

My Asus Eee PC came with Windows XP Home. I've used it as my travel laptop. I got a cigarette lighter adapter and keep the Eee PC in the car.

When I got the Eee PC in the fall of 2008 there was lots of chatter on the forums of installing Vista on it. There were some bootleg drivers out there but no formal support from Asus.

After I got the TechNet Standard subscription, the Eee PC was high on my list for Windows 7. As it turns out, Asus not only supports Windows 7 on the Eee PC with drivers but actually provides a self-upgrade guide to install Windows 7.

It all worked great. I had already installed 2GB of RAM so that wasn't a problem. There are a few subtleties of the Eee PC that don't work. For example, the XP load has the ability to configure the display to 1024x768 and either make it scroll or compress. The vanilla Windows 7 video drivers don't support that. I never used that capability but there are some hacks out there if you must.

Even the Eee PC "bells and whistles" work. For example, the multi-touch track pad (actually from ELAN) is fully functioning along with Asus' Eee Super Hybrid Engine.

Flashing the BIOS was the toughest part. I haven't figured out how to get rid of the grey POST screen but I haven't tried very hard.

Bugzilla Entertainment

Here's another of those threads where the open source contributors take a "holier than thou" approach to users of their software.

Firefox 4 is now in public beta. With Beta 2, a new "bug" was fixed.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=574654

This change nullified some simple about:config parameters that were widely used to basically turn off tab scrolling. The submitter of this "bug" said "Users can override this using userChrome.css if they absolutely want it. I don't think the prefs are worth it." userChrome.css doesn't ship with Firefox. You have to create it yourself then insert CSS code into it to reinstate this capability. Skip on down in the thread and see the uproar.

The author of this change submitted some sample CSS code that hadn't been tested and didn't work so even the author was having trouble implementing it! "Sorry, I didn't actually try it myself and got confused. This should work (although it's again untested):"

The good news is this is in a beta, albeit public.

This certainly gives some credence to concern over open source software in a corporate environment although similar points could be made over some of Microsoft's choices.

Hopefully this will all be cleared up by the time Firefox 4 goes gold.

Windows 7 and ThinkPad X40

With my shiny new TechNet Standard subscription in hand, my first target was my beloved ThinkPad X40. You'll remember I replaced the 1.8" hard drive with a KingSpec solid state drive.

I maxed out the memory at 1.5GB with a $19 DIMM from 5R Processors.

I built a USB drive with Windows 7 Pro and Office 2003 and Office 2010.

I booted the USB drive and Windows 7 was installed in about 30 minutes.

But...

Device Manager didn't look so good. Lots of yellow exclamation marks! I started Googling them one by one but came across one suggestion that was just too simple: Run Windows Update. Duh!

Since one of the exclamation marks was the wireless adapter, I plugged in an Ethernet cable and fired up Windows Update.

Fixed it.

Except...

The video card wasn't recognized. Back to Google. It wasn't so simple this time. The Intel chipset the X40 uses simply doesn't have Windows 7 drivers.

There were a couple of people who claimed they had overcome this but there were almost always comments that that solution hadn't worked.

I finally took the simplest solution with no dissenters and tried it.

Worked.

Now I have a 2.7lb. sub-notebook running Windows 7 with all the features working fine.

Next? A ThinkPad T42.

TechNet

I have a lot of PCs around my house, 3 desktops and mumble, mumble laptops! I'm slowly becoming a big Windows 7 fan after my experience with Vista here, here, and here. The Big Honker is just humming along with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit.

On one of the podcasts I listen to Paul Thurrott mentioned Microsoft's TechNet subscription and even pointed to a coupon to lower the cost to less than $300. In a recent podcast, Paul mentioned Microsoft has announced a new TechNet Standard subscription for $200. Rather than me rehashing all the work Paul has done, here's his post on this.

I bought a TechNet Standard subscription and have started using it.

Comcast and Cisco RNG200

I have Comcast cable service in the Memphis market. For a set top box I have an Cisco RNG200 HD DVR.

This morning when I came into the den, the face of the DVR didn't show the clock. Odd. I powered it up and it took a little longer than normal and then gave an error screen saying something like that the network wasn't available.

I had been watching QAM on my KWORLD SA290-Q LE so I knew that the cable-ready was working. I turned it off and went on about my business.

This afternoon when I returned home the clock was back so I figured everything was Ok. Wrong.

Later in the evening when I went to look at some recorded programs I discovered that all my programs and programming were gone!

I called 1-800-COMCAST and went through the obligatory 20 questions only to be told that they were too busy to talk to me. I immediately started pressing 0 over and over and ended up listening to Muzak (or some cheap equivalent).

When the representative came on she told me that Comcast had pushed an update to the Cisco RNG200s overnight and it had been unsuccessful. The result was that all of them were WIPED! I whined some and she agreed to give me a credit for a month of the DVR service of $15.95.

I can't believe that no one has commented on this! If this happened to you be sure to call Comcast for your credit.

Flash 10.1 and My Screen

Surely you've read the hoopla over the recent Flash vulnerability. The official download link is here. But if you're like me, you don't want to install an application just to get a patch so the direct download links are here.

Now that that's out of the way, there's something new in Flash 10.1. Hardware acceleration has been turned on by default. If you know what that means I'm sure you're excited. If you don't (like me) you'll also be excited when your power settings are ignored and leave your screen on all the time.

Not to worry. It's easy to fix. Bring up a page with Flash on it. Right click on the Flash object. Select "Settings." Click the leftmost tab at the bottom. Uncheck "Use hardware acceleration." Click on "Close."

Samsung CL65

Remember last summer when I blogged about geotagging? I'd had to work some to capture my lat/lon information and associate it with each photo. That worked pretty good but I wanted something simpler.

My Casio Exilim EX-Z1000 was only a 10 megapixel and only 3x optical zoom.

So I went Google shopping last Christmas and came up with the Samsung CL65 (ST1000 in Europe).

The CL65 has 3.5" touch screen LCD. It has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi along with built-in GPS. It has software on the camera to directly upload images online or e-mail them via the Wi-Fi. It's 12.1 megapixels with a 5x zoom lens. Oh, and the video recording is HD.

When I started looking it seemed to also be made of "unobtainium." I got on a waiting list at Rocket Camera. Their BBB rating doesn't look so good but I didn't have any problems with them. They had a good price and gave me good service. Caveat emptor.

The camera is awesome. The touch screen took me a little getting used to as I seemed to touch the screen accidentally while I was holding it. Other than turning it off, there is no screen lock. The GPS isn't AGPS like your phone so it takes a little while to find the satellites when you first turn it on. When I was in a situation where I was likely to be taking frequent photos, I just kept turning it on and off to keep the GPS sync relatively fresh.

I don't like digital zoom so I played with the settings until the digital zoom was disabled. Unlike the Casio, there isn't an obvious setting for this and I don't know which setting I changed to disable it but I think it was the image stabilization that did it.

Speaking of settings, the Casio has a lot more of pre-programmed scenarios. The Samsung has only 13. I don't use these much and all the ones I looked for were there, e.g. sunrise.

The Samsung charges with a proprietary (and short) USB cable. This cable also presents the MicroSD card as a USB drive to the PC. Just don't lose this cable. I haven't had any problems with the battery life even while running the GPS all the time.

The Samsung's 5x optical zoom is all internal. What this means is that the lens never protrudes from the camera's body. Nice.

I can't get the Wi-Fi to connect to my WPA/WPA2 network on my D-Link WBR-2310 router. I called Samsung and they weren't much help. It connected when I turned off security but that wasn't acceptable. I did get it to connect at my daughter's house and at her mother-in-law's house.

I've taken hundreds of snapshots with the Samsung but hadn't traveled with it to exercise the GPS until our recent trip to Bainbridge Island. Picasaweb does a great job of presenting the lat/lon for each photo. All went well until just before this photo.

That's when I dropped the Samsung into my soup! Luckily I had the camera all set before I handed it to the waiter so the picture turned out fine. The camera wasn't so lucky. It had landed screen down. Initially the touch screen wouldn't respond at all. Slowly it began working better and better and eventually seemed fine.

It worked great all the rest of the day but the next morning I got up early to take photos of the sunrise and it was cold outside. After about 30 minutes out in the cold the touch screen quit again.

Luckily Father's Day was coming up and the CL65 was much more available. My wife got me a new one and I've applied all my settings to it and am ready to go.

BlackBerry OS 5

I saw a friend's Bold 2 recently and it was running BlackBerry OS 5. Of course I was jealous so I went to get it from AT&T.

Surprise! AT&T doesn't support it on the Bold. I wouldn't let that stop me. After reading about good experiences, I followed the instructions here. It worked like a charm for me and I haven't had any of the problems the subsequent posters had. It took about 40 minutes end-to-end. I'm running v5.0.0.681. Realize that there are a couple of ".0"s in there so it's real early for v5.

The best recap of the new features I could find was here and that was when v5 was still in beta.

Here're the handful of things I found different.

There's something different on the home screen. Maybe it is the highlighting of icons.

The compose screen for SMS is different.


In the Messages application, there is a capability I hadn't noticed before of flagging messages.


In the Contacts application, the search is more obvious.

The Media application has several changes. It includes icons for the Video Camera and the Voice Notes Recorder but not the Camera.

It also has a search field like Contacts.

When you're playing a song, the presentation is different and nicer. Ignore the boxes instead of proper text. That is because of podshifter.

One thing that took me a while to get resolved was that by default Media times out and closes after it is idle for 45 minutes. Here's where to set that.

In the Browser, you can choose your default search provider from a nice drop-down menu.

There are slick drop-down menus everywhere.

Even Applications has a search field.

RIM also includes icons to install Facebook and Twitter applications. While we're looking at this screen, all of my old applications came across and worked fine on v5. I did lose the internal settings of them and had to reestablish those, e.g. GPSLogger.

There's a nice new application called Files.

Files is like Windows Explorer. You can navigate the file system either on the media card or the device memory.

It even has viewers.

Probably the nicest new feature is threaded SMSs.

Reminds me of the Treo 650! I blanked out the name in this screen capture.

AT&T Data Plans

I certainly can't say anything that hasn't already been said about AT&T's new cellular data plans.

What I can do is show how it affects me and let you see how you can determine if it affects you.

I went back through my AT&T bills for the last year. Here's where the data usage shows up in my bill. Notice that mine is a BlackBerry feature code so yours may be different.

The simplest thing is to search for "kilobytes".

Here's my data usage month by month.

Clearly I'm way under 200MB per month. My BlackBerry data plan is $30 per month (actually $35 with 200 SMS messages) so it looks like I could change my plan to "DataPlus" for $15 and save $15 per month. Remember that you can't go back to the unlimited (actually 5GB) plan.

There are a couple of observations from looking at the data. My data usage didn't change when I went to 3G with the Bold. My conclusion from this is that the screen on the Bold is still so small that I'm not willing to surf very much on the phone. A second observation (really a question) is why are those two months (June and August) twice the rest?

HTML5

I'm sure by now you've heard the buzz about Apple, Adobe Flash, and HTML5 video. If not you can find lots on it here.

If you want to see what all the hoopla is about, here's how to play with it yourself. Install the latest Google Chrome Portable. Then go here and opt-in to YouTube's HTML5 beta. Finally, go watch this.

Encrypted Thumb Drive

I've been using TrueCrypt for a long time but I use it as an exception rather than the default on my thumb drive. What I was seeking was to setup a thumb drive so that it would always be encrypted yet be as simple to use as possible.

I think I ended up with a pretty good solution.

I used PStart that I had used earlier. This time though I used the startup and exit features.

To get PStart running, I created an autorun.inf file on the thumb drive.

[autorun]
open=PStart.exe -autorun
icon="PStart.exe"
action=Thumb Drive Menu
label=Your Name

This causes an entry to be presented at the top of the Autorun menu (unless it is disabled) asking if you want to start the "Thumb Drive Menu."

Within PStart, I setup an entry called "Mount My Documents." This entry invokes TrueCrypt with command line switches set to automatically mount the volume as drive T: and not display the TrueCrypt window. This was specified to run at PStart startup.

Another entry was created and called "Dismount My Documents." Similarly this entry invokes TrueCrypt with command line switches set to automatically dismount any volumes TrueCrypt has mounted and not display the TrueCrypt window. This was specified to run at PStart exit.

The above makes the whole thing work. When you insert the thumb drive, if you have Autoplay enabled, you get the Autoplay menu asking if you want to run "Thumb Drive Menu." You click on it and PStarts runs TrueCrypt. TrueCrypt prompts you for the password for the encrypted volume. You enter the password and the encrypted volume is mounted as T:. When you close the PStart menu, it runs TrueCrypt and dismounts the encrypted volume.

Now, what do you do with it?

In my case when at work, I wanted to replicate "My Documents" with the PC. Within PStart, I setup an entry called "At Work." This entry invokes Allway Sync 'n' Go to sync "My Documents."

When anywhere but at work, I wanted to just use the "My Documents" on the thumb drive. Within PStart, I setup an entry called "At Home." This entry invokes Windows Explorer to explore "My Documents" on T:.

Here's what PStart's menu looks like.

Here're a few of the PStart configuration screens that make it look like I wanted it.

Bluetooth Tethering via BlackBerry Bold

Ever since I've inherited the BlackBerry Bold, I've fancied tethering a laptop to its 3G connection via Bluetooth.

Recently I've tackled this and succeeded. To be honest, I hacked away at this off and on for months. I've referenced forum posts and blog entries all over that were very helpful. I can't give you a single step by step process to get there. What I can give you is a set of references and what my Bold and Asus Eee 1000H look like when I'm done and connected.

Pinstack Probably the most comprehensive
PortlandITGuy Good links to other sources
CrackBerry Not using Bluetooth

I didn't use the BlackBerry Desktop Manager nor the AT&T Communications Manager. While these may have made the process simpler, I didn't want the result to be dependent on another piece of software.

I also didn't add tethering to my AT&T plan. So far, I've only tethered to prove the concept. If I use this regularly I plan to add this $30/month feature.

This document doesn't cover pairing the 1000H and the Bold. That was routine and similar to pairing with a headset.

When I was done with the pairing here's what it looked like on the Bold.


By the way, I captured these BlackBerry screens with CaptureIT.

I didn't have to tweak any settings on the Bold.

It's another story on the 1000H.


The password is CINGULAR1.



Uncheck all of these.

















This is after I'd clicked on "Query Modem."

You have to set this!


Now that you've waded through all these screen captures, I'm sure you're dying to know "How's it work?"

Great!

I don't have Flash on the 1000H so I used InternetFrog's speed test.

You can see that it showed almost 700kbps down and not quite 100kbps up. The QOS figure does NOT represent dropped packets but rather consistency of speed during the test.

Just to validate that test, I ran the same test on my ThinkPad connected via 802.11g to my (alleged) 3.0mbps AT&T DSL link. It tested at not quite 2.0mbps. I then retested the DSL using SpeedTest.net and got the expected 3.0mbps.

One way to read this is that InternetFrog is conservative or wrong. The other read is that SpeedTest is optimistic or wrong.

Regardless the Bluetooth tethering via the BlackBerry Bold ran somewhere between 700kbps and 1.0mbps down. That's very satisfactory to me. It feels quick.

If I left something out that you need, leave me a comment and I'll add it to the post.