I rebuilt my main desktop a few days ago and ever since I’ve not been able to connect to it with Remote Desktop. I click connect from the other machine and the buttons grey out for a moment before they reset. No error message is displayed. Checking the event log shows a number of Application Popup errors relating to RDPDD.DLL.
It turns out that this is caused by the latest NVidia drivers - which of course I downloaded and installed on rebuilding the machine, the only fix at the moment is to add this to the registry:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]
"SessionImageSize"=dword:00000020
Hopefully NVidia will fix this in a future driver.
What do we buy the birthday boy who has a no-media policy?
That’s what Phil asked me before my birthday last month. He was referring to the fact that I have no CDs, no DVDs no optical media of any description cluttering my living room. All our TV and movies are stored on a variety of redundant storage and accessed over the network. Be it full VOB rips of DVDs to Xvid or x264 encodes of movies and TV it can all now be played back by the new HTPC. Of course with as much digital content as we have, we need a decent system to manage and search it. Read on for the best solutions I’ve found…
Continue reading ‘My 1080p HTPC: Movie and TV management’
Having ditched Freeview for signal quality reasons, it’s time to talk about getting the satellite cards to work under Vista Media Centre - something that until MS release the “Fuji” update is not as trivial as you’d think! Vista’s tuning architecture doesn’t understand DVB-S (or -S2), so can’t natively tune satellite cards, so we need to “trick” Vista into believing that the satellite card is actually just a standard DVB-T (Freeview) card, albeit with many more channels. Continue reading ‘My 1080p HTPC: Freesat with Vista’
When I originally built my HTPC, I used 2 Freeview cards. Each Hauppauge WinTV-NOVA-T500 has two Freeview tuners in one PCI card. By installing two of these (and with some registry tweaking) it is possible to build a device that can record/watch 4 Freeview channels at once.
Out of the box the Vista Media Centre GUI is only capable of setting up 2 tuners at any one time. This is odd since the underlying tuner architecture is actually quite capable of using as many tuners as you can fit in the machine. Your limiting factor, really, is the speed you can push the data to your hard drive. Continue reading ‘My 1080p HTPC: Multiple Freeview Tuners’
Another post from the “helping future Howard” category. I use Outlook 2007, which is great, but in order to be able to search your email with decent performance you must install Windows Desktop Search. Unfortunately when you do this it integrates with Explorer without asking permission to do so. This means that should you hit F3 to search inside an Explorer folder you’ll be presented with the monstrosity on the left; an entirely useless dialogue box unless you happen to be indexing the contents of your entire machine and network. I’m not: I only index my Outlook content.
So, to disable this you must open regedit and find:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Desktop Search\DS
and set the ShowStartSearchBand value to 0. That’ll give you back the default behaviour.
I find it quite irritating that the interface chooses to admonish me that I’m not indexing the content instead of just presenting me with the search functionality that is able to search the content for me.
As I mentioned in the last post, I’m running the Media Center (yes, that’s how they spell it) interface from Vista Ultimate to drive my HTPC. Out of the box Vista Media Center (VMC) is capable of playing DVDs and MPEG2 broadcast content - such as the output of a Hauppauge DVB-T or DVB-S TV card. What it can’t do is play the more esoteric formats such as DivX, XVid and hidef containers such as the Matroska (MKV) files. Continue reading ‘My 1080p HTPC: The Software’
As I mentioned previously, installing Leopard on my MacBook Pro gave me the opportunity to reinstall Windows XP and the new Boot Camp 2.0 drivers. This time (and again, for the benefit of my future self) I’ve compiled the list of what gets installed on a fresh machine: Continue reading ‘Reinstalling XP on the MacBook Pro’
The image on the left is just one of the graphs generated automatically for tracking the data usage on my home network. (Click through to see more stats.)
That particular graph shows the usage of my ADSL connection over time; green is downloaded data, while the blue line shows my uploads. It is generated by Tobi Oetiker’s outstanding MRTG - The Multi Router Traffic Grapher. MRTG is a free Perl script that connects to any device capable of talking SNMP and pulls interesting data from it.
I currently log DSL, Wireless and LAN use (Bytes per second), along with line noise and Noise Margin of the DSL connection. I could also log what the switch in my network is doing, and even what my various servers are up to. As you can see from the graphs you get a nice indication of traffic patterns over time - it’s very easy to spot peaks when BitTorrent kicks in and out, or when someone in a different time zone is playing on my Counter Strike server!
It gives me an “at a glance” overview of what most of my networked devices are doing - which was enough to make me notice the other day that despite having all my wireless devices switched off, something was still polling the Access Point. Turns out I’d left one of the laptops disassociated - but on - and it was sending a little chatter to the AP every few hours.
My first generation MacBook Pro steadfastly refuses to read the dual-layer DVD that Leopard comes on. All my Windows machines can read it (or at least the BootCamp partition) and my G5 can read the disk too, but the MacBook Pro won’t boot off it. However, I do have plenty of external drives kicking about so thought I ought to be able to boot off one of those. And yes, I’m only really doing this to get continued Boot Camp support for the Windows XP install I use more than anything else on the MBP. Here’s what I did:
- Use Disk Utility (on the G5) to create a DMG file.
- Connect the MacBook Pro and G5 to my gigabit network, and boot the MacBook Pro into Tiger.
- Connect the USB drive (a self powered 100Gb 2.5″ drive in this case) to the MacBook Pro (I used the right USB port - not sure if it matters which).
- I erased the (NTFS) partition on the external disk, and created a GUID Apple partition.
- Select the Restore tab on Disk Utility and drag the DMG file to the source field.
- Drag the USB partition (the one I just created) to the destination field.
- Click Restore.
- After it’s finished, you should be able to open System Preferences and find the USB disk in the Startup Disk pane.
- Select it and press restart - the MacBook Pro reboots and boots off the external disk.
- From here on it’s as if you were using the DVD!
The install was pretty swift - without the extra printer drivers, fonts or X11 it took about 10 minutes to install. Since installing Leopard has killed rEFIt the next step is to reinstall Windows and add the Boot Camp 2.0 drivers.
Oh, and the Leopard intro movie is quite pretty, but has really silly music.
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