Month: November 2011

For the longest time, I had a network icon running in the notification area. Then when Vista arrived, I used variations on the Network Monitor gadget. As good as it was to be able to see any network traffic in action, a really annoying problem was the time it took for the gadget to appear at boot up. At first, I thought that it might be the way that it interacted with WinPatrol, but knocking out WinPatrol made no difference. There was one other problem with the Network Monitor gadget. It didn’t give any running totals which is a useful … Continue reading See the network run..

Today, I finally enabled AHCI such that I can take full advantage of an external port on my Cooler Master CM 690 II case. I had tried enabling it when I first installed the GA-880 motherboard, and my drives would not start up. Then, for some reason, the next tries saw the machine start, but, it would become hyper-active, the hard drive light staying on permanently. I had all but given up on ever having a hot swappable external drive port . Today, it didn’t do any of the above., and once Genie Timeline had settled down, the system is strolling … Continue reading AHCI..

Extend the file recognition capabilities of Windows Media Player with this bunch of codecs.. http://www.windows7codecs.com/ http://www.majorgeeks.com/Win7codecs_d5959.html http://www.windows7update.com/Windows7codecs.html OK, so why would you want these? That’s easy. It saves having to download, install and run a variety of Media Players every time that you pick up yet another multi-media file type is why..

SMART recently told me that I had a problem with my primary boot drive. I was using the SMART function in Speedfan initially, but Western Digital diags reported the same ‘read’ issue. Performance was still good but drive ‘fitness’ could not be reported. OK, the drive is not too bad and a ‘write zeros’ should restore the drive. Problem is that you can’t write zeros while still keeping the drive and partitions intact. Fortunately, I have enough space on other drives to copy across anything on the two data partitions, and I need to do this because I have to … Continue reading Hard drive issues..