Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on May 19, 2008 by CyberNet.

Naturally Windows XP users have been wanting to upgrade to the latest and greatest Service Pack 3, but it seems as though some users are getting an unexpected surprise. If you have a desktop by HP/Compaq with an AMD processor you may find that your computer shows a blue screen of death (BSoD) when starting up. And to top it all off it won’t stop rebooting.

The problem is that HP ships both AMD and Intel desktop computers with the same operating system image. AMD and Intel processors use different drivers for power management: Intel uses intelppm.sys and AMD uses amdk8.sys. Up until XP SP3 this hasn’t been a problem, but for whatever reason after installing the Service Pack all hell breaks loose on any AMD desktop machine that has the Intel power management driver running. Upon booting up the computer you’ll receive this error message:

After the error message is briefly shown the computer will restart. This cycle continues until you turn off the computer, and you’ll end up having to bootup into Safe Mode to temporarily get around the issue.

How do you correct the problem? HP has posted a workaround which primarily consists of disabling the Intel power management driver. Here’s a quick overview on what you have to do:

1. Boot into Safe Mode by pressing the F8 key when starting your PC
2. In Windows Explorer navigate to C:\Windows\System32\Drivers, and locate the intelppm.sys file
3. Rename the file to something else, such as XXXintelppm.syx
4. Reboot the PC

If you’re about to install XP SP3 on your HP computer (with the OEM operating system) then you might want to be proactive and follow these steps. It can save you a lot of headaches down the road.

It’s unfortunate that you have to go through all of this to get XP SP3 successfully installed, and I’m left wondering who’s to blame for this. Is it Microsoft’s fault for changing something that causes the error, or is it HP who was apparently too lazy to create separate OS images for AMD and Intel based machines?

Thanks for the tip Omar!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on October 01, 2007 by CyberNet.

Yesterday in the forum Pieter posted information on a sweet calendar application called MonoCalendar. It is completely free, and its primary reason for existing is to offer a Windows alternative to Apple’s popular iCal calendar app. I have to admit that it is definitely on its way!

There are a few things that I want to point out before diving into some of the good and bad things. First, there is a no-install version available, and it’s labeled as “Binary files” on the download page. That way you can try it out without having to install it.

The second thing is that the performance of this thing is absolutely incredible! After extraction the entire program consumes under 500KB of hard drive space, and it hovers around a mere 9 or 10MB of memory when being used. I don’t know about you, but I’d say that’s pretty darn good.

Is MonoCalendar ready for primetime? The only thing that it’s missing which I absolutely have to have is support for recurring events. Without that there is really no way that I can use it on a regular basis, and hopefully that will be coming in the next version.

Here is a list of the good and bad things that I’ve found thus far in MonoCalendar:

–The Good News–

• Drag & drop support for events
• Zoom in and out of the calendar (this is actually pretty cool, and surprisingly one of my favorite things)
• Cool mini calendar in the sidebar that can be resized to show more months
• 20 different languages available
• Import/export calendars

–The Bad News–

• Can’t add recurring events
• Can’t subscribe to web-based calendars
• No copy and paste
• No right-click menu (seems natural to have options like Delete in a right-click menu)
• No advanced properties for events (eg. description, location)
• Can’t customize calendar colors
• It can be hard to see overlapping events
• I think Apple’s iCal also supports a todo list, and that would be pretty cool in this program

MonoCalendar Homepage
Thanks for the tip Pieter!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on August 20, 2007 by CyberNet.

The Register had a chance to interview Opera’s founder and CEO Jon von Tetzchner last week. They discussed some of the challenges facing the company, as well as things they hope to accomplish in the future.

It was actually really interesting to read what Tetzchner’s take is on their competitors. There was a little bit of discussion on the iPhone, and a slightly larger portion dedicated to thoughts on Firefox.

Here are some of the more interesting things that I pulled from the interview:

Do you feel you’re falling behind?
We have by far the most used mobile web browser. Net Applications’ survey is showing Mini as the fifth most used browser in the world and in some countries it’s beating Safari, and others it’s beating Mozilla. The Nintendo Wii is also helping and we’re working on new version coming out.

We’re also spending time with the services, with Google and Yahoo! discussing compatibility.

Does Mini make money?
We’re not making money off Mini at this time. But we have achieved one billion page views, and so we believe we can have business models with Mini that don’t upset users. We make money through operator deals and the Yahoo! deal, for example. We’re also offering it on the server side. T-Mobile, Vodafone, Telfonica, all get specialised versions with their own front pages – and they pay us for the hosting.

How? [in regards to Opera’s efficient performance]
It’s easier to be efficient if you’re coding every piece of the code yourself. I’ve seen it myself. Someone on a core part strives to make their part really efficient; then someone on the UI side makes something simple but that makes heavy demands. It’s easy to think, "something I do doesn’t have to be that efficient", but it does. For example, in one of our builds we noticed the progress bar loading was taking up 25 per cent of the CPU.

I’m still amazed Opera has such a tiny footprint
This has been a focus for us – Opera runs on 10 year old hardware. But we noticed external code takes up time and we write our own libraries. There are libraries out there that satisfy a lot more different kinds of programmers – but when you use it your program becomes bigger and slower.

I thought that was pretty interesting how Opera Mini has had over 1 billion pageviews already. That’s pretty insane if you think about it, and if you’re wondering how they know the number of pageviews it’s because all site requests go through their servers where the pages are optimized and scaled for the best viewing possible on small screens. This even includes scaling images so that they don’t hog your bandwidth.

With Opera 9.5 Beta (hopefully) around the corner we might possibly see Opera tying all of their browsers together. For example, my bookmarks should get synced with their servers so that they are accessible where ever I am. Then when using Opera on the Wii or Opera Mini on my phone I would be able to access all of the bookmarks that I’ve already saved on my desktop. That should have been something on my list of "5 things that can make Opera better."

Source: The Register [via Opera Watch & Slashdot]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on November 02, 2007 by CyberNet.

Winamp 5.5 has all kinds of great new features, but one of my favorite things is the new Bento skin that it includes. It’s not only slick, but also very functional. Pieter over in our forum posted a cool Easter Egg that involves the Bento skin, and I think you’re going to like what you see.

The process of activating the Easter Egg isn’t new, but the result is different than it used to be. Here’s how you activate it:

1. Give Winamp’s main window focus.
2. Press the following keys: N, U, L, Escape, L, Escape, S, O, F, T.

Pressing the Escape key is necessary because the “Open File” dialog box pops up after pressing the “L” key. Here’s an alternate way to do it:

1. Give Winamp’s main window focus.
2. Press and hold the Shift and Control keys, then type : N, U, L, L, S, O, F, T.

In older versions of Winamp it would add “IT REALLY WHIPS THE LLAMA’S ASS!” to the title bar of the application (as seen in this screenshot), but if you’re using Winamp 5.5 with the Bento skin you’ll see something a little different. Whenever you play a song the transparency of the skin will “throb” in and out. Here’s what it looked like at one point while playing a song:

It can really make you go crazy after a little while, but it is cool nonetheless. The player will return to normal when you restart the program, so there is no need for you to frantically trying to disable the Easter Egg.

I was also glad to see that one of my favorite Easter Egg’s still exists in the program. Pull up the Winamp Preferences and go to Input -> Nullsoft Vorbis Decoder and then press the About button at the bottom. Start clicking the little fish as fast as you can with your mouse and see how many RPM’s you can get:

You gotta love Easter Egg’s.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on November 11, 2006 by CyberNet.

When using a computer sometimes things just don’t go as planned. Actually, that seems to happen more times than not and even in Vista RC2 I receive a Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) a few times a week. Sometimes there just isn’t a way around it.

A company that Microsoft acquired, called SysInternals, has made a BSoD screensaver that simulates your computer receiving a Blue Screen and restarting itself. It is actually too realistic for me to use because I downloaded the ZIP file that contained the SCR file and actually fooled myself. Instead of putting it with the rest of the screensavers I just doubled-clicked on it to see what it looked like. Of course the screensaver pulled itself up and I saw a Blue Screen similar to the one shown here. I tried moving my mouse and it just wouldn’t go away so I thought it was a problem with Vista and that Windows really crashed. Then I hit the Escape key and it was all back to normal.

I think this would be a really funny prank to pull on a friend since it just involves switching out their screensaver. However, I wouldn’t use it for yourself because there will be a time where you forget you have a screensaver running and you’ll get a little angry…like I did.

Thanks for the tip Dochar!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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