Archive for September, 2008
Remote Desktop Support
Today I helped a friend of a friend with a computer issue they were having. Having almost ran out of options I remembered a cool utility I’ve been meaning to try out. It’s called logmein rescue. It’s an application that allows other users who needs computer problem to download the client app and directly connect you to me so I can help you, if I am online and available to give support.
I have decided to devote some of my time to helping people in need (computer issues only please. hehe) but this is simply an experiment hopefully it will succeed and I can make a little revenue off this experiment. Right now it’s free of charge, but donations as always are highly appreciated. I currently offer support on Windows based machines as well as Mac OSX based if necessary.
If you need computer help it’s as easy as filling out the form in the sidebar. If I’m not online you will be directed to the offline page. Unfortunately, since it’s a 1 man team right now I will be hard to coordinate a solid time table on when I can help and when I will be unavailable to help. But during the times I’m in from of my computer I will try my best to help. Private sessions are also available. Just drop by an email and I will get back with a set time period.
Dual Display on Vista
There seems to be spreading an issue of running dual display under vista which has been causing alot of problems for alot of users. Since this seems to affect both nvidia and ati users, I’m not going to specifically point fingers, but I am using an ati video card at the moment.
The issue of running dual display under vista is, it crashes the system, sometimes it would work fine. The Video Processing Unit (VPU) would randomly stop responding triggering a VPU recovery to attempt to restart the service. Normally this would solve the problem, but at times it would go through the VPU recovery cycle 4-5 times before the operating system finally giving up and fail completely with a blue screen, hence crashing the user’s system.
I haven’t used a nvidia card for a while now so I don’t know when this problem started for them (driver version wise) but on the ati side the problem has been present since theirt Catalyst version 7.7 which was released last year in July. So it’s been well over a year and the current driver version, 8.9, still experiences this issue.
This made me come to a conclusion that either the graphics company just simply don’t care about this issue and that it’s not a big deal to them to even bother trying to fix it. OR they have tried and there’s nothing they can do about it and that the problem lies with Microsoft and that THEY are too lazy or dont care about fixing this issue. Either way, this problem has been persisting for far to long now.
The weird thing about it is, this issue seems to only happen from a cold boot or a restart triggered by applications that require restarting after installation or windows update. If I do another restart right after windows restarts. The video card doesn’t do the whole VPU recover thing. Also, this seems to happen when I’m on desktop using normal applications like firefox and itunes. Not those killer 3d games or benchmarking software. Just normal desktop applications. My video card is ATI Radeon HD2900XT running at stock speeds and using the stock cooler. The temperature is 69 degrees, I think its a little high but the graphics processor is designed to withstand hotter temperatures than that.
I did a little research on this issue on Google and found that quite a few forums also has topics about this and I am not the only one that’s suffering from this problem. The problem only affects people running dual display. As much as I hate this problem, I also don’t want to have to ditch the second monitor and go back to single display since I got too used to using dual displays. Switching back would be weird and hard.
Windowblinds hates me, me thinks.
I have used windowblinds for my XP system in the past but had yet to use it since upgrading it to Vista. This was like over 2 years ago.
So today I decided to use Windowblinds again, instead of installing it on my main machine. I thought I’d use it on my XP parallels partition. There’s no reason for it as to why it’s not working. but with my luck. It refuses to work. So I finally gave up completely and uninstalled it. It’s running XP Service Pack 3. And I installed the trial version of Windowblinds. And a good call at that. Otherwise I would have really been pissed off. Paid 20+ for a software that refuses to run on my virtual environment. unacceptable. :p
Windowblinds. You have failed me for the last time!
Heres the problem. I installed. It installed, it told me to reboot. I clicked yes, it rebooted. It loaded windows, I log in. All the startup applications run. But wait! Windowblinds pops up a message. A reboot is required! (thought I just rebooted), okay. I’ll reboot again. same processor. log off, restarted, log in. Windowblinds pops up again. You need to reboot your machine! and the cycle continues. windowblinds claims i need to reboot after i finished rebooting back into the system. I did this cycle maybe 5-10 times, cause theres nothing really to do here right now. lol but yea. I eventually gave up on that and said to hell with Windowblinds.
I just felt like posting this. Probably will catch the attention of a specific person I shall remain nameless (but you know who you are. 
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- @alanhsu disappointed... i thought you were an IT guy....