Archive for Windows
What a week
Posted by: | CommentsWell with the week just gone it has been a roller coaster one to say the least.
I finally managed to pick up Matt’s cold after some 4 odd weeks of miraculously avoiding it; work has probably been the most inefficient I have been in months, mainly due to feeling like death warmed up for two to three days. On top of that Matt’s behavior hasn’t been the best at school and I had to go to a meeting with his teacher about that.
By Thursday, I was feeling a lot better and with the help of Codral day and night tablets; I was a bit closer to human again but still a bit lethargic so the week on that front wasn’t fun by any means.
With Karumba coming up in the next fortnight I was fearful of a dose of Bronchitis which I normally get with any flu once I get rid of it, but so far so good.
I had to put the Mac into Apple to have it fixed due to a crack in the chassis so have been using Windows for close to a week now and should get the Mac back on Tuesday thanks to a public holiday on Monday this coming week. Windows is seriously doing my head in and I can’t wait to get the Mac back again. To Apple’s credit though, I had the laptop put in on Monday last week and it was fixed ready to be picked up from the Chermside Apple Store in Brisbane by Wednesday; can’t complain about that and10/10 Apple for customer service!!
With this Monday being a public holiday, I decided to take Matt on a last 4WD trip before I leave him for close to a week to go fishing with my Dad in Karumba some 10 hours away for 7 days; it’s gonna hurt the little guy but I intend to to get a pre-paid Telstra USB dongle so I can Skype the little monkey and send him some photos from Karumba each night and chat for a while before he goes to bed. Once we get back we’ll go for a few trips as well as he will be on the second week of his holidays much the same as me so it won’t be too bad and I’m sure that he will be spoiled rotten to go with it
Speaking of Karumba; it’s peak Grunter season when we are there and there will be tons of “Grey Nomads” there as well, but this time (unlike last time) I have the benefit of experience with fishing the Gulf and even just looking back of the North Australian Fish Finder book in the Karumba section, I see so much more this time round than I did last time. I’m seriously excited this time and can feel that we will come home with some nice fish and great photos to go with it!
Ah well, best think about getting some sleep soon as it’s an 8:00am departure tomorrow morning to Cooktown via the Bloomfield Track. Lunch at the Lions Den Hotel and then to Cooktown to Grassy Hill with Matt and get some more photos on what is supposed to be a beautiful clear sunny Far North Queensland day. I Filled up the Ranger with Diesel today and reset the trip meter, so it will be interesting to see what mileage we get this time round for the trip.
TV on your Mac
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Was in town today and looking through The Good Guys and saw an Elgato EyeTV DTT USB stick for $145.00. Having previously configured TV cards on both Windows and Linux, I wondered how things would be on my MacBook.
The reputation of Apple Products to “just work” would possibly be put to the test with these as TV cards or USB TV sticks can be a bit of a pain to configure and get running, particularly under Linux depending on the relevant chipset of the card.
Still, after speaking to one of the guys there who had a Mac and also one of these little sticks, he assured me that they worked just fine so long as you plug in your aerial cable to the stick as Cairns has less than great reception for TV, which does not appear to be getting a boost any times soon. This appears to be more to the point of being caused by the surrounding mountains than anything else.
After getting a reduction of $10.00 off the cost down to $135.00 I walked out with a USB TV stick which I was a bit skeptical of but quietly confident of getting to work.
After getting home I fired up the Mac and put everything together, hoping that the little aerial would pick up some stations so as I didn’t have to go searching for a coax cable for reception. Unfortunately, as I expected, there was no joy with the little aerial and no stations wee picked up when running the configuration utility after installing the software, so off to get a bit of coax I went and retrieved a cable form my old Windows PC.
On plugging the coax in, and re-running the signal detection, 25 stations were detected including 3 or so radio connections. All the HD free to air channels were found as were the ones that had been notoriously hard to get in channels 9 and 10. I was glad that the new OneHD channel was also detected as well as it screens some great sport from time to time.
I then started flicking through all the channels and found that reception was great and that the interface on the supplied software was just as easy to use and get an understanding on.
Compared to configuring a TV card / stick on Windows or Linux this was so easy it wasn’t funny!
I sat and watched 25 minutes of the 2009 NRL Grand Final and there were only a few stutters with the broadcast; this was more due to signal quality than anything else as we regularly get this sort of thing on the Sony TV that we have as well.
If you’re also looking to get TV on your Mac then I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this product to you as I had no issues and if you live in an area where you an get a good strong TV signal then the supplied little aerial may work with no issues – it would be great if it did! Still, if you are like me then so long as you have some coax that you can plug into an aerial socket then you will be good to go and should also have no problems.
Vista SP2 troubles
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Over the last week or so I have been trying unsuccessfully to install Microsoft Windows Vista SP 2 to my Dell XPS M1530 laptop.
The installer proceeds fine through the Windows based install and then on reboot completing stage three of the installation process, it errors out advising that there was an error and that it is reverting the changes, this is after reaching 100% of stage three?!?
Only thing that I haven’t tried is making sure that the laptop reboots into safe mode after the initial two stages; running the installer in safe mode seems to make no difference to the outcome.
Is there anyone else out there that is experiencing this problem and what if you have been able to resolve the issue, did you do?



