I love the Hype Machine!
Just a quick note to tell you that I love the Hype Machine!
Hype Machine
This little beauty let’s you search and browse the latest music being blogged, all in real time. It’s great for discovering new music, as well as the odd classic that time forgot.
Follow me on hypem. The name’s FunkadelicRelic!
Over the past few months I’ve been investing (both financially and time wise) heavily in my home media center. My previous posts have given a run through of how I’m set up, but for those with not so great memory, here’s a recap.
Home Server:
- AMD Athlon X2 5050e 2.6GHz
- 4GB RAM
- 1x 500Gb Disk (OS)
- 1x 1Tb Disk (Data)
- 1x 2Tb Disk (Data)
- Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise x64 Edition
As you can see, I’m currently running WinSrv2008. While being a fantastic product, there’s no doubt that it is generally geared up for big enterprises and not the likes of little ol’ me. It’s for that reason that I’ve decided to jump ship and make the move to Windows Home Server.
The install was pretty much straight forward, although I had a few issues of the dreaded BSOD on the second phase of the install. After much googling, I found that the issue was down to not having the correct Mass Storage device drivers slipstreamed into the installation.
I came across an excellent site with very thorough instructions on how to rectify this, and once done, the installation completed as normal.
Read the article here, courtesy of We Got Served.
I will post more on my experiences of Windows Home Server over the next couple of days, once I’ve had more of a chance to play with it.
One thing that I’m loving at the moment though, Windows Drive Extender, which lets me plug in any type of hard disk (SATA, USB, ATA etc) which is then added to the data volume, creating one huge storage pool. Handy!
New design in the works.
Since the festive season is once again upon us, I am planning on spending some of my holiday time coding up a new design for my blog. It goes without saying I’m pretty sick of the old design, though it has lasted me well up until now.
In the meantime, I’ve settled with the most awesome theme from Drew Strojny, named Titan. Keep your eyes peeled for the new year folks.
I’ve been struggling for the last couple of weeks trying to find out why our new range of HP laptops refuse to let me install a missing driver, named PCI Simple Communications Controller.
I had reinstalled the original operating system, installed every single application and driver that was shipped with the machines, but still no joy.
Well, I discovered the fix, but am afriad I don’t have a cause for it. I’m just going to blame it on Intel being sloppy.
The actual fix requires you to modify the .inf file that comes with the Intel MEI driver. Download the Intel MEI driver from the HP site, and extract it. Within the folder structure, you should find a folder called ‘mei’. Within that there should be 4 files.
- HECI.CAT
- HECI.INF
- HECI.SYS
- HECIX64.SYS
Open up HECI.INF in your favourite text editor (or Notepad) and search for the line:
[Intel.NTx86.5.2]
You will probably notice that below that line, there is a commented line that say something along the lines of ‘Empty section, this INF does not support NT 5.2 and later for x86. (2003)‘. Rubbish.
Just scroll down a bit to the section named:
[Intel.NTx86.5.1]
Copy out the lines from that section, paste them in the 5.2 section and have a whirl with that! Sorted me out a treat. I hope I can save some of you the time I wasted trying to figure this out! Thanks for nothing Intel!
Oh, and in case any of you are using x64 versions of Windows, I think this issue only affects x86 platforms.
