Category Archives: Hardware

Using old hardware: Win2K drivers in XP

How to get an old Canon scanner (which has no XP drivers) working in Windows XP: Use Win2000 scanner driver, but follow this procedure (on Canon’s German site, but written in English).

In summary you make sure the scanner is DISCONNECTED; then use the old Setup.exe to install the software; shut down the PC and THEN plug the scanner in. When you start the PC up again, it’ll detect the new hardware and — against all odds if you ask me — figure out that it matches the drivers you’ve already installed. After that you should be right to go.

It worked fine with my ancient FB-310, and it’s something to keep in mind with other hardware, too.

Basic Windows setup

I got a “new” secondhand PC for my girlfriend. An off-cast from a friend, so obviously it’s not the latest and greatest, but it’s faster than the box she has now. 500Mhz P3, 192Mb, about 40Gb space over two hard drives. Might see if I can find some more memory for it, but I can live with that. It was running Win98 SE, and was overdue for a rebuild.

Wordprocessing and web were the main requirements. An old computer and basic requirements call for basic software, and old versions in some cases.

So, here’s the setup I did on it:

Found a spare Win2K licence, booted up using the CD and wiped the disks. Installed.

It picked up all the hardware no problems, but later I found it didn’t shut down automatically (went to “It is safe” instead). Made a note to fix that later.

Installed Win2K SP4 and the post-SP4 rollup (aka SP4 and a half). And IE6 SP1.

Then went to Windows Update and got it to grab everything going; well, at least the security stuff — don’t really want the latest bloated MediaPlayer. 45 updates and many minutes later, it was okay. Except for one thing, which I came back to later.

Found a spare Office licence (XP) and installed Word, Powerpoint and Excel. She’s not a geek, so she didn’t need Access or Frontpage, and her email is all web-based, so I didn’t bother with Outlook. Went through the custom setup to ensure minimum bloat (eg no VBA help, obscure file conversion, speech input, that kind of thing).

Put on Office XP SP3, then went to Office Update to see what was going. Stupid thing wanted to install patches for Visio. Switched them off.

Grabbed the typical extras useful for web browsing: Acrobat Reader 5.05 (just before they went stupid with bloat; still obtainable from oldversion.com). Flash Player (latest). Quicktime Alternative. Real Alternative. And Google Toolbar for popup blocking.

Also plonked on the latest DirectX. Winzip. AVG Free. This PC will live behind a NAT router/firewall, so I’m not going to bother with a firewall.

Put a copy of Mame32 on there for some light entertainment.

Created a logon for her, and a logon for me. Standard users of course; not Admin. Verified everything works under those new users.

Used Ed Bott’s method for securing IE: Once the ActiveX controls you want are in place, go into the security settings and disable Active X Signed downloads. You have to do this for each individual user, but it solves a major gripe of mine; that IE can install any old crap provided it’s signed.

Went through the services and disabled the extraneous stuff, like Messenger. Likewise checked for any other little applets that decided they should run in the background. Most of them aren’t needed.

Turned on automatic Windows updates. One problem: it insisted one patch needed installing, but each time it claimed it had worked, it hadn’t. Next time it looked, it still needed to be installed. Downloading and running the patch manually showed it had been superseded by something else… but Windows Update apparently couldn’t figure that out. Eventually I solved it by going into the Windows Updates web site and manually telling it to ignore this patch. (Thanks Malcolm for the help on this.)

As for the “Safe to turn off” instead of turning itself off, that was solved by going into the Control Panel power options and turning on APM.

Am considering Paint.Net, but then I’d have to put the Dot Net Framework on it as well. Don’t want to over-burden the poor box.

Ditto Firefox — IE has the advantage of virtually sitting in memory most of the time. Firefox is great on fast machines, but is an extra load on slow ones — as I write this, Firefox on my PC is sitting on more than 70Mb of memory. Sure, I could get Opera or whatever, but if IE is relatively safe (patched, unable to download more ActiveX, most popups blocked, running under non-Admin users, and not being used by idiots), why bother?

Considering adding Java (my Internet banking needed it until very recently, but they just switched to pure HTML, woo hoo!) and DivX.

Anything else I’ve missed before I hand it over? Will it be secure enough?

Citylink goes down

CricketersA power outage resulted in a shutdown of Melbourne’s CityLink tollway tunnels today around 9am, for several hours. Apart from the obvious electronic signs that rely on power, I assume it affected lighting and exhaust pumps.

According to the Herald-Sun, Citylink spokeswoman Jean Ker Walsh said: “We have rebooted the systems that allow our operators to manage the tunnels safely.” So there you go. They rebooted the tunnel. Ms Ker Walsh also mentioned on the evening TV news that they’d be upgrading their UPS!

Interestingly on the Herald-Sun’s RSS feed, this story came through in the early afternoon. The feed claimed there was an attached picture, but it turned out not to be a picture of gridlocked cars or an empty motorway — rather it seemed to be a picture of cricket players.

The other effect of the shutdown was the Citylink web site also appeared to lose power… or perhaps it was just snowed under by the traffic. Like some other transport providers, they didn’t cope well under stress.

The Vicroads web site kept running under the load, though apart from showing slow traffic in the area, didn’t contain specific information relevant to motorists who might be caught there. I assume the information for radio reports and the like are gathered by phone, not off the web sites.

Geekbench

Now this is handy: Geekbench, a cross-platform (Mac OS-X, Windows and Linux, that is) benchmark system. It’s written in platform-neutral C++.

My aging cobbled-together PC (1.7 Ghz Celeron) returns an overall score of 73.6.

My newish cheap but cheerful PC (3 GHz P4) returns an overall score of: 137.4

Windows 2000 within Virtual PC on the above: 103.5 (I note it was only configured for 128Mb of “RAM”, even though Geekbench claims to need 256Mb.)

In all cases I shut down other applications, but obviously the figures would be subject to whatever background services were grabbing CPU time.

Cheap and cheerful disk benchmarking

Freebie disk benchmarking: Disk Bench. Does quick tests by reading/writing/copying files of your preferred size, and tells you the speed. The only downside is it requires the Dot Net Framework. (Explains why the Disk Bench download is so small.)

I found this while pondering why my secondary computer is running so slowly. Confirmed my suspicions: Windows is installed on the slowest of the old drives in the beast. Time for a quick re-install.

Pinnacle 310i TV tuner first impressions

I picked up a Pinnacle 310i digital/analogue TV tuner card last week. APC had listed it in its top products section, which from what I’ve seen, is usually a reasonable bet. The kids were keen to try out the video editing software (Studio QuickStart), because even though it’s a cut-down version of Pinnacle’s Studio product, they wanted a change from Windows Movie Maker.

Me? I wanted a video capture card that would work in XP. My old FlyVideo card was okay-ish under Win95 (but even then the built-in apps were a bit dodgy; the TV viewing never seemed to work properly), just about bearable under Win2K (I could do captures using the Windows Media Capture utility, but it was pretty ugly setting it up). But it doesn’t work at all under XP.

TV tuning was a bonus, since it would allow recording direct off telly without going via the VCR. The 310i appeared to fit the bill. Retail is A$199, but I found it for A$169 at Landmark Computers in Melbourne, and it’s probably a similar price elsewhere.

Installing the card appeared to be pretty straightforward. Find a spare PCI slot, bung it in, and connect the lead from the card’s Audio Out to something approximating the PC’s internal Audio In. (Okay I admit I couldn’t find anything marked Audio In, and settled for CD in instead. Given that was unoccupied, it’s got me wondering if I can normally play CDs on the box… I’m not sure I’ve ever tried.)

Grabbed the first of the two CDs: MediaManager, and ran the install. The first hurdle was that despite the software claiming the CD key was on the sleeve, it wasn’t, it was on the CD itself.

Now, I don’t splurge a lot on new IT products. Part of being a geek luddite, I suppose. But this is the first mass-market consumer product I’ve come across that is built on the Dot Net Framework (version 1.1) and… wait for it… SQL Server Express Edition. That’s a hefty overhead for any end-user PC, and I’m glad mine has enough headroom that it doesn’t take a disk space (70Mb or so) or seemingly a performance hit, though I’ll be checking if it’s now running by default the service is set to start automatically. Personally I’d stick to an Access/Jet backend for any consumer-level products I was writing. It may be outdated, but it’s super-efficient in comparison.

Fired up the software and after a couple of false starts tuning the channels (one involving cancelling radio tuning, which took ages; one at the end where it appeared to hang, and I ended up rebooting the machine) it seemed to be playing nicely. The digital (and especially the HD) signals are brilliantly clear. Adhoc recording worked okay, too. In due course I’ll try the “burn live programmes” and timed recording functionality.

Mind you, I do wish software manufacturers would stop re-inventing how Windows should look. Dealing with iTunes and its permanently grey title bar is bad enough. Pinnacle’s software goes for all sorts of wacky icons for such basic tasks as minimising and maximising the window — all breaking the user’s colour and size preferences, and probably using way more PC resources than is necessary.

Next I ran the Studio Quickstart install. That took ages — it seemed to take an awfully long time to unpack the sample sounds in particular. When it eventually finished I had a little play with it. Pretty basic stuff. Plenty of transition and sound effects. Maybe the kids will be happy with it, but I couldn’t see any huge advantages over Windows MovieMaker (though outputting something other than WMV is definitely a plus).

All the best stuff (like chroma key/bluescreen, which they’d love to be able to do) seems to be locked away and requires separate payment. I might eventually do the upgrade to the full version, but I really wanted the recording functionality first and foremost.

I’ll keep playing and if I find anything worth mentioning will update later.

2007-07-12: Followup: Pinnacle TV viewing software

Phones are too complex

Mobile phone companies have a problem: price competition is causing dropping call revenue. Solution: push phones that do data services.

Thing is, I use my phone to make phone calls. Oh, and as an alarm clock. Seems that lots of other people are only interested in mobile phones as telephones too. These people are destroying civilisation by being unprofitable consumers.

Brief stuff

It’s a bit quiet here this week, probably because I’m busy and Josh is away offline somewhere in Gippsland.

Google have announced the Anita Borg scholarship programme is now running in Australia, offering A$5000 scholarships to women studying at undergraduate or postgraduate level in computer science in Australia.

One of the oldest games software houses in the world, let alone Australia, Melbourne House is in trouble, and likely to be sold/offloaded by Atari in the near future.

Another example of where being geek luddite is good: Dans Data on why the latest and greatest X mega-pixel cameras aren’t good value for money. I’m sticking with my 3.1MP Canon A70, thanks — for web and domestic use, it’s great.

Nothing lasts forever. This page logs the deaths of free email services: Free email DeathWatch.

Girls, music, and virtual PCs

Hmm, a calendar of Australian IT women, in the name of encouraging more women into the industry. Available online at itgoddess.info.

If you’re more at home with mucking about on Virtual Machines, then you might be interested to know that Virtual PC is now free.

Billy Bragg has applauded MySpace for backing down on their T+Cs imposed on artists who used the site to distribute music. “I am very pleased to see that MySpace have changed their terms of agreement from a declaration of their rights into a declaration of our rights as artists, making it clear that, as creators, we retain ownership of our material.”