Posts Tagged ‘vista’

Dell Laptop, plugged in, not charging in Vista

Monday, July 19th, 2010

My Inspiron 1525 has intermittently not been charging while plugged in. It’s gotten worse, as many intermittent problems tend to do. So, it was time for a bit of research.

It’s intermittent, so the charger generally works. I do have some battery life when it’s charged, so the charging circuits and the battery do work, though, this two year old battery doesn’t hold much power anymore.

If you search the web, it turns out to be a relatively common problem – remember, Dell sold millions of these laptops, you would expect a few problems to be reported. This laptop power connector consists of a pin in the centre of a circular connector which itself has two metal contacts, one on the inside and one on the outside of the circular ring. The inside pin is used to identify the A/C adaptor as being an authentic Dell charger. If the centre pin does not make contact with the socket on the laptop, then it will not charge; however, it will still work while plugged in.

A couple references:

– http://www.laptop-junction.com/toast/content/inside-dell-ac-power-adapter-mystery-revealed
– http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/9519-2-dell-laptop-power-jack-pinout

So, I ever so slightly bent the inside pin to the side so that it would make contact again, and it seems to be working. I’ll wonder how long it will last though.

Given how often I move my laptop around, I think it was just general wear and tear rather than a manufacturing problem. Though, I wonder if there was a legitimate purpose to the identification pin. Can an non-authentic Dell power brick really damage the battery charging circuits, while still being OK to power the laptop in “plugged in” mode?

[Edit: Hmm… upon reading some more about this, new laptops might need a way to communicate with the power brick to determine maximum power output.  If the maximum output of the transformer is too low, then the laptop can skip the battery charging to keep total power consumption down.  This also would be useful in “airplane” mode where there is a very limited amount of power from the outlet.]

Anyway, I’ve had a very similar problem happen with a cellphone charger a couple years back, so the fix wasn’t all that unique. Let’s hope that someday we can all have magnetic power connectors like the Apple guys…

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Posted in annoying | 5 Comments »

Recording from a Hauppauge HVR-950Q USB TV Tuner to VirtualDub

Saturday, March 6th, 2010

The 2010 Vancouver Olympics are over. IMHO, they were awesome. Unfortunately, it’s time to get back to work. Almost.

I want to record some video from Shaw On Demand of a curling event that I attended live. I have access to a Hauppauge HVR-950Q USB TV tuner – a great piece of hardware paired with terrible software.

I had multiple issues, but in the end, as I type this, I have my old laptop capturing the video from the composite (i.e. “RCA” video) input from the Shaw Digital Box.

I started this adventure on my day-to-day laptop, a 1.5 year old laptop running Vista. On this computer, the WinTV 6 software could not properly display the signal from the composite input. It would get about 1 frame per second, plus some really weird “chipmunkesque” spurts of audio. It was unusable to view the composite feed, never mind trying to record from it. I then tried the newly released WinTV 7 software from the Hauppauge website. It was worse – it is even more bloated, even slower, and still unable to view the composite input properly. Note: I have previously watched the Over-the-Air HDTV channels with this unit, so it’s specific to the composite input, and it might be specific to my laptop. There is a big difference between OTA HDTV and composite – an OTA signal is compressed MPEG2 and the unit passes it directly over the USB to the TV tuning software, whereas, the composite is fed in some sort of raw format that requires massive USB bandwidth – i.e. there is no on-device MPEG encoding.

I tried VirtualDub next, the free video capture software that I’ve used from time-to-time for years. VDub could preview the signal fine, and with much less processor overhead. Unfortunately, when I tried to start the capture, I kept getting this error: “The Capture device does not support the video format”. I eventually find a solution to this error, but only after I tried my ancient laptop.

I tried using my ancient HP Celeron 1.1Ghz laptop. It runs XP, and my theory was that the Hauppauge software just doesn’t like Vista. This might be true. I was able to use the WinTV 6 software on the old laptop fine… eventually. You have to run the install, and the setup from an administrative login. Otherwise, the software will crash hard, without giving any clues as to why. Watching the composite input in WinTV 6 used a lot of the CPU, but it is a 5 year old laptop, so it’s all relative. It was unfortunately, far too slow to do a live encoding to MPEG.

So, I knew that the composite signal worked reasonably well. I tried VirtualDub on the ancient computer. I got the same error when trying to start the capture. The fix? The trick is to look at the VirtualDub device properties to see in which format the preview was coming in. In my case, it’s 720×480 UYVY. Once I set this on my custom capture format, VirtualDub worked fine. I’m not able to encode to MPEG live, I’m using HuffYUV and 10s of GB of hard drive space to capture 2 hours of video, but it will work. I’ll have to transcode to MPEG4 later.

In the end, I could probably have used VirtualDub on the first laptop that I tried now that I knew how to get a compatible capture format. According to Google, there aren’t many people who have had these problems… I feel special. Sometimes I wish things would “just work.”

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Posted in annoying, computers, software | No Comments »

The Missing Menu Bar in Vista

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

A few weeks back  I discovered the missing menu bar in Explorer in Vista.  All you have to do is press and release the Alt key and the good old “File | Edit | View | Tools | Help” menu pops up.  I find this useful to get to “Map Network Drive” no matter where I am in the computer browser.  Otherwise, the only link was the  context sensitive button that shows up at the “Computer” level.

Only a few more Vista annoyances to go!  OK,  it would have been smarter to post this before Windows 7 launched; however, Vista will be running on this laptop until it dies of old age.

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Posted in annoying, windows | No Comments »

Using an Old Printer with Windows Vista – and other Vista issues.

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

So, I bit the bullet and got a new PC with Microsoft Windows Vista.

Yes, like every informed geek, I expect a few issues.  However, sooner or later I will need to support Vista at client sites; besides, XP is getting on in years.

Today’s post is mainly about getting my old, but reliable, Brother HL-1030 to work in Vista.  The Brother laser printer is shared over the network by a Windows XP machine.

Some inter-related problems when trying to map this printer in Vista:

Immediately after trying to map the printer, this error comes up: “The printer driver is not compatible with a policy enabled on your computer that blocks NT 4.0 drivers”.  The Microsoft KB describing this, with no real work around other than “find a compatible driver”, is KB931719. Honestly, given the error message, wouldn’t you expect the KB article to provide a way to change the local policy?

Vista has no built in driver for my old HL1030, nor are there compatible drivers on the web.

On the driver front, a quick Google search told me that the built in Vista driver for the Brother HL-2030 would work fine.  But how do I use it? Every time I try the add printer wizard, it tries to install the incompatible point-and-click NT4/2K/XP drivers.

* Update – 2009-04: I had some intermittent problems with the HL-2030 driver, once in a while a page would not print completely and would cause the printer to require manual intervention to get it going again.  A quick search turned up this page which suggested using the Vista built in driver for the Brother HL-1430.  I’m trying that now.

So, I used an old trick. I faked a local port for the printer. I don’t remember the terminology, but I do recall this mapping system being common in the past – maybe with Novell or DOS?

Anyway, create a new local port using the share name, e.g. \\server\brother. You will be prompted to pick a driver. In my case, using the Brother HL-2030 driver does indeed work fine.

Some other Vista problems that I’ve had to resolve:

I’ve disabled User Access Control.  I can’t officially recommend this to other people, but it just doesn’t jive with me.

I’ve removed all but the US keyboard from my keyboard settings. Canadian PC’s (maybe it’s dependent on the regional settings?) have English, French and a “combo” keyboard mapping installed by default.  That’s fine until you accidentally hit the hot-key to switch to the French format – for some reason you do not get a confirmation prompt (!?!).  It happened to me on day two with this computer.  I’ve previously helped others fix this too.  While you’re at it, those with Intel Graphics, disable the hot-key that rotates the screen – everyone stumbles on that one eventually.

I had issues with an Access “.mdb” database on a network share that I use for tracking stuff. The resolution for that was to add the “serving” machine’s host name to my Internet trusted zone.  Adding only the IP address did not work, despite a MSKB Knowledge Base article I found.

I’m sure more Vista issues will pop-up.  But, so far, it’s been manageable.  I quite like the new 3-D flip task thing and the search tool.

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Posted in annoying, computers, support | 4 Comments »