Bartman's Blob

  Get your SITEX 2012 Show Price List Brochures Flyers collection here. Large collection of price list and product information contained in this collection. Good for researching the price changes or just simply keeping a record of the pricing during the show for future reference : Get it here .   That’s it. Have Fun.

Have a spare DVI/VGA monitor laying around? Thinking of connecting your HDMI output device(e.g android stick, BR player etc) to that DVI/VGA monitor?  There are some constrains that you should know about. For HDMI to DVI-D conversion, there are inexpensive cables out there that are able to do this. Here are some example : -                  You can use HDMI to DVI-D(digital only, single-link or dual-link) cable if what you are after is purely the video output from the HDMI. Those cable will do just fine. The problem arises when you want to include audio output from HDMI. DVI as you know does not have any audio input pins. In such cases, how do we obtain the audio? It is not possible to extract the audio straight out from HDMI without some kind of converter in place. All HDMI signals are in digital and it does not transmit any audio signal in analog. You would need to use a converter to extract the digit...

Are you considering getting a Sound Blaster X-Fi Pro Surround 5.1 Pro USB sound card (with THX SB1095) for your Windows Server 2008/R2 server box and wondering would it work? On the official Creative Site for Sound Blaster X-Fi Pro Surround 5.1 Pro USB sound card , it did not include any drivers for the Windows Server 2008/R2 OS. I did a quick check to see if it would work by plugging it into a Windows Server 2008/R2 server box. The Sound Blaster USB card was quickly detected and stock drivers were being installed. The blue LED on the front panel of the sound blaster USB card lighted up indicating that it is ready. However, only the basic volume controls are available. The audio output sounded like playing back from a CD deck (without any audio enhancement from EQ or Bass/Treble adjustments). The Bass department was lacking considerably to my taste. I had to have access to the equalizer and other audio controls to “enhance” the audio output to my taste. The next thing I did was...

Have been playing around with Windows 8 and I thought wouldn’t it be nice to be able to install it on my old HP Compaq NC4010 notebook. This notebook comes with 1.7Ghz Pentium M processor and 1Gb memory. So, I pop in the Windows 8 media and tried to do a upgrade install from my existing Windows XP pro installation. The installation ran for a while trying to copy some temporary files and finally failed with the following message : “Windows Setup cannot find a location to store temporary installation files. To install Windows, make sure that a partition on your boot disk has at least 939 megabytes(MB) of free space. Error code: 0x80070490 “ After some searching on the internet, I discovered that my nc4010 is lacking a feature that is required my Windows 8 .  Pentium M processor computers have to support PAE(Physical Address Extension) in order to install Windows 8. If the processor bus speed is greater than 400Mhz, there is might be PAE support. Looks like my NC4010...

Are you stuck with a server box that does not come with a sound card? Have you tried to debug some issues and the solution comes in a form of a youtube video and you are not able tell what the heck that video is trying narrate without audio? It’s time to considered getting a sound card for the server box or at least have something on hand that you can quickly add sound capability to your server box. I’m currently using a HP ML110 G7 as my regular workstation and it does not come with any onboard sound card. It is installed with Windows Server 2008/R2 . I had originally wanted to get a pci-e sound card but decided not to as I was looking for a more inexpensive and flexible option. I searched around and found this little low cost USB sound card. But I was skeptical that it might not work on my Windows Server 2008 /R2 server box without drivers. Looking at the price of the usb sound card that I have found, I guess it is worth the gamble to give it a try. If it doesn’t work out, ...