Dell laptop sound issues....IDT High Definition Audio

A friend of mine brought me her computer to fix. She had recently contracted a few viruses and/or spyware intrusions, and the morons that she took it to fix it ended up losing all of her data (except for her music) and reinstalling the OS (Windows XP MCE). However, now the sound doesn't work (I would have thought they would have made sure the thing was working before giving it back, but like I said, they are morons). The laptop is Dell Inspiron E1505. When you bring up the Device Manager, you see a "!" next to IDT High Definition Audio Codec. I found this document which explains that we simply need to install the SigmaTel drivers from the Dell site (I had already tried the Creative Labs drivers, but they didn't work). So I downloaded the SigmaTel drivers, uninstalled the current IDT drivers (right click, Uninstall), rebooted, ran the downloaded driver file, and all is fine now.

I personally don't buy Dell (for reasons which are more than obvious to those who know me), but my brother has a Dell. I've already yelled at him about it....

Firefox 3.5 has a memory leak....

I'm now running Firefox 3.5 on my Windows 7 64-bit RC1 (7100) release. Last night I had iconified Firefox to the taskbar, with only a single tab open (my home page, which is nothing more than file on my system with a list of favorite sites), and when I tried to open it this morning, it would not open. This is the 2nd time this has happened since my 3.5 upgrade last week, so I brought up the Task Manager and found that Firefox indeed has a memory leak. This single instance of Firefox had consumed over 1.2Gb of memory. Not only could I not bring up the old window, I could also not launch a new instance of Firefox.

I was able to kill Firefox with the task manager, but this is truly disappointing behavior from such a long-running product as Firefox.

I have monitored it throughout the day so far, and my current instance with 4 tabs open has grown to nearly 132Mb of memory. I will continue to monitor and report back here, but will also check for a bug report on mozilla's site.

Easy as 1..2..3...WRT54G wireless router now working as an access point

Well, that was much easier than I thought. It took just a couple of minutes to get my old WRT54G Linksys wireless router up and running as an access point, thereby allowing me to disable the somewhat unreliable wireless access through my AT&T RG. Here's how I did it:

1. I disabled wireless on the RG
2. I plugged my WRT54G (port 1) into a free port on my Linksys Workgroup Switch.
3. Since my WRT54G was already set up as 192.168.1.1, I didn't have to modify that, but I did have to disabled DHCP on the Basic Setup screen.
3. The "Internet Connection Type" was set to "Automatic Configuration - DHCP", so I left it there (later I actually tried setting it to "Disabled", and that broke the wireless connections, so I put it back).
4. Since this router had been set up prior with all the wireless security and features, I didn't have to monkey around with any more settings.

It just works! Hopefully my son won't have wireless disconnects during his marathon WoW sessions now. The only other tidbit of data is that I'm running firmware v4.71.1 Hpyerwrt 2.1b1 + Thibor15c [May 12 2006]. I installed that some time ago for my torrent activity, and see no reason to change.

Linksys WRT54G router as an access point

Well, the wireless on my AT&T U-verse RG (Residential Gateway) has flaked out a few times lately, and I don't recall nearly that many issues with my old, reliable Linksys WRT54G, so I'm gonna attempt to utilize the Linksys router as an Access Point, thereby allowing me to disable the wireless on the RG. Hopefully it'll work. I found a guide here, and some suggestions here as well. It doesn't sound too hard, and since the kids are away and Mandy is sleeping off a headache, I'm gonna give it a shot.