The U-verse is falling...still...oh my achin'head...holy crap!

It seems like ever since we enabled HD on our AT&T U-verse account, the picture has been stuttering, stammering, hanging, etc. I called tier 2 support (yes, I have their direct number because the front line flowchart morons are worthless!), and they checked it out, and there was definitely a problem. The technician came out and replaced the outside splitter as well as a couple other connectors. The picture was no different.

As an experiment, I ran a 100-ft length CAT5 cable from the RG to the DVR and removed the coax connection. Instantly the picture was better...and perfect! Obviously there is a problem with the coax connection. It just so happens that the coax to the DVR is a RG6 shielded line, dedicated to the DVR, and only splits at the outset, for household distribution:

RG -> AT&T splitter -> 3 way house splitter -> 1) DVR 2) living room 3) floor 2

My suspicion was the home 3-way splitter, since the tech had replaced the AT&T splitter. I called to get another tech to come out. When he arrived, I gave him the rundown of what was going on and what had been done, so he set out to replace the home splitter, and he discovered a lot of interference on the line coming from the floor 2 line. I showed him the attic access to that line and splitter, where he replaced a couple of the end connectors. In all, he replaced the 3-way splitter and also some end connectors, as well as the end connectors at the splitter in the attic on floor 2. After all that, he could detect no interference on the line, and the picture has been perfect ever since.

Demonoid is back online!

After months (early September) of being down due to a hardware failure that caused data loss, the Demonoid torrent tracker is finally back on line. Welcome Back!

For all things ClimateGate

To keep up with all of the latest developments on ClimateGate, Watts Up With That is the place to be!

DVD drive stopped working on Gateway laptop...it wasn't hardware!

A friend of mine gave me his Gateway laptop to fix because the CD/DVD drive had stopped working. Naturally I assumed it was a bad drive, but I checked it out first by inserting a disk, which did not autorun. Then I realized, as I tried to navigate to the drive in Explorer, that it wasn't even present on the system.

A trip into the Device Manager showed that the device had a caution mark on it. I deinstalled the drive, rebooted, and reinstalled the drive, but it still was no good.

Yep, must be a bad drive right? It isn't even recognized by the system! But then I found this Microsoft document, which talked about removing the UpperFilter and LowerFilter for the drive in the registry.

I did that, and poof, the drive magically started working again. I wish I could remember the entire model number of the drive, but all I can seem to recall is that it was some variant of a TSSTcorp CD/DVD TS drive. I also don't know the model of the Gateway laptop...but it did have a 1.7Mhz processor, 1Gb of memory, and ran Vista so slow that I thought I would pull my hair out waiting on that thing to do any mundane task!!!

I hate Vista and have been using Windows 7 since it was released in January. I have 2 official copies pre-ordered from newegg for the Oct 22 release.

My son's 1986 Merkur XR4Ti is for sale

Well, the time has come, after 23 years in the family, for our 1986 Merkur XR4Ti to leave the family. My dad bought the car new in '86, after some positive reviews and much prodding by ...ME... He enjoyed it for several years, and then it started having some issues, not the least of which was a leaking steering rack, so he parked it and only drove it around the yard a bit to excercise it. In about 2005, my son saw it in the garage and decided he had to have it, so my dad sold it to him for about $1000 after getting the rack and the rear brake cylinders replaced. If that's where the saga ended, it wouldn't be quite as interesting, would it? Didn't think so. We've had numerous issues with the car (which I won't detail here), and it just isn't a reliable, every day driver type of car. So, we are going to sell it. I think, given the amount of work that we've put into it, we should be able to get $1000, but that remains to be seen in these tough times. It has just under 110,000 miles, and lots of new parts, including tires. There is ZERO rust, but the original paint it fading. If someone knows how to work on these cars, this one is a great project car, because it does run, but could use some fine-tuning to get it in good enough shape to be that reliable, every day driver that we hoped it would be.

I'll probably list it in the Merkur Club forums.

Peter Cetera was AWESOME!

The wife and I took in a Peter Cetera concert at The Fred in Peachtree City, GA on Saturday night. What a show! Peter was absolutely fantastic! We had front row seats (just behind the section of tables that front the stage), so the view and sound were both amazing. My only regret is that I don't own some sort of recording device that would have allowed me to secretly record the show....Yes! It was that good!

Maybe next time :-)

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....