Recording Sound with Vista

Windows Vista oftens ships with limited sound processing functionality. For example, Sony VAIO and Toshiba laptops ship with fully functional sound cards, but if you try to record you will find only a microphone input available. That may be fine for video chat, but what if you want to process sound in a production environment? There is a solution:

Click the Start button, and select Control Panels. Choose the Hardware and Sound control panel. From the Sound section, select "Manage Audio Devices." The Sound manager window will appear, with three tabs: Playback, Recording and Sound. Click on the Recording tab. On many systems, only a microphone input will be listed. To see the full range of your sound card options, right-click in the blank area of the window. Check the line for "Show disabled devices."

You should now have a choice to activate "Stereo Mix" or other sound card functions. Stereo Mix will give you an extra slider in your volume controls (at the lower right of the taskbar), allowing you to control the volume of your mix. Now you can record from software inputs.

Wireless Interference

As wireless networks proliferate, wireless interference is becoming a bigger issue, especially for small business in a metropolitan area. The number one symptom is an intermittent connection. If your signal strength is already low, you may be receiving an interfering signal from a neighboring router. Two solutions are possible.

Some routers allow you to boost the power of the signal, for example the new 2-WIRE boxes from AT&T, which offers power settings from one to ten. Your other option is to scan the surrounding signals to determine if there is a free channel. Channels 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, and 10 simply overlap the main U.S. channels of 1, 6, and 11. Therefore it's really only beneficial to use the non-overlapping channels. Switch to 1, 6 or 11 and retest. Higher frequency channels may provide better resistance to interference.

AHCI prevents startup on XPS system

A client brought me a beautiful XPS system. The hardware is neatly packed into a small case and is easy to remove. Unfortunately the system failed to start up. I checked the BIOS and it was detecting the hard drive. Other settings seemed normal, however the Advanced Host Controller Interface was active.

AHCI enables hot-plugging of SATA devices, and is normally enabled in a RAID array. As there was only one hard drive present, SATA cabled, I wondered if AHCI was necessary. The alternative was plain-vanilla SATA. After disabling AHCI the computer started up properly. Obviously the AHCI/RAID drivers were not installed or had been corrupted, so the computer halted when booting the drive at startup.

Instead of replacing the AHCI drivers (available from Intel), I turned off AHCI. Activating AHCI really isn't worth the effort on a system with a single drive. You already have lightning-fast access with SATA!

Horizontal Drop Down Menus in CSS

I recently added horizontal drop menus to the Portage Park District website (www.portageparkdistrict.org). CSS drop-downs take advantage of unordered lists, which they supplant by applying styles and using opacity to create visual effects. During the process two key CSS rules were reinforced:

CSS does not act across frames.
Get rid of your frames or they will cut off your css display! The previous web administrator had an unnatural fondness for frames. I eliminated frames across more than fifty pages on the site, and eliminated the button javascript, freeing up more horizontal space on the pages as well!

Internet Explorer will interpret your CSS differently from Firefox.
Where Firefox uses the CSS standard and displays CSS beautifully, IE will require some tweaks and adjustments. There goes Microsoft again, trying to be different. Are they steering us toward their proprietary solution? Looks fine in Firefox? You are going to have to test in IE over and over again!

Sluggish Keyboard Misses Strokes

I just finished cleaning up a Presario 2100, an older model notebook suffering from a keyboard problem. While typing, certain letters drop out, leaving words without h's i's and j's (among others). It has been suggested that this is related to the keyboard connection. However, I suspected that this was not the case (and I did not want to open the case ;^). Digging deeper I began to realize that it was actually the battery that was causing the problem. The battery had been dead for years, but somehow it was still interfering with the bus. When the battery was removed, the keyboard functioned perfectly, but when the battery was back in it started stuttering again.

The solution: I removed the terminal plug on the battery, popped it back in without its connector, and the machine is working great!

Reinstalling Windows XP (Service Pack 3)

Extreme spyware infestations require extreme measures. Repartioning /wiping the hard drive and reinstalling Windows is the safest solution. If you reinstall Windows XP from the original system CD, it will usually install either Service Pack One, which has only limited firewalling capabilities, or Service Pack Two, if you are lucky. However, Microsoft is making the Service Pack 3 update available for download at:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=5B33B5A8-5E76-401F-BE08-1E1555D4F3D4&displaylang=en

Burn the installer to a CD, and you are good to go. You do not need to boot from the CD to run the Service Pack 3 installer.

In lieu of the SP3 update, you will need to install a third-party firewall (I would suggest the light-weight Filseclab personal firewall) BEFORE connecting to the Internet. After restarting with the firewall active, you can proceed to the Windows Update site to activate automatic updates, and download Service Pack Two and Three. It is a time-consuming process, and when you have a clean system you might wish to ghost it to CD or DVD for future reinstalls.

P.S. The answer to my Windows USB device problems was simple: My old computer was not supporting USB 2.0. So I can't really blame Winrot, can I?