Tancap Blog » OS

Windows 7 Media Center / HDMI Audio Tip

Tim — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 16:10:46 +0000

I’ve been using Windows 7 Media Center for quite a while in a VM with content viewed using an XBox 360 as an extender. However, I’m looking at purchasing one of the Ceton tuner cards and ended up moving the VM to an ASUS AT5ION-I (Atom / ION) based box directly connected to my TV and receiver via HDMI. I ran into a problem where audio would periodically loop and cause playback to stop with an error. After searching various boards it looks like there is a problem when menu sounds are used with a Dolby Digital setup that also transmits audio and video via HDMI. To work around the problem you can either disable Dolby Digital audio, disable menu sounds (Settings -> General -> Visual and Sound Effects -> Play sounds when navigating Windows Media Center), or disable “Allow applications to take exclusive control of this device” in the sound control panel (advanced tab). There are several posts going back over a year on this issue on technet, but it doesn’t appear Microsoft has provided a true fix yet.

Mac OS X 10.6.5 Patch Released Breaks PGP Whole Disk Encryption

Tim — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 02:51:29 +0000

Apple released OS X 10.6.5, but those of you with use PGP Whole Disk Encryption will want to wait. Installing the latest update will cause OS X to fail to boot due to modification of the boot.efi file. You can still access your data by using PGP’s rescue disk, but there isn’t an official permanent fix yet.

See this post for more information.

Steam Client for Mac OS X Released

Tim — Thu, 13 May 2010 00:22:59 +0000

The Steam Client for Mac OS X is now available here. When you are done installing be sure to pickup a free copy of Portal.

Thanks DailyTech

Windows 7 – So Far So Good

Tim — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 18:19:11 +0000

Over the past couple of days I’ve installed Windows 7 on 4 different machines. Everything seems to work pretty well. Of course, I would hope this is the case since Windows 7 is pretty much Vista SP 3 with a tweaked UI. Windows 7 is noticeably faster for me on computers that have 4 GB or less of memory. If you have a machine that falls in that category you probably want to seriously consider upgrading. The updated UAC is considerably less annoying than Vista’s. It’s too bad Microsoft decided not supporting to upgrades from different editions of Vista. Not being able to go from Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Professional seems a bit odd.