Web Talk

If you thought that after installing Windows Vista SP1 all of your Vista related problems would disappear, well you’d better think twice! As a matter of fact a lot of users are reporting an incredible quantity of issues and you could be the next one. ( I know that you are touching wood right now). Anyway, here is another Vista SP1 issue. After installing Vista SP1 you could experience one of these issues:

• A device driver won’t install and and and exclamation point appears next to the device driver in Device Manager.
• A device driver stops working normally despite it is installed correctly.

To fix these issues follow these tricks:

First Method

1. Click Start
2. Type Device Manager in the Searh Box and press Enter.
3. If you see a exclamation point next to a device driver, continue reading, otherwise go to the Second Method.
4. Assuming that you saw an exclamation point, click Start, All Programs, Windows Update.
5. Check for Updates.
6. Click View Available Updates.
7. Check for the device you are looking for and install the update
8. Done.

Second Method

If the device driver seems to work, but it does not work, follow these steps:

1. Click Start, type Device Manager in the Start Search box, and then press enter.
2. In the Device Manager look for the device that is not working properly.
3. Right click on it and click on Properties.
4. Uninstall its driver.
5. Make sure that the Delete the Driver Software for this device check box is cleared, and then click OK.
6. In the Device Manager dialog box, click the Action, and click Scan for hardware changes.
7. You should get back that a device is being installed and that a new device is now ready in the Device manager.
8. If the hardware device driver is not installed, scan for new updates by following the first method.

There are a lot, really a lot of reasons not to be happy about the just released Windows Vista SP1, if you want a comprehensive list of issues and their solutions, visit this link here. What you can find here instead is a small list of issues (and the relative tricks to fix them) which are well known to Microsoft itself.

• Software which have issues with Windows Vista SP1. As you should know Vista SP1 doesn’t solve many incompatibility issues but, wherever possible, it does its best to create new ones. Microsoft acknowledge this and released a list of what you can not install in your computer. Read this article (KB935796).
• Because of an update (KB937287), you computer can go into endless reboots. If you want to fix this issue, read this article (KB949358).
• After installing Windows Vista SP1 your computer may experience random crashes when you try to wake it up from sleep mode. The solution to this is to upgrade your BIOS.
• Some people report sound system issues. Again, this problem is not totally unknown to Microsoft which dedicates a full article to it. Article (KB948481)

After installing Vista SP1 you may experience a lot of failures. One of the most irritating one which is strictly related to the famous USB “unknown device” issue, is the Readyboost feature which stops working all of a sudden. Basically the USB key is not recognized anymore. To fix it, follow this trick:

1. Click Start.
2. Click Run…
3. Type Regedit.
4. Find this key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\EMDMgmt
5. Remove all the sub values. They looks like folders. They should look like this: _??_USBSTOR#Disk&Ven_Multi&Prod_Flash_Reader&Rev_1.00….
6. Re-insert the USB key.
7. Now, reopen Regedit and change the following values in the memory stick settings Vista has just created: “CacheSizeInMB”=dword:000003c0 “CacheStatus”=dword:00000001 “DeviceStatus”=dword:00000002
8. Close Regedit, right click on the USB Key on My Computer, Set the cache of your ReadyBoost
9. Done!

Source: forums.microsoft.com

Ok, don’t get too thrilled about this. As a matter of fact to make this skin work on your iPhone you need a jailbroken iPhone (download the software to hack your iPhone here) with Summerboard and a few other apps. The theme include 90 Vista icons, custom boot and restore images, sliders, Vista login/logoff (lock/unlock) and sound effects, everything packed and arranged for your nice iPhone. The guy who has created this skin is at work to release a new version to make the whole procedure an easy task and not a pain in the butt like it is now! If you want to read the whole guide about this nice piece of hack, click here.

If you are a big fan of the “Make-it-yourself” category, here is a step-by-step guide teaching you how to change your Playstation Portable speakers! Despite this is in french (but a full translation is available here), the guide is well made and lets you, in a few easy steps, remove and replace the tiny speakers in your PSP! Watch the video now!

If you own an iPod or a PSP (Play Station Portable) you know only too well how tricky it can be to watch videos from YouTube or Google. In fact you can not simply download them into your device (by the way, to download videos from YouTube and Google Video, cilck here and here). As a matter of fact YouTube videos are encoded in *.flv format, while iPod and PSP can just read MP4 files. Luckily for us, this is not an issue anymore thanks to Free YouTube to iPod and PSP Converter. This software, whose name is absolutely without any fantasy, does a very simple thing: Convert *.flv video files to *.mp4. The procedure is quite simple and very fast to achieve. In fact, all you have to do is fill in the form with the web address of the video you want to download, select the location where you want to download the file on your computer, select your device (select Apple iPod, Sony PSP or Mobile Phones with MP4 or 3GP video support) and hit download to start the conversion. That’s it! The software is absolutely for free and contain no spyware or adware. Download it now!

In order to improve security in your Wordpress blog, the new version of this wonderful Content Management System has seen the birth of a new way of tightening your security by creating a unique and hard to find number when calculating hash value to encrypt password, especially on cookie authentication. This trick highly prevents hackers who use specific software to brute force your admin account. But, where can you find and use this new feature called “the secret key”? Simple, first of all open the Wordpress zipped file or, alternatively, gain access to your blog by using a FTP software. Look for wp-config-sample.php (if you just installed Wordpress) or wp-config.php (if you have a running blog), open it and look for the following piece of code:

// Change SECRET_KEY to a unique phrase. You won’t have to remember it later,
// so make it long and complicated. You can visit https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm
// to get a phrase generated for you, or just make something up.
define(’SECRET_KEY’, ‘put your unique phrase here’); // Change this to a unique phrase.

Now, just change “define(’SECRET_KEY’, ‘put your unique phrase here’)” by writing a long and hard to guess password. I would like you to remember that the longer and “mixed” it is the better your will be protected against malevolt people. But what do I mean when I say “mixed”? When creating a new password you should keep in your mind what specific software used by hackers are and do. They are huge databases trying to fill in your admin form with all kind of words to gain full access to your blog. They also try to combine words, use capital letters and special characters and such. It is evident that the more messed-up a password is, the better. To give you an example you SHOULD NOT USE a password like this: johnthebest198606. You SHOULD USE instead a password such: RiGhTPaSs$56*8@2Ok. This lessen the chance that some program may, even by change, guess your password. In case you are not creative enough, you can use this simple Web Tool, directly provided by Wordpress that makes the hard job for you, namely find out a very hard-to-guess password. Here is the link.

Another ultraportable has been spotted in the wild. In fact, Bestlink has just unveiled its new ultraportable Alpha 400 which promises to be as cheap as the famous Asus Eee laptop, but almost with the same look and feel. Here are its specs:

• It runs Windows CE as well as Linux.
• 400MHz Xburst CPU.
• 128MB of RAM.
• 1GB or 2GB of flash memory.
• 7-inch 800 x 400 display.
• The following add-ons are available to expand the laptop’s features: WiFi, CDMA, GPRS, and ADSL.

This laptop should cost around $250 and it is already available. If you want to buy it click here, if you want more infos, click here.