Time for a reformat, and instead of Vista, I decided to put XPÂ on this machine this time. To be honest, I had forgotten about some of the installation issues that tend to arise with an aging operating system…
First up, a BSOD right at the beginning of the boot disk install. As it turns out, the particular blue screen is caused when the installer can no longer read from the install disk (or something to that effect). Very quickly, I realized it was due to the dvd-rom drive being SATA. I quickly swapped it with an IDE cd-rom drive, and the installer made it to the point of letting me know there were no drives detected to install XP on (I expected this, the drive swap was more-so to make certain it wasn’t a totally separate issue).
In any case, there are 3 options should you happen to be in the same situation as I… Read more…
Alright, I’ve had to do this twice now, and it’s taken a few extra minutes of annoying-ness each time to figure it out, so I’ll put it here. Hopefully it helps someone else. Yes, there’s some background. Skip to the last paragraph if you just want the answer. Read more…
Upon installing Vista x64 on an ASUS P5B-VM SE, there were a couple devices in Device Manager that were missing drivers. The first was for the Attansic L1 Network Card, for which ASUS had a driver on their site. The 2nd was an unknown device. Right clicking and going to Properties showed the location as “Intel(R) ICH8/ICH8R Family LPC Interface Controller – 2810″.
Thinking that maybe the Intel Chipset INF package might have the driver, I installed it. No such luck. Finally, I did a search which brought me to a couple other pages, the biggest help being from a post by d.chatten on ocforums.com, although a hardforum.com post was helpful as well. As it turns out, it’s for a device called the ATK0110 which may have something to do with legacy I/O.
Regardless, the link in the post was broken (asus vs ASUS), so I browsed to Read more…
A couple days ago, I went through the process of installing the Kalyway OSX install on a white box computer. Since then, I’ve tried on a couple more machines, mixing up the hardware a bit, and have been through about 10 install attempts. None of the installs have gone hitchless, although with enough time and effort put in, they were all workable.
Rather than write an essay for each install, I’ll put the tidbits in point form. If anyone else is installing and running into similar issues, hopefully this will help. Read more…
Some of you may have read my previous experience installing OS X Tiger on “whitebox” computers. I tinkered with it on and off from 10.4.6 to 10.4.8 on various machines but haven’t really played with the new versions until recently.
A couple months ago, I got a hold of a couple installers – iATKOS v1.0i, and the Kalyway 10.5.1 OS X installers. I was doing re-installs of Windows at the time on a few different machines, so I tried the OS X installers to see if things had progressed to the point where it was a simple install-go-and-everything-works sort of thing. It wasn’t (which answered that question), and I didn’t touch it again. Until now that is… Read more…
It happens to just about everyone. Whether you’ve just bought a new machine, or you’ve just done a reformat/reinstall, you’re probably looking to get a few of the essentials installed. I’m going to assume you’ve already found/grabbed/installed the latest drivers for your motherboard & video card, and go right to some programs you just might want. Don’t worry, they’re all free. Read more…
Upon installing Vista on what I considered to be a relatively recent motherboard (the p5pe-vm), I found that the audio drivers weren’t detected or installed. Often, Windows Update finds updated drivers, but this time I wasn’t so lucky. So… I tried the following:
- Choosing random generic drivers included with Vista
- Trying an ADI SoundMAX 1888 driver for another ASUS motherboard
- Searching the net for about an hour
From what I gathered, it looks like ADI hasn’t really put a lot of effort into making drivers readily available for Vista. Just about every search result I came across was someone looking for drivers and not finding them. I’ll also throw a little bit of blame at ASUS. I’ve bought a lot of ASUS motherboards, and I’ve never had issues down the line when upgrading to a new OS. IN ANY CASE, there is one and only one way I’ve found to get the sound to work…. use old drivers.
The ones I used are available here, Read more…
Mac OS X is a fantastic OS. It’s not perfect though, and there are a few annoyances that do come along. One is that it creates a file called “.DS_Store” in every folder which contains information about that folder. Read more…
I recently came across the following issue:
I set up one of our machines with an Administrator account (only I had the password), and a regular user account. The idea being of course that the regular user account would be the only one used except when a program had to be installed. Since multiple people use this computer, this makes sense. Most viruses/trojans/spyware have a little trouble infecting an account that doesn’t have administrative priviledges. It’s as simple as that.
Of course, those of you who have done the same thing have undoubtedly come across programs that don’t like this. They expect to have full access to everything. Warcraft III is one of these programs, and while I myself barely play it, friends and family often do. Once Warcraft III was installed and patched (both through the Administrator account), it gave error an error message when trying to connect to Battle.net. The message was something to the effect of “Wacraft III is unable to write a file to the hard drive, yadda yadda yadda”.
The fix?
Read more…
Those familiar with the OSX86project might know that semthex has been releasing new kernel updates on a fairly regular basis. If you barely muddled your way through the initial install, well… updating the the kernel isn’t exactly a piece of cake. Nevertheless, here are some instructions that might help you… Read more…
