Category: Technology

Hey Wait … Isn’t That Meister in the New York Times?

The New York Times had a Small Business section today with an article entitled You Can Call for I.T. Help Without Hiring a Whole Crew that talks about computer support options for those smaller organizations that can’t hire a full or even part time technical support person.

From the article:

Amy Wright, a collision repair consultant who works from her home in Willoughby Hills, Ohio, had Geek Squad set up her computer and digital camera and the wireless Internet connection in her home office, as well as the Sony video recorder her husband uses. When it came time to upgrade her computers, printers and monitors, she spent about $2,800 at Best Buy.

“You can call them for help, but you don’t have to have them on a full-time basis,” Ms. Wright said of Geek Squad.

It’s definitely a little weird seeing your photo in a major newspaper, but I’m glad I got the chance.

AMD HP Pavilion PCs and Windows XP Service Pack 3

I came across an issue today with an HP Pavilion desktop PC with an AMD processor that displayed a BSOD error message after it was updated to Windows XP Service Pack 3.

I found the resolution here, which involved booting into Safe Mode and changing a registry setting that was causing the system to load incompatible Intel drivers due to a mistake on HP’s part.

There are two ways to fix the issue, both of which will require the system be booted into Safe Mode.

Non-Regedit Fix:

  1. Start system in Safe Mode.
  2. Click on the Start button.
  3. Click on Run.
  4. Type “sc config intelppm start= disabled“. (note the space after the = sign)
  5. Click OK.
  6. Reboot.

Regedit Fix:

  1. Start system in Safe Mode.
  2. Click on the Start button.
  3. Click on Run.
  4. Type “regedit”.
  5. Click OK.
  6. In Regedit, locate and click on the key “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Intelppm“.
  7. Click on “Start” entry in the right pane and click Modify.
  8. Change the value from “1” to “4”.
  9. Click OK.
  10. Exit Regedit.
  11. Reboot the system.

After the reboot, everything worked fine. For some reason, the Intel service was set to start, causing issues on the AMD-based system.

WordPress 2.5

The team behind the popular blogging software WordPress has released another update.

I’ve gone through the easy upgrade process for this site and was quickly greeted by the newly redesigned Dashboard.

There’s obviously been a good number of changes done both behind the scenes as well as with the user interface, though the security upgrades seem to be the most important.

Little Yellow Robotic Drum Machine

[kml_flashembed movie="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=8393403029360051976" width="450" height="375" wmode="transparent" /]

This little mobile percussion bot uses on-board sensors to find an object to drum on, then proceeds to beat out some entertaining rhythms before moving on to its next target.

Find out more about Yellow Drum Machine at letsmakerobots.com, along with additional videos.