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Archive for the ‘Microsoft’ Category

Driver for WebCam with a zc0301plus chip

March 4th, 2007
7 comments

I got a WebCam for free, but with no driver. And since no generic driver was buildin XP I thought “easy come easy go”.

I decided to take it a part and do a litle peaking inside.

What I did find was a chip named ZC0301Plus.

I then turned to Google and after an hour I got lucky.

I found a driver at a .ch site, and the funny thing was that it was the zip file itself that was indexed
and not the html page linking to the file. So it was pure luck.

While searching for the driver I found others like me, but only a few of them finally managed to find a driver.

I have made a local copy of the driver for my personal archive purpose, but feel free to take a copy yourself.

Download driver for zc0301plus based webcam here

Keywords:
MSN Messenger, WebCam, chip zc0301plus, Super AMT PRO Series Lense.

Benjamin Sølberg Microsoft, WebCam

How to keep your Windows Media Center running

February 25th, 2007
No comments

I have had my Windows XP Media Center running for months now without any kind of problems.

Normally Windows XP does a good job even when never/almost never restarted.

My developer machine can run for serval weeks, even so that I am programming resource hogs.

But when it comes to my Media Center running as a settop box, it somtimes just dies or do other kind of nasty stuff such as not being able to fetch the Electronic Program Guide (EPG) and its like.

This is very annoying as it misses TV recordings

I usually restart the Media Center PC once a day to solve this.

And because I am lazy I had been looking for a way to do this automatically.

The buildin windows commandline SHUTDOWN.EXE program isn’t just enough so I found :

NirCmd v1.85 - Freeware command-line tool
Copyright (c) 2003 - 2006 Nir Sofer

You can find it here: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/nircmd.html

The program can do anything well almost anything, from a command line.

Including “standby”, which was what I was looking for.

So the only thing to automate the restart & standby process is to use:

SHUTDOWN.EXE -r

at 4:00 am and

NIRCMD.EXE standby

at 4:05 am.

I have added the two commands to the Windows XP scheduler found in the Control Panel.

The Media Center now behaves alot better, but unfortunately it is still far from perfect.

Benjamin Sølberg Microsoft

MCE (Media Center) 2005 configuration reset utility

November 27th, 2006
No comments

I have recently bought a x-one (AOpen) media center with great success……

Actually not really. But it worked great the first couple of days but when I tried to add a old VCR to the channel list, it went bad. I did many channels rescans but I ended with a bad list of non-functional TV channels.

I gave up and went to google for help..

As usually it (google) didn’t let me down and I found the utility I was looking for:

I am happy to present “The MCE Reset Utility” (among others, take a look yourself)

http://www.salloway.org.uk/MediaCenter/util/index.htm#config2

You can choose between Full, Application or TV reset.

And I did TV reset with limited success but when I did a Full reset every thing started to work again.

Success!

Benjamin Sølberg Google, Microsoft

First glance of my Windows Media Center X-ONE

November 20th, 2006
No comments

I have been looking for a good and cheap hard disk recorder for home use for a while now and I finally found one that I liked.

I usually never buy a complete PC system but pieces them together myself, just for the fun. Also finding the right piece at the cheapest price has become a small obsession. But sometimes, just sometimes I surprise myself.
Today was the day! I’ve just bought a Windows XP Media Center 2005 Edition X-One PC, fully equipped and bran new. I actually only wanted a hard disk recorder but the price for such a device with a decent size of hard disk was quite close to the Media Center box itself. If I added a cool looking box, an mp3 player, a decent DivX player, image viewer and an extra windows XP machine at the price of nothing then the price was just right. I know that a Media Center is nothing more than a XP with a TV Tuner, and the Media Center application on top. But for once, Microsoft actually did create something that actually looks nice and seems to work. I was very impressed with the IR keyboard layout and the IR remote control, both seems to do the trick. The only bad thing so far is the IBM style mouse build into the keyboard. You have to push it down in order to make it work. I guess this is because of power consumptions issues.  The “Pause” function works instantly when watching TV and it is so cool. If the phone rings or the kids needs a slap (no I would never do that) then I just click Pause as I would do with any real DVD or VCR. I know that this is standard functionality on a hard disk recorder, but getting this and a PC at the same time just thrills me. The TV Tuner seems to be a bit on the cheap side, or I just might be the MPEG2 compressions that sucks as I am able to detect missing pixels between JPEG blocks.


If you want to see the Media Center I just bought then click below.
http://www.xone.dk/
I am in no way affiliated with X-One or intentionally any other company regarding the x-one media center PC.
Price tag: 5500 DKK including 250GB HD, 1 GB RAM, 3GHz Dual Core, 1 TV Tuner, 7.1Ch Audio, DVD+-R dual layer and so on.
All in all I will give it 8 out of 10 stars at a first glance. 

 

Benjamin Sølberg Microsoft