Mods and Fixes

Mods and Fixes to various software.

Alienware Aurora R2 Saga

Posted by windyweather on August 3, 2013
Posted in: Computers, Mods and Fixes.
Alienware Aurora R2

Alienware Aurora R2

Recently I’ve gone round and round with my Aurora R2 system.

I finally chose to upgrade the system with new Motherboard, processor and memory, but I get ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning.

You may remember this system from previous tales on this blog.

As you can see from the image of the system on that page, the system had 8GB of memory that was all working. Somewhere along the way it developed an issue where it would only use 1/2 of the memory.

 

Update: See note at the bottom about performance of Intel Graphics on Haswell.

Update: System is now stable. I moved back to a previous version of the Nvidia GTX drivers for the 560ti.

Continue Reading

SSD Migration Nightmare

Posted by windyweather on May 20, 2013
Posted in: Computers, Evaluations, Helpful Hints, Mods and Fixes, Opinion.

The Problem

Samsung 840 250GB SSD

Samsung 840 250GB SSD

You may have noticed that prices for SSDs have come down quite a bit in the last year or so. And the sizes are now quite reasonable. A 250GB SSD will set you back about $200 and a 500GB SSD is about $350. So, I’ve decided that it’s time to begin migrating my computers to SSD system drives.

Casper 6.0 is among the tools I’ve had for sometime to migrate disks, so I gave that a try.

The test machine is an Alienware Aurora R2, circa 2008, with 8GB memory and a 1TB HD, running, Win7 x64. Only 180GB of the 1TB HD is used. As a test target before the SSD arrives, the migration target is a 320GB SATA Laptop drive.

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Battle Chair Design – Revision 1

Posted by windyweather on July 18, 2011
Posted in: Computers, Home Projects, MMOs, Mods and Fixes.

Front View

When used for gaming, laptops tend to over heat, and eventually they destroy their video cards. My Alienware m15x laptop, while it seems to have good cooling, has had 4 new video cards in the last 3 years. I have wanted to use a desktop for gaming, but prefer to do most of my playing from the comfort of my recliner. Here is the start of an idea to accomplish that. Missing from the renderings are the arm that holds the monitor from the case to the right of the recliner to the monitor in front of me. As  you can see the computer case is very large. I’ve provided for a UPS in the cabinet since in my area all my computers require a UPS due to frequent power glitches that would cause an unprotected computer to reboot. Click on pictures for larger views. Continue Reading

AlienFX Software – Bugs / Workarounds

Posted by windyweather on January 26, 2011
Posted in: Bug Info, Computers, Mods and Fixes.

AlienFX Fusion Woops

Based on a forum post, the AlienFX hardware now works, but if you use this software on Win 7 x64, there appears to be a problem.

It was indicated that the Alien Fusion component would not work, but the problem is that there is a memory leak or other problem that causes the program to apparently grow without bound. After several hours, I found that the AlienFusionController.exe was 1.7GB image size in memory. Clearly a problem. Continue Reading

AlienFX – Software Found

Posted by windyweather on January 26, 2011
Posted in: Computers, Mods and Fixes.

AlienFX Head

I assume you have been following the continuing saga of the non-working AlienFX under Win7 / Vista x64.

OMG.. A fellow from the UK had a solution for his Alienware ALX-58 system. So I got his private download and it works just fine.

Here is a post that contains the downloads in a later reply that I used.

So no board to make, no more hassles and it even supports the animation of the zones that I have.

Wheew.

I can’t believe that Alienware support were completely out to lunch that they had a solution all the time.

– w

AlienFX Static Lighting Solution

Posted by windyweather on January 21, 2011
Posted in: Computers, Mods and Fixes.

AlienFX Side Light

The AlienFX Lighting feature of older Alienware desktop systems – 2006-2008 – is not supported by Alienware for Vista x64 or Windows 7 x64. These operating systems are required to support memory beyond 2.7GB or 3.x GB depending on the motherboard of the system. This means that any system that has been upgraded does not have a working AlienFX lighting feature. This was discussed this in detail in a previous post.

Since I plan to get another decade or so of use from my Alienware P2 case, I’m designing a static lighting solution for my system. By static I mean a board that mates with the existing connectors for power and LEDs, and allows setting the colors, but does not support animation, and does not require any drivers, or USB connection. Anyone with this case and a recent version of Windows or Linux, will benefit from a lighting solution. Continue Reading

Bad Laptop Hard Drive

Posted by windyweather on November 29, 2010
Posted in: Mods and Fixes.

Here’s a bad laptop hard drive I recently replaced. Since the drive is dead, I took off the label and removed the screws and cover to see the platters and arm. Don’t ever spin this drive up again, of course. Click on a picture for a larger view.

Google Sitemaps for Coppermine

Posted by windyweather on October 12, 2006
Posted in: Mods and Fixes, Web Tools.

Google has help and services for Webmasters. Among the things they provide and encourage are sitemaps. However, it’s not as complex as it all seems. WordPress and coppermine, and many other CMSs have scripts that generate these sitemaps. There are tools that run from your computer too, but these can’t know the internal structure of the site database, and so they are inefficient or don’t work for dynamic sites like WordPress and Coppermine.

With over 2000 images in my photo site, it seemed useful to generate a Google Sitemap for the Coppermine gallery. After some searching a plug-in turned up in the Coppermine Forums.

This plug-in is fairly primitive and when I tried it, it failed with an error on Google. Google produced an error about the first URI produced by the script. Also, the entire sitemap was produced as one single line, so error messages or looking at the sitemap with an editor were not user friendly.

I have repaired the script and you can find the new version by the link below. It is advertised to work for CPG 1.2.x, 1.3.x and 1.4.x. For more information, read the forum post above.

To use the script, unzip and upload it to the base coppermine directory on your site and then activate it from the browser with a URL like: http://www.yourdomain.com/cpg144/sitemap.php

Then visit the Google Webmasters Site,

  1. create an account, or log in with your google email account,
  2. add your site, using the Coppermine base directory, and
  3. then verify your site using one of the methods provided and finally
  4. point to your sitemap to tell google about it.

Here is the fixed script.

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