Category: Tech

Ever since I updated the BIOS of my ST20G5 server PC, the on-board sound device failed. ( ´Д｀)

I suspect it’s that time I fooled with the DirectX registry entries because my FFXI installation could not detected the DirectX version as something prior to ver8.1 and refused to start. But in fact, DirectX9.0c was installed. I came across a post in KI forums and found out that the Service Pack 1 I installed for this Windows2003 Standard Edition was the cause. But then, it was too late. [X|]

2 things I am going to try before I resort to reinstalling:

1. Uninstall and Reinstall SP1 (may not be able to reinstall because I chose not to backup the files when isntalling SP1 back then)
2. Run through the windows registry again and try to restore the changes I made.

Blah… it’s going to be a long Sunday. Expect intermittent errors during the next few days as I constantly reboot the OS to find out the problem.

Yea… I have everything backed up now! Haha.

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Update:
Hah! I uninstalled SP1 and everything cocked up. Mouse and keyboard wouldn’t work. So yea, I reinstalled the whole OS. I plugged it into the router, wanting to do a windows update, and wanting to skip SP1 and ended up getting virused. Some lsass.exe thing failed and I’m forced to restart. Reinstalled Windows 2003 again, this time, I applied the SP1 patch I already had before exposing it to the internet.

The source of the audio problem, lies in SP1. I googled and found a patch for it at realtek website which now enables the onboard sound to work with my new BIOS and SP1. [X|]

Think I’ll google further on the DirectX9.0c issue at work tomorrow. The same thing happened to a friend but he was on WinXP with SP2 and for the game, World of Warcraft.

After lots of googling and forum posts, I got the TV Tuner card to install on Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition. I’m lucky it could run IIS the way I wanted it to, but installing PHP4 was a little trickier. It’s different, more tedious than installing it on Web Edition of Win2K3.

My room is a lot quieter now with the old machine and faulty HSF switched off. Now to look into the noise coming from my main machine. I suspect the Antec PSU at fault.

FFXI – Went levelling black mage a little more. It’s so easy to get PT invites, I get tells as soon as I disband… I have Elemental/Dark/Enfeeble magic skill capped from my Dark Knight job. Also have evasion capped and this has helped me many times to evade attacks from monsters that I nuke too much.

My new SFF multi-purpose PC is ready for action!

I just need to test the temperatures to make sure I applied the thermal paste properly and install an OS.

I bought 2 Seagate 160GB SATA NCQ harddisks. I intend to do mirror RAID (RAID 1). But if the performance is not impressive enough, I’ll break them up and remind myself to do weekly backups.

Here’s how it looks like, specs can be viewed here. Onboard audio and sound, TV Tuner.

All right! Because there’s going to be a new colleague in the office, my boss ordered 2 computers. A laptop and a desktop. Desktop comes with a 17 inch LCD which I am allowed to switch with my current 15 inch LCD. Finally more viewing space for coding at work!

The new computer will be placed upstairs in the conference room for training purposes. But I’m thinking of making it run the maximizer database server instead of having the older, slower PC do the job. This may involve a lot of extra work transferring MS SQL databases for I don’t have much experience yet.

By the way, I just discovered the slider in display control panel is already at max(1024×768). I’m very afraid I may not be able to get it up to 1280*1024. [X(]

Ugly. Very ugly. Fugly.

There’s a new client for my company and I need to edit their existing website a little which is in ASP. Code organization looks good enough. Easy to understand and edit. At least all I need to do is to make changes to a page or two to have that change applied to all other pages.

Every content is stored into the database and then pulled out with keywords from querystrings. No filters are applied to the querystrings before using them to query the database. Means anyone who knows SQL injection well enough could unleash havoc onto this site. I could fix that but I have forgotten a lot on ASP.

And I repeat, I don’t like ASP anymore.