Tablet update

At Christmas Sony offered a major update to the tablet, not over wi-fi but via PC. This requires using their 'PC Companion' program to download and then transferring to the tablet using the USB cable that doubles as the charging connection. I guess this is to avoid "Oh noes my internets just died!" problems.

Anyway all went well, Android went from 4.2 to 4.3 and several Sony bits changed. The most obvious change is that the camera interface is a lot easier to use.

Wireless and useless

The wireless keyboard wasn't working. Oh wait - some keys were, some not.
So I searched the house for PS/2. This is the second temperamental wireless setup I've had, maybe all the other wireless things are interfering. Yes, there were my old gunged up ones, and they worked. Except - why was the mouse running round the screen on its own? Naughty mouse! Could it be... yes, it needed a different surface, light colors but not shiny.
So now all is fine, except for the sticky 'b' key and several unreadable ones that if I don't think my fingers can find by themselves.
Enough of this Mr Tesla, I'm buying a new set with wires.

Where's my Start button gone?

So I power on (me cup of coffee, computer big button) and log in and up comes the background pic but nothing else. Uh, oh... CTRL-ALT-DELETE, black screen. Eek. Manually switch off, reboot, everything's fine.
It turned out to be a video card two screen problem, it looks like the latest update of Catalyst, the AMD control program, has deviously changed something that isn't happy with my switching off with two screens and restarting with just one.

Fun with Hi-fi

After twenty years, it was time to update my hifi system. It was sitting on one side of the living room unused with the PC and TV on the other.
I settled on a Sony STR-DH820 A/V as the hub, which though defined as 'entry level' sounds fine to me. It has more sockets in the back than Neo and is awesomely black.

Glitch #1 I managed to press the wrong buttons and disabled the remote control. A Google forum search found the remedy - press a previously untouched button unintuitively labelled 'AMP'. Yes it was in the manual but in the wrong place.

The PC, TV and satellite box connect to the A/V via HDMI cables, and the A/V turned out to have better video output: Channel 4 HD had been choppy but is fine now.

Glitch #2 was (ha!) Windows. Switching from the PC speakers to HDMI output, the only option was Stereo. Where's my surround sound? Back to Google, which suggested some complicated and suspiciously old remedies. So... update driver? Yes, there was a recent update but that made no apparent difference.
Eventually the solution hit me last night: Windows was being clever and looking to see where the sound was going. To a TV with just two speakers? OK, just stereo then. In the A/V settings I needed to disable 'Pass Through'. Now Windows could only see the A/V and up came the speaker options I wanted.

Multiscreen

The only problem with my big (37") TV screen that's been doubling up as a monitor is that its text display isn't good; using programs with unadjustable text size (such as Eve Online) causes serious eyestrain. So I looked around for a reasonable size monitor and came up with a 22" LG E2250. It's an 'LED' monitor, an improvement on pure LCD.
Connecting via a DVI-D lead was no problem, Windows7 auto detected and multiscreened - that's where you move the mouse off the edge of one screen and it pops up on the other. The specific LG driver needed a nudge to install.
Text is now clearer by a lot. The LED improves on backlighting, making the picture brighter.

Home Networking

Just because I possibly could, I tried networking the old and new machines via the two sockets on the router.
Vista recognised Win7 right away, and after some fiddling with permissions I found out how to add folders. Win7 however... it turned out the firewall I had on Vista was blocking access. There were passwords involved in this, but just like on TV shows guessing only took a few seconds.
Win7 has a new networking for dummies system called Homegroups, but that only recognises other Win7 machines.

More glitches

I have a couple of Win95 programs, a decade old but never bettered, that Windows 7 refused to Install - surprising, as Vista hadn't quibbled. Maybe it's a 64-bit problem. Anyway I transferred the folders over and they ran fine, complete with previous settings since Win95 programmes store those in their own folders.

Webedit is a long lost HTML editor that has enough bells and whistles for me, and WS/FTP LE is the old freeware version of that transfer program.

Windows 7 arrives

My Vista machine never really recovered from its overheating problem and recently lost contact with its graphics card, defaulting to the onboard graphics. So, an early Yuletide prezzie - a brand new Windows 7 desktop, 64-bit OS, with a Radeon 5750.
Overall I'm happy - as promised it's all rather smoother than Vista. I'm slowly loading in stuff and so far the only program that didn't want to know was PGP, I needed the 64-bit version.

Hiccups:
(1) The speakers by default had inputs off, it took me a while to find out how to connect them to Line-in enabling me to use them for the TV.
(2) My Second Life TV isn't working. This seems to be a streaming glitch with Quicktime, I can see other streams in RL and SL and Liz can see it fine - she spotted a friend of hers being interviewed ("look look it's Amber!") and all I had was a blank screen.
(3) Not a single Blue Screen of Death so far! The graphics card has paniced and reset twice in SL, both times when I was working it hard, so I'm guessing at some minor OpenGL problem.
(4) Today, the screen blanked out. It turned out the HDMI cable had come loose, the 5700s only have HDMI output plus a rather grudging DVI socket which I haven't tried. Fortunately the HDTV has several HDMI inputs since I need another for the satellite box.

HDMI is fine with graphics, not so good with text but then the TV isn't optimised for that. Tweaking text size and Clear Type has made it readable.