OzCableguy

With 16 digital channels here in Brissie at the moment and the TV channels’ annoying habit of running over time (which is apparently illegal in some countries. Ahh… to live in those countries…) I often found I had 3 or more channels I needed to record & watch simultaneously. Luckily my Media Centre is just a PC at heart so it’s a dead easy job to add another dual tuner card (in this case a cheap and cheerful Leadtek PCI DTV2000DS to my existing Hauppauge Nova-T-500 MCE).

Unfortunately it’s not that easy though. For some strange reason Microsoft never considered that anyone would need or want to record and watch more than 2 different channels so they only designed Media Centre to work with 2 tuners. The Media Centre application can see all 4 tuners easy enough in its setup wizard but it only allows you to choose 2. 

Thankfully the hard work has already been done and I found the bulk of the “how to” in the forums at XPMediaCentre, in particular this thread. Each installation is unique though so I thought it was worth summarising my particular technique which went as follows: 

1. After performing a clean installation of MCE 2005, install both tuners then download and install Rollup 2 for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005.
   Note: You can save previous record settings such as series recordings etc by backing up the \WINDOWS\Application Data\Microsoft\Ehome\recording folder then restoring it to the same location on the clean installation. Don’t forget to backup any programs you’ve recorded too if you want to keep them. These can be found in \Documents and Settings\All Users\Shared Documents\Recorded TV.
2. Run the MCE setup wizard choosing the first 2 tuners.
3. Setup the guide and add listing to channels as per usual.
4. Close the media centre application.
5. Download and run MCE Tuner Config utility.
6. Ensure the box to enable each tuner for MCE is ticked and each tuner has a unique name.
7. Open regedit and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Media Centre\Service\Video\TunersKey.
8. The 4 keys for all 4 tuners should be obvious at this point and each will have values listed for Record Order, Record Pref, Watch Order and Watch Pref.
   Set the values as follows:

Now test by attempting to record and watch 4 different channels.

Problems:

• If you find more than 4 tuners listed in the registry, delete them all, reboot and start over from point 2 above. (Windows will automatically recreate the keys on reboot). This sometimes happens apparently due to Windows being confused with all of the PCI to USB controllers that most of these TV cards employ. For more information and other workarounds to this problem search the XPMediaCentre forums for ghost or phantom tuners.
• If a channel scan reveals no channels or there’s several missing when previous scans picked them up without issue, then delete the EPG data found in \WINDOWS\Application Data\Microsoft\Ehome\EPG and try the scan again.

For more help try the forums at XPMediaCentre and TheGreenButton.

I recently changed VoIP providers and to my annoyance I discovered that I had to dial area codes for local numbers or the call wouldn’t be connected. Thankfully my router provides an easy way around this by creating dial plan rules.

For Draytek owners this is what it looks like in the VoIP > DialPlan > Digit Map section:

What I’ve done here with these 3 rules is for any 8 digit number I dial that also starts with a 3, 4 or 5 it will automatically add the 07 prefix (for Queensland) and send it through my “VoIP1″ VSP (VoiP Service Provider).

For other options such as routing certain numbers via a certain VSP or via PSTN (such as 1300 numbers to certain national companies which can sometimes connect incoming VoIP calls to the wrong State’s Call Centre) and replacing certain numbers with other numbers and so on see the Draytek FAQ here.

Ever been unable to delete or rename a file because another program is apparently using it but haven’t been able to work out which program it might be or how to get it to let go of the file?

WhoLockMe is a handy little freeware application that will do both. After istallation just right-click on the file in question in Windows Explorer and select “WhoLockMe” to find the culprit application and end its process.

If you use any of the Acrobat Pro applications you may have noticed new emails in Outlook have an annoying “Attach as Adobe PDF” button that just won’t go away. You can untick it via the View > Toolbar option in Outlook but as soon as you close and re-open Outlook, it’s back again.

To fix it, open regedit (Start > run > regedit) and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SOFTWARE > Microsoft > Office > Outlook > Addins > PDFMOutlook.PDFMOutlook.
Double click on “LoadBehaviour” and change the value to 0. (If you want to bring the button back again you can always change the value back to 3).

Next time you open Outlook it’ll be gone, until you install the next Acrobat update. Then you’ll need to go through this procedure again.

Don forwarded these instructions received from 2Wire Technical Support for bridging a 2Wire modem. (Step 4 was the trick we all missed) -

These directions for enabling bridged mode are to only be used by customers with the prior knowledge that any configuration issues or problems that arise during the use of bridged mode are not supported. 2Wire Technical Support can only support a HomePortal when it is fully functioning as a router.

There is a factory reset on the back of the HomePortal. It is a red dot located between the Ethernet port(s) and the USB port (on some models the USB port is not available). Press and hold the button with a paper clip for 10 seconds. This will reset the HomePortal to factory state. Also, on this particular model, it is required that you reset the HomePortal this way before the bridge mode setup will work. Once you have done this, follow the steps below:

1. Browse to http://gateway.2wire.net/management (10.0.0.138/mdc)
2. Click on Configure under Broadband Link
3. Enter the VPI and VCI that your ISP has given you  (Bigpond VPI = 8, VCI = 35)
4. Click on Disable PVC Search
5. Set Connection Type to Direct IP
6. Click Submit/Save
7. Click on Configure Services under Advanced
8. Uncheck Enable Routing
9. Click Submit

To disable bridge mode simply reset the Homeportal back to factory and reconfigure with the user identification information provided by your ISP.

Another fun XP issue that came up for me recently is the error message in the subject whenever I attempted to delete anything from C:\. Interestingly, deleting anything from D:\ worked fine. Apparently this problem can come up from time to time with partitioned hard drives.

There’s a few possible solutions:

1. The Microsoft Knowledge Base article. This one basically tells you it’s a known bug in the original XP release and was fixed in the latest service pack. There is a hotfix available if you’re unable to install the service pack for whatever reason but the hotfix won’t install if you do have the service packs already installed. No solution is mentioned if you do have Windows XP patched and up to date and still get this error (which is what happened to me) but one thing you can try is to download the full SP3 installation package and re-install SP3.

2. If the Microsoft suggestions above fail, try the patch from Kelly’s Korner. (Go to line 64 and across in the right-hand column download “Replace/Repair the Recycle Bin in Windows XP”. It’s a registry patch that will basically delete and re-create the Recycle Bin. Run it and reboot and you should be laughing.
Sadly I wasn’t quite laughing at this point. I was no longer getting the Recycle Bin corrupted message but instead files were now deleting in full without going to the Recycle Bin so something still wasn’t right.

3. What worked eventually for me was this solution from rossfingal at experts-exchange.com.

Open a command prompt (Start > Run > type cmd >OK)At the prompt type and enter:rd /s c:\recycled
(This is if your file system is FAT32)Or:rd /s c:\

recycler
(This is if your file system is NTFS)Then reboot.I believe this may possibly do the same thing as the Kellys Korner reg patch but I’ll mention it because it’s something I did just prior to it coming back to life again for me. (Bear in mind this command deletes the Recycle Bin so that Windows is forced to create a new one automagically).

The other thing I did after this was to right click on Recycle Bin, select Properties and go to the Global tab. Un-tick “Do not move files to the Recycle Bin. Remove files immediately when deleted.”
Reboot.
Re-tick “Do not move files to the Recycle Bin. Remove files immediately when deleted.”

4. There’s also several viruses and spyware/adwares out there that can cause this problem as well so run your favourite adware &/or virus remover and try the suggestions above again if you still have no success.

One thing that always bugs me with a clean install of Excel is that it doesn’t seem to want to save any custom buttons I create. Also, the stupid auto-hyperlinking feature (turned off in Tools > AutoCorrect Options > AutoFormat as you Type tab) won’t stay turned off. The next time I start Excel, the damn hyperlinking thing is back on and my custom buttons have vanished.

A technique to make this problem go away (found in the officeformac.com forums) is once you’ve changed the settings and re-created any custom buttons etc, open a new sheet and save it as a template in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\STARTUP. (This folder may be in a slightly different location depending on your version of Office).

Also, if you use the MROUND function you’ll first need to go to Tools > Add-Ins and make sure Analysis ToolPak is selected.

When reinstalling iTunes on a formatted or new PC you naturally want to bring across all of the old library data as well as playlists and so on. If you’re like me and don’t allow iTunes to keep your music folder organised then there’s an easy way to do this.

First, on the old PC open iTunes and go to Edit > Preferences > Advanced tab and find the iTunes Music folder location. The default location is Drive:\My Documents\My Music
Go to that folder and find the folder called iTunes and save it.

Now on the new PC after installing iTunes, go to that location and copy your old iTunes folder into that location.

A possible trap: If you’re also like me and don’t keep your My Music folder in My Documents, you’ll soon discover that Windows XP installs a folder with that name into My Documents by default so when you install iTunes it will create a new iTunes folder in that default location.
To move it to your preferred location, first copy all of your My Music folder into the My Documents\My Music folder (over-write anything already in there). Then move the My Music folder from My Documents to where ever you want it. This will automatically sort out all of the file paths and iTunes will remember where the proper iTunes folder actually is from then on.