1. Go to Start > Control Panel > Network and Internet Connection > Network Connections
2. Here you will find your Wireless Network Connection Icon. Right click and choose Properties
   
3. Select the Wireless Networks tab. Click the Advanced button and select the third option “Computer-to-computer (ad hoc) networks only”. Then click OK
   

4. After that, you need to add a wireless network connection. Click the Add.. . button.
   
5. Enter the network name and your Network key. If the network key’s field is disabled, untick the option “The key is provided for me automatically”. For the WEP network key, you need to enter exactly 5 or 13 characters. (If you want to be more secure, you can choose to use longer network key, exactly 10 or 26 characters using 0-9 and A-F.)
   
6. Repeat the same steps on the other computer.
7. After that, go back to the Network Connections window. Select your Internet connection and choose “Properties”. In my case, I need to select the “Broadband” option as I connect to the internet using WAN Miniport.
   
8. Go to Advanced tab and tick the option “Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s internet connection”. Select your Wireless Connection on the drop down menu.
   
9. So, everything is ready. Now, go to Start > Connect to > Wireless Network Connection. Here you will find the network you have set. Choose the network and click connect. You don’t need to enter the key, as the key is already saved. It may appear shorter than the actual key, but you don’t need to change that. Just click connect. Do the same thing to the other laptop. Now you are done! Start surfing wirelessly!

   

The steps above should actually work. But if you do have problem connecting to the wireless network, you can try to set the IP manually. This can be done by repeating step 1 and step 2. Then, instead of choosing Wireless Networks tab, stay at the General tab and higlight the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). Then click Properties. Choose the option “Use the following IP address:” and enter this numbers
IP address: 192.168.0.1
Subnet mask: 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway:192.168.0.1

Repeat this on the other computer but you need to change the last number of the IP address e.g. 192.168.0.3

And for the computer which does not connect directly to the internet, you might need to set the DNS server addresses to get the internet connection. First you need to get to the computer with internet connection. Run this command: cmd /k ipconfig /all
There a window will popup and you will find the DNS addresses there. Key in the addresses in the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) properties.

I think there will be no problem anymore. You should be successfully connected to the internet. Feel free to contact me or leave a comment here, if you are still facing problems.

I thought I could get rid of Apple products after selling my iPod classic 80GB to able me to buy Sony PSP. What I really like about Apple Product is the user interface. Apple products have the most intuitive user interface in my opinion.

Before this, I wanted an iPod Touch, but I settled down buying Sony PSP as my Portable Entertainer and Sansa Clip with much less money than iPod Touch would cost me.

Seeing many peoples using iPhones and the coolness factor of it make me want to have one. Yeah, those two reasons are not so strong to justify my need to spend my money on that. Hundreds of Euros just to look cool? Please!

But if I buy it from the UK, it will cost me less compared buying iPhone in Germany, by far! In UK, you can buy an iPhone with O2 Prepaid Card without contract for about GBP 340. Ask your friend there to buy it for you, and Royal Mail will ship it to Germany for about GBP10, which will make it only GBP350!!! Or you could even buy on eBay for about GBP400.

And you know how much this lovely iPhone costs in Germany? On eBay, the price is above EUR650! Just about double the cost in the UK. With the current exchange rate, it make it more tempting to buy from the UK.

So, will I buy the iPhone? I still don’t know. I don’t need it but I want it.

I always thought that my anti virus (Avira Antivir Free Edition) had real time scanning, which will at least warn me if something weird happens probably caused by virus attack. I had once tell my friend, that full system scanning is redundant. Shame on me. He is actually right.

I don’t know exactly what virus had affected my system, but it prevented me to view the content of my hard disk from “My Computer”. Every time I double clicked on C:, the error message appeared:

C:\resycled\boot.com is not a valid Win32 application

I suspected that was a virus since “resycled” is wrong spelled. Luckily, it is not only me who had this problem. From the front page of Google Search, I found the solution.

It’s a virus, all right (as you might have suspected due to the misspelling
of “recycled”).

Start Windows in safe mode, then click Start -> Run. Type in regedit and
click okay.

Now at the top of the registry editor, click Edit -> Find. Type boot.com
and click Find Next. Every time it finds a new boot.com, press the delete
key and then enter. It should find a dozen or so copies.

Now, plug in any external drives or flash drives you have used with this
computer. Open My Computer. Click Tools -> Folder Options -> View and
select “Show Hidden Files and Folders” and click okay.

For each drive, open it and delete the “resycled” folder and autorun.inf.
Back up each autorun.inf before deleting them off external drives, because
they might be important.

Restart the computer and the problem should be gone.

Source:[link]

Strangely enough, I could not find any folder named “resycled” and autorun.inf file. I thought doing the registry part was enough, but it wasn’t. After the registry fix, I did a full system scan and Antivir did actually find four viruses. All of them were then deleted.

After restarting, the problem still was not solved. I looked at the registry again, the boot.com entries were still there. After repeating the steps for few times with no success, I decided to format my C: and do a fresh installation of Windows XP. Before that I need to make a copy of my important files on C:. While copying I noticed one more strange thing on my system. To copy 1GB files, it took about 30 minutes. That was crazy. I do have USB 2.0!!!. Even with USB 1.1 it would takes only about 11 minutes.

Having no patience to wait, I booted the computer to Ubuntu (fortunately, I still don’t get rid of Ubuntu from my system) and copied the files from there. While browsing the files, I did realize that the folder “resycled” and file “autorun.inf” did actually exist. But how can these two files be invisible in Windows XP? I did tick the option “Show hidden files” in Folder Options setting.

After those folder and file were deleted, I booted back to Windows and everything runs normally. Ubuntu did save my precious time from formatting and reinstalling Windows. Lesson of the day, always do a full system scan. Better safe than sorry.

After a few weeks, my friend reintroduces me with Ubuntu. Yeah, I know it. I have it once installed but having no success getting the right driver for Broadcom wireless card to function properly. Hey, but this time the Ubuntu is different. It comes with Compiz Fusion, which has super cool graphic effect. It is way much cooler compared to Vista.

Being amazed with the effect, I installed Ubuntu on the empty partition left by OpenSuse. This time, with a little bit luck, I manage to get the wireless card to work. The learning curve was not too hard. Getting used to Terminal, installing packages, root access and so on was not a big deal.

But then some problems occurred. The first thing which annoys me very much is the video freeze. It freezes every time I watch movie. The video freezes for about 5-8 seconds but the sound is still there. It is okay when I watch English or Malay movies, but when I need to depend 100 percent on the subtitles, such as Japanese dramas, it is awful! I need to rewind back a little bit and for an episode of drama, I need to do that about 5 times. I have looked for solution in forums, but nothing worked. Maybe I just need to wait for the update.

Changing platform is not only change the Operation System; you need to change most everyday software you use. As a photography enthusiast, I do use Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom a lot. Unfortunately, there is neither Photoshop nor Lightroom for Linux. Yes, there are some alternatives to such softwares, such as GIMP for Photoshop or Lightzone for Lightroom. But, again I need to learn them. After so much effort learning Photoshop and Lightroom, I should change to new softwares, learn them, and get use to them.

All these make me thinking again, whether I do want to switch to Linux. Do I need to fancy graphic effects? Do I need an almost virus-free Operation System? (There are lots of free antivirus programmes out there. By the way, after about two years using this laptop, it does not suffer any virus attack.) Does Ubuntu 8.04 more stable than Windows XP?

Gosh, I need to get some sleep now. Tomorrow morning I need to catch a train to Games Convention in Leipzig. Good night.

On the customize window, select the option “view small icons”, which can be found at left bottom of the window. After that, drag the navigation buttons and put them beside the menu bar, then followed by the address bar and search field. Apply the change and return back to Firefox. You will see that there is still an empty bar below the menu bar. To get rid of this, go to View – Toolbars, and untick the Navigation Toolbars.

It is very simple and no plugin required. What make me feel bad about this is, I have found this feature after years of using Firefox. Ok, below is the snapshot of my Firefox.

Have a great weekend!

Like the title said, I am back with Linux. No, I am not boycotting Windows or Microsoft! Microsoft are such a great company, who gives us (most of home computer users) such a great and user-friendly operation systems (hey, it even comes with great IE7! Who needs Firefox?) and they new version looks very great to my eyes. Unfortunately, my old printer does not want to work on Windows Vista. Canon just refused to come up with updated Vista driver for this printer. Yes, I know, it is an old printer, so what? Customers are king, right? Or nowadays not anymore? By the way, it was also my fault of buying an old used printer (Canon MPC190), just to spare some money from buying the ink. I muss keep up with technologies or just borrow my friends’ printers.

Ok, back to Linux. Now I am running openSUSE 10.3 on Compaq Presario V3000. The biggest issue was the wireless network card. Before this, I gave up installing Ubuntu because of the same issue. It is difficult to find solution for your troubles with Linux, if you couldn’t get to internet. I needed to switch to Windows XP to get access to internet looking for solution for this wireless issue. I need to save the whole webpage and restarted the system and opened it back on Linux. Not all the solutions work for me. That means, I need to switch from Linux to Windows quiet a number of times.

This guide from Jabba Rants did work great for me. I still will paste the steps below because many of links pointing to the solution don’t work. The sites are not exist anymore. Sorry Jabba, I don’t intend to steal your content.

Installation Guide

1. Insert CD and boot.
2. When you see the menu to choose which installation type you want to do, choose the regular installation, but before pressing Enter, type: “noapic irqpoll nosmp” without the quotes. Those three words should be at the bottom of the GRUB menu in the Options line. Hit Enter.
3. Go through the graphical installer. It is pretty straight forward and self-explanatory. Go ahead and accept most defaults as they are. I would recommend setting up networking and everything and getting updates with a regular ethernet wired connection during the install process.
4. Once it is finished, go to YaST (Administrator Settings). Go to System and click on “Boot Loader”. Click the first item and click “Edit”. Make sure that you see “noapic irqpoll nosmp” in the Options line. If they are not there, add them.
5. While still in YaST, click on Sofware and then choose “Community Repositories”. Make sure that the main repositories as well as the nVidia and any other ones you think you might want are checked and click Finish. After they are done being set up, click on “Software Repositories” in YaST and make sure that all the repositories you selected are enabled and make sure that the “openSUSE-10.3-OSS-KDE 10.3″, which is the CD or DVD, is disabled.
6. Click on “Software Management” in YaST, and search for “nvidia” and choose “nvidia-gfxG01-kmp-default” and “x11-video-nvidiaG01″ to install. Then search for “ndiswrapper” and choose it to install. Click “Accept” and let it finish the installation.
7. Google for “Dell R151517.EXE” and download that file from Dell’s download site. Open a terminal and navigate to the directory where the file was downloaded. Type: “unzip R151517.EXE”. This will probably spill files all over the place, so you might want to move that file into a directory that you can easily delete later. Once it is done unzipping, type in the following series of commands:

su -

(enter your root password)

cd /home/user/directory/where/you/unzipped/the/file/

cd DRIVER/

ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf

ndiswrapper -m

echo blacklist bcm43xx >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

echo ndiswrapper >> /etc/modules

reboot

Now, if everything went smoothly, when your computer boots back up, you should see the nVidia logo flash across the screen right before you log in. Once you are logged in, you should be able to click on the KNetworkManager icon in the system tray and see your wireless networks. If you didn’t see the nVidia logo before you logged in, edit the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf as root and find the word ‘nv’ and change it to ‘nvidia’ and restart the X Server or reboot again. Hopefully someone will be helped by this guide and not have to go through the many hours of trial and error to get this notebook working nicely with Linux.

I didn’t use the Dell R151517.EXE file. The contents of the files are just the same like my Broadcom wireless network card driver for my laptop SP36684A.exe. Wireless and Graphic card issues are now settled. Now I am having problem with my sound card.

Ok, till then. Sayonara!

Ok, back to business. Today I want to write something about digital music player. For some reasons, I would like to have an iPod now and the new iPod Touch is very appealing. This thing started as I began to use iTunes as my music player instead of Winamp. For me, iTunes is a very ingenious. The main reason why I like iTunes is that it can manage podcast very well. If I were to have an iPod, the experience with iTunes will be greater because iPod and iTunes seem to have seamless integration.

Now, my digital music player is one of Sony Walkman MP3 player, which I borrow from my friend, as he has already got his iPod, the new iPod Nano 3rd Generation to be exact. And the best part of Sony MP3 player is the attrac file format, which compresses the music better, without compromises the quality of the sound. In other words, the sound is still great to many ears even at low bit rate, compared to mp3. But the best part is also the worst part. Since I do listen to lots of podcasts, it is very annoying to first download the files from website and then convert it to atrrac using SonicStage format to be stored into the player (Sony MP3 Players do not support Drag-and-Drop). If the SonicStage is a great as iTunes, the world will be better, at least for me. Or if SonicStage just supports RSS Download for podcast…

But, when I clicked links from Yahoo! Messenger or Acrobat Reader, the links were opened with Internet Explorer. I do not hate Internet Explorer, but I just want to use one browser and the links should be opened in one window, so that the taskbar is not too crowded.

I thought it was a method from Microsoft so that people will tend to use Internet Explorer, but I was mistaken. The setting of the standard programs can be change. To make your Firefox as fully standard browser for your Windows Vista, just follow these simple steps:

Start button > Control Panel > Programs > Default Programs > Set program access and computer defaults

and this window will appear:

Untick the option “Enable access to this program” and then click OK. After that, the links you click from other program such as Yahoo Instant Messenger or Adobe Reader will be opened via Firefox. But, the links from Windows Live Messenger are still opened in IE7.

The installation was successful as before. But this time, Windows Aero can be done. Last time, even Windows Sidebar did not load automatically after the installation. Maybe 512MB is not enough to run Windows Sidebar efficiently. And I started to love Windows Vista. Microsoft was right with the “Wow” of Vista.

Back to the main topic. After the installation, I realized that my primary partition was only 15GB, which is minimum requirement for Vista. The size of the partition was enough at the time I used XP, but now I need to expand the size.

Vista can do the partition resizing without third party software (link), but for the primary partition, you can only shrink the volume. Therefore, I visited Windows Marketplace to find compatible disk manager software for Vista. And they do have solution, which will cost you $50.00.

Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 is compatible with Vista and has resized my primary partition to the size I wanted. The only problem I had by this software was, I cannot open it and the error said that I don’t have enough privileges to run the program. This can be fixed by using “Run as Administrator” optio

And for those who hasn’t try Vista yet, do try it and feel the Wow!

But, what can I do, if I want to intentionally save the current session and want to restore it when I open the Firefox again? A little trick that I have found is by killing the Firefox process. You can do this by pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL to open the task manager and kill the process with image name firefox.exe.

It works great but this is not practical. There must be an easier way. Then, I searched in Mozilla addons page and I’ve found this plugin for Firefox, Save Session. By using this plugin, you can save your session by just clicking on the menu “save session and exit” under the File Menu. On the next start of Firefox, you will not be asked whether you want to restore the session or not, instead the session will be restored automatically.

To download this plugin, you can go to this page. -Save session-. By the way, it is compatible to Firefox version 2.0 – 3.0a4.