HMS Noodles

Since flogging £300 quids worth of old stuff for work the other week i’ve become addicted to selling stuff on ebay. I’m hoping to raise some funds for my flight later this year and selling all my old junk seems a pretty sweet idea.

So far i’ve managed to round up:

Pentium 4 2.4Ghz with Mainboard and 1.5GB RAM
Athlon 2000+ with Mainboard and 1GB RAM
Pentium III 1Ghz with Mainboard, 384MB Ram and a TNT2 32MB Graphics card
Duron 950Mhz with Mainboard, 128MB Ram and a TNT2 32MB Graphics card
Socket 462 Mainboard
450W PSU
195W Small Form Factor PSU
Nvidia GeForce 7600GT 256MB PCI-E Graphics Card
40GB IDE HDD
60GB IDE HDD
80GB IDE HDD
2 Warhammer 40k Sential Walkers, still boxed
Belkin 54g PCI Wi-Fi Card (still boxed and shrinkwrapped)
Dlink 54g USB2 Wi-Fi Dongle
Rainbow 6 Vegas Poker Set (don’t ask)
Antec Green 120mm Case fan
512MB DDR400 Ram
256MB DDR333 Ram

Hoping I can get a couple of hundred quid for that lot. The graphics card is still worth a few quid, and might be able to get £15-25 each for the mainboard combos as they are all fully working and tested.

Sorry to anyone who tried to access my blog over the last couple of days and was hit by a virus warning. I had been too lazy to update my blog software and a vulnrability with the version I was using allowed a non-registered user to edit my posts without my knowledge.

Seems that they injected an iframe that had some infected content in it. I’ve removed all the injected content I found and have updated to the lastest version of wordpress.

Although the latest version seems to have broken all my categories, it does have alot of extra features and the interface is easier to use. Let just hope I remember to update this one.

I’ve spent more time than I care to admit over the last few days trying to get my blasted headphones to work with Vista. After reading some of the horror stories on the internet that are associated with any new release of Windows, I was pleasantly surprised that my headphones were my only immediate problem. In my nieveity, I assumed that a quick bit of investigation would solve the case. This was not to be.

The problem seems to stem from the new Digital Rights Management (DRM) code with Vista. Any USB Audio or Audio/Video device that’s more than a year or two old isn’t compatible with the DRM code in the usbaudio.sys driver file. You know if you have this problem when your USB soundcard or headphones appear in the device manager with a yellow exclamation mark sign, and you get a ”Device Cannot Start (Code 10)” error.

I’ve seen various fixes on the Internet, most of them center around using the Windows XPSP2 version of usbaudio.sys file, either by changing the registry, or the file itself. This is temperamental at best, as Vista notices your changing things and, without your consent, changes them back in front of your eyes. I had some small success with this, by playing with ownerships and permissions on the file then replacing it. It worked for a couple of days, but after I unplugged and reconnect the USB headphones, it refused to work again.

There is a handy Microsoft knowledge base article on it, KB 933262 but it doesnt actually provide a solution, just tells you there is one, but you have to contact support for further details. I phoned support and after 15 mins of answering the same questions again and again they agreed to email me the hot fix, which is passworded zip file that changes passwords every 5 days.

I extracted the zip and received an MSI file which installed the hot fix, and after a reboot my USB headphones installed correctly and have been working ever since. I’ve uploaded the file to my web space so anyone else with this problem can fix it with significantly less hassle than me!

Hotfix – Windows6.0-KB933262-v2-x86.msu
KB Article – KB 933262