More Medion 8818 stuff

The Christmas break has been like the curate's egg as far as the new PC goes.

I successfully wrote my first DVDs - I discovered that my DVD player seems to read both +R and -R sucessfully.

However, I had more fun when it came to burning a CD from an ISO. This has caused me fun and games over the years; I do it infrequently and used to forget how to do it. Surely it's easy with Nero, I thought. But Nero didn't like trying to use a .cue file; it seemed like there was something missing from Nero, or whatever. I tried updating on-line and that didn't work - indeed Nero complained that it couldn't connect to the internet properly. (Subsequently I have decided that this was due to some behaviour of the Bullguard anti-malware. See below). So, I downloaded the newest Nero from the Nero website and installed it. The new version worked just fine but what should have been a really straighforward process took ages.

Then came the real problem. I was trying to add a collection of UK contour maps into my Garmin Mapsource installation. This requires editing the registry. To cut a very long story short, I ended up deciding that I'd messed things up so badly I'd better put the PC back into its delivery state and start again.

The recover procedure worked pretty well. I've now backed up the key recovery files onto DVDs, so I'm safer than I was. It's taken about a day to get things back to a pretty much full installation. I'm just missing my Garmin installation, which I've decided to leave until last. Nero caused some issues. The orginal installation worked fine but there does seem to be some problem with Nero and Bullguard; I ended up disabling the firewall while Nero was installing and then all went well.

In conclusion. Firstly, be very careful editting the registry (but you knew that). Secondly, Nero and Bullguard have a problem with their relationship. Thirdly, I was impressed by the reinstallation process that Medion supplied.

New PC ups and downs

The reason I've not reviewed my passport holder thoroughly is that I have just bought a new PC. It's not just a PC, it's a "Multimedia Internet Entertainment PC". Actually, its a Medion 8818, which is a E6300 (core duo) powered machine with 1 Gbyte of RAM, a Lightscribe DVD writer, a DVD reader, TV tuner, some 256 Mbyte video card with HDI, DVI and VGA out. I also bought a new 19" monitor. Yes, Aldi did well out of me on Sunday. (For those of you not in the know, Aldi is a low-end supermarket chain that sometimes does amazing offers on expensive goods).

Anyhow, I've been busy clearing of the viruses that came installed (e.g. MS Office 60-day trial) and installing the essentials of life (Google Earth, Google Pack, Firefox, ...). However, I have a problem; when I sync my Palm to my new PC I get the blue screen of death! I've now spent about three or four hours looking into this problem - which has pissed me off no end as part of the reason for buying a ready built PC is so I didn't have to debug something I'd built. Anyhow, Microsoft pointed the finger at an NVidia driver problem (there is an obscure problem with the interaction between power management software, threading in the NVidia driver and dual core processors). I tried NVidia's new drivers and their suggestions without luck. Then I looked on the Palm site. Palm doesn't support Windows Media Centre. I don't know why, I don't care, but problem over as far as I am concerned. I was thinking of returning the PC but I think I'll have to ask Santa for a new PDA instead.