Pilbeam Engineering

On occasion, you may find that an icon for an application has that white boxy looking icon instead of the correct icon for the application. This happened to me most recently with Firefox, actually. I keep my icon for Firefox in the taskbar on my Windows 7 laptop, and when I noted it wasn’t right, I first though to delete it and ‘re-pin’ the application to the taskbar. That would have worked, except the icon didn’t show up properly in either the Start Menu or the directory where Firefox was installed (C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox). So, it stirred something in my mind that I’ll share here.

Since we know that the actual program executable in the Program Files directory wasn’t showing its icon, we can be fairly certain that something’s gone wrong with the icon cache. This is where Windows 7 stores information about the images used for the icons you see….everywhere. The fix for when the cache becomes corrupt is actually reasonably simple.

1. Press “CTRL+SHIFT+ESC” to bring up the process manager. Ensure that this is in fact on the ‘Processes’ tab. Find ‘explorer.exe’ in the list, select it, and hit ‘End Process’ in the lower right corner. This will close down the start menu/window manager capabilities (well, a majority of them).

2. With the process manager still open, go to ‘File’ and select ‘New Task (Run)’. This will open a dialog box where you must type in ‘cmd.exe’. This will bring up the DOS style command line.

3. Type ‘cd /d %userprofile%\AppData\Local’

4. Type ‘del IconCache.db /a’

5. Type ‘Exit’ or click the ‘X’ to close the window.

6. From the ‘File’ and ‘New Task (Run)’ button you used before in the Process Manager, type “explorer.exe” to re-start that application. You should find all the icons are back in their places!

Many thanks to the WinHelpOnline Blog for their posting on this topic.

http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/how-to-rebuild-the-icon-cache-in-windows-vista/

So, I’ve got OS X Leopard (10.5.8) running on here, and I’ll go into later what I did for each various section that didn’t work out of the box. For now, here’s a quick summary of what works and what doesn’t:

Intel SpeedStep – Working via VoodooPower.kext (Version 2.1.3)

Graphics – Working via NVenabler (which is, as I understand it, still under development) – full 1920×1080 resolution with Quartz Extreme and Core Image working.

Keyboard – Working via VoodooPS2Controller.kext (with trackpad scrolling – some media keys are non functional, and the Tilde key spits out this character: §)

Sound – Works using VoodooHDA.kext, but volume control via OS X is hinky. AppleHDA.kext with HDAEnabler.kext works much better, but pops now and then on battery power and the webcam no longer works. Both methods should be watched for future improvements. Microphone support is hinky, but the dual headphone jacks seem fine.

*Edit* Am now using AppleHDA.kext with HDAEnabler.kext, and have the webcam working fine. Was a curious glitch, and once I reinstalled these drivers, everything worked well. Also deleted AppleHPET.kext prior to the reinstall of the audio drivers.

Sleep/ACPI – No worky. The OS will sleep, but the hardware will not go into sleep mode thus requiring a hard shutdown and cold boot of OS X. Additionally, the Shutdown command DID work, and would shut the hardware off as well, but now I’ve done something and it doesn’t. Restart command works as expected.

Battery – Reported via VoodooBattery.kext: Seems to work fine…laptop dies completely at 0% (with auto-sleep disabled, of course). The time calculations might be a little hinky, though.

Wireless – The Intel 5100 series card that’s built in does not work. There is a driver in development, but it’s not ready yet. More on this later.

USB – Seems to work just fine, am using a WD 250 GB portable USB drive for Time Machine backups. Have also used USB headset/mic with no issue.

HDMI output – Works fine.

VGA output – not tested as yet

Optical Drive – Works fine, but no Blu-Ray support in OS X so the unit is limited to CD/DVD reading or burning.

Fingerprint reader – Not working, probably never will unless someone make a driver and security app for OS X. (There is one app, but it doesn’t work with this model of reader).

Card reader – Not tested yet, should work once I install the driver.

Wired ethernet – seems to work right out of the box, I may have installed the Realtek drivers off the disk, though. Better off using the Realtek drivers anyways.

ExpressCard – Not tested, I just use the slot to hold the media center remote.

eSATA – Not tested, I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t work though.

Overall, very useable. I’ll be putting up more posts on things I’ve tried to get the broken things working. Have of that will be just so I can keep track of my various attempts…but in general some hardware components might just need to wait for an update to the driver to get rid of some of the strange behaviours.

-Adam

So, I have broken down and switched off my Blackberry for good. Using the Blackberry 8830 as I had was becoming increasingly difficult as the older hardware was difficult to use with newer more data intensive applications.

So, knowing that the Blackberry Tour was coming out soon I considered waiting for it. Having seen the newer OS it definitely looks impressive, but my overall impression of the available apps for Blackberry is poor. Since I got an iPod Touch earlier this year, I was impressed with it’s capabilities, so I took the plunge and switched to AT&T for the iPhone 3GS. So far I have been relatively impressed with the capabilities of the new unit…As expected the 3G network does leave a little to be desired. As such, the WiFi capabilities are useful where available, especially when higher data throughputs are desired. The interface is good for use though the typing takes a little getting used to, especially since it’s a virtual keyboard.

Overall, I have no complaints with the unit and am looking forward to playing around with some of the other apps. This entire entry is being typed using the WordPress app, and while I admit the typing process is a bit slower, the screen resolution and feel make it worthwhile.

-Adam

Well, in one of my cycles of boredom, I took the time to wipe my desktop computer to play around with an OS besides Windows. I do this now and then to sort of gauge the current state of the art with the operating systems out there…

I don’t usually consider myself an “average” computer user, given my use of dual video cards, triple monitors, and frequent use of new/untested software. Given all that, I do find it fun to play around with Linux as a desktop OS, and see how well it can handle my various tasks – especially how much tinkering it takes to make it handle my tasks.

After burning my Kubuntu DVD, I took the time to back up my data to the external server. That server, I may add, is getting desperately low on disk space – if anyone wants to donate 4 Western Digital 2TB Green drives so I can upgrade my server, be my guest! In the meantime, I’ll keep saving… Curse ZFS for not being able to easily expand a RAID-Z pool, otherwise I would piece-meal the array together.

Anyways, I digress…

Got the installation working just fine and dandy on the first try. As I’ve come to expect with every OS besides Windows, my primary video card clones the monitors. This is usually rectifiable within the first five minutes (using default drivers), or at worst after installing proprietary drivers from ATI. However, in the case of Ubuntu now (specifically with using Xorg 1.6), this is no longer an option as ATI has bumped everything in the X1 range and below into “legacy support”, which means no new drivers…and it’s bad luck that it coincided with a pretty big changeup in X11.

Anyways, using the open source driver for Radeon usually yields decent results. Not so this time, however…

Within KDE is the display configurator, and for some ridiculous reason, there was absolutely no way to un-mirror the displays on the primary video card. So, after some hunting around I discovered this is apparently a known problem…one that makes it extremely difficult for me to seriously consider using KDE 4.2 as the window manager. Nevertheless, I made some efforts to get XRandR and Xorg to understand I definitely wanted a single desktop spread across the two monitors, and in spite of my best efforts it would never work. Part of my research said this was an issue with KDE, part said it was an issue with the Radeon driver.

Either way, I took the time to install the Ubuntu desktop packages, and thus tried out Gnome. Gnome worked to much greater success, with a simple option allowing me to span the desktop across both LCDs. Efforts to get the third monitor (on the second card) working were fruitless, and resulted in so many hard-locks that I got tired of getting up to push the reset button. Sound, using the PulseAudio server (which I had not used previously) was easy to configure, in spite of my use of a Logitech USB headset as my primary card now, it was recognized and the server had merely to be told to change its default.

Overall, the system was pretty snappy feeling. Even with all desktop effects turned on, the Radeon driver and my Radeon X1950XT handled the strain with aplomb. Oddly enough, the graphics subsystem could handle wobbly windows and 3D cube desktops, but tended to hiccup playing YouTube videos, especially in High Quality mode. Little frustrations like this are annoying – I don’t object to fewer desktop niceties, but I expect normal user things to work well.

Overall, I’d say that the KDE 4.2 user interface is downright gorgeous, and with the customizations available to the user such as focus/non-focus fading, it can be very very nice. While the majority of services and peripherals are easy to use out of the box, it still seems to me like extensive work needs to be done on graphics substructures to make it as user-friendly as the remainder of the OS strives to be.

I cannot wait to see what updates and improvements come to (K)Ubuntu, and Linux in general!