I was asked the other day by someone at work to have a look at his BT comtrend powerline adapters. The problem with them is that BT supply them in pairs and if you want to use more than the original 2 you need to be able to set them up (for which BT do not supply instructions).

So after a bit of research I found the following post on DigitalSpy. The process goes something like this:

1. On the back of each device is a label, one of which is a MAC number, which looks like 012345678ABC. Make note of these numbers on each device you wish to set up.
2. Plug in the devices, and connect them to your router. Log into your router, and find the DHCP option. In here there will be a list of IP addresses associated with a MAC number. For each device you have a MAC number for, make a note of the IP address associated with it (for example 192.168.0.10).
3. Open your web browser and type into the address bar the first IP address you have noted. This should take you to a login page. The default password is admin (if it asks for a username, it should also be admin by default).
4. Once into the device, choose the option for change configuration, then choose Mac.
5. Under this heading make a note of the Network Identifier (I suggest copying it and pasting it into a word or notepad file).
6. Repeat this process for each device, making sure the Network ID and Encryption Key are identical on all the devices. Once you have applied the setting to all the devices, they should all work on the same network.

Now, I don’t use these devices at home so have only very limited experience with them (I use Netgear instead). Also, bear in mind that the process may vary slightly depending on how old or new the adapters are and which router you’re using, so these aren’t necessarily “step-by-step” instructions. But if you’re confident by all means give it a go. Just don’t blame me if it doesn’t work.

So, I finally decided I was going to go with Vista as the OS, and decided that I could get Ultimate. After installing the 64-bit version I had been using it for about a week when I found that there were problems with the sound card, which was a SB Live! 24-bit built into the motherboard. I grabbed an OEM X-Fi Audio gamer from Ebuyer.com for about £30 and installed it as soon as it was recieved.

After installing the card, I turned on the PC only to find that it was refusing to POST. Checking the “diagnostic LED’s” and the motherboard manual, I discovered it was having difficulties recognising the memory. “So”, I thought “I’ll chuck in the spare stuff to see what happens.” Unfortunately for me, the board was having none of it. So after pissing about with it I had to bite the bullet and admit it wasn’t going to work which meant I had two options. 1: Try and buy a new mobo for my (very old) 939 Athlon X2 4200+ or 2: get a new mobo/Processor/RAM set and use the problem as a an upgrade path. Naturally I chose the second option.

I have an old desktop from my workplace that runs Ubuntu as a spare machine, just in case there’s a major problem and I need it. I needed it. So, in it went and I fired up Ebuyer once again to look at what was on offer. Browsing the site I decided on: Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 (my first Intel!), 4GB of OCZ Platinum 800MHz DDR2 and an ASUS P5N32-E SLI Plus. Don’t bother checking the ASUS website for the board as I can’t find it anywhere, but it basically has a nForce 650i northbridge and a 570i southbridge meaning I get full 16x PCI-E SLI from the “budget” nVidia chipset. All in all, that little shopping trip set me back £307.

Having the spare PC meant I could get the stuff ordered before the delivery cut-off point and it came the next day. So I took my PC into work (advantage of being the IT guy – you can do it and no-body cares) and installed the bits as soon as they arrived. After spending the afternoon installing everything (I had a meeting in the morning, plus I had to wait for the delivery anyway) I had to reinstall Vista and the changed mobo meant the current install wouldn’t boot. By this time I had to wait until the following day to mess around with Vista as life was getting in the way.

After getting back into work, I tried installing Vista x64 again, but it refused to install, giving me a 0x0000007E error. Looking around the web, there appears to be many reasons for this, and I wasn’t able to determine what the actual issue was, although there is a hotfix from Microsoft that may be worth having a punt at later on. As my scanner, a Canon 3200F doesn’t have Vista x64 drivers, I decided to try Vista x86 (the 32-bit version for those that don’t know). The x86 sailed through the install, which is a bit annoying as I have 4GB of RAM. A 32-bit OS can only ever address 4GB in total (binary is a base 2 numerical system and 2 to the power of 32 is 4,294,967,296 or 4096MB/4GB) and needs to reserve up to a gig of this for IRQ’s etc, so any 32-bit OS will only see about 3 – 3.5 GB of physical RAM.

Anyway, I am now on Vista, with an improved system spec (I got 10,770 points in 3DMark06 at stock settings) and the Xbox finally connects to my machine without me having to do anything stupid like restart services. This of course could have all been avoided if I’d stuck with XP as I wouldn’t have bought the soundcard, which wouldn’t have meant taking the PC apart, which may have prevented the motherboard from dying (I don’t know about this, but its plausible) which would have meant not buying the new bits and being £350 out of pocket. So let this be a lesson to y’all, if you’re thinking out it, don’t do it.

Well, after trying and trying to get this thing talking to the PC properly, I’m going to give up and re-install windows. I have a feeling that the DRM on my install is fubar, so it needs to be wiped. Now, the question is which version of Windows do I use? I’m currently on XP Pro, but I’m pretty sure I’d be better served going to a version with Media Center. So do I use XP MCE, Vista Home or Vista Ultimate. If I decide to use Vista, I then get the question of using x86 or x64. I’m thinking I might just bite the bullet and use Vista Ultimate x64. I’m trialling all three (MCE, Ultimate x86 and x64) on virtual machines at the moment, although I’ve not set up a connection to the Xbox on any of them yet.

Of course, the biggest pain is getting a hold of drivers for x64, as it seems a lot of companies just don’t want to support it. Its a bit of a catch 22 for them I guess. They won’t build the drivers because no-one uses the OS but no-one uses the OS because there’s no drivers…

Anyhoo, I’ll try grabbing as many x64 drivers for my system as possible and see if its viable.

Here at work we have a few people who wish to connect to our network from outside the organisation (i.e. those people who have no life), which means we need to set up a VPN. Now, before going mad on the live network I’ve set up a little test network of virtual machines.

Messing around with it, I managed to get my test client machine connecting to the VPN server which then passed its RADIUS authentication to the domain controller. However, when I started to try using another test user’s credentials to connect it refused to see the DC and its shares. Bastard.

Now it refuses to do anything! Grrr.

Edit: It seems like the client machine is caching logon credentials, so if one user logs on and logs off, then another user logs on after them, there is a mismatch in the credentials causing it to all fall over. Why this should be I don’t know…

Having updated the WMP files and such like, its still generating errors on startup. I can only assume now that the DRM component of my Windows installation is screwed and can’t be repaired. So, I’ve set the UPnP service to start after the spooler service, and we’ll see what happens now.

If this doesn’t work, I’ll try setting a batch file to run when my profile loads which will stop and restart the Zune and WMP services.

Edit: This hasn’t worked, so I’m going to add the following script to the startup folder (initally at least):

net stop WMPNetworkSvc
net stop ZuneNetworkSvc
net stop ZuneBusEnum
net stop upnphost

net start upnphost
net start WMPNetworkSvc
net start ZuneNetworkSvc
net start ZuneBusEnum

“A new media server was not initialized because WMCreateDeviceRegistration() encountered error ‘0xc00d2711’. The Windows Media DRM components on your computer might be corrupted. Verify that protected files play correctly in Windows Media Player, and then restart the WMPNetworkSvc service.”

This is one of the messages that I’ve been getting in the event log. As you can probably tell, my problem with the xbox connecting to the PC still isn’t fixed despite it seeming to be the last time I wrote about this. Here’s the other one:

“The description for Event ID ( 14344 ) in Source ( ZuneNetworkSvc ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and Support for details. The following information is part of the event: 0xc00d2711.”

I’ve been to this KB article and followed the steps (didn’t bother doing the backing up thing as I don’t have any protected files). Lets see if I get these errors after updating my WMP.

Edit: So far it still isn’t working but the event ID is generating more useful google results. I’m trying those right now.

I ran some tests last night and I think I’ve found what was wrong with the Xbox 360 connecting to my PC. The HTTP SSL service was set to manual, which is one that both the WMP & Zune networking services are dependent on. The reason it worked when I restarted the UPnP service was because HTTP SSL was started after the WMP & Zune services because it was set to manual on boot. Then when UPnP was restarted, HTTP SSL was already running, so everything worked. Microsoft should really have a list of required services and their startup state listed on the Xbox website so this doesn’t happen.

Despite having owned the Half-Life 2 Orange Box for some time now, it was only this morning that I gave Team Fortress 2 a quick blast. After loading it up and getting shot to pieces a couple of times in a row, I noticed that I hadn’t changed my name from the default GEPlayer. So I open up the options screen to hunt out where I can change my name and low and behold, the option just isn’t there. W. T. F?

So, I quit the game and go googling for the answer. Most of the answers are about opening the console and typing commands, which doesn’t permanently change the nick, and has to be re-done every time you load the game. So after 10 minutes or so (about as much as I can handle if I’m trying to find the answer to something) I find a post that indicates you need to change your name via the “Friends” option in Steam.

Now I’ve never looked in the friends section, as I’m not part of a clan or anything and just like to mess around online from time to time, therefore I have no friends in the list. But you have to go into the View/Settings menu in the Friends screen, which then has a place to change your nick. I’ve not tested it yet, but I suspect this is a global setting, for all Valve games, which makes me wonder. Fine, for someone like me who isn’t part of a clan, but what about the people that are? And are in different clans for different games? You’ll have to change your nick before every match and to me that just seems stupid. At the very least there should be a check box to apply the setting across all Valve games or not, so those who need to have different nicks in each one don’t have to go through the hassle of changing the nick every time.

I hate format wars… they’re so pointless. It seems that the battle for the next gen format is hotting up with some (most?) camps predicting the end of HD-DVD. I’m not going to do that, but Warner putting its weight behind Blu-Ray is interesting. Obviously, BD has the edge in a technological sense, being that it has greater capacity, I’m just not sure we need it. You can already get a full movie and uncompressed multi-channel audio on a HD-DVD with half the capacity so what’s the extra space going to be used for? Extras that very few people watch? Picture in Picture (PIP) is interesting, but HD-DVD does that anyway and a large number of the early adopters of BD have “old” systems that can’t be upgraded to this anyway.

It all reminds me of that “other” format battle, VHS Vs Betamax. Back then, Sony supported Betamax which was the superior quality, but more expensive product which lost out to VHS, primarily because VHS was cheaper. Of course, back then Sony didn’t have a games console to push its technology onto the market.

I don’t know why the market seems to have rejected HD-DVD despite its obvious cost benefit. I guess its probably to do with the fact that most people are happy with their current red laser DVD’s and can’t be bothered to upgrade again so the sales are being pushed by the Playstation 3. The biggest problem I can see at the moment for both next gen formats is the relative expense of the media. Until it is just as cheap to buy on HD/BD as it is on standard DV, I don’t think we’ll be seeing a large take up of hi-def formats. I know that I won’t be buying into it until either a format has won or there are low cost multi-format players/recorders, and you can get Star Wars/Indiana Jones/Back To The Future in HD. Those are films worth upgrading for!

I’ve connected my Xbox360 to my router using these Netgear powerline networking plugs, which work like a charm. I get probably 75-80Mbps from them across separate floors. They cost £90 for the pair, but I much prefer this to using wireless.

The problem I’m having at the moment with the xbox, is that when I connect to my computer (XP Pro) to share my music and video files, it errors unless I restart the UPnP service (which also restarts the WMP & Zune networking services). Now, in order to get it working correctly the first time, I had to share the media via both the WMP and Zune software, despite them being the same software with a different front end on it. Looking at the event logs both the WMP & Zune network services error on startup, which I’m thinking may be to do with the fact that they’re trying to load too soon. I’ve looked into delaying the services from starting, the method for which seems to be setting a dependecy in the registry so they start a bit later. The suggested service that starts late is the spooler which seems like quite a good idea. I will test this and report back.

“HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\(Service name), where (Service name) is the service you want to delay. Add a REG_MULTI_SZ value named DependOnService to the key, then edit the value of DependOnService to add the service name of the service you want started before the selected service. “