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Category: Windows

  • Configure Media Player Classic to output 5.1 surround via optical S/PDIF

    Download and install AC3 Filter. Light version will do. If you download full version make sure you choose custom install to deselect crapware during installation. Official website: http://www.ac3filter.net Archive: AC3Filter 2.6.0b Lite Open Media Player Classic and go to Play > Filters > AC3Filter

  • srvnet prevents Windows 8 computer from sleeping

    Issue Computer never enters sleep mode on its own. A user can manually press the sleep button and it works fine, but PC never enters sleep / standby as specified in power settings. Troubleshooting Running powercfg -requests at the elevated command prompt revealed that computer is prevented from sleeping by srvnet driver. srvnet is related to network sharing and media…

  • Computer randomly wakes up from sleep

    Issue Computer wakes up from sleep / standby mode without any obvious reason. Very often this happens just few seconds after computer enters the sleep mode. Cause and Resolution Issue was caused by Intel Ethernet Controller (integrated LAN card) option: “Wake on Pattern Match“. Disabling this option resolved the issue. To do this: Open Device…

  • Windows loses drive letter after reboot

    Issue Windows 8 loses a drive letter after every reboot. Adding the drive letter manually via Windows Disk Management works fine, but this needs to be done after every reboot. In addition, VMware Desktop wouldn’t work reliably with VMs saved on that particular hard drive. It would fail to create a snapshots or even open a hard disk tab…

  • Gigabyte Z87X-UD3H – Windows 7 doesn’t boot after install

    A brand new PC with Gigabyte Z87X-UD3H motherboard. Installing Windows 8 worked absolutely fine. However, trying to install Windows 7 was unsuccessful. After installation, computer would reboot for the first time and then get stuck on Starting Windows logo. Trying to boot in safe mode also failed with computer freezing after disk.sys. 

  • Copy Windows Photo Gallery face tags to Google Picasa

    Windows Photo Gallery (formerly Windows Live Photo Gallery) writes facial recognition tags (people tags) directly to image file meta-data. Google Picasa until version 3.9 was storing face tags to its own internal database and configuration files. This made it tricky to synchronise face tags between different computers and makes it very easy to loose face…

  • Slipstream Windows 7 SP1

    Download and install RT Se7en Lite. Choose 32 or 64 bit version appropriate for your OS. You will need version 2.x (which at the time of writing was still in Beta). Version 1.7 will not work. You can download version 2.6.0 (Beta) from here: 32bit 64bit. Or check for latest version on developer’s website. Download Windows 7 SP1…

  • Acer XC600 – how to boot from CD

    Even if you select CD/DVD drive as your first boot device, Acer XC600 will simply ignore this and boot from the internal hard drive. To boot from CD or USB drive on Acer XC600 and similar Windows 8 machines you need to make 2 additional changes in BIOS.  

  • Where is Work Offline button in Windows 8

    In Windows 7, if you are in a folder that was made available offline, you can always see Work offline button on the top toolbar. This allows to force working offline even when you are connected to the server. Very useful if connection is slow or unstable. Similarly, if you are working offline, the above…

  • Check that host is online before running robocopy

    A simple task – once a week I need to copy certain folder to a NAS device. There are three devices and at any time only one of them is online. Following Windows PowerShell script will check if host is online and if it is, run the robocopy command. If the host is offline, it…

  • Uninstall software via Group Policy / Script

    To uninstall Microsoft Windows Installer (MSI) based software remotely you can use a start-up script with MsiExec.exe command. First of all find out your software package ID number. There are number of way to do this. I normally use NEWT Professional for this purpose. There is a free version with limit of 25 machines 

  • Change network from public to private in Windows 8

    When you first connect to a new network, Windows 8 prompts what type of network it is. If you later want to change this connection from Public to Private (or other way around) perform following steps: