Apr
21
2006











Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category

by @ 7:00   Linux / Unix | Tech   Permalink

nVidia GeForce FX 5700LE video overlay problem

Friday, April 21st, 2006

After a windows update and updating my graphics card drivers, video playback became almost impossible. The video playback in all of my multimedia players was overlayed with a bright green filter.

A quick search through google and the nVidia forums and I fond the answer. The nVidia drivers are to blame, and the fix is simple, but temporary.

This does fix it so long as you don’t change the gamma settings back to Video Overlay or Desktop.

  • Right-click on the desktop and select Properties.
  • From the Display Properties select Settings.
  • Click Advanced.
  • Click on the GeForce tab (this will be your video card model… example.. GeForce 6800 Ultra)
  • Click on Color Correction
  • There should be a drop down menu top left with Desktop, Video Overlay, and All. Select All from the dropdown box this should set everything to driver default and click Apply. And your video overlay gamma should be fixed.

Please note: This is the only temporary fix that will work with everything and, depending on your system, you might find yourself adjusting it everytime you restart your computer.

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Bandwidth Issues Part III

Sunday, March 19th, 2006

OK I had a lot of trouble with bandwidth management on the firmware I had changed to. The damn things just would not let me control the bandwidth at all.

Fatty’s torrents still ended up taking my bandwidth and stopping me even checking my mail.

I was nearly at breaking point when I recieved an email from Linksysinfo.org with a reply to one of my posts.

I checked out the link provided, which led me to HyperWRT Thibor.

After installing and changing the settings to my liking I think I have managed to solve the problem.

The new firmware actually has the ability to prioritise computer ports, hardware ports (the physical ports on the router) and applications themseleves. I have been running the firmware for around 7 hours and all seems to be fine at the moment.

Hopefully, this is my last post on the matter. I have a sytem log in place to monitor the health of the network while I sleep and my housemate restarts his torrents.

Fingers crossed everything will be fine when I try to check my mail after breakfast.

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Bandwidth Issues Part II

Sunday, March 19th, 2006

Well, the last attempt at solving the problem did not work.

After leaving my computer idle for just 20 minutes, my housemates computers took over. I am getting annoyed with this little problem. Right now I have disabled both his ports on my router so I have time to find out what the hell is going on and hopefully find a solution to the problem.

I updated the firmware again to Sveasofts Alchemy. This one had the same results as the first one. So now I am trying Sveasofts Satori release. It, like the last one, promises bandwidth control and prioritisation.

I cannot upload it at the moment though, as my housemate is in, and guaranteed that if i started the update process he would try accessing the internet or something along those lines and interrupt the process killing my router.

I will post an update later once I have peace and quiet to get the firmware onto my router and to try and solve this little conundrum.

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Bandwidth Issues Part I

Sunday, March 19th, 2006

Plain and simply, my Roubenesque housemate has a 20 “gig a day” habit. I know when he is on the computer because my internet connection suddenly disappears.

The Issue: The programs he is using to download his stuff is hogging all of our 10mb cable connection and leaves me high and dry without a connection.

The Task: I needed to control the bandwidth through my router (Linksys WRT54G) so it can be shared equally among the 3 computers and the Xbox system.

The Fix. Part 1: The router has an admin side, with all the features you need, or so I thought. First off I tried the QoS packet management utility to set priorities for applications and the ports on the router itself. This failed miserably for reasons i am yet to figure out. so, onto…

The Fix. Part 2: After a quick round of E-Mails with Visp_bofh, the tech guru, he reminded me that the router in question can be flashed with open source firmware. He provided a link that details all the available firmware for my router.

After some research, I settled with HyperWRT. This firmware basically expands the original firmware and gives you more control over bandwidth management and application control.

I set low priority to the port numbers that his download app uses, gave my computer, FTP port, pop and smtp ports high priority and saved the settings in stone so to speak.

After fiddling with some more of the settings and rebooting the router I was up and running and ready for the test.

The Test: All seems good so far, “supersize me’s” downloads are back on, on both computers and i’m still happily surfing the net, and most importantly I can still FTP.

The real test will come after my computer has been left idle for more than an hour or so. I will update when that happens later on this evening.

There are plenty of options for updating the firmware on my specific router and at some point I will upgrade to something else with more advanced features. tinyPEAP seems like a good idea, I can run a radius server and provide wireless access for people in my street at a nice little cost to them lol. All kidding aside, there is one in particular I am looking at that has loads of functionality plus it acts as a very small HTTP server for serving up web pages. That could come in handy for remote controlling the PC’s on the network.

I will write a little tutorial on all of this and add it to the appropriate section. I will announce when it is complete.

While I was surfing up the interweb looking for info on the router I came across some cool stuff. USB add-on for a mouse

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