Just thought I’d share some pics of my current PC. I won this at Quakecon 2007, it was the "Dream Machine" sporting the following specs:

• Intel Quad Core QX6700 Extreme Edition
• 2GB Corsair XMS PC6400 DDR 2
• (2) EVGA 8800 Ultra’s in SLI
• 1200 watt Thermaltake PSU
• Cooler Master CSX custom paint job case
• (2) 750GB HDD’s + (1) 150GB WD Raptor
• ASUS Striker Extreme mobo (now an EVGA 680i SLI)

The specs are still the same, the only thing I’ve done with it is add watercooling and make it pretty. This also might be useful for anyone looking to watercool a Cooler Master CSX case. I completed this project back in July of 2008, but just recently took some pictures, enjoy!

Modding the case and fitting the watercooling components together:

Here she is today. Unfortunately, the dye I used to make the water blue was very poor quality and has stained the tubes.

Here is a short film I helped make for my Introduction to the Arts class. It was inspired mainly by Left 4 Dead but also influenced by pretty much all the zombie movies out there. It takes a somewhat humorous approach at what would happen if the people most prepared for a zombie apocalypse were doomed. The editing and special effects were done by me (it was my first time to do both).

Apartment of the Dead from Tyler Milner on Vimeo.

It has been a long 7 months, but finally the CGEC is over and Project Curdled (now called Overdose) is completed. Check out the video below (although it seems someone forgot to record gameplay sound). We built an arcade cabinet for this game, but I don’t have any good pictures of the finished product so you’ll have to wait until the judging is over for me to post them.

I’ve never been a big fan of HP. My dad bought a HP Pavilion dv9000 a couple of years ago and the thing has completely crapped out twice despite its being used on a desk 90% of the time. My aunt’s newer HP laptop was a pain to install XP on as I had to slipstream the SATA drivers into an XP install.

Even furthering my hate for HP laptops, my friend asked me to install Windows XP on his new HP Pavilion DV4-1222nr and I had to once again search for a way to get Windows XP installed. I first tried using the custom XP CD I used for my aunt, but after being greeted with a friendly "STOP: 0×0000007B" blue screen I quickly realized that the CD didn’t work because it was made for an HP laptop with an Intel processor, I was going to have to hunt for the AMD drivers and create a new CD…great.

The process is really quite simple. Here’s what you will need:

• A Windows XP CD (I used one with SP3 already slipstreamed in)
• HP Pavilion DV4 laptop
• nLite
• HP AMD SATA Driver (alternate link)
• An extraction program like WinRAR or 7-Zip

First, copy the contents of your XP CD to your HDD in a directory like "C:\XP" and make sure you have nLite installed and the SATA driver downloaded (don’t install it though).

Next, extract the SATA driver ("sp40046.exe") using a program like WinRAR or 7-Zip. Just right click on the file and choose "Extract to sp40046/". This should create a folder containing the contents of the exe.

Next, go ahead and open up nLite, hit Next, and select the folder where you extracted your XP CD. Click Next until you get to the "Task Selection" and choose"Drivers" and "Bootable ISO". You can also choose "Unattended" to make the install a little more hassle free if you want.

On the "Drivers" screen, click on "Insert" and navigate to the folder of the extracted HP driver. The driver we want is in the "RAID7xx" -> "x86" -> "ahcix86.inf".

At the Integration Options window that pops up, make sure that "Textmode driver" is selected and that you select the x86 driver if you’re using a 32-bit version of XP like me. Click OK and Next and make your way through the Unattended Options and Start the Process.

After it’s finished integrating the driver, select "Make ISO" at the next screen and save your ISO image to your hard drive.

That’s it, you’ve integrated the AMD SATA HDD drivers into your Windows XP install! Just use your favorite CD burning program (I use CDBurnerXP) to burn your ISO onto a CD. Also, don’t freak out if it takes a little while for the inital XP setup to load, mine took about 5 minutes at a completely black screen before I was able to edit my partitions and format my drive.

Drivers

As far as drivers go, if you have the HP Pavilion dv4-1222nr (product number NB204UA#ABA), you can get the chipset/graphics drivers from AMD here. This should at least give you a nice resolution, but getting the rest of the drivers can prove to be a bit more difficult. Luckily, I have a USB Wifi adapter so I was able to get online after installing the drivers for it. If you happen to have an iPhone, you can use it to connect to a Wifi network (or your data connection) and tether it to your laptop using PdaNet. I have a guide for doing that here.

Anyway, once you’re online, you can visit the Windows Update site (I hope you’re using a legit copy or else this probably won’t work) and download the many missing drivers.

After installing all the drivers on the Windows Update website, I still have a few left as "Unkown" in the Device Manager, but the system seems to run fine.

Note: If your speakers pop every 10 seconds or so or when a sound is played, disable the "powersave" function in the audio drivers. Go to Control Panel and double-click on the "IDT Audio Control Panel". Uncheck "Enable Power Management".

That’s all I’ve got for drivers, you should have a pretty functional Windows XP install now, feel free to post comments/questions below.

I’ve had the iPhone 3G since it first came out. I camped out the night before, #2 in line for 15+ hours. I love my iPhone, so naturally my obsession with the device led me to jailbreak it. I’m running 2.2.1 software on there (haven’t "unlocked" it yet since I’m on AT&T for a long time), but it is jailbroken.

I’ve used PdaNet quite a bit and just recently, they released desktop software (XP/Vista only right now) that allows you to simply plug in your iPhone via USB and "pipe" the 3G Internet connection directly into your desktop or laptop. This is quite handy as you can turn off WIFI which will save quite a bit of power/heat vs the old way of tethering and also serves to charge your iPhone while sipping from its Internet connection!

About a week ago, the campus apartment Time-Warner internet here slowed to a crawl. It went from a typical 1.5Mbps connection to less than 100Kbps with huge latency spikes. I became fed up with this and decided to give the newest version of PdaNet a try.

In order to tether your iPhone to your computer via USB, you need to already have the latest version of iTunes installed and you’ll of course need PdaNet installed on your jailbroken iPhone via Cydia. Once that’s done, go over here and grab the latest version of the PdaNet Desktop software. What it will end up doing is creating a dial-up modem that’s linked directly to your iPhone at 3G speeds.

While the desktop software is downloading/installing, go ahead and open up PdaNet on your iPhone, tap "Settings," turn on USB Mode, and then tap "Done." You should then be given a screen telling  you to launch the desktop software.

Once you’ve installed the desktop software, go ahead and run it, right-click on the icon it makes in your system tray and hit "Connect."

If this works, great, you can skip the rest of this tutorial.

However, if you’re like me and run a pretty lean XP install, you may get the following two errors: "Fail to create dial up entry (err = 711). Some services might be turned off on your computer."

And "Windows Dialup Service was not responding, please restart your PC."

If you get these errors, go ahead and exit out of the PdaNet desktop software and press [Windows Key] + R to bring up a Run dialog. Type in "services.msc".

 Next up, double-click on the "Telephony" service, set its Startup type to Manual, and Start the service.

Do the same to the "Remote Access Connection Manager" service.

Next up, go into the Control Panel and double-click on Network Connections. Click on the "Create a New Connection" and click Next at the first screen. Choose the first option to "Connect to the Internet". We’ll be creating a bogus dial-up connection so that PdaNet can create it’s own to connect to the iPhone.

 Next up, select "Set up my connection manually" and "Connect using a dial-up modem".

Next, enter in "att" for the ISP name, although it really doesn’t matter what name you give it. Enter in any phone number when prompted.

Next, enter in anything for the Username and Password fields, but uncheck both of the options at the bottom. Click Next, Finish, and then cancel out of the connect window.

Now launch the PdaNet desktop software, right-click on it, and choose "Connect". With any luck, the program will connect with your iPhone and automatically begin to pipe your iPhone’s internet into your desktop or laptop over the USB connection. You’ll see a ballon-tip telling you the speed it’s connected at and you’ll also see that a new dial-up connection has been created in your Network Connections. You can delete the bogus dial-up connection now if you wish.

Note: Make sure you’re not connected to a Wifi network on your iPhone or else you will be piping the internet from your iPhone’s wifi connection into your desktop. 

Here are the results of a quick speedtest over my 3G connection at full bars.

And that’s all there is to it. If you already had the Telephony and Remote Access Connection Manager services running, then this tutorial was hopefully quite quick! If you have any questions/comments, feel free to post below.

Last week, I showed you how to create your own minimal XP install for the Acer Aspire One using nLite. By following my config, you should be able to shave somewhere between 300 and 500MB off of your stock SP3 Windows XP install. By doing this alone, you should have a pretty minimal fresh install of XP  as a lot of unnecessary programs are already cut out, saving a few background processes along the way.

However, there are a few more tweaks we can do to your freshly cut down XP install to make it even less resource intensive. I’ll show you which background services and processes I have found pretty safe to disable, resulting in a super-minimal install and configuration of Windows XP.

I can’t remember exactly how many processes you have at startup, I think somewhere between 20 and 25, correct me if I’m wrong. Anyway, this is what I’m at right now, after a few weeks of heavy usage. My pagefile usage might seem a bit high, but that’s because I’ve got a 64MB Ramdisk running as a temp drive for my Firefox cache.

After manually configuring the registry many times, I have finally broken down and usually use BlackViper’s custom "SAFE" XP Pro Config (use the XP Home one if you’re not using XP Pro). You can find the link to download that reg file here. You can also use BlackViper’s Service Configuration Tool if you want to make your own (note that that’s the version for XP Pro, use the one appropriate for your version of XP).

Simply unzip your SAFE configuration and double-click on the .reg file to add the tweaks into the registry automatically. Restart your computer after doing this.

After restarting, go ahead and open up the Services Editor by pressing the Windows Key and R at the same to bring up a Run dialog. Type in "services.msc" and press Enter to bring up the Services Editor.

I can’t quite remember what is still not disabled after a fresh run of the SAFE configuration, but I think you still need to disable the Security Center, among other things. To do that, find "Security Center" in the right hand, double-click on it, change the "Startup type" from Automatic to Disabled. Also press the "Stop" button right below that to stop the process immediately. Then click OK.

I can’t remember exactly what else needed to be disabled, but I manually ran through the Black Viper list, further disabling what I did not need. Here is a screenshot of my current services configuration.

After weeding out the remaining services, open another Run Dialog, type in "msconfig", and press Enter.

Click on the "Startup" tab. As you can see, I disabled everything from running at startup except for the Synaptics Touchpad Driver as I found it must be running to enable circular scrolling. If you don’t use circular scrolling (why would you not?), feel free to disable it to.

Now click OK and click on Restart to go ahead and restart your computer. This should get you to around 16 processes running at a fresh startup and login, which is just what we want for the Aspire One’s limited resources.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to comment below.

I love my Acer Aspire One. I originally planned on purchasing one of the new MacBook Pro’s and bought the Aspire One simply to take notes in class. However, I really see no need to blow more money on a full-sized notebook anymore. The only downside to my Aspire is that I got the 110L with the 8GB solid-state hard drive.

I’ve gone through many operating systems on my AAO, and while Ubuntu is definitely my favorite, it’s just not up to where I need it to be. The battery life is only around 2 hours, 3D doesn’t work properly in 8.10, and the wifi would crap out sometimes among other things. The only real option for me is Windows XP and I’ve installed many different versions of that as well, ranging from stock SP3 installs to nLite installs posted elsewhere on the Internet.

Until now, I’ve never really been happy with the end result. A stock XP install was way too bloated and required a lot of work to remove components and tweak services and settings to work well on the AAO’s limited screen and HDD space; yet some of the custom versions I attained had features like Remote Desktop missing which I use frequently to connect to servers on my home network. Anyway, enough with the background story, I finally bit the bullet and created my own custom "Acer Aspire One" version of Windows XP using nLite. I based a lot of my removal of components off a similar guide for the Asus EEE PC here. The install ended up taking up about 600MB (down from 1.2GB) with 18 initial processes running and just under 80MB of page file usage.

I’m assuming you are already familiar with how to use nLite. If not, follow the first 7 steps in this guide to get up to speed. I’m using a version of XP Pro with SP3 already slipstreamed in.

Next up, integrate in the RyanVM post-SP3 update pack available here.

For Drivers, I removed everything except for Modems as I plan to tether my iPhone with my Aspire down the road.

Here is what I removed under Hardware Support.

I removed all the Keyboard except the United States ones and did pretty much the same thing for Languages.

Multimedia.

Network.

For Operating System Options, make sure you don’t remove Manual Install and Upgrade otherwise you will get a BSOD during setup if you try to install XP from a USB drive.

I didn’t remove any services as I planned on simply disabling them after the install. Also remove any unnecessary directories.

The Unattended screen is pretty self-explanitory. Fill in your Product Key, turn off the Firewall, Hibernate, and System Restore. Also flip through the tabs at the top and fill in details like Owner Name and your Timezone Region.

I chose to go with the black background and classic-style installer as it’s supposed to be a bit faster.

Under the Patches tab, I disabled SFC.

Tweaks. These next few are completely up to you whether or not you want to apply them.

Desktop tweaks.

Explorer tweaks.

Internet Explorer tweaks.

I skipped the My Computer and Network tweaks, you can look through them and see if there is anything you want to apply though. I would recommend applying the following Performance tweaks though.

Privacy tweaks, kinda up to you.

I skipped the Security tweaks, but feel free to look them over. My Start Menu tweaks are also completely up to you whether or not you want to apply them.

Taskbar tweaks are again up to you.

Windows Media Player tweaks are up to you. I really only use VLC Media Player though.

Next up, start the process and you should end up with a reduction around 360MB.

I would recommend making an ISO and burning it to a disc. nLite saves the configuration on the ISO so you can always go back and further tweak your configuration.

That’s pretty much it for the configuration part. Simply put your XP install on a flash drive using USB Multiboot 10 available here (alternate link) and enjoy your custom slimmed-down version of XP!

After buying several printers off of eBay, he came to me and asked me to take a look into the problem. After spending much time researching the problem on the internet, I learned of how the printer could have its on board firmware reset using a program and decided to dissect the printer to see if there was a way to actually clean out the ink absorbers. The process is really quite easy if you’re comfortable taking things apart and know what you’re doing, but can be a real drag if you don’t know where the pads are located.

I’ve now taken apart, cleaned, and reset several of my friend’s old Pixmas and they work like new. Below are a couple of videos I made showing how to physically take apart an iP1500 and clean the ink absorbers as well as how to reset the printer’s "print-count" to zero, making it think that it’s brand-new.

Part 1: Taking Apart and Cleaning the Pixma iP1500

Part 2: Resetting the Printer to Factory Settings 

I’ll pretty much be posting anything that I find interesting in my life or on the web, including past projects. The idea is that there is at least one other person out there that will find at least something I post interesting as I know I’ve come across blogs that have been helpful to special projects I have worked on.

Anyway, that’s all for now.