Category: Uncategorized

I have had to exchange my iPhone5S for a new one at the Apple Store last Saturday, because the glass was bent for some reason and would pop out of its frame on one side. (known issue as described in the apple forums here). Fortunately they have swapped it right away as exchanging the glass would not be allowed because of touchID.

So no problem, back home restore the phone from iTiunes backup.

It worked but I noticed today that Push notifications stopped working.
Apple Support office was already closed, so I browsed the Apple Support Forums for all the odds of solution suggestions. However all of them didn’t help except one, which is – according to the feedback – the solution that works in the majority of all cases).

Uninstall and reinstall the “find my iphone” app!

(as described in the apple forums by Rooki here)

Have fun with your iPhone and iOS7!

Technorati Tags: push, iphone

It isn’t easy to face bluescreen issues in Windows 8.1, but sometimes it still happens if you happen to come across a bad driver/outdated driver and driver conflicts. So, after buying the Gear Shifter, I faced hourly bluescreens.

The trained eye may notice that the Thrustmaster Support Download Site for the TH8RS only mentions Windows XP-Windows 8, but not 8.1.

Since the bluescreen issues only appeared as soon as the Gear Shifter was connected and only since I got it installed, I guessed that a driver issue with this device maybe the reason for my bluescreens.

So, searching for evidence may not be as straightforward if you don’t know what tools to use. I have passed the “trial and error” phase since long, and also Windows Event Manager is not my tool of choice.

Step 0) Starting Windows 8.1 in Safe Mode with Network functionality.

Step 1) Finding out which kind of error you are receiving and which system files conflict with each other: Use

You can see that most times, it crashed because of “IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL”, wich means that some devices have an interrupt address conflict. You can see by the red marked files, that HIDCLASS.SYS (so Human Interface Device driver for USB devices) and the Windows NT OS Kernel” conflicted with each other.

Now we know what is happening but we don’t know yet about the “Why”. So:

Step 2) Checking out which HID and USB Controller Drivers are installed and whether they are the latest versions. We use DriverMax for that.

When we scanned for currently installed drivers and we hover over the “Date” line of the USBG Host Controller Driver, we can find the date of the installed driver vs the recent driver version, we see that the installed version is from 2006! That’s incredibly outdated, long before Windows 8.x and even Windows 7 was released. Also I see the generic USB hub driver is outdated (however I don’t think that’s the reason for the bluescreen, but since 2 is the maximum amount of driver downloads per 24h of the free version, why not? 😉 ).

Step 3) After restarting Windows 8.1 in normal mode , we may be facing a blue screen again this time because the ASMEDIA onboard USB3.0 drivers crash 🙁

Don’t mind the German in the error message, important is the last bit of information. You can see the reason again and you can see which driver is involved. In this case, the ASMedia USB3.0 driver for my on-board USB3.0 ports.

Since this happens right after loggin into my Windows 8.1 user account, I have no other choice but to reboot into Safe Mode with Network again.

May I kindly refer here to my previous post which discribes where to get a working driver from, here or if this one doesn’t work, use the previous one supplied by ASUS as described here. (WARNING: DO NOT use the most recent one supplied by DriverMax, because it will make your system instable!)

The problem just is, you cannot installed it in safe mode, and since it instantly crashes in normal mode, you are in a devil’s circle. To break the circle, simply go to the Device Manager in Control Panel and uninstall the driver .

After restarting into normal mode, you may notice that the Windows 8.1 stock driver has been installed and that the USB root hub mentiones “non functional”.

So, then we download and install the ASMEDIA driver as mentioned previously. Once we restarted Windows 8.1 the bluescreen and USB driver  IRQ conflicts  are gone!

Happy Gaming! 🙂

  Technorati Tags: TH8RS, USB3

In contrast to what ASUS Germany Suppport told me in an email before, (i.e. that the product is not certified and supported for Windows 8), it seems they changed mind now and put up a Windows 8.1 driver download page in December 2013 and also released a new BIOS.

The page can be found here on their support page for this model . Thanks ASUS! 🙂

And I tried it, the official Windows 8.1 USB 3 drivers of the ASMEDIA USB 3.0 ports offered on that page of the board really work now ! 🙂

Technorati Tags: USB3, Windows 8.1

I have written about the driver issue with 64bit Windows and the Epson Perfection 2480 Photo before and this time with Windows 8.1 it’s no exception, however that the old driver that worked in Windows XP X64, Windows Vista x64 and Windows 7 x64 no longer work in Windows 8.1 x64.

But there is a workaround. You can use the free DriverMax and search for drivers for devices that have the drivers missing. It will find a driver that will work. It even works with the USB Remote Control feature of the Fritzbox 7390 router.

  Technorati Tags: Epson Perfection 2480, Windows 8.1

We are at the 4th quarter of the year and the Smartphone market is hyped, by many factors, good and bad changes happened in the recent past that I wanted to discuss and mention in this post.

I seriously think changes that are done to adopt to the ever growing market are done too fast by big companies without being well thought regarding the effects this has to the users.

E.g. Skype now informs you via a pop-up that Skype Desktop API will be discontinued by December this year, making many plugins and even commercial programs like Pamela and Messenger Plus! for Skype will be no longer available for use.

This also affects hobby projects like my C64 diskmag Scene World, where we use thew Messenger Plus! for Skype Skype plugin to record Skype video interviews with computer industry pionneers for every isssue.

Right now, I do what Pamela suggests (see above) and stick with an older version of Skype. Lucky enough 6.7 for Windows Desktop can be found here.

While this is bad for freeware and commercial solutions that rely on the Skype API, there are now already alternatives that of course use that for marketing. Like SuperTinTin here, which means I have to buy it from my own pocket just to be able to do the Skype videos again in the future. Sad!

Skype reasioning is, that people shall rely on the new Skype URIs that are also used for their mobile smartphone clients. Means less resources neccessary to use for Microsoft developers (Yes, Skype is owned by Microsoft nowadays, and they didn’t kill any platform in contrast to what people were afraid of (a lot of users said “now Linux, and Mac clients will be dead 🙁 ), instead they decided to make the life for the 3rd party Skype applications hard.

Skype explains the reasons in their Support database here and speaks about the road ahead in their “Big Blog” here.

Last but not least let’s look at the statistics of the smartphone world via an info graphic:

This Infographic is produced by Coupon Audit (provides Shoebacca coupon) and Nafcom

.

What are your thoughts on this? Technorati Tags: smartphone, Skype

So I have got my new iPhone 5 today as a replacement for my previously broken one.

Now I was struck with a problem. After I registered it as a new phone in order to be able to update it to iOS7 as my backup of the old phone was made on iOS7, I was finally able to get it working again except all the apps were missing. syncing was always stuck at “waiting for changes to be applied” (last step of the process).

As I was very unlucky, none of the suggestions I found on the internet worked except the one to transfer all purchases to the new iPhone. At the post of JDCree you can find the way.

now it finally installs and syncs all the missing apps!

I really wonder.  Why is iTunes so uneasy sometimes? I had smiliar “stuck issues” with itunes with older iPHones too.
they could as well, make a time out and give an error message but no, things are just stuck endless.

Technorati Tags: iOS7, iTunes

Apple’s customer support is not really really having a good reputation in the EU, especially since they tried first to limit the 2 years warranty to 1 despite it’s an EU law. I have been an early adopter of the shiny new iOS7 and installed the beta, Especially I was happy about the new looks, the new notification center, the control center and the new photo app and the improved multi-tasking.

Then suddenly I notied with the latest beta version, that the Power Button reacted slow on input, I thought this was due to a bug in iOS 7. In the night of last Thursday, when Apple released the new iOS7 in its final version, I had the problem like others that the device crashed while updating and ntoiced that the combination to reset the phone didn’t work well either. I thought damn, the bug is still there. and opened a case under the topic related to firware issues. I was then seeing a message on the screen with “you have decided to call Apple later.

Hotline hours Monday-Sundy.

Your Case Number (You might be asked for this).”

On the following Saturday, I noticed that the problem with the unresponsive power button worsened and decided to google to see whether it’s a known “common” problem.

I found then this (in German). It was exactly as described and pictured there and as in the youtube embedded video: First the right side of the button gets unresponsive, the next step would be that the full button fails.

Since I am a very fair seller and I wouldn’t like to sell a partly damaged phone to a co-worker, friend or on ebay (and I am proud of my 100% positive profile. No neutral no negative ever!) I decided I call them on Sunday. The welcoming message said, Sunday, only limited support is available and when I provided my case number I was told to try again on Monday. So I decided to go without case number this time and was transfered to a German agent that asked standard questions like serial number, IMEI, AppleID, iOS version. When I told him I have a case ID already, he checked it up, found the case ID but said all fields were empty, no AppleID connection, no Serial Number, no error description or IMEI of the iPhone 5 in question. He assumed I didn’t fill the info. When I told him that I didn’t receive a copy by email, he told me I was supposed to call the next day as this happened. I asked him “How I am supposed to know? I got my case ID and thought it’s like at all customer support systems that this is containing all info and my problem”. I told him I first assumed it was caused by a bug in iOS7 rather than anything else, when I found out yesterday that the problem worsened, on the last day of thw 1 year manufacturer warranty covered by AppleCare. He tried to send me to the trader as by EU law this is aupposed to cover the 2nd year of limited warranty as I am 1 day over the manufacturer warranty now becase the ticket is empty. I told him, I didn’t not fill anything, I was simply not asked for additional information but was forwarded straight to the screen with “you have decided to call Apple later.” .

I have told him I noticed problems on Thursday night already when the iOS7 was released but I thought it was because of a software issue but just found out on the last day of the 1 year manufacturer warranty that it’s a hardware failure but that was after Apple’s hotline times. And I would rather not deal with my trader (in this case O2 Germany – Telefonica who are slow … (reports on the internet say O2 takes 4 weeks and longer as told e.g. in this thread of O2 Germany’s forum). I surely didn’t feel like waiting for that long.

The Apple Supporter put me on hold and told me a few minutes later a repair ID number and that UPS will pick it up while I am on holidays the coming week (and guess what, an UPS driver really came at 6 PM today and picked it up! 🙂 ).

We had a few cases of AppleCare returns with iPads at work, and in both cases they rather replaced the device with a new one instead of repairing the device that was sent in. I assume the same will happen with mine!

If you are interested to learn about the power button problem in English, check this.

If you are interested on the EU law rules for warranty and how Apple modified their tables according to it, check this (in German).

Interestingly, the power button problem has also been seen on the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4s previously. However the difference is: in such cases, it was long after the warranty, while the iPhone 5 powerbuttons, if they break, usually break within the warranty time!

An English video of the faulty button can be found on youTube here.

All in all, I am glad I found this out before it was too late. And the Apple Supporter was nice enough to believe my (seriously true!) story!

I can understand how Apple tried on the phone to protect itself from warranty fraud/misuse, but I felt like I was seriously not responsible for the faulty ticketing system that didn’t even request any info and only provided a case number without any user info, device info or error description!

Luckily, I was believed!

This is my 2nd experience with Apple’s customer support and can say I am happy with how I was helped!

Thank you, Apple!

And the new owner of my old iPhone 5 will be happy to get a wonderful shiny and 100% working device for his money! 🙂

Technorati Tags: ICQ, skin

Windows Vista, we all hate it. But once in a while we are still facing it. Might it be because we fix a co-workers laptop that comes with it, or you have it because of the sake of using programs that do not run under Windows 7 or 8, or you just never bothered updating.

For a year now, I had faced the following two very disturbing issues:

1) IE 9 would open and close instantly rendering it unuseable.
2) Windows Update Service would not start anymore, despite being activated and not showing any errors.

Of course as usually, in such cases , all the helps on google do not help, neither the official or nor the custom made fix ie and fix windows update too.

An in-place upgrade installation of Windows Vista was not an option as Windows 8 is my primary OS so I didn’t want to spend a lot of time with fixing it, and didn’t feel like fiddling with BCD because of overwritten boot info due to the inplace upgrade.

So I have decided to try a forcing installation of SP2 and IE9, that wasn’t succcessful either.

Finally I found the solution:

As described here in TechNet in “1st option”: 

“Run the System File Checker (SFC) to repair Windows Vista system files

1. Click Start, type “cmd” (without the quote) in the Start Search bar, right-click cmd.exe and click run as administrator.

2. Input the following commands and press Enter after each line.

sfc /scannow

Note: There is a SPACE between “SFC” and “/Scannow”. This command will take several minutes to complete.

If the corrupted files are detected but cannot be fixed, we need Windows Vista Installation Disk to repair Windows.”

This fixes the IE 9 starting issue.

Then I did create a way of fixing Windows Update 
(this is coming straight from my head).

First we stop the update service by running the following in CMD as Admin:

“net stop wuauserv“

Then we delete the “Software Distribution” folder which can be found in your Windows Root folder.

then we restart the Windows Update service via CMD and same command as above except “start” this time.

If you run Windows Update now it will tell you that it has to install updates to be able to use Windows and then it will ask you to reboot Windows and run Windows Update again

Technorati Tags: Update, Vista

you see Super Speed USB Hub (Non Functional) in the device manager with ASMedia USB 3.0 Controller (e.g. on M5A78L/USB3 motherboard) on Windows 8?

 (You can see in detail what this means at the Microsoft Windows USB Core Team Blog, here).

 Here is what to do:

 try disabling the onboard USB 3 controller in the BIOS first and see whether the Non Functional SuperSpeed problem still appears. Well , it didn’t. So it was a driver issue between the PCI-e USB 3.0 controller card and the on-board USB 3.0 controller.

 Of course the ASUS M5A78L/USB3 is not certified for Windows 8 and contacting ASUS before they denied any support or putting new Windows 8 drivers on the download page because of it.
 But thanks to Google I found out that there are new ASMedia USB 3.0 Win8x64 drivers supplied by asus on their Notebook drivers download page: http://support.asus.com/Download.aspx?SLanguage=en&m=USB3.0&p=3&os=30

 And voilla it worked!

This solution was actually supplied with big help of redyear20! Thanks! 🙂

  Technorati Tags: Windows 8, ASMedia USB 3.0

You have a  laptop with ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650 (in my case Sony Vaio VGN-FW46M) and your OpenMandriva 2013 Beta does not show a screen after installation and booting?

I wrote about this issue last year already but it’s a bit different with this new release.

Here is what you have got to do:

Select in grub boot menu that you want to edit the entry.

then you add the following line in the menu entry:

“vga=844 nomodeset“

Technorati Tags: ATI, OpenMandriva