12Aug/100
Installing an old, networked printer on Windows 7 or Vista (with the printer physically connected to a Windows XP machine)
I've got an old HP Deskjet 5550 that has served me faithfully over the years, so I haven't had the heart to toss it. I use it as a secondary printer every once in a while; it's physically connected to an old, crappy PC running Windows XP.
After installing Windows 7 on my nice PC, I had a heck of a time getting the networked printer to install on Windows 7. Every time I'd try to add it by searching for a networked printer, Windows 7 couldn't figure out the driver.
Here's the workaround. This should work for any printer that has this issue, I think.
- Click the Start Menu, then on Devices and Printers.
- In the upper left corner, click Add a Printer.
- Counter-intuitively, click Add a local printer.
- On the "Choose a printer port" screen, click Create a new port, and select Local port from the drop-down menu.
- In the "Port Name" box, you have to type two forward slashes (\\), the name of the computer where the printer is, another forward slash (\), and then the name of the printer. So the whole thing looks like \\computer-name\printer-name.
Tip: to find the name of the computer and printer, go to Start, Devices and Printers, click Add a Printer, and then click Add a network, wireless, or Bluetooth printer. Windows will search for any networked printers, and will display the computer name and printer name of any it finds. Note the pertinent computer and printer name, and then cancel out of that screen. You can then use that information to enter in the "Port Name" box in step #5.
- After you have entered the "port name", you can choose a driver.
- On the "Type a printer name" screen, give it any name you want:
- On the "Printer Sharing" screen, it's probably best to select the Do not share this printer option, since it's really already shared from another computer. If you want to get wild, though, why not try sharing it twice?
- Click Finish on the last screen. To verify your new printer is installed, go to Devices and Printers again, and you'll see it in the list:
That's it! Well, maybe that seemed like a lot of work, but your antiquated printer will thank you for saving it from the garbage heap.
Tip: if you delete the printer and try to re-add it, it won't work, because Windows remembers the port. To delete the port, you have to go to printmanagement.msc, expand Print Servers, expand your local computer, and then click on Ports. Delete the appropriate port from the list on the right, and then restart the Print Spooler service using services.msc. For more info on that process, check out this forum.
Give me a shout in the comments section if you have any trouble.
31Aug/073
Free HDTV…finally!
So I broke into the high-def market early this year by getting Comcast digitial cable for the low low price of $75 per month. After a while, the slow realization sunk in that...we were only watching network shows in high-def, while skipping most of the other cable offerings. Thinking that was a complete and total waste, we canceled our cable and looked into other free/cheap high-def options. So the journey began.
The machine
It started with choosing my machine. Since the only extra PC I had was an older P4 2.4 GHz one with 768MB of RAM and a GeForce FX 5200 (fairly low-end by today's standards), that was what I decided to go with for my Media Center PC.
I then purchased and installed Windows Media Center 2005, which was a breeze.
Analog
It started with analog. A buddy at work gave me his old Hauppauge card WinTV 878-based card (old school). That thing worked pretty well, but MCE wouldn't recoginze it and the old WinTV application it came with crashed if you looked at it cross-eyed. This wasn't going to work. Something better—digital even—was in my future....
Analog and Digital: Together at Last?
Asking a techie friend of mine if he could recommend a HD tuner card, he let me have his ATI HDTV Wonder. While that was very nice of him, the card turned out to be a nightmare (I think I see why he was so willing to part with it!). Horrid drivers. Horrid I tell you! While I've always known ATI to write buggy drivers, these were by far the worst. And getting it all to work was like picking dog hair out of carpet with tweezers. Absolutely frustrating.
And to add insult to injury, MCE won't let you use the ATI card without a separate analog tuner installed, so I had to borrow yet ANOTHER analog tuner card so the MCE would let me install and use the HDTV Wonder.
Well once I actually got the ATI HDTV Wonder working, the HD component of it was like wacthing a slideshow (Think: about as smooth as running Oblivion on this same machine). Reading on the Internet, it turns out the ATI card offloads most of the work to the CPU & GPU. Fine for modern machines, but bad news for my aging box. This wasn't going to work, either.
Card I've never heard of to the rescue!
I was looking into several other cards at this point: the Hauppauge Wintv Hvr 1600, the Macro Image MyHD MDP-130, and the DVICO Fusion 5 HDTV—all pretty solid-looking tuners. But then I stumbled upon one I've never heard of: the Vistaview Saber DA-1N1-I. It had the second-lowest system requirements of any card I'd seen (the MyHD having the lowest requirements, but costing almost $50 more), so I took a chance and picked up the Vista View card at a local computer store for just over $100.
And finally, the moment of truth...this card rocks! It is a true dual-tuner (meaning I can watch an HD show while recording an analog show), and the best part is it does all the decoding on the card, so lame systems like mine can still show smooth Live TV. It works flawlessly in Windows Media Center, and for $100, I don't think there's a better value out there.
Now with recorded HD taking up 10GB+ / hour, I need to look into some of those 1TB drives!
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