edimensional AudioFx headset - Adjusting the volume so your ears dont bleed

I've had one hell of a time with this headset.  Master volume for the system would be almost as low as it would go and I felt like i was going to loose my hearing.

It was either on and ear bleeding or off.

Finally on my 3rd time through downloading and installing the software i noticed under its own software was a settign to adjust output device.


Their software under control panel is called USB PnP Sound Device.

Launch this and on the main setting tab will have different sectioned off panes.  Look at the Output Device.
Click the Sound icon volume.  it will then display a slider for left/right.  For me the sweet spot was -30db on both.

Doing this puts the headset back at a normal volume that wont lead you to shouting at your co-workers from lack of hearing.

Hope this helps.

How to tell what port a program needs open

This is an issue I run into.  Searching forums for threads that tell you what ports need to be open to let an application work properly.

Most of the time you can find these on their wiki or on the software's forums.  Sometimes the port is listed but its outdated information.

Here is a fairly quick and easy method to find out some information.

Tools needed, application running that is giving the issue, windows command prompt and  task manager.

Open Task manager and click on the processes tab.  The bottom right is a check box to show process from all users. Go ahead and check that.    Under the menue click view->select columns.

Check PID and press ok.

From the application you need to find the port for launch it and log into the server if possible.
Switch to command prompt and type in    netstat -ano

Look at task manager for the running application and write down the PID number.

For example a game  launcher.exe  has a pid of 8081.

looking at netstat for pid 8081 i see it is pointing to an external IP address and its using port 10781.

Bingo thats the port number i need to open.


Hope this helps people out.  If you are trying to open up ports for a game this may get you in the door, most games have ranges of ports that are a few hundred ports.  Way to many to open up for in my case.

If you can open up all ports for a given ip go that route. its a lot easier.

Ubuntu how to run a minecraft snapshot

It has been a while since i've had to update a snap shot and being on the linux side i couldn't remember where a lot of it was.

First go to minecraft.net download minecraft.jar

choose properties and check executable.

Run the file and it will create the rest of the files by downloading them from mojang.

browse from your home folder to .minecraft. There will be a folder now bin
Open that and now take your snapshot minecraft.jar and overwrite it.

I also checked allow executing.


After that finished go to the original minecraft.jar and run with java. log in and you will see the update version there.

Oracle Public Synonms troubles

I got schooled today on this topic.

Our internal users were having issues trying to restore database through our front end web interface.
They were able to pick the database server but the drop down for all the schemas were blank.

Quickly getting to the point  the public synonym for sys.dba_users was missing.

Easy way to see this is from enterprise manager drill down to Schema > Public>  there should be an object called DBA_USERS.

To fix our issue loggin in as Sys

CREATE PUBLIC SYNONYM DBA_USERS FOR DBA_USERS;
COMMIT;


After that was ran all of the schemas populate the drop down list now.

Hope this will help people.

BSOD on newly imaged dell

Had a strange issue when i tried to image a laptop it went through it's normal process and imaged the machine.

When it started to boot into windows it displayed the normal startup window then went straight to blue screen.  Pulling the hard drive and viewing windows\minidump showed that nothing was written to the hard drive.

I got to thinking hmm maybe it is a bad hard drive.  Running diag scan I did not find any issues.

Last step enter the Bios and see what there is to be seen.

The sata drive was set to AHCI. switching this to raid ready and poof computer boots without issue into windows.

Win 7 Sp1 failed to install because of old version of Security Essentials

Oh yeah SP1 u cant install because Security Essentials is installed Ha ha ha... Wait windows updates doesnt show any updates for security essentials and it doesnt appear to be running under process NO WAY....

yeah it was a Houdini issues.   Luckily I stumbled on a MS article telling that the anti virus program can cause the sp1 to fail on update.

Sure enough only place to see it was there was under add/remove programs.

Got rid of it and now sp1 is installing.

Not able to ping computers on the same switch simple fix

This is one of those issues that just perplexes you for a while until you go OH silly me this is how you fix it.

I'm trying to get 5 laptops ready for a demo that will be using IIS and a Database server.

So currently i'm at the stage where all laptops are powered on and connected to a 8 port switch.

From command prompt i'm typing in the trusted ipconfig. Look at all the results and find it a bit odd all ips are class B for an 8 port switch.

Each machine doesnt even have the same first 3 bits its just all over the place for ips.

From command prompt i start to ping the machine to the right but i'm not getting back any reply. I'm thinking its an icmp so why isnt it going through..

Thought strucks me must be windows firewall.

Sure enough i go to inbound rules and look under file and print ICMP echo is not enabled.

Once i enabled on all the laptops firewalls they all started pinging and replying i'm here now use us.

Short post but none the less helpfull.