MOVING

MOVING MY BLOG... Now I'm going to have only one blog instead of the many that I have had up til now... The new location is http://jeffthomann.wordpress.com/

http://www.era.com/property/index.jsp?property=ERA2774027

Fantastic house for sale!
http://www.era.com/property/index.jsp?property=ERA2774027

Uninstalling ATI All In Wonder 9000 Pro...

http://www.driverheaven.net/windows-xp-2k-radeon-display-drivers/1893-guide-uninstalling-ati-drivers-winxp.html

http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?s=&threadid=33606840

Also under ATI/Technologies/Support is sometimes an unstall utility that sometimes work, but it's about a 50/50 chance if it'll show up, or work...

Please pray for Jon.

My cousin Jon Thomann has been in the hospital the last week. He fell down a flight of concrete stairs and did some major damage to his head that required brain surgery. He has not fully become consious yet, but there are indications that he is becoming more active. This has been a trying time and has been hard on all of us.

Please pray for his recovery. If you would like to know more about his current situation, his girlfriend, parents and brother are keeping us all updated with this website/blog:

http://caringbridge.org/visit/jonthomann

If you would like to help out financially, there has been a new Support Fund recently set up. You may send checks to the

Jon Thomann and Family Support Fund
P.O. Box 1262
Columbia MO 65205-1262

For more information on the fund and its purpose, you may contact Cathi Harris at 573-220-6582.

Trick to All In Wonder 9000 Pro.

I admit it. I don't post here too often. I mainly use this place to post some super useful (at least to me) links and stuff since that sort of thing can be buried deep in search engines and dissappear eventually.

If you ever get your hands on an All-In-Wonder 9000 Pro or similar type ATI video card, you can put yourself in to major dll hell if you are not careful because ATI's latest drivers unfortunately are not what you should use. DO NOT DOWNLOAD THE LATEST DRIVERS - or at least if you have a computer set up like mine. I find the latest drivers actually cause tv lipsync to be way off. Various rumors around the internet claim that ATI blames Microsoft for something in WMDs or something, but honestly, it's just crappy updates from ATI that the haven't ever fixed and don't plan on ever fixing... So if you do ever accidentally install the updates for 9000 pro all-in-wonder, you need to go find your cd, and get read to reinstall it all... but first you have the major headache of uninstalling all the crap you just installed with the latest update. This is a multistep process. Here's where I found the steps originally:
http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?s=&threadid=33606840

Just for simplicity, and archiving's sake, I'm copying what that says here:
[blockquote]
Guide to Uninstall ATI Drivers Completely!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Alright...here is my way of deleting and installing ATI drivers running Windows XP (Win200 should be the same too).

1. Go into the Control Panel and under the ADD/REMOVE SOFTWARE icon uninstall the ATI MultiMedia software and/or the ATI DVD software.

2. Uninstall the ATI drivers also found in the Add/Remove section. Once removed, it will prompt you to reboot....do so.

3. When returning to windows, the NEW HARDWARE FOUND wizard will come up and will tell you that it has found a new VGA card and will prompt you for drivers. Hit CANCEL!

4. Now, go to START - SEARCH - FOR FILES OR FOLDERS and do a search for all files and folders using the filename ati*.*
This search will normally give you 3 to 4 files found in your c:/windows directory and subdirectories (including the Windows/System directory). Select these files and erase them. Now go to your Recycle Bin and Empty your bin.

5. Next...time to go to your Registry. Go to START -- RUN -- regedit

Here go to key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -- SYSTEM -- ControlSet001 -- Control -- Video . Here there should be 4 entries. 3 of them are default Windows XP entries and the 4th one is put in by the ATI drivers. Expand each one by one until you see ATI entries. Once found, erase the entire key.

Now repeat the same step above for the ControlSet002 key and the CurrentControlSet Key. Normally, whenever you erase a key in the ControlSet001, XP automatically deletes it in the CurrentControlSet section too. So if the ATI key is not found in the CurrentControlSet section, don't worry about it.
Once all keys are deleted, proceed to the next step.

6. While still in the registry, go to the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -- SOFTWARE section. Here you should find an ATI Technologies key. Select it and delete it. In that same section, look for an Installed Options key. Expand it and there you should find another ATI Technologies key. Select it and erase it.

7. Still in the registry, go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER -- Software and there you should find another ATI technologies key. Select it and erase it. Once all this is done, close the registry. the registry is now clean.

8. Close all windows and reboot.

9. When in windows after the reboot the NEW HARDWARE FOUND WIZARD will pop up again. Cancel that. Now find the new ATI drivers that you have downloaded and extracted and run the SETUP file. Once complete, reboot and you are done. You may want to reinstall your ATI MMC software and DVD software if you use them. DONE!


For all those who do not like going into the registry and rather have an easy to use program to do it for you, you can grab a nifty tool called "RegCleaner" here and it will do it for you without getting your hands dirty in the registry. Follow steps 1 through 4 as stated above, then run RegCleaner to do the rest. Once completed, follow steps 8 and 9 and you are DONE!


If there are errors in this guide or there are things to add or change let me know and I will alter the guide.

Hope this guide helps everyone!
[/blockquote]

Good luck.

I love my all-in-wonder and the drivers and software out of the cd work's fine and dandy. It's just annoying that ATI screwed the world over by releasing crappy update drivers and never fixed the problem. If I had a better computer (mine's only 1.5 ghz with 512 mb ram) the new drivers might, possibly work better, but I highly doubt it since they just made buggy software and never took the time to fix it.

Now that the world is going to atsc this old analog tv card can probably be gotten pretty cheaply on ebay and other places. All you need is one of those funky digital to analog tv converter things put in front of it and you should be good to go. I would get a real atsc tv card, and am working on getting one eventually, but keep getting outbid on ebay. Good luck with your TV viewing and recording on your computer!

Please Stay Tuned...

I haven't had a lot of time lately to dedicate to this blog, but do plan on adding a lot more useful and information posts... I think I'm going to try to add a lot of really useful links to various online forums and discuss some of the technical issues of getting a free-to-air satellite system set up, do-it-yourself style... Hopefully this will lead to some useful items that someone down the road might actually find helpful.

PLEASE DO check out the links list at the bottom of this page.

8193 trick

My Pansat 3500 sd has a problem... for some reason I can't make it go between audio and radio when I hit the satellite audio/radio button. In reading some forums and discussion groups on satellite fta reception... I discovered that 8193 is a great video pid that you can scan in for transponders that are solely for satellite radio, and aren't suppossed to really have a video pid. What this does is it fools the fta receiver in to thinking there's something on the video side when there isn't really... and thereby causes it to load the radio channel with no video in to your video channel list instead of your audio channel list... which means you can flip to a radio station on your receiver without having to hit that audio/radio button on your remote, and it just shows up as a normal tv station in the list! For people like me who have broken receivers that have problems going between audio and radio lists this is awesome. This is also a neat trick for any lazy fta reciever owners who have fine working recievers but don't want to have to constantly hit that audio/radio button to jump between audio and radio satellite reception! I'm posting this here because this is a little known secret that a lot of folks who might be first time receiver owners (like me) probably don't know about...