Category Archives: Windows

FIX: Front audio jack not working on Gigabyte GA-Z77X-D3H motherboard

Posted on by
Reply

Back in May I built a new computer which included a Gigabyte GA-Z77X-D3H motherboard. All was well till I tried getting the audio drivers working correctly. At that point in time, I discovered if I wanted to use headphones say out my front audio jack, I would be forced to turn my stereo off first, as sound would go out both audio jacks at the same time.

This was incredibly frustrating, since I was upgrading from a motherboard that I could choose between front and back audio, and I simply used an AutoHotkey script that would switch between the two using an assigned key on my keyboard.

At the time, I upgraded to the latest Via HD audio drivers, hoping that would have a fix for the situation. Unfortunately not.

Thankfully, I’ve just done a Google again on the situation and came across this thread. Turns out the VIA drivers released some point in August fixed the issue. So If you’re reading this post and you haven’t updated your drivers, you can download the latest VIA version from Gigabyte here.

Speaking of AutoHotkey scripts, below is mine, which is basically a script to assign which audio device is the default. So to activate it, I would need to press Ctrl + Alt + A, which in itself isn’t bad, but I’ve also got a logitech keyboard with some extra keys which I’ve assigned to one of them the above command sequence. Works well 🙂

^!A::
Run, mmsys.cpl
WinWait,Sound
ControlSend,SysListView321,{Down 2}
ControlGet, isEnabled, Enabled,,&Set Default
if(!isEnabled)
{
ControlSend,SysListView321,{Down 1}
}
ControlClick,&Set Default
ControlClick,OK
WinWaitClose
SoundPlay, *-1
return

how to do DNS host lookup without entering the full domain

Posted on by
Reply

This post is for those running a Microsoft DNS Server

This is a stupid thing that has been bugging me but I never really made the effort to look into it. I used to know how to do this since I actually did a Microsoft course that covered DNS yet I just couldn’t remember how to set this up properly.

So you’re in your web browser or you want to ping a device on your network and you only want to put in the hostname, without the FQDN. Turns out it’s very simple.

Open up DNS manager (Start > Administrative Tools > DNS)

What you want to do is right click Reverse Lookup Zones, and click New Zone.

Click Next.

Depending on how you have DNS set up (say you have more than one MS DNS server) you may need to configure this differently, but I imagine you’ll probably be the same as me, which is selecting “Primary Zone”, and “Store the Zone in Active Directory” ticked > Next.

Again, choose the Zone Replication that suits your AD/DNS set up, Next.

Choose IPv4 or IPv6 reverse lookup. Hopefully a no brainer for you.

Now we’re finally at the screen that matters. This is where you put the IP subnet where your Forward Lookup Zone resides in. As you can see above, my domain is mattie47.lan, which has devices just in the 192.168.0.0/24 subnet. I believe you will need to do a Reverse lookup zone for each subnet you want to resolve to that has devices in, so go through all these steps, finish, then start again for the next subnet (I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure I’m right…).

Click next once you’ve filled it in. The next screen again will be specific to your set up. Finally click finish.

For me, things just worked, but you may need to set up pointers (either double click each Host A record, and tick the box, or go under your new reverse lookup zone > right click > New Pointer.

Hope this helped someone!

Fix: windows 7 blue screen caused by ntoskrnl.exe error 0x000000f4

Posted on by
8

For several months now I’ve had this error, which causes my server to randomly blue screen and restart. I don’t typically notice this though, as virtual machines running on top of the server are preset to auto boot once windows has restarted (thanks to VMWare workstation 8 shared VM feature). I’ve looked at this issue in the passed and presumed it must either be hardware related or a bad install of Windows server 2008 R2 (This also applies to Win 7).

I think I may have just gotten to the cause issue of it. If you’ve come across this page and you use a DLNA program called Serviio, keep reading, otherwise your issue could be unrelated (although as described below, it was a combination of serviio, java and ffmpeg).

I’d previously looked at the blue screen minidumps using some analyzer which didn’t seem to say more than the error was f4 caused by ntoskrnl.exe which didn’t leave me with much to try and figure out what really was causing it. A quick google on it will show the number of people having frustrating unexplained issues with it.

Something I should have done ages ago was simply to open the windows Event Viewer. Looking at logs around the time of crashes showed something quite interesting and unexpected:

Faulting application name: ffmpeg.exe, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x4ee7d185
Faulting module name: ffmpeg.exe, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x4ee7d185
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0071e4e3
Faulting process id: 0x10f0
Faulting application start time: 0x01cd8d892d613b00
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Serviio\lib\ffmpeg.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Program Files\Serviio\lib\ffmpeg.exe
Report Id: 6c28bf8e-f97c-11e1-8d1f-940c6d82d8ea

A bit more googling on this, and hopefully I have a fix for the crashing. Time will tell, as the blue screen restarts are quite random (might go a day without it, or a week) and often when the server is idle and not having any major resources accessed.

Hopeful fix:

Installed latest Serviio (1.01)
Downloaded and installed offline version of Java x64 (forum suggestion) – uninstall any previous versions of Java you have installed first.
Manually downloaded latest ffmpeg (http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/) and put in it C:\Program Files\Serviio\lib\

Update:

Well it’s only been a day since I wrote this post, but a bit more research into this has shown that for me at least, it is somehow Serviio related. Thanks to a brilliant forum post I found while trying to find a better BSoD dump analyser, I discovered http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=analyze. This website allows you to upload your BSoD minidump and will analyze it for you! Brilliant!

Example of one of my Minidumps here.

Update #2:

A month 1/2 now and no bluescreens! Issue for me = closed!