Lexmark X6100/X6150 Problems with Windows Vista – SOLVED
28 October 2009 at 12:41 pm | In Guides, Windows | Leave a CommentTags: Lexmark, printer, solution, Windows Vista, X1270, X5130, X5150, X6100, X6150
Symptoms: Print jobs don’t delete from the print queue after they are finished. Restarting the computer will allow the next job to print, after which the queue stops again.
Steps to reproduce: Install Lexmark’s printer software on a Windows Vista computer. Try to print more than one document. Get ticked off because Lexmark doesn’t have any solution on their website.
Printers affected: The list goes on and on—models X1270, X5130, X5150, X6100, X6150, and several others all seem to be affected. In general, if your printer seems to be having the symptoms above, then this solution might work for you. I have only tested this solution with the X6150, and your mileage may vary.
Solution:
Phase 1: Eliminate all Lexmark software/drivers
- Disconnect the USB cable to the printer and open up the Control Panel. Go to Programs and Features and find the Lexmark software for your printer. Uninstall it. If it gives you any problems, try opening up Printers (under Control Panel), right-click on the Lexmark printer, and select “Cancel All Documents”. If they don’t delete right away, restart your computer. You may need to connect the printer again to finish deleting the jobs from the queue. Make sure you disconnect the printer before trying to uninstall the Lexmark software again.
- Restart your computer.
- Go to Start, type in “cmd” (without the quotes), right click on “cmd.exe” and choose “Run as Administrator”. Type in “printmanagement.msc” and press Enter.
- Go to Action->Manage Drivers. If any Lexmark drivers are listed, click on each one and click “Remove…” In the window that appears, choose “Remove driver and driver package”. When you’ve finished removing any drivers, you can close the Print Management window.
- At this point, we should be rid of any leftover Lexmark crap. If you’re feeling extra cautious, you could go through and check your Program Files for any remnants, and maybe reboot your computer again.
Phase 2: Reinstall drivers, the right way
- Okay, now this is the important part. We want to reinstall the printer drivers without using the Lexmark installer. First, download the appropriate drivers for your printer from Lexmark’s website. Make sure you choose the Vista drivers and also make sure you choose x32 or x64 drivers, depending on which version of Vista you are running. As of writing, this page allows you to locate the drivers for your printer. Lexmark’s download descriptions tend to be a bit confusing, so read carefully.
- Once you’ve downloaded the correct installer, go ahead and run it, but don’t go through the installation! When the installer starts, cancel out of it. If everything has gone well, we should be left with a new folder located at C:\drivers\printer\[insert your model here].
- Now we’re ready to plug in the printer. When you plug in the printer, Windows will try to locate the drivers for it. There are two possible outcomes: Windows searches Windows Update and finds the correct driver, in which case we need do nothing more; and the second outcome, Windows can’t find the correct driver, in which case we need to point it to the one we downloaded.
- At the first “Found New Hardware” screen, choose “Locate and install driver software”. If you are asked whether to search online, choose “Yes, search online this time only”. If the window “Windows couldn’t find driver software…” appears, choose “Browse my computer for driver software” and navigate to C:\drivers\printer\[insert your model here]. Make sure that “Include subfolders” is checked. Windows should then recognize and install the driver from that location.
- If everything goes successfully, you should now have a working printer. Try to print out a few documents and make sure it is working. If so, congratulations! You’ve managed to get your printer working with Vista. If not, read on for some more troubleshooting advice.
Still having trouble?
If your printer still isn’t working at this point, there are a few more things to try:
- Disable the Lexmark printer spooler service and make Window’s spooler the default. To do this, press Ctrl-Alt-Del and choose “Start Task Manager”. Go to the Services tab, and click on the Services button at the bottom right. Scroll through the list and see if you can find a service called “lexbce” or any other reference to Lexmark. If you find such a service, right-click on it, go to Properties, and change the Startup Type to “Disabled”. Next go to Start, type in cmd, right-click on “cmd.exe” and choose “Run as Administrator”. In the window that appears, type “sc config spooler depend= rpcss” (without the quotes, with a space after depend= ), and press Enter. Restart your computer and try printing again.
- Make sure that bidirectional support is enabled. To do this, open Control Panel and go to Printers. Right-click on the printer, and choose “Properties”. Go to the Ports tab, and make sure the box is checked next to “Enable bidirectional support”. Restart your computer and try printing again.
- Restart the print spooler after each job. You can do this by going to Start, typing in “services.msc” and pressing Enter. Find “Print Spooler” on the list, right-click and choose Restart.
Conclusion
If you’re still having trouble, then you’re probably stuck with working around your problem (restart your computer after each print) or buying a different printer.
If you have a chance, feel free to call Lexmark and complain. They’ve done a crappy job with their drivers, and haven’t even addressed this and other problems on their website. Even though they claim that their printers are “Windows Vista Compatible”, the printers don’t work at all or only work after some workaround. Either Lexmark needs to fix its software/drivers so that they work out of the box, or they need to stop calling their printers “Vista Compatible”.
If you know of a fix that I haven’t mentioned, please tell me about it in the comments below and I’ll make sure to add it to this guide.
Burning Gapless CDs from mp3 in Linux
11 June 2009 at 4:36 pm | In Linux | Leave a CommentTags: burn, CD, cdrdao, gapless, lame, Linux, mp3
Adapted from the archlinux wiki page.
This is a guide for burning gapless audio CDs from mp3s using Linux.
First, make sure you have lame and cdrdao installed. Both packages should be included in your distro’s repositories. In Ubuntu, you can install them with:
sudo apt-get install lame cdrdao
Now, copy and paste the following script into a text editor, and give it a meaningful name, such as “burngapless”:
#!/bin/bash
if [ -d wav ]
then
echo "wav folder already exists; using existing wavs."
else
echo "Decoding mp3s..."
mkdir wav
for file in *.mp3 ; do
lame --decode -S "$file" "wav/$file.wav"
done
echo "Done."
fi
echo "Creating table of contents..."
cd wav
{
echo "CD_DA"
for file in *.wav ; do
echo "TRACK AUDIO"
echo "FILE \"$file\" 0"
done
} > toc
echo "Done."
echo "Burning CD..."
cdrdao write --eject -n -v 0 toc
if [ $? ]
then
echo "Error burning CD. Try running the script again."
exit 1
else
echo "Done."
cd ..
echo "Deleting temporary files..."
rm -r wav
echo "Done."
fi
exit 0
Make the script executable, and move to a location in the path:
chmod a+x burngapless
sudo mv burngapless /usr/bin
Usage
cd to the directory where your mp3s are located and run the script:
cd ~/Music/mp3/As\ I\ Lay\ Dying/Shadows\ Are\ Security/
burngapless
Tweaks & Shortcomings
- For more detailed progress information, remove the “-S” flag from the lame command, and remove the “-v 0″ flag from the cdrdao command. If you don’t want to eject the CD after burning, remove the “–eject” flag from the cdrdao command.
- If there is no writeable CD in the drive when the script reaches the cdrdao command, it will output “WARNING: Unit not ready, still trying…” for a while before giving up. If you insert a CD right away, it should go through with the burn process. Otherwise, just run the script again (after inserting a CD) and it will resume at the burning phase.
- If you have multiple CD drives, you may need to specify the correct drive to cdrdao using the “–device” flag. For more info, see the cdrdao man page.
- Note: if the burn is unsuccessful, the wav files will be left intact in case you want to try burning the CD again. If you don’t want to try burning again, you must manually remove the wav folder.
Ripping Audio from DVDs on Mac with 0SEx
20 May 2009 at 10:39 pm | In Mac OS X | 2 CommentsTags: 0SEx, Audio, AudioSlicer, DVD, DVD Ripping, ffmpeg, free, freeware, Mac, Rip
Disclaimer:
The use of the libdvdcss library (included in 0SEx) is controversial in some countries such as the US due to DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). This article is not intended in any way to promote piracy or illegal sharing of DVD videos.
0SEx is an awesome, completely free Mac application for ripping DVDs, with a lot of functionality, buried under a somewhat cryptic interface. One of the features it provides is the ability to rip just the audio of a DVD, as well as the ability to choose only part of the DVD to rip. This makes it a great tool for ripping the music from concert or opera DVDs, or just ripping the audio from your favorite movies so you can listen to them on your iPod or in your car’s CD player.
Using 0SEx to Rip the DVD’s Audio Files
To get started download 0SEx and copy it over to your Applications folder. Now pop in a DVD and fire up 0SEx. You’ll be presented with the main window:
The 0SEx main window in all its glory
First off, click on the Fmt button and select “Elem. Streams”. Under Seg, choose “Chapter”. This will break the audio up into bite-sized pieces, perfect for making an audio CD.
Now let’s look at the three buttons in the row above: Vid, Aud, and Sub. Since we only want to rip the audio, uncheck any video streams under Vid. Choose the desired audio streams you want to rip under Aud. Usually you’ll want to choose 2 Ch streams, rather than 5 or 6 Ch streams. Uncheck everything under Sub.
Selecting audio streams - hint: you probably don't want the 6CH or foreign language streams.
Before we start ripping, we need to choose which parts of the DVD to rip using the Ti (Title) and Ch (Chapter) buttons. If you’re not sure which title(s) and chapter(s) you want to rip, open up DVD Player and use the Go menu to select each title and/or chapter to see if its the one you want. Now, choose the desired title(s) in 0SEx using the Ti button, and choose the desired chapter(s) using the Ch button.
We’re ready to get started now. Click on BEGIN to start ripping the DVD. A progress bar indicates how much of the DVD has been ripped.
Ripping some audio from "The Manchurian Candidate"
Converting the ac3 file to mp3 using ffmpegX
When the rip is finished, you can listen to the resulting ac3 files using a media player like VLC. However, you’ll probably want to convert them into a more common format such as mp3. To do this, we can use another handy app: ffmpegX. Follow the instructions on the ffmpegX Download page to install it, then fire it up. Drag and drop an ac3 file onto the text “Drop file here”, or alternately select the file using the Open button. Under Target format, click the arrow next to “To” and choose “Audio file to mp3″ (second option from the bottom). If you want to fine tune the mp3 quality options, choose the Audio tab to reveal the mp3 encoding options. When you’re done, hit Encode to start encoding the mp3 file.
Using ffmpegX to convert an ac3 file to mp3
Trimming the mp3
One last thing you might want to do is trim the mp3 down to remove any gaps or extraneous parts. AudioSlicer is a free app that does just that. With it, you can split the mp3 into multiple slices, remove parts you don’t want, all without any loss of quality to the mp3. You could also use QuickTime Pro or MP3 Trimmer to do the same thing, although both of those cost money.
Using AudioSlicer to split an mp3 file into separate pieces
Summary
The Mac has some great free applications available for DVD ripping and encoding. The programs mentioned above–0SEx, ffmpegX, and AudioSlicer–are all very powerful and contain many more features than discussed here. For example, you could easily use 0SEx to rip a DVD and then encode it to a DivX or H.264 video using ffmpegX. Or you could compress a DVD9 to DVD5 so that you could make a backup copy on a DVD-R. The possibilities are virtually endless.
If you’re interested in any additional guides to using 0SEx, ffmpegX, AudioSlicer, or other free Mac apps, let me know in the Comment section below.
Musgen: Music Generator Concept
15 April 2009 at 11:19 pm | In Uncategorized | Leave a CommentTags: concept, generator, music, piano, random
Taking some inspiration from my earlier Kanagen program, I’m thinking about writing a program to generate random sheet music. Currently, I haven’t written any code and its still in the design stages. My goal would be to have a program that could output to Lilypond format, making it easy to create nice looking sheet music. It would be pretty simple to make a truly random generator, but it would generate a lot of noise. What would be more interesting would be a generator that could produce musical stuff. I’m tossing around some ideas for music generating algorithms. I’d like to make something completely unique, that would fit with my conceptions of music and create “interesting” compositions.
Of course, at the very least I’ll come up with a random note generator that I can use to create “interesting” exercises for my piano students… hehe.
Asus eeePC 1000HE Likes/Dislikes
28 March 2009 at 2:03 am | In Reviews, netbook | 2 CommentsTags: 1000HE, Asus, EEE, eeebuntu, eeepc, Linux, netbook, Review
Here’s some of my thoughts on the new Asus eeePC 1000HE. I’ve had mine for about a month now and don’t have any major gripes. Here’s what I like (and dislike) about this netbook:
Likes
Weight – Its light enough that I can forget I even have it in my backpack.
Keyboard – Nice action and good spacing. I haven’t had any problems typing on it, and it didn’t really take me any time to get used to it either.
Screen – Bright, crisp, good colors. Its big enough for most tasks, although it can feel confining at times.
Touchpad – Has a nice matte finish and good response. I like the two-finger scrolling capability.
Hard drive – Plenty of capacity to store my music collection as well as a few DVD rips.
Linux compatibility – Standard hardware (nothing exotic) means that Linux runs without a problem and support all of the hardware out of the box (provided you use a distro like eeebuntu or Easy Peasy).
Dislikes
Performance – Can be sluggish at times, especially on Flash-based websites. Bootup could be faster, too. Of course, I wasn’t expecting extreme performance from a single-core Atom processor anyway.
Fan – Its almost always running, usually at a low speed, but if you’re doing anything CPU-intensive it will bump up a notch. It makes a low whining noise that can be irritating after a while. I’ve heard that you can lube the bearings and it will run quieter, but I’m not about to void my warranty for something as silly as that.
OS Choice – Actually, the lack of OS choice. You get (and pay for) Windows XP whether you like it or not. I would have preferred a no-OS option, or at the very least a Linux option. My first step on getting it was to wipe out Windows and install eeebuntu.
Stickers – A very minor complaint and easily remedied. If you don’t mind advertising Microsoft products, then feel free to leave the stickers in place. Also, you get the standard Windows keys. No thanks, Microsoft. If you want me to advertise your product, you’d better give me some money first.
Meh
Gloss – Like every other laptop/netbook/desktop PC out there, you’ve got lots of gloss to collect fingerprints and grease. I wish they would use a matte finish, which would actually be more durable and stylish in the long run. Oh, but that wouldn’t appease the fashion gods, would it?
Speakers – OK, what did you expect? It doesn’t have a subwoofer. It does have lots of volume. So I guess you could walk around school and blast out some distorted, tinny rap/hip hop, you know, since that’s so cool. Oh yeah.
Battery – I don’t think its even possible to get the claimed 9 hours without some major tweaking. I think 6-7 hours would be a more realistic number.
Overall – good or bad?
I think its safe to say that the good side of this netbook outweighs the bad. Out of 10, I’d give it a 7.8.
Acer Aspire 6930 Windows XP Installation Guide
11 February 2009 at 1:19 am | In Guides, Laptop, Windows | 24 CommentsTags: 6930, Acer Aspire 6930, Guide, howto, install, installation, Microsoft, Windows XP
For those that prefer the speed and stability that Windows XP offers, this guide will help you get it running on the Acer Aspire 6930 laptop. Beware that there are a couple limitations. Firstly, you will only be able to use 3GB of RAM if you use the 32-bit version of Windows XP. Secondly, some features may not work or function the same as they do in Windows Vista. Keep in mind that this laptop was designed to run Windows Vista, and so Acer probably won’t support you if you run Windows XP. With that said, let’s get down to business.
Step 1: Recovery Discs
You should make recovery discs if you haven’t already. In case you change your mind or something goes wrong, you should make sure you have these discs. That way you can at least go back to a working system. Also, it’s a good idea to backup your data now because installing Windows XP will wipe out whatever is on the computer.
Step 2: BIOS Settings
By default the Aspire 6930 uses AHCI mode to access the hard disk. Unfortunately, Windows XP doesn’t have the right drivers to use this mode. The easiest way to get around this is to change the access mode to IDE. Turn the laptop on, and start pressing F2 right away. The BIOS setup screen will appear. Use the arrow keys to go to the “Main” tab, then go down to select SATA Mode, and press Enter. Then select IDE Mode and press Enter. Finally, press F10 to save and exit, and choose Yes and press Enter to confirm.
Technically, using IDE Mode will reduce the performance slightly (although I haven’t noticed the difference). For full performance, you would need to slipstream the AHCI drivers with the Windows XP CD and then proceed with the installation without changing the BIOS settings. There are plenty of guides on the Internet on slipstreaming, like this one, if you’d like to give it a try.
Step 3: Install Windows XP
If you haven’t every installed Windows XP on a computer before, it’s not that hard. Go ahead and turn the laptop on, or reboot it if it’s already on. When you see the black screen with the Acer logo on it, start pressing F12 until the boot menu appears. Then put the Windows XP CD in the CD drive. Choose the CD drive in the boot menu, and press Enter. After a second, you should see some text saying “Press any key to boot from CD…”. Make sure you press a key!
After a couple of minutes the Windows XP installer will be loaded. Just follow the instructions on the screen to go through the rest of the Windows installation. If you’re really unsure of anything, try looking at Microsoft’s guide to installing Windows XP. It’s easy, trust me.
Step 4: Installing Drivers
Now the crucial step to get everything working, installing all the right drivers. Since the laptop was designed for Windows Vista, it can be hard to find all the right drivers for XP. Thankfully, some folks (like myself) have already done all the hard work and collected together the location of most of the drivers.
Here’s what I needed to get everything working:
Video: Intel Graphics Media Accelerator drivers from Intel’s website. If you have NVIDIA graphics, you’ll need NVIDIA drivers instead.
Audio: Realtek HD Audio drivers. The XP driver links are right under the Vista Driver links.
Wireless: Intel WiFi Link 5100/5300 drivers. Some models are equipped with a different wireless card, see the section below.
LAN: Atheros L1 Gigabit Ethernet drivers.
Webcam: Windows XP supported it without any special drivers.
Card reader: Windows XP supported it without any special drivers.
Media keys: Volume, play/pause, and Wireless on/off keys worked without any special drivers. For better support, including on-screen feedback when you press the keys, download the Dritek Launch Manager software.
Touchpad: Synaptics touchpad drivers. Required if you want to use the scroll area!
Bluetooth, modem, etc.: untested. You can try the drivers at the links listed in “Other Driver Sources” below.
Other Driver Sources
For the devices that I didn’t test or that my laptop wasn’t equipped with, you may have some luck looking at this page, which has links to a bunch of different drivers. You may also have luck trying Acer’s drivers for Vista, because some will work in XP as well. And finally, you can always try the different manufacturer’s pages, although it can be difficult to figure out which components are made by which company.
Final Thoughts
The Aspire 6930 worked well in Windows XP, and provided a lot better performance compared to in Windows Vista. I also found that the battery life was improved, the hard drive was accessed less, and things just generally worked faster and better. I didn’t have any issues, and all the hardware that I use was supported without any problems. On a cautionary note, though, keep in mind that Windows XP is already 7 years old and will become more and more obsolete as time goes on. So I’d suggest that if you don’t like Vista, but still want a modern operating system, try Ubuntu. It works great on this laptop, offers very good features and performance, and doesn’t cost anything. Its worth a try, regardless of your views on Microsoft Windows.
Limiting CPU Usage of a Program in Windows
22 January 2009 at 12:16 pm | In Windows | Leave a CommentTags: CPU, Limit, Process, Windows
If you have a single-core CPU, you might have noticed that certain programs will hog the whole processor and won’t let you do anything else. Everything starts to bog down until you can’t do anything but wait for the one program to finish.
Or, you might have a computer that overheats whenever you do something CPU-intensive, like video or audio encoding.
So how do you deal with these nuisances? There’s two ways to do it.
The first is to set the priority of the program’s main process to a lower value. Unfortunately, I’ve never had much success doing this because most programs ignore the priority and end up sucking up all the CPU anyway. If you really want to try it, check out this post for some info. (It talks about speeding up, but it applies exactly the same to slowing a process down).
The second (and better) way is to use a program that limits the program’s CPU usage. One program that I find very handy is Battle Encoder Shirase, or BES. It allows you to selectively limit a process’ CPU usage. Once you’ve downloaded it, start it up and choose the Target… button. This brings up a list of processes that are currently running. Choose the one that is eating up the CPU and click Limit this. Then hit Yes to start limiting it. Most things are self-explanatory, and the website has good instructions on how to set it up, so I won’t go into any further details.
Of course, you can use these same techniques with a dual- or quad- or whatever-core system too. I just find them a little less necessary.
Kanagen 0.0.2: Japanese kana generator for Mac, Linux, and Windows
12 January 2009 at 2:56 pm | In Japanese, Kanagen, Linux, Mac OS X, Python | 6 CommentsTags: generator, hiragana, Japanese, kana, katakana, language learning, Linux, OS X, program, Python, romaji, Windows
Kanagen 0.0.2 is now out and works under Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), many Linux/BSD variants, as well as Windows XP/Vista. Simply download the ZIP file below and follow the instructions in the README.txt to get started! If you are unfamiliar with Kanagen, its a program I wrote to help study Japanese characters. It generates random strings of hiragana, katakana, and romaji so that you can learn the syllabaries and also practice writing characters.
Mirror 1: http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?yyx4gncmwjw
Mirror 2: http://www.filefactory.com/file/a019agh/n/kanagen-0_0_2_zip
Changelog:
- Cleaned up code so its easier to read and maintain
- English-localized strings separated into a new module for easier localization
- Clear screen routine now works on Windows (not much else works in Windows, though)
How to view Japanese characters on the Linux virtual terminal
11 January 2009 at 11:26 pm | In Japanese, Linux, Ubuntu | 1 CommentTags: console, framebuffer, Japanese, jfbterm, Linux, Ubuntu, virtual terminal
Although it’s no problem to view Japanese/Unicode characters on an X11 console like xterm or Konsole, it can be difficult to view them in the Linux virtual terminal. That’s where JFBTERM comes into view. It provides Japanese and other special character output using the framebuffer.
Ubuntu provides a prebuilt package in the repositories; to install it execute
sudo apt-get install jfbterm
It is also helpful to install a good font for it to use:
sudo apt-get install unifont
Now, provided that you have a working framebuffer, you can start it by running jfbterm.
If you receive an error about /dev/fb0 not present, you need to enable a framebuffer. In Ubuntu, modify the current kernel line in /boot/grub/menu.lst to include vesafb. For example, my section in menu.lst reads something like:
title Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-9
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-9 root=/dev/hda1 ro vesafb:mtrr,ywrap vga=0x318
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-9
quiet
After making the modification, reboot the system and try running jfbterm again.
Once you have jfbterm running, you can run commands like usual, and now should be able to see Japanese characters properly.
Blog at WordPress.com. | Theme: Pool by Borja Fernandez.
Entries and comments feeds.
