Audio problems on a HP Compaq nx6325

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I’ve had a HP laptop in several times in the last week, suffering from severe audio stuttering – in Media Player, VLC, when playing DVDs, and even just playing the Windows start-up jingle. It’s almost like when I had a nasty 16-bit ISA soundcard in my ancient PC and tried to play Half-Life. We tried all sorts – scanning for viruses, defragging, reinstalling drivers, reducing the hardware acceleration, adding more memory, changing the volume… everything. But it still kept doing …

The MSI Wind

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We ordered an MSI Wind laptop (rebadged and sold in the UK as a PC World Advent 4211 Netbook) for work recently, and it arrived yesterday so I’ve had a chance to have a play with it. My very first impressions were quite poor. It looked very nice, is small, light and seems reasonably well built. However, it wouldn’t power up. Every time it tried to boot past the POST screen, the hard drive squealed and it switched itself off. …

An interesting look into North Korea

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Everyone likes to know about places they can’t go, don’t they? It’s normal curiosity. That’s why kids explore empty houses and caves and wells and stuff, isn’t it? North Korea is one of those places. I know very little about it, apart from that it’s The Evil Half Of Korea. Or so I thought. Thanks to a random post on a forum I read, I was made aware of this fascinating set of videos. A US journalist gets into the …

No More Heroes (Wii)

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With Zack and Wiki completed, it was on to the other Wii game I bought recently. Or one of them, at least. Today, I completed a few jobs (mainly lawnmowing) to make some more money, giving me enough cash to pay for the next fight. Which was set in a school. After beating up a load of thugs, I had to defeat a schoolgirl with a samurai sword. I’m sort of enjoying the game, but I’m not really sure if …

Zack and Wiki (Wii): COMPLETED!

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It took over an hour to finish off the boss, as I had several failures, but eventually he was defeated. There were then four (or five?) “Game Over” sequences, including two more after it declared “Fin”, and then it was finally over. Now there are some extra challenges to complete, but I haven’t a clue how to go about accessing them. The books on the bookshelf are mostly empty still too. Total play time: 12 hours 27 minutes.

Baby news: 16 weeks

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So my most excellent wife and I went to see the midwife today, and all the results from previous tests are fine and everything seems great. Then we got to hear the baby’s heartbeat through a device that looked like it was designed for detecting pipes in walls. It was very exciting! What I didn’t expect, was that inside my wife is an actual game of Pac-man. I imagined the heartbeat noise would be sort of badumbadumbadumbadum, but in reality …

Zack and Wiki (Wii)

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ONE HOUR AND FOURTY FIVE MINUTES. That’s how long it took me to complete Barbaros’ Land. In fact, aside from a quick fail of the final “boss”, that’s all I did on the game today. I’m up to around 11-12 hours in total, but it doesn’t feel that long. The time just vanishes while I play. Anyway, since I’m on the last bit of the game (I think), I’d best start asking for a sequel. Mind you, only seven people …

Pop (Wii)

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Advanced mode make me am cry from my arm. The idea is to hit the maximum score possible as quickly as you can. Sadly, for me, that too almost an hour an a half. Hence the arm pain. However, I did manage to rank 58th in the world!

Pop (Wii)

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The guy responsible for this WiiWare title posts over at rllmuk, as do I, and so I thought it nice to give him a bit of support. Not least because I managed to get 1000 Wii points to buy it with from Nintendo Stars. If you’ve no idea what any of that means, tough. After an hour of moving and removing stuff I actually wanted to keep, my Wii had enough space to let me download Pop! And then I …

Assault Heroes (360): COMPLETED!

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I was going through my list of downloaded content, re-licencing stuff to my new 360, when I realised I’d bought this but barely played it. I’d not even managed the spider boss at the end of the first stage. So I gave it another go, and, if you’ve read the title of this post already you’ll already know, I completed it. It wasn’t actually that hard, so I’m not really sure how I managed to fail so badly on previous …

Assorted XBLA Demos (360)

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I tried some more demos today, all of XBLA games I’d downloaded over the last few weeks. BattlezoneLooks amazing, but the demo is only five seconds long. So I’m not buying it as there’s no way that gives any sort of representation of actual game. Wits and WagersA quiz game where your answer is largely irrelevant? And only 700 questions? I say no to you, sir. Rocky and BullwinkleIt’s Wario Ware, only in Rocky and Bullwinkle costumes. It was OK, …