"It's the hardware, not me!", says Vista

My agonies with Vista continue. My heart skipped a beat yesterday when my USB backup drive just wouldn't show up in Vista. The error message was "Your USB device has malfunctioned". It worked before! And moreover, another external hard-drive I had attached worked fine. There goes all my backup ...... what do I do?

Lucky for me, I had another Dell laptop at hand. So, I plugged my external backup hard-drive and prayed. Isn't that what Microsoft touts about? - "Plug 'N' Pray!"

Just as expected, my hard-drive worked under my XP Dell but not my Vista Vaio. Seemed like a driver issue to me. But for an external USB HDD why would I need a driver?

Finally (as always), I turn to the friendly neighborhood Google. A quick search revealed that it was a Vista issue. The solution was to delete a file called INFCACHE.1 in C:\Windows\inf. Seems like this file stored the drivers for the USB PnP devices. Delete it and Vista will try to detect these devices all over again.

Once the file was deleted, I started plugging all my USB devices again starting with my external drives first followed by the mouse and then other devices (there's a long list here)

So going back to the original error message, it seemed like it was not the hardware that malfunctioned after all.

Shame on you Microsoft! Stop blaming others for your own software issues!!

Hey, where did my videos go?

Last Monday, I came across an issue using Vista which really alarmed me. Trying to play an avi file in Windows Media Player caused it to play only the sound but there was no video.

I use Vista Home Premium and this was the first time I came across this problem playing video files. I tried installing a host of different players and codec packs. Yet nothing seemed to work! Much against my will, I decided to remove Vista and go back to XP. Had scheduled to work on this lousy and time consuming process this weekend. However, before I took this drastic step, I thought of giving it one last shot.

I launched Firefox and googled for the issue at hand. Thats when I came across this link. This link hinted at the issue being with the default settings that most players used for DirectX. It seems to be an issue with the players. So to remedy this issue in VLC player, you would need to follow these steps:

1. Open VLC media player.
2. Click on Settings and select Preferences… .
3. Expand Video and click on Output modules. Note that DON’T expand Output modules, just click on it.
4. Check Advanced options in the lower right corner.
5. Set Video output module to either “DirectX“, “OpenGL” or “Windows GDI”

I use Media Player Classic which is a great freeware player that is part of most popular codec packs.

To correct this issue in Media Player Classic, do:

1. Open Media Player Classic
2. Click on View and select Options ...
3. Expand Playback to click on Output
4. In the option list for DirectShow Video, check the radio-button for Haali's Video Renderer. For RealMedia Video and QuickTime Video, click Direct 9.

Check your video files again.

Have a great weekend!!
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