I found a neat trick to fixing the problem with resuming from standby on the M200 when using updated video drivers.

My setup:

– Windows 7 x86 build 7100

– Forceware 98.16

– Dual Displays enabled (see other posts)

The trick:

After resuming from standby press Fn + F5, the switch display function, twice. This will cause your computer to attempt to switch to the secondary display and then back again to your primary display which will reinitialize your screen.

I haven’t done enough testing on other setups to say that this will work for everyone, I’d imagine that so long as you have the Dual Display trick enabled you should be able to do this.

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T.

Toshiba M200 and a Solid State Drive

So I decided to amp up the performance of my Toshiba Protege M200 tablet by installing a Transcend 64GB SSD into the already awesome device. And I must say: Wow! So quiet! And it got a huge boost to hard drive performance all the way from 4.4 to 5.8 in the Windows Experience Index. On top of that it’s a lot cooler now but did I mention quiet???

I have my power options in Windows to allow the processor to lower it’s speed even on full power so the fan barely comes on. Even while I type this post, the fan it totally silent so this computer is emanating NO SOUND what so ever and holding steady at 55c for the processor temp. Now of course compared to my new 45nm quad core AMD which is 45c at full load, doesn’t come close. But for a 90nm processor in a 5 year old tablet laptop, I’m doing pretty damn good.

Q: Does it really boot faster with SSD?

A: I’d say it shaves about 2-3 seconds off the boot time of mine*.

Q: Does your profile and applications load faster?

A: Definitely seems more responsive, yes. For both loading my profile and applications.

Q: Is Aero any more stable with the SSD?

A: Not really.

Q: Do games play better with the SSD?

A: I may see a bit better on loading screens but overall frame rates will probably remain the same.**

Q: Has your battery life improved a lot?

A: Solid State Drives require far less power than traditional hard drives, but how much they actually draw on the battery I can’t really say (verses the cpu or gfx). Presumably I should, but I haven’t had the chance to test it yet well yet. So far Vista estimates about 2:30 hours on the battery with my current setup. I’ll know more when classes return.

*Specs: 1.8 GHz, 2GB PC2700, Clean Vista Ultimate Install

**No games installed yet

m.

mobile radio

So I finally figured out how to stream radio to my phone. More specifically 1.FM radio. The problem came with the fact that 1.FM uses MMS to stream their radio which would work on most non-java smartphones. Unfortunately I have a u740 Java phone and so it doesn’t work.

So after about 6 months of sporatic work, I finally figured it out. I had to use VLC as a encoder to tranform the MMS stream to a mp4-latm RTP stream. After that, then use Darwin Streaming Server to take the RTP stream from VLC and broadcast it using the RTSP protocol.

So yea, now I can rock away and tell my cell company to take that 7.00/month radio package and shove it.