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So my media center pc was having issues with sound. Some channels worked great, and others didnt work right at all. By this I mean that you could hear the laugh track perfect but couldnt hear the dialog at all. I am using an Asus P5Q SE/R motherboard, this board has a Realtech HD audio chipset. The sound seemed to work perfect in all the apps I tried.. VLC, Windows Media player, even the HDHomerun Quick TV app. I was stumped.. The device manager showed no unknown devices and reported all devices working correctly. As usual I went to google and tried to find a solution. I found nothing.. I decided there were not enough options in the windows control panel for my sound card so I thought I would see if Asus had a driver for this system They did… I downloaded the audio drivers from Asus here: http://support.asus.com/ you have to search for your motherboard then your OS, then go to the audio driver section. I grabbed the global file which was about 72MB worth of a zip file. Once the down load is complete you can right click the file and extract the files, browse into the directory and find the Setup file, and run through it.. Once the reboot is complete you just need to make sure the Realtech audio settings are correct for your speaker setup do the test from the audio app, and enjoy the sound not giving you problems in media center any more

I upgraded my Vista Windows Media Center machine to Windows 7 this weekend. I was wishing I could get Hulu into media center so I went to google. I found posts where people had done it, but most of them were using some 3rd party app to edit some settings and do it, and the rest never said how they did it. Well since none of the apps were open source it made me very un-trusting of them. I decided to figure out how to add this my self. Its pretty simple. First you need to install the Hulu Desktop. Next open a windows explorer and navigate to your users WMC directory. Here is where my users info is:

C:\Users\errr\AppData\Roaming\Media Center Programs

Next simply stick a shortcut to the Hulu desktop in this folder. Windows Media Center should not be running while you do this. Name this shortcut “Hulu Desktop” or what ever you want. Once that is done simply close your explorer window and start WMC. You will need to go to the Extras section, and go into the Extras Library, select Hulu Desktop (or what ever you named it). This will minimize Windows Media Center and open Hulu Desktop. If its not full screen simply full screen it, and when you close it from full screen it will reopen that way next time. You will now be able to control Hulu desktop with your Media Center remote. The annoying thing is that when you close out of Hulu it does not restore WMC, but you can hit your Media Center button and that will reopen WMC in full screen.
Pretty easy eh?

So today I was setting up a new laptop for one of our employees. I went to activate his copy of Office 2007 and was told that I had already activated this copy to many times!! Oops, that is my bad for having such a messy desk that I grabbed the wrong copy of office and used the wrong key. No big deal I think to my self so I call to activate over the phone. While talking to this script reader he tells me that my copy is over activated and now I need to reinstall using this other disk (same version of office same everything..) I get a bit pissed cause I have better things to do with my time then totally reinstall Office just to change a simple key. I tell him how that is crazy and that there just HAD to be a way to do this with out a reinstall. The “tech” tells me that there is no way. I tell him he is nuts and how he is lazy and should learn more about his job. So off to regedit I went. I dug though HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\12.0\ since it was the biggest number. Mine also had an 8.0 and an 11.0. While digging though there I see “Registration”, I open it then while going though there I found something called DigitalProductID and something else called ProductID. On a whim I decided to just delete these key=>values so I right clicked on them and hit delete. Next I closed regedit and opened up Outlook. Guess what it asked me for thats right!! It asked me for a product key. I gave it, then Office activated with no issues… So this is to you, jerk at M$ who tried telling me this was not possible!! IN YO FACE!!!