Some FAQs about PCs you wish you knew before you bought it!

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Q: I have a mainboard with ALI PCI IDE controller. I was told that driver was out of date, but I can't find the replacement update. ALI's website in Taiwan lists nothing. Help?
A:
ALi actually turned into ULi Electronics. The Original ALi (which was Acer Lab Inc) is a purely research and development unit now. And NVIDIA just acquired ULi so that NVIDIA now actually have chip building facilities. For now, all ALI and ULI stuff can be downloaded at http://www.uli.com.tw/eng/support/drivers.php

The catch is they are listed by southbridge model number, NOT the individual drivers. You'll need to do a search on Google or such to locate your southbridge model of your specific mainboard, then you can find the proper driver.

What's better, NVIDIA also hosts the same files ftp://download.nvidia.com/ULi/ULI_filename

where filename is the filename on the ULI server.

Wednesday, July 04, 2007

Bugmenot.com - login with these free web passwords to bypass compulsory registration

Q: In order to read some websites I have to register. Is there any way to bypass that? I really don't want to give away my e-mail address due to spam issues, and it's too much hassle to get additional e-mail addresses and remember to check and purge them.
A:
Try Bugmenot.com. They maintain a list of web account and passwords to bypass compulsory registration, so you don't have to give out your information. If you use Firefox browser they even have an extension that will download the account and password for you.

Q: What if the website I want is not listed by BugMeNot?
A:
Go ahead and register, but use the e-mail proxy from http://email.bugmenot.com. Basically, you make up an address, like JohnDoe, or just a random bunch of letters like dyfujehfq. Add @bugmenot.com to that, and that's your proxy e-mail address. For example, if you picked dyfujehgq, then your proxy address is dyfujehgq@bugmenot.com. Register using that address. The verification e-mail will be sent there. Then go to http://e-mail.bugmenot.com, enter your address dyfujehgq, and you'll see your verification e-mail there. Do it quickly, it'll be wiped in 24 hours. After that, any spam the site sends goes into a blackhole and is lost forever!