Black screen when playing all video in Windows

So, the other night I decided to clean up my PC and install XP Service pack 3, update my ATI drivers etc etc.

After the reboot, went to play some of my videos, only to find the video display to be black. Audio was fine, everything looked dandy. VLC, Media Player, Nero all refused to show the video.

Doubling checking the codecs, everything looked fine.

The solution - in the back of my head I remembered settings in the Catalyst Control Center. Look under VIDEO and then BASIC color. For some reason, USE APPLICATION SETTINGS was unchecked, and the brightness turned down to zero. I still can’t set it back up higher, but checking the USE APPLICATION SETTING box fixes the issue.

Blocking the searchme.com bot

Nice idea for a search engine, however, their bot is a disrespectfull bastard, doesn’t obey robots.txt, plus as it’s a visual search engine, processes Javascript tracking which throws your stats off.

Block it using iptables thus

iptables -I INPUT -m iprange --src-range 208.111.154.1-208.111.154.254 -j DROP

Jerky video / flash on laptops.

Ok, this one took me ages to work out. Acer laptop had been running fine for ages, then suddenly any video playback would be jerky after about 2 or 3 minutes, along with Flash applications going slow. Youtube unwatchable, Quicktime very patchy and intermittent.

No spyware, no virus, no random processes. Drivers all up to date, firmware up to date.

After much hunting, reinstalls, spyware checking etc the simple answer turned out to be the laptop was overheating. So ( and this is specific to my Acer, but look for a similar software solution on other providers ), I turned down the speed of my ATI graphics processor from the Cataylst Control Center, and bam!, back up working fine ( look under Power Play, set the setting for ‘Plugged In’ as optimal battery ). For day to day use ( no large 3D applications ) works the same as maximum performance.

Also, give the fan a clean with a compressed air duster. The Acer only has a single fan hole under the chassis, and can get very dust filled. Clogged vent, no airflow, high temperature.

Some handy tools to check whats going on:

Speed Fan, gives you current temperatures of your various chips. With the Acer, if the core is getting above 70, you will possibly start having issues. You can also use the EpowerManagement to lower the core CPU speed ( and thus temperature ), however, be aware of display issues with multiple users.

Process Explorer, an advanced Windows Task Manager. Even better, it shows DPCs ( Deferred procedure calls ) - why? Well, too many of these and something is wrong somewhere between your software and hardware, and overheating CAN cause these issues. You will always have SOME, just run the video or flash, and if it really increases when the video start to go bad and you may have heat problems.

Anyway, this not may be THE solution, but not all performance issues are software, virus or spyware related.

Acer EPowerManagement Issues

So, you can’t get your Acer laptop to keep a nice bright display. You set it nice and bright, then a few seconds later it goes dim again. You change the profile in EPowerManagement, goes bright then dark again. Doesn’t seem to happen all the time. Hair pulling time.

Unfortunatley, your looking at an issue with the EPowerManagement software, and probably the issue is when another user is logged on to the laptop at the same time. The solution … err .. sorry, there is none. You just have to uninstall the EPowermanagement option from Add / Remove programs. In all honestly, not a major loss.

That thing … Mk II