Tips from Tom

From: Tom Rich

Here are some excerpts from my correspondence with others:

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[No positive response to this.]

I recently stumbled across several upgrades for the PCG-C1, links below. Because I do not read Japanese, I have not tried them. Do any of you read Japanese well enough to provide explanations of purpose and installation instructions?

http://www.ittrc.sony.co.jp/download/index.html

(pointing device?)
http://www.ittrc.sony.co.jp/download/W-N09-U01-0.html
C1TP_Up.exe

BIOS R0108T0
http://www.ittrc.sony.co.jp/download/W-N09-U00-1.html
BIOS0108T0.exe

Digital Media Park Ver. 1.3
http://www.ittrc.sony.co.jp/download/W-A02-U02-0.html
DMP13_Up.exe

Picture Gear Ver. 2.x
http://www.ittrc.sony.co.jp/download/W-A01-U04-0.html
PG2x_Up.exe

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Smart Capture does not run. After loading for a few seconds it puts up a "!" window containing underlines and "ESS AudioDrive Record (220)". In the Control Panel applet Multimedia, ESS AudioDrive is set up as both playback and record devices. In the Control Panel applet System/Device Manager, the ESS devices are "working properly". 220 is the I/O address.

Reinstall the audio driver from source /drivers/win98/sound also, install sony shared, dv gate, everything that says DV. etc. It took several tries but eventually it began to work.

The first time I used the "Update" command on each of the three sound devices (one of them, the voice modem, probably was not relevant, but I updated anyway.) This greatly changed the number and names of the driver files on the two ES devices.

Apparently the Sony drivers had not been installed originally. Most likely Win98 builtins were installed.

However SmartCapture continued to fail with the same error message windows. I tried several more times, sometimes updating, sometimes removing and reinstalling.

Eventually I noticed that the "Plug and Play AudioDrive" device had been moved to a different I/O address range. The first range was 240-24F; originally it had been 220-22F, and the error window continued to say "220". So I turned off "Use automatic settings" and manually changed to 220-22F and SmartCapture began to work.

The audio driver upgrade also fixed Winamp (a MP3 player) which was clicking frequently with the original driver.

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[No positive response to this.]

Looking through the Japanese Vaio manual I noticed on pp 82-3 indications that the ALT, CTRL, and SHIFT keys modify the behavior of the P button. Also the button is referred to as PPK, which is the name of one of the applications on the CDROM(which fails to install). Do you know any more about this?

I have discovered that I can power down from freeze ups by pulling the left side slide switch forward and holding several seconds until power goes off. The button should be held longer than seems natural.

Have you heard of the Automatic Skip Driver? Search for "ASD" in Win98 Help from the Start menu. It cleared problems I was

having with the PCCard subsystem, which was responsible for most of my freeze-ups.

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[No positive response to this.]

Here is a suggestion:

Information about resource usage might help solve other problems. If you have access to a fully functional factory installed Japanese language system, it might be worthwhile to take a few minutes to go through all the devices in Control Panel/System/ Device Manager and note down the resource usages and other settings under the Properties tab, and provide the information to customers as part of the documentation. It would be a useful reference when troubleshooting English Win installs.

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Yes, I do get hard freezes which seem to correlate with sound emissions. WinAmp is the most consistent cause. Freezeups are rare since I turned off all standard system sounds in Control Panel | Sounds. Still occurs occasionally when an application such as Eudora "beeps" at me. This was really annoying before I figured out how to shut down without removing the battery.

How do you shut down after a hard freeze without removing the battery?

Pull the left side slide switch forward and hold a long time, five seconds or more.

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[No positive response to this.]

Questions: Is there a way to increase the time limit on the length of video recordings in SmartCapture? What other variations are available in the option screens? What is the purpose of the P (or PPK?) button? It seems to partially duplicate the slide switch, but maybe it would do more if the PPK application were installed - but that fails to install. How to install PictureGear? Is SonicFlow useful, or a demo? How do the suspend or sleep modes work? How to configure config.sys and autoexec.bat for a DOS boot floppy which loads the real mode drivers for the PCMCIA slot? Etc.

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As for wants: