prostheticHead.Network

Me with my just updated iPod

I had not used my iPod for almost 6 months and after next weekend I have a reason to use my iPod again but I had a problem. I have in that time of iPod neglect dumped iTunes as my music player/manager so I had no way of getting my new songs onto it without major hassles and flaky foobar plugins.

I decided it was time to give Rockbox another go. I had previously used Rockbox a while ago and did not like it and had a lot of random problems but I have to say Rockbox has changed a lot since then. What I was most impressed with was how easy it was to setup now. Simply download the automated setup, connect the iPod to your computer and you are away.

The defult GUI of Rockbox is well to put it bluntly crap compared to the original firmware and even with skins dose not improve that much. Any issues with the GUI though go out the window when you can finaly play Ogg media files and Doom on your iPod.

I recomend giving Rockbox another swing and seeing if the new version 3 fixes any problem you had with the older versions. If you have never heard of Rockbox but wish to dump iTunes for any of the much better music players/managers avalable have a look into Rockbox 3 it just may make you like your old iPod again!

Rockbox can be downloaded from the Rockbox website

I recently purchased a shiny new Dell XPS M1530 and it come with Windows Vista. I had not played with vista much but was shocked at how slow its windows file sharing transfer speeds are.

I spent a full day copying over my games and such from my old desktop computer at a pitiful 2MB/s after complaining to anyone that would listen I was simply told vista is slow get over it and that it was much worse before SP1.

On one of my there must be a way to fix this hunts on Google, Dan and I found something that looked promising and it worked.

To get full speed in windows file sharing simply open a command prompt in Administrative mode (You can do this by typing “cmd” in the Start Menu and pressing Ctrl+Shift+Enter to execute).

Type “netsh” and press Enter. You are now in the netsh command mode.

Type “int tcp” and press Enter.

Type “set global autotuninglevel=normal” and press Enter. The command prompt should return “OK”.

Type “exit” to return to the normal command prompt.

You Must then restart your computer!! (This is important!)

(Above taken and edited from http://www.ocmodshop.com/ocmodshop.aspx?a=900)

On the original source they say to disable it but from what Dan and I found by default it is set to Highly Restrictive and simply setting it to normal fixes the issue but if you want to typing “Set global autotuninglevel=disabled” will disable it entirely.

With our testing we got speeds faster than in windows XP after setting it to normal. Leave a comment with your results!