Category Archives: Ask J.D.

History of Intel’s QuickSync, soon even faster! (Ivy Bridge)

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Intel’s Quick Sync is a great new feature of their latest CPUs. One reader experienced 3x faster encoding and that is definitely not out of the norm! You are probably already familiar with how Quick Sync speeds up video encoding and that it is generally regarded as better than the competing AMD and NVIDIA solutions. However, here are a couple tidbits you may not have heard yet! #1 Intel’s Ivy Bridge brings even faster acceleration to Quick Sync If this progression keeps

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Create BIGGER genius playlists in iTunes? [solved]

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Q. Good morning. I have iTunes for my music collection (mp3 & AAC) and really like the Genius feature of iTunes. However, I cannot figure out how to make a Genius playlist with more than 25 songs in it! Is this possible? I don’t really know my way around iTunes very well and I have checked preferences etc. but to no avail. Please help if you can. A. Yes, you CAN make a bigger Genius playlist with 50, 75 or 100

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DELETE a Recovery Partition when Disk Management won’t let you

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Today I was preparing a 2.5″ SATA laptop hard drive for use in my wife’s mini-PC. The hard drive I was attempting to use came from an old Acer laptop. I connected the hard drive via a USB enclosure and attempted to clear out the old partitions and reformat. Unfortunately I found that the Windows 7 Disk Management interface would not allow me to delete the “System Recovery” partition. Here is how I went about deleting that protected partition so I could

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Which Intel GMA does i945GTm-VHL have?

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Q. I just built a little mini-computer HTPC with a i945GTm-VHL motherboard from AOpen. When I go into device mananger under video/display adapters all I see is “mobile 945 express chipset family” but what I want to know is what version of Intel video GMA do I have? A. Your motherboard has Intel GMA 950 integrated video. You can find more details about your motherboard here:   AOpen Global – i945GTm-VHL specshttp://global.aopen.com/products_detail.aspx?Auno=2064Support Intel® Viiv™ Technology Integrated Gen 3.5 graphics controller in

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One Click or No Click DVD Ripping [HOWTO]

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Q. Helloz… ive been backing up my DVD collection b/c Im worried about scratching them. i like DVD shrink on Windoze but it takes a few clicks to do it. Is there a 1 click way to make it eazier and faster? thx n advanc –DVDFan91 A. Interesting spelling and good question. 😉 There are a few resources out there dedicated to the one click or even NO click dvdrips, so yes you can make it happen! NOTE: please make

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Better two-finger scrolling for Windows! (like 2011 MacBooks and MacBook Air)

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On Windows, missing the MacBook’s nice two finger scrolling… After returning a MacBook Air 11.6″ to Apple, I was surprised that I only really missed the very nice two finger scrolling. Some of the other Apple multitouch gestures were nice, but it was the really the smooth two finger scrolling on that nice trackpad that was so VERY handy and I missed the convenience! My Dell laptops have multitouch capable touchpads that support two finger scrolling. Unfortunately by default they

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Duke Nukem Forever game benchmarks (FPS)

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There are only two computer games that I play these days: StarCraft 2 and Duke Nukem Forever. Both of which are sequels to venerable classics. StarCraft 2 is widely considered a worthy successor to SC1. Duke Nukem Forever is generally not considered to be worthy compared to it’s older counterpart Duke Nukem 3D. However, they are both surprisingly fun to play in multiplayer for exactly the opposite reasons: StarCraft 2 – one of the ultimate games when it comes to skill, it

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Increase audio quality in Remote Desktop Connections

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I really dislike fuzzy/tinny audio. Sometimes RDP connections with RDC clients results in laggy and/or poor quality audio. A two step tip that you can use to try and solve these problem in Windows7: #1 on the server (the machine you are connecting to) Using the Group Policy editor, Go to Computer Configuration:Administrative Templates:Windows Components: Remote Desktop Session Host:Device and Resource Redirection. Set “Limit audio playback quality.”  to “Enabled,” and set “Audio Quality” option “to High”. #2 on the client

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