Silvermac

When you buy Western Digital external hard drive it is very likely that it will come preinstalled with the WD Smartware. What this means is that when you connect the drive to your Mac the software will run automatically, mounting WD Smartware drive and placing an icon on your desktop. If you try removing the icon from your Desktop or ejecting the drive through Finder you’ll find that it comes back after 2-3 seconds.

Some have tried reformatting the drive, but this won’t help either, the partition with a number of WD folders keeps coming back. Frustrating …

This is because a Virtual CD (VCD) has been installed on the drive. The VCD mounts every time you connect the drive. To prevent this you’ll need to disable the VCD.  Once you have disabled it you can either leave it as it is (it won’t mount again) in case you think you may want to install it in future, or you can repartition and reformat your drive from Disk Utility without any restrictions.

To disable VCD you need to download Virtual CD Manager from WD website and run it off your Desktop.

The best thing about Microsoft are their mice (mouses), I love them. The tracking acceleration seems so natural while Apple’s is rubbish, for me at least. That’s why I use the Microsoft Wireless Mobile Mouse 3500. Cheap as chips and works perfectly in every way … but one. Scrolling is way too fast.

No matter how much adjustment I did it’s still way too fast. I set the Vertical Scrolling Speed in System Preferences (under Microsoft Mouse) to a minimum but it still scrolls like 15 lines with one wheel click (those little clicks while scrolling the mouse wheel).

Lucky I had a spare wired MS mouse to compare them. The wireless mouse USB dongle is plugged in one USB port on my external monitor (Dell U-2410), the Apple wired aluminium keyboard into another one while third one is free for my camera’s cable when needed. The monitor’s internal USB hub is then connected to the computer (MBP) via another USB cable.

I plugged the wired USB mouse into the USB port on my keyboard and the scroll on that mouse worked fine, slow as. I took it out and plugged into the spare USB port on the monitor and the scroll went crazy. I thought it might be conflicting with the dongle, so I took the wireless mouse dongle out, but the wired one still acted crazy. The last option was to plug in the dongle into the keyboard’s USB port and guess what – it works perfectly fine.

So if I plug the dongle into the USB port on the monitor – the scrolling is super-fast. If I plug it into the keyboard, which is connected through the monitor anyway, the scrolling is perfectly fine. I have no idea why, but it works.

I was upgrading BIOS on my ASUS EeePC 1000H today and was surprised to find how many users are asking the same question in so many forums – How to upgrade BIOS on 1000H?

Surprisingly, it’s dead easy. This is what you need to do.

Go to Asus website, click on Downloads and select your hardware from the list, then select your operating system. The operating system is not  important when it comes to BIOS updates, but this option will give you a list of all drivers for your PC and your OS, so you can download them as well if you need any.

Once you’ve downloaded the bios update file, unzip it and rename it to 1000H.ROM and copy the file to a CD/DVD or to a USB drive.

Needless to say, plug in the power adapter, you definitely don’t want to lose power while upgrading BIOS.

Plug in the USB drive or an external CD/DVD drive with a disk containing 1000.ROM file and reboot. When you see the EeePC setup screen (grey) that prompts you to press F2 if you want to enter setup, press Alt+F2.

The setup will scan any attached storage devices for the .ROM file and once it’s found it will start the upgrade process. The upgrade takes about 2-3 minutes and at the end you’re asked to press the power button to restart the computer.

That’s it, as easy as it gets.