Dell Ultrasharp Monitor too bright?

Most Dell customers are calling Dell Technical support complaining that their monitors are too bright, even though the monitor's brightness settings are set to zero. And even if the technical support would replace the monitor, still same issue.

I've tested Dell UltraSharp 2408WFP, one thing I do noticed is, since it's ultrasharp, the picture is really crisp and yes, bright.

I've tried to see it for myself. Here's the specs of the computer I used.

MSI GX620.

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo P8400

Memory: 4GB DDR2, 800

Video Card: Nvidia 9600MGT

OS: Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit

The results. The monitor's brightness settings are set to zero, and still it's too bright.

The thing that i found is, most video cards are not designed for ultrasharp monitors, so technically the brightness settings of the video card is set to 50%.

I tried to lower the video card brightness settings to zero then adjusted the brightness settings of the monitor to my preferred settings, then viola, everything's pleasurable to my eyes.

All video cards have independent brightness settings.

For Nvidia you can access the Nvidia controll panel

For ATI you can access the Catalyst Control Center

For Intel you can access the display settings.

Hope these would help you. Because replacing the monitor won't fix the issue, since the monitor is working as designed.

A Quick Look at ATI 5870

The battle continues between ATI and NVIDIA.

With Nvidia's GTX 295, ATI's 4870x2 was far left behind gaming graphics card market.

ATI's big come back? Sept. 23, 2009.

I know my blog is a bit late. kindda busy at work. But anyways, i was able to get my hands on this monster card. and I can say, as soon as ATI would release the x2 version of this monster. Nvidia's GTX295 will be eaten alive. But I don't think Nvidia would give the crown that easy.

I saw in other forums that Nvidia is now developing their 300 series video cards.

Here's the quick peek on ATI's 5870 features and specifications.

• Get unrivalled visual quality and intense gaming performance and for today and tomorrow with support for Microsoft® DirectX® 11
• With ATI Eyefinity technology get the ultimate immersive gaming experience innovative ‘wrap around’ multi-display capabilities
• Tap into the massive parallel processing power of your GPU with ATI Stream technology and tackle demanding tasks like video transcoding with incredible speed
• Feel the brute strength of more than 2 teraFLOPS plowing through the most demanding games
• Experience the speed, responsiveness and performance of ultra-high bandwidth GDDR5 memory
• ATI CrossFireX™ technology with multi-GPU support offers advanced scalability

• 2.15 billion 40nm transistors
• TeraScale 2 Unified Processing Architecture
  • 1600 Stream Processing Units
  • 80 Texture Units
  • 128 Z/Stencil ROP Units
  • 32 Color ROP Units
• GDDR5 interface with 153.6 GB/sec of memory bandwidth
• PCI Express 2.1 x16 bus interface
• DirectX® 11 support
  • Shader Model 5.0
  • DirectCompute 11
  • Programmable hardware tessellation unit
  • Accelerated multi-threading
  • HDR texture compression
  • Order-independent transparency
• OpenGL 3.2 support¹
• Image quality enhancement technology
  • Up to 24x multi-sample and super-sample anti-aliasing modes
  • Adaptive anti-aliasing
  • 16x angle independent anisotropic texture filtering
  • 128-bit floating point HDR rendering
• ATI Eyefinity multi-display technology^2,3
  • Three independent display controllers
    • Drive three displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls, and video overlays
  • Display grouping
    • Combine multiple displays to behave like a single large display
• ATI Stream acceleration technology
  • OpenCL 1.0 compliant
  • DirectCompute 11
  • Double precision floating point processing support
  • Accelerated video encoding, transcoding, and upscaling^4,5
    • Native support for common video encoding instructions
• ATI CrossFireX™ multi-GPU technology⁶
  • Dual, triple, and quad GPU scaling
  • Dual-channel bridge interconnect
• ATI Avivo HD Video & Display technology⁷
  • UVD 2 dedicated video playback accelerator
  • Advanced post-processing and scaling⁸
  • Dynamic contrast enhancement and color correction
  • Brighter whites processing (blue stretch)
  • Independent video gamma control
  • Dynamic video range control
  • Support for H.264, VC-1, and MPEG-2
  • Dual-stream 1080p playback support^9,10
  • DXVA 1.0 & 2.0 support
  • Integrated dual-link DVI output with HDCP¹¹
    • Max resolution: 2560x1600¹²
  • Integrated DisplayPort output
    • Max resolution: 2560x1600¹²
  • Integrated HDMI 1.3 output with Deep Color, xvYCC wide gamut support, and high bit-rate audio
    • Max resolution: 1920x1200¹²
  • Integrated VGA output
    • Max resolution: 2048x1536¹²
  • 3D stereoscopic display/glasses support¹³
  • Integrated HD audio controller
    • Output protected high bit rate 7.1 channel surround sound over HDMI with no additional cables required
    • Supports AC-3, AAC, Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio formats
• ATI PowerPlay™ power management technology⁷
  • Dynamic power management with low power idle state
  • Ultra-low power state support for multi-GPU configurations
• Certified drivers for Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP

Speeds & Feeds

• Engine clock speed: 850 MHz
• Processing power (single precision): 2.72 TeraFLOPS
• Processing power (double precision): 544 GigaFLOPS
• Polygon throughput: 850M polygons/sec
• Data fetch rate (32-bit): 272 billion fetches/sec
• Texel fill rate (bilinear filtered): 68 Gigatexels/sec
• Pixel fill rate: 27.2 Gigapixels/sec
• Anti-aliased pixel fill rate: 108.8 Gigasamples/sec
• Memory clock speed: 1.2 GHz
• Memory data rate: 4.8 Gbps
• Memory bandwidth: 153.6 GB/sec
• Maximum board power: 188 Watts
• Idle board power: 27 Watts

Windows Update Causing STOP Error 0x0000007E

Windows update KB973879 has been pulled from Windows Update and is being worked on.

For now simple system restore should fix the issue, else uninstall this update by booting to safe mode.

Issue: System blue screens either when disconnecting a USB device, using safely remove hardware or when system is resuming from standby/idle state.

Workaround: Uninstalling windows update KB973879 and hiding this update from available update is currently seem to be fixing the issue.

In case if removing update KB973879 doesn’t fix the issue, we need to remove remaining two updates KB970653 and KB972036.

How do I change the liquid crystal display (LCD) language on my Dell Inkjet All-In-One Printer?

How do I change the liquid crystal display (LCD) language on my Dell Inkjet All-In-One Printer?

Reset the language on 922 printer.

If a language other than your preference is displayed on the LCD of the printer, follow the below steps to change the language.

• Power on the printer.
• Press the Cancel button to stop the LCD from scrolling.
• Press and hold both the Power button and Cancel button for 10 to 15 seconds until you see For English.... on the printer LCD.
• Use the Up Arrow button and the Down Arrow button to navigate to the desired language and press Menu to select it.

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Reset the language on the 924 printer.

To reset the printer language using the menu, perform the following steps:

• Power Cycle the printer to make sure you are at the default menu position.
• Press the Power button and the up arrow simultaneously when powering on.
• Press the arrow keys until English is indicated, then press Menu to save the changes.

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Select the printer language on the Dell Photo All-In-One 926 printer.

To select the language on the Dell Photo All-In-One 926 printer, follow these steps:

• Completely power down the printer, wait 15 seconds, then power it back on.
• Press the Right Arrow button three times.
• Press the Select Button.
• Press the Right Arrow button four times.
• Press the Select button.
• Press the Right Arrow button three times.
• Press the Select button.
• Use the Left/Right Arrows to display the language you prefer.
• Press the Select button.
• Press the Back button to get back to the main menu.

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Reset the language on the 942 printer.

To reset the printer language using the menu, perform the following steps:

• Power Cycle the printer to make sure you are at the default menu position.
• Press the Menu button.
• The Menu sub menus appear.
• Press the down arrow 12 times to reach the Language sub menu.
• Press the right or left arrow until English is indicated, then press Select (the check button).

---

Reset the LCD language display on the 944 printer.

To reset the printer language using the menu, perform the following steps:

• Power Cycle the printer to make sure you are at the default menu position.
• Press Down 4 times, press Select (the check button).
• Press Down 1 time, and press left or right until you get to the correct language setting.

To reset the printer language by clearing the printer settings, perform the following steps:

• Pressing Menu and the Up arrow at the same time.
• It switches to USB Serial Number (no matter which language is set on the LCD).
• Press Down 6 times, then press Select on Clean NVRAM.
• Once it says Success, power cycle the printer and select the correct language.

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Select the printer language on the Dell All-in-One 946 printer.

To change the default language on the Dell 946 All-in-One printer, perform the following steps:

• Turn off the printer by pressing the Power button.
• Press and hold the Cancel and Start buttons and press the Power button to turn the printer back on.
• Continue to hold down the Cancel and Start buttons for another 10 seconds after you release the Power button.
  The display will change from the logo and ink levels and eventually present the Initial Setup screen. This screen has three lines and the first is the Language selection.
• Use the Left/Right arrow buttons to select your preferred language.
• Select the country and input the time and date.
• Using the Power button, turn the printer off and then back on.
  Your chosen language will now be the default language.

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Reset the language on the 962 printer.

To reset the printer language using the menu, perform the following steps:

• Disconnect the power to the printer, wait 10 to 15 seconds and then reconnect the power. Make sure you are at the default menu position.
• Press Menu 13 times, press Select (the check button).
• Press the arrow keys until English is indicated, then press Select (the check button) to save the changes

---

Reset the language on the 964 printer.

To reset the printer language using the menu, perform the following steps:

• Power Cycle the printer to make sure you are at the default menu position.
• Press the down arrow 4 times until Setup is indicated (bottom option of the first screen) and press the button (check mark or Select). The Setup sub menus appear.
• Press the button (check mark or Select) to select the first option Change Printer Default Settings.
  The Printer Default Settings menu appears.
• Press the down arrow once until Language is indicated, then press the right or left arrow buttons until your preferred language is indicated.
• Press the button (check mark or Select) to select your preferred language as the printer language.

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Select the printer language on the Dell All-in-One 966 printer.

To change the default language on the Dell 966 All-in-One printer, perform the following steps:

• Turn off the printer by pressing the Power button.
• Press and hold the Cancel and Start buttons and press the Power button to turn the printer back on.
  Continue to hold down the Cancel and Start buttons for another 10 seconds after you release the Power button.
  The display changes from the logo and ink levels and eventually displays the Initial Setupscreen. This screen has three lines, and the first is the Language selection.
• Use the left/right arrow buttons to select your preferred language.
• Select the country and input the time and date.
• Using the Power button, turn the printer off and then back on.
  Your chosen language is now the default language.

As an alternative to the above method, you can simply change the language through the normal menus by performing the following steps:

• Turn off the printer power, wait 15 seconds, then power the printer back on.
• Press the down arrow four times.
• Press the Select button.
• Press the down arrow one time.
• Press the Select button.
• Press the down arrow two times.
  This highlights the Language selection window.
• Press the left/right arrow buttons until your chosen language is highlighted.
• Press the Select button.

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Change the language on the A940 printer operator panel.

To change the language on the A940 printer operator panel, follow these steps:

• Turn off the printer, wait for 10-15 seconds, then turn the printer back on.
• Press the Option button a total of fourteen (14) times.
  The display now shows the printer language.
• Use the Left/Right Arrow buttons to change the printer language until it displays the preferred language.
• Press the Select button.

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Change the language on the A960 printer operator panel.

To change the language on the A960 printer operator panel, follow these steps:

• Turn off the printer, wait for 10-15 seconds, then turn the printer back on.
• Press the Option button a total of thirteen (13) times.
  The display now shows the printer language.
• Use the Left/Right Arrow buttons to change the printer language until it displays the preferred language.
• Press the Select button.

Dealing with WGA Tray and WGA Notifier. (Your copy of Windows is not Genuine)

Dealing with WGA Tray and WGA Notifier. (Your copy of Windows is not Genuine)

The new Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage Notifier was released to Microsoft Windows Update and also to the Microsoft Download Center in Knowledge Base Article 905474 on June 27th, 2006. This new release fixes the issues with the release issued earlier this month. If you encounter any customer with WGA issues please make sure they download and install this newest release of the WGA Notifier.

In extreme cases where the customer is adamant about removing or disabling WGA, the following Microsoft Knowledge Base Article is available:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/921914/en-us

*** If the suggested steps above did not work, perform the steps indicated below: ***

If the authentication had failed or similar. For that you have to reregister certain dll files in the operating system to resolve. Here is what you do :

Start >> Run >> cmd

Type Regsvr32 followed by the name of the dll below and hit enter to register the DLL. You have to register all the dlls mentioned below to resolve WGA Authentication issues.

Register the following dlls : (eg. regsvr32 file.dll)

softpub.dll

Wintrust.dll

Initpki.dll

Dssenh.dll

Rsaenh.dll

Gpkcsp.dll

Sccbase.dll

Slbcsp.dll

Mssip32.dll

Cryptdlg.dll

Then go to Start >> All Programs >> Accessories >> System Tools >> Activate Windows.

Make sure that the firewalls are disabled and pop up blockers are disabled. Let the Activate Windows module to run and it will activate the copy. Restart and the issue should be resolved.

*** OR ***

command prompt : NET STOP WUAUSERV

command prompt : NET STOP BITS

download: http://tinyurl.com/o3cpu - this is the patch

download: http://tinyurl.com/9ggd3 - this is to check validation of windows - It will bring up a screen stating windows is genuine

command prompt : NET START WUAUSERV

command prompt : NET START BITS

Note : BITS refers to Background Intelligent Transfer Service