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Technorati Tags: Half Life 2, Orange Box, Valve, Steam, Out of Range, google, regedit

Technorati Tags: MSI Wind, Hackintosh, Synergy, OSX, dual boot

If you try to use a Japanese Keyboard with an English version of Windows XP the geniuses at Microsoft have designed it so that you will not be able to enter backslashes without messing with the Windows Registry Keys. Backslashes are used to access other PCs and servers on a windows network making this limitation very annoying.

You will need to make changes to the Windows registry and then reboot for this to work. Confirmed this fix works.

Copy and paste below in to notepad. Name the file WindowsXPKeyboardFix.reg

Double click the file to make changes to the registry and reboot. You can enter these changes manually and it will also work.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters]
“LayerDriver JPN”=”kbd106.dll”
“LayerDriver KOR”=”kbd101a.dll”
“OverrideKeyboardType”=dword:00000007
“OverrideKeyboardSubtype”=dword:00000000
“OverrideKeyboardIdentifier”=”PCAT_106KEY”
“PollingIterations”=dword:00002ee0
“PollingIterationsMaximum”=dword:00002ee0
“ResendIterations”=dword:00000003

If you can’t get it to work get a Mac or create a Hackintosh. See my article on how to get OSX running on a MSI Wind.

This link leads to the Windows support article that will walk you through how to change the settings so that the keys such as backslash will work properly on your Japanese keyboard and English Windows Vista.

If you try to use a Japanese Keyboard with an English version of Windows Vista the geniuses at Microsoft have designed it so that you will not be able to enter backslashes. Backslashes are used to access other PCs and servers on a windows network.

You will need to make multiple changes to the Windows registry and then reboot for this to work. Confirmed this fix works.

Windows Sucks and that includes Vista.

If you can’t get it to work get a Mac or create a Hackintosh. See my article on how to get OSX running on a MSI Wind.

There are other ways to get a  OSX running on a dual boot MSI Wind Hackintosh. This is just how I got it to work. OSX is pretty cool Windows does suck.

What You Will Need

1) MSI Wind
2) External USB DVD Drive
3) MSIWindosx86.iso Image burnt to CD. Find the image on any torrent site.
4) Windows XP Install Disc

These are the steps I used to get the dual boot Hackintosh working.

Step 1) Install Windows XP first. Using the Windows XP install Disc partition the hard drive in to two parts one for Windows and one for OSX. Install Windows XP normally.
Step 2) Once Windows is installed successfully quick format the Mac partition as NTFS. The drive should show up when you go to My Computer

Step 3) Install OSX. Boot from disc using the MSIWindosx86.iso image. Using the disc utility program erase and reformat the partition set up for your OSX install. Choose the Extended Journaled file system option and install the operating system.

Step 4) Boot from the MSIWindosx86.iso dvd again.
Click “utilities”.
Click “terminal”.
Type fdisk -u /dev/disk0   - That’s disk zero the number not disk O

Step 5) From now on the Darwin bootloader will load and if you don’t press anything OSX will load automatically. If you press a key then it will give you the option to choose your Windows partition or your OSX partition. That’s all there is to it.

Step 6) Download the OSX 10.5.5 and OSX 10.5.6 Upgrade package from Apple’s site. Since upgrading works fine you may as well upgrade to 10.5.6. Run the upgrade packages you shouldn’t have any problems getting to 10.5.6

Problems you will encounter after upgrading to 10.5.6.

1) Keyboard and Touchpad will not be working. You need to google around for 2 PS2 related kexts. Run them and the keyboard and touch pad will start working fine. They will usually even include an app for running kexts. For this steps you will need a separate USB mouse and keyboard which everybody would have.
2) The screen resolution will be wrong. Again google around for display kexts for upgrading to 10.5.6. They won’t be hard to find.  After you run the display kexts use the app DisplayConfigX to create the resolution 1024×600 at 60Hz resolution.
3) The headphone/microphone jack will not work. There is a hack that exists but you are forced to run it every time to get it to work. If you have to have it working for Skype or something. Just boot windows.
4) The built in camera will not work in Photo Booth there is currently no solution that I am aware of.
5) How to get the wireless working? There are unofficial drivers released by Ralink specifically for people running OSX on a Wind. One thing to note is there are more than one version of drivers  for the multiple generations of winds that are out there some have 160 GB of hard drive space, and b/g/n wirelss and others may have just b/g wirelss. Google around to find them and try one or the other if it’s not working

If you have any comments, suggestions or questions leave your comments about this post or email me at japannewstoday@gmail.com. I’ll help if I can.

Enjoy your Mac

Technorati Tags: dual boot, MSI Wind, Hackintosh

I tried out iPhoto for the Mac for organizing my picutres and I hated it. iPhoto sucks ass.

Try Picasa for Mac instead.

Reasons why iPhoto sucks…

1) iPhoto forces you to import the photos to the local hard drive before it will display them. If the photos are on an external hard drive you are forced to import.
2) Importing in iPhoto takes too long. Had about 7000 photos I wanted to import this will take you literally more than a day. No exaggeration.
3) iPhoto converts your photos in a way similar to the way iTunes converts MP3s before you can use them.

All the reasons why iPhoto sucks seem to apply to Aperture as well after trying both.

Reasons why Picasa is better…

1) You can keep your pictures on an external hard drive no forced importing.
2) No file conversion necessary
3) Picasa is free. iPhoto and Aperture are not
4) Adding photos to your library is much faster than iPhoto