Monday, February 24, 2014

Fixing Aspire 3680 - No sound on headphone jack

I have an old laptop laying around, an Acer Aspire 3680. It's been a thrusty companion for the years i used it. But about a year ago i replaced it with another cheap, slightly newer office spec laptop. And since then my Aspire has mainly been gathering dust altho it's occasionally booted linux, to avoid dual booting my main machines.


But now recently i found a use for this laptop as a Youtube watching station for my treadmill. And so i flushed my linux install and spun up Windows 7 on it. Installed drivers and all was good. Until i mounted it  by my treadmill and plugged it to the speakers with the 3.5mm jack.
... and nothing happened. No sound.

After reinstalling drivers, newer drivers and googling a bit i found the solution to be odd, but simple:
Simply putting the computer to sleep.
After waking it up again the audio jack will work just fine.

The headphone jack will continue to work untill you restart the computer. Then you will have to put it to sleep again in order to use the headphones again.

Way back when i used the laptop for work i never turned it off, just put it to sleep, so chances are i this issue has always have been there without me noticing.

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

How to force SQL Server 2012 to do what you want

SQL is a pain.

I've been hating on it ever since i first was forced to use it, about a year and a half ago.
I first started out working with MS Access, and while SQL Server 2012 only sucks about half as much, it's still a sore and painful experience.
Now one of the worst things about SQL Server 2012 is that by default it requires you to be 100% flawless in you database design. You're not allowed to change a single thing after deploying the database, and if you try, then you get this error:

And being a grade A noob at database management i assumed there was no way around this. So i have been redoing entire databases from scripts way to many times now. And i must admit that i got a bit mad when i found the solution to this problem ;)

Just go disable this error dialog in:
Tools -> Options -> Designers
And uncheck "Prevent saving changes that require table re-creation"
And voila! no more silly errors!