Microsoft Equation Editor problem with system locale

http://help.wugnet.com/office/Modify-equations-Word-2007-ftopict1094894.html

I was facing similar problems with Office 2000/XP under Windows XP and Vista 32bit. Now I understand the problems. That is because I have set up System Local to use Simplified Chines to be able to display Chinese for some non-Unicode programs. After setting back the System Locale to English (Singapore or USA), equation editor can run again. I believe this applies to other version of Office as well (like 2003 and 2007).

Install XP on HP Compaq Presario V3619AU

There are many articles on installing XP on the HP/Compaq
laptops. The major problem seems to be the chipset,
graphics and sound card driver. Here are some good links
which works for our Presario V3619AU. YMMV.

General overview and dual boot.
http://forums.techguy.org/windows-vista/558994-how-install-xp-after-vista.html
http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/topic/installing-windows-xp-w-pre-existing-vista-on-hp-laptop/page/2

I used Vista's built-in Disk Manger to shrink the C: partition
and create another D: partition (the recovery partition will be
E: now. The I installed XP SP1 on the computer (better not
connect to Internet because of some bugs with XP SP1) and then
updated it to XP SP3. After that, we need to fight with various
driver issues.

Working drivers for chipsets and graphics.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=184457

I used the same Nvidia chipset driver and graphics driver
(NForce 630a+Gefore GO 6150 graphics) and it works for our
Compaq Presario 3619AU.

Nvidia Chipse driver
http://tinyurl.com/3ajgxy
Nvidia graphics driver
http://tinyurl.com//2q6ss4

Sound card was the worst for 3619AU (Connexant HD Audio). I
tried all kind of things to no avail. Finally got an Toshiba driver
and manually edited the INF file to get it working. Still it has
some bugs and occasionally noise comes out. Some people
have lucks with the HP Vista driver, not for us.

[EDIT in October 2008: finally solved the problem by using
the HP XP driver for other models but modifying the
INF files to add the IDs by copying the INF file
section from the Vista driver]

For most of the other things, HP/Compaq's Vista driver/software works
(wireless, card reader, bluetooth, DVD writer, etc). HP puts
the software in C:\SwSetup directory and that is a good thing.

For people who want a real XP based desktop/Notebook, the new
Atom based PCs will be a good option. For instance, I played
with Asus EEEbox and it was not slow at all running XP.

Acer M1641 Ubuntu 8.04 Shutdown Problem Solved

I could not find any BIOS updates to Acer M1641. Therefore I have to use "acpi=off pnpbios=off" option. There was still a problem. Reboot works. Shutdown does not work as it hangs.

Similar bugs were reported for Ubuntu 8.04.
1) https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/193125
2) http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=699506
3) http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=698972

The solution in the Launchpad bug report works.

This is certainly not an old PC and Vista 32bit SP1 works fine. However I tend to believe this is more an Acer Bios bug. Actually FreeBSD 7 hangs during startup. If I disabled ACPI in BIOS, FreeBSD 7 will complain about GPF (General Protection Fault) no matter which option I select for startup. If I enable ACPI in BIOS, it could not find the disk. So I could not run FreeBSD 7 at all with this new PC. So Ubuntu 8.04 is at least better than FreeBSD 7 in this aspect.

FreeBSD problem with Acer M1641 is reported here.
http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/FreeBSD/questions/2008-08/msg00806.html

Notes on 10-April-2009:
The latest kernel does not need the options any more for Ubuntu 8.04.

Samsung SCX-4200 Scannding and CUPS Printing Problem Finally Solved

It turns out that the USB cable is to blame. Changing to a better USB cable solved the Scanner I/O Hardware Error problem. Now I do not need to use the USB 1.1 Hub to force the scanner to work in the USB Full Speed mode.

This also solved the CUPS problem when use the Western Digital Mybook World as the printer server. We are using an image from a Chinese website (http://bbs.qzxx.com/thread-294-1-1.html). It has already done a good job and provide a nice web interface for managing the Mybook World. In CUPS, we need to explicitly enable “raw” printing for application/octet-stream. Please refer to the following two URLs for more information.

http://us3.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/CUPS-printing.html
http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2002-September/051879.html

Basically what we need to do is to edit /etc/cups/mime.convs and put in this line:
application/octet-stream application/vnd.cups-raw 0 -

Then we also need to install Samsung driver for the Windows Vista, XP and Linux client.