Tag Archives: remove

Orange removes broadband Fair Use Policy

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Long time readers of GEEK! may know the Orange complaint I made in late 2009. In the past, I’ve also written to Ofcom and complained about the vague FUP that gave no details as to what they defined as “unlimited”.

Well, finally, Orange have removed their FUP and now supposedly no longer limits the amount of data people can download. Orange claim that they now offer totally unlimited downloads.

Previously, Orange would contact you if they believed you were using an excessive amount of data in a given month. If they believed that you were not taking action following their warnings, they would throttle your connection to almost unusable speeds during peak periods until they were satisfied that you had changed your ways.

I love what they’ve written though: “Some of the other broadband providers out there track and limit your speed if you reach a certain amount of data, we don’t.” Of course, they would know that – because they used to be one of the few providers that actually did it!

Remove Sky Player channels from Windows 7 Media Center

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If you’re like me and get really annoyed by the Sky Player channels in the new Windows 7 Media Center, you’ll be pleased to know I’ve worked out how to get rid of them.

Simply right-click on each Sky Player Channel in the TV Guide, and click Disable channel. This will remove it from the guide and stop it showing up.

I suppose the service is only really useful if a) you’re a full Sky subscriber and b) you have unlimited broadband bandwidth. I have neither so it is useless to me!

Mininova torrent site tracked down and destroyed!

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Mininova, one of the biggest file sharing torrent sites, has recently been broken down by various legal agencies.

Following a court procedure, the owners of the Mininova website have been ordered to take down all trackers that are related to any copyrighted content or face a multi million euro fine.

Mininova has followed this procedure and has removed all illegal content. Just to make sure, I did a search through their site for various CDs to see if the rumours were really true. They are. Everything is gone, and the admins of Mininova say it is now a “content distribution” service.

If you want my honest opinion, this is a good day for many companies and vendors. This will have eaten into a large proportion of file sharing piracy, which is great, because I have always been against it. I find it really depressing that people don’t want to support the artists that make their music.

Anyway let’s not go onto a miserable topic about P2P and illegal file sharing…

Hopefully this is the start of the future. I really hope that eventually we can minimize piracy because it’s an awful thing. It’s exactly the same as shoplifting – and would you have the courage to do that?

Sadly, I don’t think piracy can ever be truly stopped, but the more we can close down on it, the better.

Removing visualizations in Windows Media Player 11

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Ok, so I was bored with the visualizations in Windows Media Player 11 and I decided to get some new ones from Microsoft. However, now I’m bored of those and don’t want them anymore, I went ahead into the Windows Media Player settings, into the Plugins tab, and what? The remove button on the Visulizations tab is greyed out. Why?

Anyhow, we all know that you can always get something done in Windows with a bit of determination, so I did a quick Google search, and found someone with exactly the same problem. After a short period of searching around on the internet, I have a solution.

So, the first thing you need to do is determine the location of the visualizations. This should be at:

C:/Program Files/Windows Media Player/Visualizations/ (replacing C with your hard drive letter)

However, in some cases they can be found at:

C:/Program Files/Windows Media Player/Visualisations/ (replacing C with your hard drive letter)

Once you’ve found them, you need to use regsvr in Command Prompt to remove any registry keys associated with the visualization. You may need to run Command Prompt as an administrator (right click Command Prompt in start menu > accessories, and click Run as Adminstrator). Before doing this, make sure Windows Media Player is closed and that the wmplayer.exe program is not running in Task Manager.

Once it’s closed, you need to open Command Prompt (run “cmd” without quotes) and type the following. 

CD C:/Program Files/Windows Media Player/Visualizations/

Again replacing the C with your drive letter. If that doesn’t work (a directory is not found) try:

CD C:/Program Files/Windows Media Player/Visualisations/

Here is a screenshot of what you should have in command prompt so far:

administrator__c__windows_system32_cmdexe_1be953d0d5304a31b8da15e8ef10fa4e

Once you are in the correct directory, type “DIR” without quotes to get a directory listing.

administrator__c__windows_system32_cmdexe_2dbb0c29047547fca44c7657b71ea177Now, knowing which visualization dll you want to remove you need to unregister it. For the purposes of this demo, I’m going to call the visualization I want to remove “visualization.dll” but you’ll need to use the .dll you want to remove. 

So, type into the Command Prompt you have open:

regsvr32 -u “C:/Program Files/Windows Media Player/Visualizations/visualization.dll

or if that doesn’t work

regsvr32 -u “C:/Program Files/Windows Media Player/Visualisations/visualization.dll

replacing the visualization.dll with the .dll of the file you want to remove.

You’re probably thinking wow this ain’t half complicated. Well it seems like that at first, but after a while you get the hang of it.

Anyway, moving on. Once the .dll is unregistered, you just need to open the location of the .dll in Windows Explorer, and then delete the .dll. Once that is done, that should be it. 

Open up Windows Media Player, and check in the Visualizations list to see whether the visualization has gone. It shouldn’t be on the list.

You’ll need to do this for every visualization you want to remove. At first it may seem like this may take forever, but seriously, once you’ve done one it’ll become very easy and quick.