Those trying to record on systems with 4GB or more of RAM with an Audigy 2 ZS, possibly X-Fi and other models too, have probably come across the problem with distortion, noise, or choppy sound (like talking through a fan). This affects the microphone, line-in and also 'what u hear', important for capturing audio that is currently being played.

The trouble stems from Creative's drivers not being entirely 64-bit compatible, Creative have no date for any fix to be implemented, and haven't even announced if they're working on any such fix.

As it does require 4GB or more RAM for this problem to show up, it only affects 64-bit systems. For those with similar issues on 32-bit systems, this is not a workaround.

There's a few different options, none of which are particular pleasant. First up, you can pull RAM out of your system, or enable a memory hole feature if your BIOS supports one, enabling the memory hole in the BIOS will cause your RAM to max out at around 3GB.

However there is an easier solution, that doesn't require you to open your case like removing the RAM physically but it does still require a reboot. This involves setting the operating system itself to set the maximum amount of RAM.

Press Start, type in msconfig and press enter.

This will launch the System Configuration tool. You'll want to click on the Boot tab, then click on Advanced, and set the maximum memory to a number under 4096. Unfortunately setting it to a figure like 4095 in practice will probably limit you back down to about 3GB as it looks like it disables an entire channel on the RAM.

Then reboot, record what you need to, then when you want your RAM back, just undo the change and reboot again. Not the best workaround but it'll have to do until Creative fox their drivers.

More than a few people seem to be struggling with this problem. I didn't have much difficulty deciding however, back in February I awaited the Mobile World Conference, a few hours after Microsoft's keynote I ordered the HD2.

Don't get me wrong, the WP7S is nice. It does have some killer features, such as Xbox Live integration and Zune integration which hopefully will mean Zune Social and Zune Pass (fairly priced) will become available in the UK later this year as I've been whinging about lately. It'll also help application developers raise the quality of their applications by not having to write for the lowest common denominator as Microsoft have set pretty high minimum guidelines for the device specifications they'll be more willing to take advantage of the improved performance that WP7S will offer.

But the HD2 is here now, well has been here for 6 months in Europe, with Windows Mobile 6.5, perfectly respectable and with the HTC TouchFLO 3D, now called Sense interface highly usable with a finger. And with some pretty nice specifications.

The good:

• Fast, that 1Ghz Snapdragon is nice.
• Nice screen 800x480 pretty standard for WM devices over the last 18 months or so, but puts iPhone users in their place.
• Flash support in Internet Explorer (although not Opera the default browser).
• The ability to install applications from any source. :-) The Marketplace is good, but only lists a tiny fraction of the software available for WM.
• Ability to tweak the hell out of the phone to get it exactly the way you want it.
• And of course always the potential for juicy ROM updates in the future, including to WP7S *fingers crossed*.

It's got some bad bits as well. Performance is pretty poor in the SMS client. And doesn't have a hardware keyboard (I do sometimes miss my Touch Pro).

WP7S on the other hand:

• Won't have copy and paste on release, I don't use it much but I know when I happen to need it, I'll be swearing.
• Doesn't have full multi-tasking, although the limited multi-tasking it does have is superior to the iPhone.
• Application performance is up in the air considering its Silverlight based, developers might want to write natively for the hardware but don't currently have that option.
• Uncertainties over application distribution, will the Marketplace be an absolute monopoly, or can I still dump a .cab on their and install it?

Of course it's got the good stuff, Xbox Live, Zune, Super-swish UI that isn't trying to be an iPhone clone, like Android seems to be, no offence but surely there's something a bit better than a boring grid full of icons? Oh yeah WP7S' interface.

So that's why I went for the HD2 back in February, I did actually wait until February so I could check out the WP7S announcement and weigh things up instead of just ordering one in November like Catherine did. Plus Windows Mobile being Windows Mobile, there's always a good chance of WP7S being made available unofficially for the HD2. :-)

Longtime readers will know I am a huge fan of WorldWide Telescope. To put it mildly, WorldWide Telescope is the best astronomy program ever. If I had this when I was a kid I would never turn it off, it would autostart with the computer and I would be constantly looking at everything.

Anyway as you may recall a Silverlight based web version of WorldWide Telescope was released last year. It wasn't as well featured as the Windows client, nor anywhere near as fast. But it covered the basics. Essentially that's what has been intergrated into the new Bing Maps.

What's really cool is if you're currently in Streetside view, turn on the WorldWide Telescope application, and look up, you see stars! The screenshots in this post are of me stood, virtually of course, along University Drive in Phoenix. You can scroll through time as well to see the stars as they would appear above that location.

You can zoom in too. Below showing the Andromeda galaxy, you can access all the additional images as well, I could view it in infra-red with just a click of a mouse using images from the Spitzer space telescope for example.

If you're not in Streetside view, it still works, you just lose the perspective of having the ground under your feet, being able to see the complete sky instead without it being blocked out by the Earth.

All in all, good stuff. The only thing I can really complain about is performance, unlike the Windows client, it doesn't have anywhere near the same sort of silky-smooth frame rate. So yes I would still recommend the Windows client. But its nice having the option in the new Bing Maps too.

Here's a video of it in action demonstrated by Blaise Aguera y Arcas at TED this year in addition to some of the other improvements in the new Bing Maps:

There's a lot of confusion going on out there. Increasingly it's more and more about issues related to DirectX. So much so that now I'm writing an update to the article I wrote almost 3 years ago now. That article advised people to install the latest DirectX end-user runtime if they encountered errors like d3dx9.dll is missing or not installed.

The confusion seems to stem from people running Windows Vista or Windows 7 and seeing that they have DirectX 10 or 11 installed, by way of the DirectX Diagnostic Tool.

DirectX 10 however represented a clean break from DirectX 9, essentially the two are on the system together. DirectX 10 and up handles all the new stuff and DirectX 9 provides all the backwards compatibility with previous versions.

It can be represented like this:

The DirectX team felt this was superior than bloating out DirectX 10 with all the old features nessasary to support ten years worth of games. Why do that when DirectX 9 would be on the system anyway and can achieve all of that?

The most recent example I came across, about 30 minutes ago. Had a user attempting to play Flight Simulator X, which returned the following error:

Flight Simulator cannot run because the version of Microsoft DirectX(R) installed on your computer is incompatible. Please reinstall DirectX9.0 by running Flight Simulator Setup, or download current version from www.microsoft.com/directx.

Nice and simple, and tells you exactly what to do. Go to the DirectX website, and grab the latest version. Doing that would solve the problem.

However, as people think they have DirectX 10 or 11 installed, they don't think they need to grab the update. Not realising that DirectX 9 has its own updates which may be required or that it has optional components which don't come installed on the system.

My advice for those with problems, just install DirectX. It doesn't matter what version you have, grab the update anyway. It won't break anything by installing it, it'll know what optional components are needed and which components need to be updated and update them.

For those installing a game, and are tempted to cancel the DirectX installer, just think for a second that maybe that installer is installing something the game needs to work.

HP released a video showing more of their Slate computer. It's presented entirely by someone from the Adobe Flash platform team interestingly enough.

So the key bit of new information from this video seems to be the Air application HP are using for an application launcher. I don't think that's been mentioned before, but it isn't that big news really. Like their multi-touch desktops they always have a specific front-end on them. I just hope they give the Slate 2GB of RAM.

The main point of the video essentially seems to be a long stab at what the iPad can't do. It mentions statistics like 85% of the top 100 websites use Flash, 75% of all video uses Flash. In addition Adobe estimate more than 70% of all casual games on the web are written in Flash. And obviously to anybody following along, none of that will work on the iPad.

It's good they're trying to communicate these facts, back when the iPad was announced the only thing media could say was how amazing it is, while quoting Steve Jobs saying it'll provide the best browsing experience on the planet - something a bit difficult to argue considering it doesn't support Flash. Obviously nobody from Apple plays games on Facebook, or Portal Forums so it seems.

I've been looking forward to Silent Hunter 5 for a while now as regular readers will know I am a bit of a submarine fan. Playing number 2 and 3 to death, for those wondering Silent Hunter 4 was set in the Pacific and in my opinion nothing could be more boring :-) Silent Number 5 when it was first announced was looking fantastic.

However a few months ago it was announced there would only be one submarine, a Type VII. Now I don't know about you, but I started my career as a U-Boat captain in a Type II before the start of the war, then to get a Type VIIB, and then a couple of years later to start longer range patrols in IX. Desperately trying to hang on until 1945 and with a bit of luck somehow manage to get the epic Type XXI, I could never survive long enough personally but it gave you a goal to try and achieve.

It was also announced the game would end in 1943. Say what?

Both of these facts diminished my interest. But not as much compared to what I heard last week. Ubisoft's new copy protection system that they've got coming down on their games this year has firmly squashed any intentions of getting this game close to release. May be I'll pick up a version when it's cheap somewhere. But I'm not getting it on release and not paying full whack for it, not when there's the possibility of the game not working half the time.

With this new copy protection scheme you're completely reliant on your internet connection to play, and Ubisoft's ability to maintain its servers. You need to stay connected to Ubisoft's servers or else you can't play. If you connection drops while playing you're kicked out to the main menu.

On the plus side there's no disc check. Or an activation limit. There's other cool things that I've been keen to get for a while, server-side saved games (ideally with a local cache but not in this case) and config. Like some of the Steam cloud stuff we've been seeing lately, so that's all cool. But then of course there's the bad things...

My opinion has always been that copy protection systems are pointless and that they only inconvenience your paying customers. After all the people who pirate it don't have to worry about the copy protection systems, they've already been ripped out.

If a game does have to require some form of copy protection, in my opinion these days it's reasonable to have an install-time activation over the internet. However, and importantly, your activation count should reset over time. Like it does with Windows, you can activate it once, try again the next day on a different computer and not be able to. But try again in a few months time and it'll activate again. This is more reasonable and takes into account people getting new computers.

There is of course always the danger that the company will go under, which is why they should always have a patch developed to remove the activation either at the end of the supported life, or if the company is about to go under. Ubisoft have however said that they will release a patch if and when the online service is shut down so that "core" gameplay remains unaffected.

Discs checks nowadays are also getting less viable as people start having computers without optical drives. And let's face it, it's annoying.

A Steam-like system is borderline usable. However the one big issue with Steam is you're required to be online to put Steam into an offline mode. Meaning if your internet connection dies and you want to play a game. You're screwed. A big issue for me as I'm much more likely to waste time playing games if the internet goes down.

Something like Fallout 3 is a good example of copy protection done right. It checks the disc on install. And then if you want all the cool stuff like being able to sign-in to Xbox/Games for Windows Live you need to use the Live access key and be connected the internet. But the game doesn't suddenly break if you lose your connection.

The minimum I would like to see Ubisoft change would be scrapping the whole booting you to the menu when the connection is lost. If the connection goes down, fine, keep playing, cache the save games locally until the connection is restored. That way most people at least won't notice if their connections dies. That's my biggest issue with this. Nothing would be worse than preparing to strike at a convoy you've been following for 3 days and losing all your progress because the connection dropped briefly.

Ideally though. Stop bothering with DRM, too much money is wasted developing it, it wastes more money in support costs and just hassles paying customers, and let's be honest. It doesn't stop people from pirating.

Silent Hunter 5, aside from the one submarine type and the game ending in 1943 and the obvious questionable DRM issues, looks like a fantastic game, and it is sad that so many people will not be buying it, at least on release due to the restrictions that Ubisoft have placed upon it, but we have to send a message saying that we aren't going to accept this level of copy protection.