Andrew Connell

Another MCE update... if it's not one thing...

It’s something else… isn’t it always that way? Well I fixed my video issue. Ends up I was fighting with the ATI Control Center, a special app you can get with the latest Catalyst v5.10 drivers that’s suppose to make it easier to manage your ATI card’s settings. I was having such a fit with it. In my research trying to troubleshoot my video issue (where the right & bottom part of the screen was getting cropped off when viewing on a TV & the video was only coming out in black & white), I saw many screenshots of people referring to the dialog with all the tabs when they went DISPLAY SETTINGS | SETTINGS tab | ADVANCED button. I didn’t have that because once you clicked ADVANCED, you got a single tab that said you had to launch the ATI Control Center. So, I decided to uninstall the Control Center and reinstall the v5.10 Catalyst drivers WITHOUT the Control Center. A reboot later, I now had all the card’s advanced tabs in the dialog. With a click here and there, I was easily able to find what I couldn’t find in the Control Center and fix my video issues!...

It’s something else… isn’t it always that way?

Well I fixed my video issue. Ends up I was fighting with the ATI Control Center, a special app you can get with the latest Catalyst v5.10 drivers that’s suppose to make it easier to manage your ATI card’s settings. I was having such a fit with it. In my research trying to troubleshoot my video issue (where the right & bottom part of the screen was getting cropped off when viewing on a TV & the video was only coming out in black & white), I saw many screenshots of people referring to the dialog with all the tabs when they went DISPLAY SETTINGS | SETTINGS tab | ADVANCED button. I didn’t have that because once you clicked ADVANCED, you got a single tab that said you had to launch the ATI Control Center. So, I decided to uninstall the Control Center and reinstall the v5.10 Catalyst drivers WITHOUT the Control Center. A reboot later, I now had all the card’s advanced tabs in the dialog. With a click here and there, I was easily able to find what I couldn’t find in the Control Center and fix my video issues!

But now, another issue. In my last post, I mentioned I got my Bluetooth keyboard+mouse combo working. Well, now they aren’t. I can see the keyboard is still listed as a Bluetooth device, but no matter what I press, nothing comes up. As for the mouse, when I add it as a device, it will get added (the PC won’t pickup the input when I move it around or anything), but once I close & reopen the dialog for the Bluetooth devices, the mouse is gone. Just doesn’t “stick”. I’ve scoured newsgroups, but unfortunately Microsoft hardware isn’t much of a popular group apparently. I really want to get this resolved before I put it in the living room as a wired connection isn’t an option. I tried ripping all the Bluetooth stuff out by the roots as described in the Microsoft KB article Q811805 , but no luck there.

Usually I subscribe to the “blogs are for publishing, newsgroups are for questions” school, but I’ll make one exception. If you know how to troubleshoot Bluetooth issues, I could really use some help here.

Andrew Connell
Developer & Chief Course Artisan, Voitanos LLC. | Microsoft MVP
Written by Andrew Connell

Andrew Connell is a web developer with a focus on Microsoft Azure & Microsoft 365. He’s received Microsoft’s MVP award every year since 2005 and has helped thousands of developers through the various courses he’s authored & taught. Andrew’s the founder of Voitanos and is dedicated to delivering industry-leading on-demand video training to professional developers. He lives with his wife & two kids in Florida.