Saturday, August 9, 2008

ASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA BIOS Error 6B38



I bought ASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA motherboard a little over a year ago and it was a kind of baby step upgrading at first. I was going to upgrade to Core 2 Duo with baby steps so I could use DDR400 ram and my Ati Radeon 9800 Pro AGP graphics card with my new setup. This motherboard even had SATA connectors so I could install new hardware as well so it was a perfect motherboard for my needs.

Soon after I hooked up everything and the machine was running smoothly with two SATA 160GB hard drives in RAID-0 configuration and with AGP Ati graphics card the computer halted at BIOS error 6B38. It happend right after the memory check and I couldn't get to BIOS or anything. I tried to search the net for solution but nothing. I even contacted ASRock through their web page for a fix but they never answered and there was no answer for this 6B38 error. I blogged that error at my other blog and realized that there is still no solution to that error what the motherboard gives as of today.

That's why I'm writing this blog post about a year old motherboard. I got it working eventually but it has come up occasionally every now and then.

The solution is to shut down your computer and unplugit from the wall socket.

The normal shutdown from the power button is not wnough. You have to at least use the power button in your power supply if there is one. The easiest is to unplug the computer from the wall power socket for few seconds. After the complete power down the motherboard should rise up and boot normally.

I haven't figured what causes this event but I guess it has something to with USB hard drives or USB flash disks that are connected to your computer while it boots up. You could remove USB drives and disks before you turn your ASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA moteherboard up.

Hope this blog post helps all the people suffering from this odd hang up and if you still have proplems with it give us a comment below.

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

How to change incoming email message sound in Windows Mail or Outlook Express




You know that beeping sound you get when new email messages arrive to your inbox in Windows Mail at Windows Vista or Outlook Express at Windows XP? You can easily change that sound what ever please you or turn it off for good.

In Windows Vista just head... (Windows XP is almost the same, just locate Sounds from control panel)
  • Start
  • Control Panel
  • Hardware and Sound
  • Sound --> Change system sounds
  • locate New Mail Notification from the list and select it
  • then you can change it from the Sounds list or turned off selecting the first choice (None)
  • or... you can browse what ever sound file from your hard drive (must be in .WAV format)
That's it. You can change all kinds off sound from that same Sounds tab while you are there.
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