The most powerful man of the Internets!

I often wonder: who is the most powerful man on the Internet? Who can change the landscape of several sites at will? Who has a following amongst the high and might, elites of the web? Whoz work has the most far reaching consequences?

The Answer is very clear. It is Randall Munroe!



For those of you, who sadly don’t know, who he is, I say, go to http://xkcd.com/ and spend an hour or so. You will come out as a fan. I have been his fan for a long time now, and have even posted his comics here a couple of times.

If you still think, that I am wrong, let me provide conclusive proof.

On 12th Jan, 2008, XKCD published this comic:

Within a day or two, the results got highly skewed. The results for “died in a blogging accident” rose from 2 on that day to over 6 million today. Read more about it, at: http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2008/01/13/the-xkcd-data-died-in-a-blogging-accident/
He is one of the most popular authors amongst Geeks, and his talk at Google is a treat to watch.

But now, he has outdone himself. He recently published this comic:

Now the guys at Youtube , went and implemented this suggestion. Wow! Just Wow! You should check his reaction at: Youtube Audio Preview.

Isn’t he the greatest?

Drivers for the SIGMATEL STAC 9228 C-Major HD Audio, on a dell Inspiron 1420

This is a documentation post, and may not be useful, to my regular readers. They are requested to ignore it.

I have been breaking my head over this small problem, for the past two days, and finally found a way, to solve the Issue. I though that I should document it here, since many others are still facing the problem.
So here is the History. I got a Dell Inspiron 1420, with Vista installed on it. Since I wanted to run some programs that run properly on Xp only, I had to downgrade the System to Windows Xp (some might say, that Xp is actually an upgrade, instead of a downgrade, but that is a debate for another day).

So here is what I do:
1]Wipe the entire hardrive with GParted.
2]Install Windows Xp SP2 from an Orignal Media
3]Install the Windows SP3
4]Install the drivers, downloaded from the Dell site, one by one.

I got everything to work, except for the Audio.
After searching here and there, I found that a lot of people were facing the same problem. there were a couple of solutions at : http://forums.cnet.com/5208-7813_102-0.html?forumID=5&threadID=264247&messageID=2588300 and http://www.davidreedonline.com/wordpress/2007/08/03/installing-windows-xp-on-the-dell-inspiron-1420 But none of them helped. The Sigmatel company itself does not offer any drivers for download.

I gave up, and was about to reinstall Vista, so as to have a Dual Boot Machine. When I happend on to this question Experts-exchange (these people are unethical #%$&!@ of the highest order, and you won't get to see their answers, unless you have a referral from Google. So here is the cached copy of the question) at http://209.85.175.104/search?q=cache:LAi_EE9bgSAJ:www.experts-exchange.com/Software/System_Utilities/Drivers/Q_23511686.html+http://www.experts-exchange.com/Software/System_Utilities/Drivers/Q_23511686.html&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=in.

A guy called clutch23, gave a solution which worked for me.

Turns out that there is a bug with Windows, which is responsible for it. This has been documented as kb835221
As this Bug is applicable on to Xp SP1 and SP2, but not for SP3 (which is funny because, the bug is actually there even after SP3), the patch does not work for XP SP3.

So here is how I got the Audio to Work:
1]Uninstalled Xp SP3
2] Downloaded the driver from : http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&releaseid=R171789&SystemID=LATITUDE%20PRECISION%20M90&servicetag=&os=WW1&osl=en&deviceid=8907&devlib=0&typecnt=0&vercnt=3&catid=-1&impid=-1&formatcnt=1&libid=3&fileid=235761
3]Ran the Installer till it unzipped the setup, and then pressed Cancel
4]Went to the Unzipped Location
...\R171789\HDAQFE\win2k_xp\us
5]Run the kb835221.exe
6]Reboot
7]Then run the R171789\setup.exe - this time it found a driver and it worked!
8]Install Xp SP3

Now I have an up-to-date machine, which works perfectly. Hope that helps anyone who is searching for the solution.

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Please let me know, if this helped you out by commenting on is post.