Thursday, August 9, 2012

Getting rediculous amounts of free space (8+ GB) with SugarSync

Ahem, and now for a shameless plug in an effort to reap the benefits with everyone else.

I recently discovered SugarSync after my sister used it to share photos of her twins with the rest of the family, in a nutshell it allows you to share files and have them instantly uploaded to your personal online storage and any computer running the SugarSync software (including friends you invited to share your folder with). DropBox does something similar (and only gives 2 GB free), but I've found I like SugarSync better and you get more space. Not much of a cheat or hack for SugarSync, but the results are still good!

The breakdown:

5 GB: Opening a Free Account

+500 MB: Getting a free account through a referral...
**STOP! If you sign up for a 30 GB or more plan (they start at $4.99/month, or $49.99/year) right when you first sign up after clicking on the referral link you can get an additional +10 GB of space that's yours to keep even if you switch back to free after the first 2 months (30 day trial + 1 paid month)** - FAQ

+625 MB: For completing the getting started tasks

+250 MB: For completing the getting started "game" on Android or iOS, follow this article

+2 GB: Limited time offer, send a referral link to 20 of your contacts in Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail. They don't have to actually join.

+500 MB: Everyone who joins using your referral, whether by email invite or link gives you this bonus. Free users are capped at getting an additional 32 GB this way, but paid users have no limit to the amount of extra space they can get (and keep).

=8.34 GB without any accepted referrals.

Only the files you own count against your quota unlike DropBox, so share folders with your friends! All the links to sign up are referral links intentionally, don't be afraid to use them, they benefit us both ;)

Saturday, June 30, 2012

ASUS Xonar Essence STX suddenly not working

Argh, so I bought a new ASUS Xonar Essence STX pci-e sound card so I could have Dolby Digital Live with my cheapo 5.1 surround sound system that only has one optical input (currently used by the tv out) and one coaxial digital in. Today it stopped working after I installed the drivers for my Creative E-MU Xmidi 1x1 saying windows cannot verify the digital signature. No matter how many times I tried reinstalling the drivers.

Here's what finally worked on Windows 7 x64:

Download the drivers from the website and extract them somewhere
Have the ASUS drivers installed like normal using setup.exe
Reboot if you needed to reinstall them
Open device manager, select the sound card (it should have a yellow ! by it)
Right click and choose uninstall
Check the box that say remove the driver as well
Reboot
Open device manager, select the sound card (unknown multimedia device or similar)
Right click and select update driver
Select browse my computer for driver software
Navigate to the location where you extracted the drivers and open WIN7\SoftwareDriver\driver
Continue installing the driver, if a box comes up asking to trust the developer check always trust
Reboot again for good measure and make sure it works.