The Next America

Core 2 Duo and Media PCs

My new Media PC is great. Except it skips on recordings. Watching recorded programs in stop-motion animation is pretty bad.

The main reason appears to be processor power. With up to 4 simultaneous recordings (2 HD, 2 standard) this isn't completely unreasonable. The problem is that power maxes out at 50% because much of Windows/Media Center/Tuner drivers appear to only use one core. Which is definitely not something I thought of when purchasing my processor. I'm actually considering getting a cheap one-core processor to see if I get better performance.

During research though, I found the E4300 to be eminently overclockable. Even in my less than ideal Shuttle PC I got 10% easy already with more yet to come. Hopefully that will be enough to solve my problem until Microsoft/Hauppauge catch up.

How come there aren't any utilities to help analyze recorded files (post or during recording) for problems like this? Sounds like a moneymaker.

Building a Media PC

I'm 95% done with my new Media PC.

I previously had used a Hauppauge MediaMVP with the custom SageTV firmware (pretty much reprograms it as a Sage terminal). Nice piece of hardware for $100 or so. Did the job. One problem was that it couldn't show streaming content for fairly obvious reasons. But great on downloaded or archived TV shows. The other problem was that the interface was a bit sluggish and strange things would happen like not being able to rewind. Technologically, its amazing it works at all. But just not a premium experience. The other problem is that the TV card in the Sage "host" computer is fairly low quality and the computer itself is not reliable enough for an always-on appliance. So it didn't replace the Tivo.

I built the Media PC from scratch. Shuttle case (very elegant and incredibly dense fit). Core Duo 4300. 1TB of HD.

Picture quality is great though I'm not thrilled by the resolution. Have to switch between "Zoom" aspect for watching TV and "Full" aspect for using the computer. The onboard card doesn't support custom resolutions. Probably off to buy a cheap card. Accidentally, didn't get the SPDIF interface for long-term sound (on order).

I was surprised that Vista doesn't support drive mirroring at the OS level. I was surprised how quickly it installed. I was surprised how quickly it reinstalled after I hit the "disappearing control panel" problem, rendering my system useless, within 5 hours. Apparently, there's a nasty interaction between some drivers and Vista that makes the control panel inaccessible. I'm not sure whether it was updated Hauppauge WinTVPVR drivers or Powerstrip, but I'm not touching either again.

I'm surprised that Media Center doesn't allow and automatically consolidate multiple data locations (since without mirroring, I now have 950GB of media space). You can have media in multiple locations, but you can only record to a single location. Doesn't seem like a hard problem. The Media Center interface isn't as good as the Tivo being replaced (hopefully), but its good enough. They were definitely too cute on their interface design.

The biggest surprise was that my new $30 DVD writer was much, much better than my 4-year-old $30 DVD reader at ripping CDs. Several "unrippable" CDs had clean reads. And it rips fast.

MS Networking Hell

I've played this nightmare before but it took two hours or so to remember the answer yet again.

Machine has internet connectivity but has mysteriously lost peer to peer microsoft networking capability. Nothing seems to work.

Turn off the computer browser service (Control Panel:Administrative Tools:Services) on all the computers except the one with the best uptime and closest to data (and not one connected with wireless).

Everything magically starts working again.

ClearType Tuner

Now I know Windows very well. I've beta tested new releases for 10 years. At one time I was an expert at locking down Windows 2000 machines to NSA standards (while allowing the commercial software installed to still function).  One of my primary focuses is improving the "as deployed" employee experience with their computer at my company.

And I've never heard of the ClearType <a href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2004/11/21.html#a8703">tuner</a>. The difference is surprising and worth five seconds of effort. Why is this not in the Windows installation sequence? Why isn't this automatically done every six months?

<a href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2004/11/21.html#a8703">Vectored</a>  from Scoble, who also shares some hope about a pet peeve of mine -- screen resolution. Almost without exception, every older person I know can't handle 1280x1024 resolution on an 18" flat panel. Lower resolutions look awful. And the 120 DPI is a marginal solution. Hopefully Longhorn will mitigate.

Microsoft Virtual PC

Microsoft Virtual PC is a great idea. I'm intrigued by the virtualization technology. I've been pushing it hard at work (we have far too many "development" and "testing" machines which could be easily virtualized). And a found a use for it at my favorite small business client, wrapping old DOS-based applications for continued use under Windows XP. (VMWare is great too -- MS VPC is probably better for Windows-centric shops). And the 45 day free trial makes it an easy sell.

But boy is it hard to do the basics, like get a bootable Windows 98 system. Track down this CD, that bootable floppy, figure out how to make floppy images, etc.

Dear Microsoft:

Don't make it so hard to buy and effectively use your software. Let me "unlock" bootable images of DOS 6, Windows 95, Windows 98 from your website with my license key or original CD. Right now, you need to be a real geek and a packrat to get this working. After an afternoon, I'm still only halfway there. This could be a big advantage over VMWare (can't do the same due to licensing). And frankly, a little abuse/piracy of ancient software is harmless (the going price for licenses is about $5 on Ebay).

Acronis TrueImage

I was very impressed by this software this weekend.

A Western Digital hard drive had been indicating impending failure via SMART for about a month, so we turned the machine off until I came onsite. Luckily, there was an identical "backup" drive already installed in the machine -- it just needed an OS image.

I tried Western Digital's migration utility between drives. The bad part was that it appeared to work just fine. Until half the icons didn't work, and more than half the programs crashed on launch.

So I poked around. Acronis <a href="http://www.acronis.com/products/trueimage/">TrueImage</a> offered a generous free trial sufficient to copy the drive image. And it worked great. Absolutely perfect.

It was surprisingly easy to use. And unlike Ghost and the ilk, it can make backup images without leaving Windows. It is easy enough that it is now reasonable for my client to maintain images of each workstation (prior to this, all data is maintained on a backed up server, and workstations were reloaded from a fresh image/machine on catastrophic failure). As an added bonus, you can "mount" an image to extract specific files, removing the primary reason why I have avoided images in the past.

By the end of the day, the company had purchased a full license. And I may get another one to use at my day job (I've had a motherboard failure and an HD failure within the past year).

Another Round of ServeRaid 4M

Its odd how upgrades can occasionally send your system into total disarray. As part of routine maintenance on a small business fileserver, the heart of which is the RAID 5 array powered by an IBM <a href="https://www.typepad.com/t/app/weblog/post?__mode=edit_entry&id=539565&blog_id=12739">ServeRAID 4M </a>, I upgraded the firmware, driver, and management utility to 7.1. And then everything crashes. To the point where the server would crash before the Windows startup programs even finished loading.

Thank goodness for System Restore in Windows XP. This was the first time I'd used it in "production" work. It rapidly and effectively backed everything out. Except for restoring the deleted management software (version 6.1). Which IBM has now removed from their website. The 7.1 firmware and drivers worked great, but 7.1 management software led to rapid system death. After searching for almost 45 minutes, I realized that I must have the installation CD I burned a year ago (IBM distributes .isos) somewhere. Deep in the business owners "offsite backups" plastic bag, there it was.

So beware ServeRAID 7.1. And disk space is cheap -- keep copies of your .isos. I'd already had such trouble finding CD-ROMs at the client this weekend, that I ripped an .iso from every CD I used.

Screen Resolution

Interesting thoughts from Scoble on screen resolution. I remember the early 1990s when 640x480 was the top acceptable to many business users -- I just couldn't get them to go to 800x600. Now with 17"+ monitors (rather than 14") 1024x768 is normal. But I still have to reset the flat panels to 1280x1024 when I return to one client (native resolution -- otherwise horrible artifacts).

The problem is operating system design. Even "large fonts" mode tends to be erratic, making some things bigger while most things stay the same (how about the condition where the same icons get separated by 2-3x the space for wasting screen space). Geeks love more data -- most low-end users only keep one application on the screen at a time. Show them better quality and they'll buy. Show them their one application just smaller (or even stuffed with more information) they'll refuse the alleged "upgrade". Bigger screen, yes.

To fix this, it has to be thought about from the ground up in the operating system. 1600x1200 should look exactly the same as 800x600 -- just in High Definition. Once that's the case, high resolution monitors will fly off the shelves. I'm sure we can find some legacy mode for microtext aficionados like Scoble and myself.