TweakGuides.com. Well removing the ATI Catalyst 4.12 allows the machine to boot. I went to safe mode and whacked it and now it seems fine. I deleted all the drivers and will try a reinstall. Wish me luck.
Also will try out the Omega drivers as well to see how that goes.
unofficial ATi Troubleshooting guide. OK I think I may have found what's wrong with Calvin's machine. Sounds a lot like video drivers. Here's a note from someone who is using the same Chaintech VNF3-250 and ATI Radeon 9700s so close to his 9800. I've had the system fail to boot because of the video driver. Worked semiwell with the 6/04 drivers, but the new 11/04 Catalyst 4.12 have been a disaster. Here's another writers experience, it has to do with the nVidia AGP driver conflicting with the Catalyst drivers.
I would experience lock-ups, crashes and blank screens, usually needing a reboot. As I am sure you all have, I have tried every driver ever made by ATi. I have tweaked every BIOS setting (8x, 4X AGP, fast writes on, fast writes off, hypertransport 1X, 2X, 3X, 4X, resetting frame buffer sizes in games, resetting video memory in the BIOS, etc.) Tweaking these settings and changing drivers have worked to varying degrees, but never truly solved the problem.
It is to use a combination of the 3.9 Catalyst driver (using Omegas based on the 3.9's might even be better) and UNINSTALLING your AGP / GART driver from your system. My GART driver is an nVidia AGP driver.
Is it nVidia sabotage(?), I don't know, but I read VIA Hyperion AGP drivers caused the same type of problems with ATI video cards. By right clicking on "My Computer", going into the Device Manager and then System Devices, you will see " nVidia nForce 3 250 AGP Host to PCI bridge " Right click on that and uninstall. It will prompt you to reboot. Upon rebooting, if it redetects it and askes you to install it again, obviously don't, but it shouldn't ask you to install it again, anyway.
Your ATi video card drivers will not detect an AGP setting (either 4X or 8X)
nor will you be able to enable Fast Writes, as you now do not have an AGP driver installed to allow you to do this.
No matter, because AGP settings are a lot of "hooey" based on impractical theoretical bandwidths anyways (anyone notice a difference in PCI-e video card benchmarks compared with their AGP counterparts? I didnt think so...)
Now, the downside...If you run benchmarks like Aquamark 3, or 3DMark01 SE, 03, or 05, you will see a 50% performance drop.
BUT....the interesting thing, is that there is NO discernable performance hit in the actual games themselves. In other words, in UT 2004, Doom3 , Far Cry, Half-life 2 and CS: Source, I get the same framerates at the same detail settings without crashes, blank screens or VPU recovers (I have that turned off, anyway).
To clarify: If I install the AGP gart driver and install 4.12 Cat Betas, I get the same frame rates in games as I do if uninstall the AGP gart driver and use 3.9 Cats, except with the latter, I have no crashes or freezes.
ETYCOM. Etymotic is now making a headset. Should be very good for noise reduction given its design. The thing works fine with Connie's 7100t, but just is terrible with hum on my 7290. I don't know why. Others have recommended it, but doesn't work for me. Something to do with the connector I think. Cnet liked it too.
They also make a nice looking adapter set that will take proprietary Nokia connections and turn them into standard 3.5mm headsets.
The ER22-20N3 is is just $8 and well worth it since you can use anyone's headset then. Other useful accessories they have include various cases, filters and shirt clips that you can order online from Etymotic.
stoer.de// Outpod Home. What Ephpod recommends for getting Outlook contacts onto your iPod.
The top Google hit is iPodSync so that's another to try.
Tom's Hardware Guide Graphics Cards: VGA Charts IV AGP Video Cards - FarCry - Very High. I also found those benchmarks for Phil, I was looking for.
With Farcry, there are the statistics comparing video cards by family:
| Card | Farcry noAA/AF (fps) | 4xAA, 4xAF | Generation |
| GeForce 6800 GT | 79.2 | 53.4 | 2004 |
| X800 Pro | 71.1 | 48.8 | 2004 |
| Radeon 9800 Pro | 40.2 | 26.4 | 2003 |
| GeForce FX5900 U | 20.7 | 14.1 | 2003 |
| Radeon 9600 Pro | 16.8 | 15.1 | 2003 |
| GeForce Ti4600-8x | 28.3 | 12.6 | 2002 |
| GeForce4 Ti4200-8x | 23.9 | 10.5 | 2002 |
So you can see, basically, his Ti4200 is about at the limits of playability. So it is about 3x slower if you have all the antialiasing and anistrophic filtering turned off.
If you turn on all the advanced stuff, it is 5x slower and unplayable at 1024.768.
GamePC - Dothan Delight : DFI's 855GME-MGF Pentium-M Motherboard and Tom's Hardware. To really build a quiet and cool home theater PC is a challenge. Using the Dothan chipset from Intel is one way to do it. This board from DFI would fit into even a small case or the Silverstone shown previously. The most interestin thing is that a standard 2GHz Pentium M can overclock to 2.8GHz and then blow away just about anything including a Pentium 4 3.6GHz and an Athlon FX-55. So that's the chip to get if you can afford it.
The motherboard is hard to get. From Canada for aboud CAD$350 so about $300 American. The chip itself is $430 , so this is an expensive if small option.
You can get it a little cheaper though with the 1.7GHz Pentium M 735 at about $280 and it will overclock less since it has more like a 17x multiplier compared with 20x for the 2GHz version.
AnandTech: December 2004 HTPC Case Roundup. Big thing holding me back from building a home theater PC (htpc) has been a case. Now the Silverstone CS-SST-LC10B-M seems perfect at $248 from Newegg.
It is just $140 if you don't have the IR remote for the Media Edition software. So this is good for a full sized computer that needs to look like stereo equipment. You'll also want to change the fans out as it is a very noisy 56dB.
The nMediaPC HTPC-100 at $140 at Newegg. is another option if you can find a good microATX board (see the next post for a Dothan microATX). You have to change the fan out as it is only 60mm or use the Dothan Pentium M so it creates less heat.
Well there are certainly a lot of border crossing sites. If you are going to Canada:
Microsoft Exchange 2003 Server Hosting Dedicated Manager Host Outlook 2000 2002 2003 XP Windows ASP. If you don't want to run your own Exchange and Blackberry server, here's an option.
Haven't heard much about this, but if you have a family and you really want shared calendar, then this would do it for you. $10/month/person for Exchange hosting, then $10/month/person for Blackberry and finally you'll need a $40/month/person plan with a carrier. So for $60/month/person, you'd be like any big corporation.
Main advantage would be shared contacts in the family and shared calendar.
AnandTech - Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9 WARNING!!!. Talk about arcane version models. The K8NXP-9 is the fast version of the nForce4 Ultra chipset while the GA-K8NF-9 is the budget board built on the budget nVidia nForce4 4x chipset not the nForce4 Ultra chipset.
Confused yet?
What this means is that the 4x chipsets won't overclock at all while the Ultras will. So don't get this board even though its shipping now. You want the as yet unavailable K8NXP-9 or the K8NXP-9 SLI.
It's amazing how many updates come up if you don't watch for three months. Here are the latest for us:
Chaintech VNF3-250 Motherboard BIOS's. If you dare, here are hacked BIOSes that fix various problems.
Also I just noticed that this board's HyperTransport only goes to 1600MHz so with a 4x I've been way overclocking it (running at 200MHz gets you to 1600 MHz, I believe).
Overclockers Forums - Other AMD Boards. OK, I have one of these and it works well, but has a couple of interesting quirks:
Time once again to think about watching HD. Right now we have Comcast HD and their digital cable package plus Netflix.
I have to VOOM : See It
iPodlounge iPod photo review. A good balanced review of the iPod photo. I'd summarize by saying really beautiful screen, but the photo stuff is pretty lame.
For myself, my photos cause itunes to crash when it is trying to process them. It really doesn't like tif files and barfs on them as it trys to process. It actually creates bad thumbnails.
For big Jpegs, it appears to die on some of them, but there is no error diagnostic I can find. It just fails.
Without the photos though, it is a beautiful user interface. Very expensive, so it is truly the Volvo of music players. Get it if you have to have the latest, otherwise, the more pedestrian iPod 4G 20GB serves well and is about $300 vs. $400.
Well, I've been scanning quite a few 35mm slides now and getting quite good at it. My monitor and printer still aren't calibrated though and with the Spyder2Pro finally in distribution at about $240 or $100 more with Printfix, its time to look seriously at buying one.
Here are some reviews:
The new spyder2pro comes off netter:
Pricegrabber now monitors prices for the gpu128 which is the standalone spyder2pro and gpu129 which imc;udes printfix.
Handtops.com- New OQO WIFI Drivers!!! Dated 11/11/04. Hat tip to Handtops.com, this is exactly my problem, I see a signal, but DHCP hangs. Sounds like the fix is to deinstall the Bluetooth drivers
While I was in an experimenting mood, I tried something else in an attempt to get to the bottom of the problem I had at the client's office the other day. Most of the wireless networks I deal with are unencrypted, but the one in this particular office uses 64-bit WEP.
At home, I set up a spare access point with 64-bit WEP, and tried to connect it it. I got the same result I got yesterday afternoon, namely that I apparently got an address from the DHCP server, but that Windows hung up on actually setting up the network. It was communicating with the AP, but something else wasn't happening.
Without moving the computer, I uninstalled the 'OQO Bluetooth Radio' device in the Device Manager. Within seconds, the WEP-encrypted network was working.
I then reinstalled the Bluetooth device and paired my keyboard, mouse, and phone, after which the network connection was still there. Both the Bluetooth and the WiFi worked normally at that point.
I tried this several times with slightly different configurations, and I am pretty confident in saying that with Bluetooth active, I cannot initiate WEP WiFi connections; with Bluetooth inactive, they work 'normally' (i.e. just like on an unencrypted network, which means the connections are dropped relatively often and Windows says that it's 'acquiring network address' every few minutes -- even when it's not configured to use DHCP).
Definitely not a problem of interference, then, but of a driver defect. There's nothing different about the radio signal involved in a WEP network vs. an unencrypted one, unencrypted networks work 'fine' (see above), and Bluetooth WEP works 'well' when Bluetooth is enabled after the WEP connection is active.
jkOnTheRun: Further hardware problems for the OQO. this guy is just ahead of me. Just noticed the AC Adapter buzzing and I can't acquire a Wifi signal. Actually, it report it sees the signal, but can't DHCP. Wierd.
jkOnTheRun: Problems in OQO-land. Hat tip to Jonathan Kellerman for pointing out where to get help on the OQO.
He points out that most OQO users hang out at the OQO Forum so maybe I can get some problems fixed there.
My buddy Mike Kwatinetz is an investor in OQO as reviewed by "Tomshardware":Tom's Hardware Guide Mobile Devices: The OQO: WindowsXP in the Palm of Your Hand - Introduction, engadget and a good review by webchat on handtop.com
I bought a Model 01 to see what the experience is. IMHO there is a real product playbook to go along with the Marketing Playbook and evaluting the OQO reminds me of some of the principals listed below, I'll do a quick rating, the net is that is a way cool device that illustrates the challenges of turning a standard Windows PC into a gadget.
The machine looks incredible and it is only a one pound windows machine. Who wouldn't love to at least try that. It is a slider design and feels very solid so that is great as well. The web demo is really pretty neat. I can see how influentials would want to try it.
This is the most simple rule of all. First find a segment that really has a need. Doesn't have to be huge but has to be passionate. You'd rather have 10,000 dedicated folks than 1M people who kind of need the product. In OQO's case, it is a 14 oz. handtop that runs full Windows XP. Kind of a marvel really, but the key issue is who is it for. Certainly there are plenty of vertical applications, but what about the general purpose folks. I evaluated it based on the idea that influentials that are general prosumers generally will try anything once and there is a hard core of 1-2M people who fit in that.
In this case, I struggled a little with figuring out exactly what the OQO is good for. Most folks say it is good for PowerPoint folks. I think the main issue here is that ultraportables like the Sony T-140 or the Apple G5 do a pretty good job of handling that segment because a 5" screen that is 800×480 or 200 dpi is pretty hard to read. Even the T-140PL that I have at 1024×640 at 10" is hard to read at 120 dpi.
Email might be one answer, but the battery life at 3 hours makes that a hard comparison compared with a Blackberry 7290 for instance. Here the website would really help IMHO to really target who should use it. It is not the average busy executive I think.
For general users, the best I could come up with is that it is good for web browsing around. If it had a really big hard drive (80GB), it would be an awesome next generation media player (the janus devices that Microsoft is trying to sell). Although the price point is very high $2K.
It is amazing how many product fail the first 30 seconds test. The iPod is one that passes it. Apple products always have. From every detail in the packaging to the start here. In this case the packaging is indeed beautiful. It comes in a 18"×12"×4" black box so it looks like a Coach bag packaging. When you open the box, the little guy is sitting there like a jewel. I love the way it doesn't look like a standard notebook with thousands of flyers falling all over the place, but the presentation is great.
When you lift the box open, there are all the usual cables and things. I have to say the accessory cable has to take the prize as the most incredible ungainly thing I've seen in a long time. It is huge and thick by necessity and has a VGA output, Ethernet and USB 1.1 connector. For device like these BTW, having to pack this huge cable to just get VGA out is like tying a boat anchor to a Porsche. Its a common problem with most of the ultraportables I've used. The first Toshiba 3 pound and Sony VAIOs had the same issue.
Next thing is that there are no quick start instructions so its a little hard to figure out how to use it. About 10 minutes later, I figured out that there is documentation in the lid above the device. No way I'd ever find that. The iPod has instructions on the shrink wrap around the device. Not a great solution, but not bad. (BTW, the big problem with the iPod is that it completely unclear how to turn it on when the Hold button is set. I struggled for a while with that). In this case, there is a Power button with the universal symbol, so hitting that is great.
Because OQO uses standard Windows XP (which is cool), the preinstall spend minutes just saying, I'm preparing to setup. Not OQOs fault, but it shows how the PC experience and the gadget experience expectations are different. Should boot in 10 seconds. After all, what else needs to be done. It then asks you all kinds of inane questions about how many users should be on the device. I have to say I really don't get that on a handheld. I understand OQO's desire to have standard Windows, but IMHO, the standard Windows install hurts the product since it looks like an instant on PDA (in comparison the iPod and the Blackberry and most phones have a 30 second boot sequence).
Another point is the screen backlight. The Sony and iPod Photo guys are smart as are most TV folks. Out of the box, just blow it out in screen brightness. It is the first 20 second experience to see an XBrite screen on the new Sony's. Blows you away. Or the iPod Photo color screen or the screen on the Nokia 6620. And have a brilliant beautiful background (not the generic Windows XP start screen). Sony does that super well. When the device starts, it goes immediately into a Macromedia show and the screen saver actually plays rad music. So figuring out how to make the screen rock is always an important thing for a consumer device.
It took me a little while to figure out how to slide up the screen. There are no hints for that. Nor are there any hints there is a pen until later. So, there is that first 30 second mystery as you stare at a black blue screen and figure out what else you can do. Way better to do a more customized startup and tell you you can slide up and where the pen is.
The screen is really hard to read for my nerdy eyes. I know they turned up the fonts to Extra-large, but as most geeks know most Windows applications have 10 point fonts hard coded in their menus and text, so for the most part, the screen is completely unreadable. There is no way I know to tune that. The most depressing thing is that there is no introduction to the OQO when it starts. This is a device that has a big hard disk 20GB and sound etc., so why can't it tell you want to do?
The mouse and the mouse buttons are obvious for a power geek. Showed it to another geek friend, Bob and he agreed, the mouse threw him off. Since I use phones and blackberry's alot, it threw me off that the click wasn't done by pressing down on the mouse. That is the way the blackberry, most modern phones and the ipod work. Also that holding the key down doesn't do capital letters.
Windows asks you tons of strange questions about the name of the device, the description, users, etc. before you do anything. I've always been confused by this for a gadget device. Who cares what the name of the machine is until later. Just get up and surfing.
The hardest part was getting wifi to work. Had a bunch of incompatibilities with my D-link router. The price of open standards. If you don't want to carry around the monster cable, then the 802.11b is the only way to get out. I suspect that the Bluetooth is interfering with things but there is quite a bit written on the web about that problem.
The Wacom touch pad was hard for me to use. The main thing was figuring out how to calibrate was not easy to find. Palm's used to boot and start with calibration. That is very important and gives the user something to do. In OQO's case, the touchpad calibration is hidden in Start/Control Panel/Wacom Tablet. Only a power user would know that the touchscreen is OEM'ed from Wacom. So when I started, I had a 1 inch error in calibration. When this happens, you also can throw the thing into the dreaded pan mode.
I accidentally go the thing into 1024×768 mode and suddendly you are panning and scrolling everywhere since the default is 800×400. I think that this mode should just be disabled for ordinary humans like me. In my case, I managed to get a start menu 10 feet high before finding out how to disable.
Same thing with autohide of the start buttons. For me, hiding like this is just horrible when you are trying to learn the product. I realize you get a little more screen, but you lose all the UI elements.
Finally, like the Tom's Hardware reviewer, I never did get double click to work correctly with the touch panel. Y0u have to double click super fast.
The thing is loud with a builtin fan. Personally, I would have biased in the default mode for very low processor power and really bright screen. The machine gets quite warm but that's not a big deal really.
Other problem is the hard disk is quite small in this version and with only USB 1.1 and this big thick dongle thing, you really don't have a 1 pound Windows machine, you need to carry the power brick and this big dongle guy to be useful (at least until I can get Wifi working help!)
And the high screen dpi coupled with its dimness really creates lots of eyestrain. And the you basically give up on the touch screen after a while, so you have to open it up to use it. The actual position of the thumb thing and the mouse keys on the other side isn't too bad, but the sensitivity of the thumb point is super high so you miss things quite a bit when combined with the high resolution of the screen.
Well, this device I think illustrates a few things. First is that people will go to great lengths to use new technology and that compactness is amazingly important. There are a few simple things can really stymie gadget usage. If I were OQO, I'd recommend a few changes:
I'm sure they are doing all these things and it was a great opportunity to get to use this cool thing.
Audioscrobbler :: Home. A cool application. It installs in your music player and then you vote by simply playing music. Kind of interesting to see popularity like this.
Your Windows PC doesn't recognize iPod. Things have been working great, so of course Murphy's Law says things should start to fail :-)
My 40GB iPod Photo suddenly isn't recognized by Windows over USB 2.0. Doesn't work across two Windows machines but it does work with Firewire to a Macintosh.
Mysterious thing is that it used to work perfectly. I tried resetting the iPod, but have failed spectacularly to force it to do a reset. Main issue is that the reboot sequence differs between different iPods.
For older iPods, it is hold the Play/Pause and Menu but for the new firmware in the iPod Mini and 4G iPods, it is hold the Menu and the Select. Wow, what a strange difference.
Once I did that, the reset took and the recognition worked again!
Hoops said he had a bit of quick shopping to do. It is amazing how you can still get things online and quasi-online just a few days before Christmas. Here are notes for last minute shoppers:
Movable Type Publishing Platform: Movable Type 3.14 released. You'll want to get this one, it fixes slow downs because of massive spam attacks. Sigh. Sign of the modern world.
Choosing a Cordless Drills. My Dad still has the same drill he bought from Sears in 1965 and it still works.
I have an el cheapo drill that Infoworld gave me in 1999. Main problem is that the cordless ones die eventually. It has NiCads and they never last. Taking it apart, it of course uses some strange non-standard battery, so off to find another drill even though the rest of it is perfectly good.
As usual, the Internet and google reveals a great source of ratings:
Time once again for the regular car servicing. Some folks are finally letting you use Internet forms:
TreeSize Treesize Download. I've been trying to figure out why directories are so big. It is amazing that Windows doesn't have a utility that shows how much a directory (vs. an individual file is using).
There is a command line tool called diskuse that comes in the Resource Kit, but it unwieldy. Here's a freeware tool that does it graphically.
IMAX Film Schedule. Way cool, the Polar Express in 3D is at the pacific science center. Hope there are still tickets!
Neil's World - Defragging your iPod. Well, the whole iPod seems shrouded in mystery is actually just a FAT32 file system with some magic directories.
If you plug the iPod into a PC, it comes up as a hard drive. iTunes also comes up, but you can actually see the drive.
They don't let you see the music, because they are in hidden files, but since it is FAT32 (if you formatted it for the Mac, it uses the Unix hard drive format).
So in the directory \ipod_control are a bunch of music directories.
This also means that you can defrag the iPod as well. Mines was pretty defragmented, although the firmware does a nice job of spraying the files around so that they don't fragment as much as the default FAT32 allocation does on Windows.
Still if you want the maximum battery life, you should defragment.
BTW, this makes it easier for me to see how all these utilities work. They just go to the hidden directories and work their magic.
Phil has come to visit us and was asking about upgrading his computer. Here is what he owns that is 2002 vintage:
| Component | Replace or not? |
| Athlon XP 2000+ | An older part, 2x performance increase possible |
| PNY nVidia 4600 Video Card | Direct 8.1 only, should replace |
| Mitsubishi CRT 21" | Still best for gaming |
| 512MB PC2700 memory | Can get to PC4000 with overclocking now |
| Soyo Dragon Black Platinum MB | Replace as CPU is changing |
| 60GB disk | Can use for data, get new system disk |
| Sony DRW-510 DVD Writer | Fine for now |
So what to get if you had $500 to upgrade the machine. First question is of course, what are you going to do with it?
He like to play games and also to the regular Internet stuff, so what should he do?
Here is what I would do to get a more balanced system. First, I don't think just getting a faster CPU will help particularly much with games.
Adrian's Rojak Pot has a great comparison of old cards. Video performance since 2002 has essentially increased by 10x while CPU performance is perhaps 3x faster. His Athlon 2000+ is probalby running at 1.4GHz in reality and an overclocked Athlon 64 3200+ will be running at 2.6GHz in comparison his 4600 card vs. a late model nVidia GT probably has a frame rate difference in modern games of 10 assuming his 4600 could even run Doom 3 or Far Cry. Many of the modern games will only run on DirectX 9 hardware.
So there is a tradeoff right now between best price/performance and the lowest price. A $500 upgrade is really about getting the lowest price and trading off quite a bit of performance to hit that price point.
To get the right budget upgrade, first thing you need to do is to stack rank the components in importance and spend appropriately. Here it is for a gamer:
Total is $638 so we are a little overbudget. To get precisely to $500, I would probably cut the memory and give up on overclocking as a result. This will cut performance by about 30%, but it will still be way faster because of the graphics card.
With a $1000 budget, this increase moves you into the sweet spot of super high performance at modest prices. An upgrade like this looks like this with a bit of future proofing:
Total cost is $1,127 so again a little over budget. If I were to really get down to $1,000, I'd probably drop down to a cheaper hard drive, say the Seagate 7200.7 200GB at $120 is a fine drive with a five year warranty. And also drop to the Athlon 2800+ at $135. The 2800+ probably means giving up about 10% of performance since it will probably just go to 2.4GHz on overclock rather than 2.6GHz.
This is where you get into the luxury items. It is the $1000 upgrade above plus:
ICC - iPodSync. This shareware program syncs Outlook to your iPod so it can be a poor man's PIM. YOu can't edit of course, but you can read.
OK, given the choices right now there are two options for building a fast machine right now. Actually, not exactly right now, but if you can wait to January...
If you want the maximum in performance, then you want the upcoming SLI boards. These are first coming December 28 but have a pretty big premium. The ASUS motherboard is now out
| Component | Price | Comment |
| ASUS K8N SLI | $247 | Drops to $180 in January hopefully |
| nVidia 6800GT | $440 | Very short supply, again wait if you can |
| AMD Athlon 3200+ | $207 | Socket 939 retail with warranty |
| Thermalright XP-120 Heatsink | $50 | Optional but very quiet |
| Geil Ultra X 2×512 | $275 | Alternative Corsair 3200XL for $250 |
| NEC 3500A | $68 | Dual layer DVD Writer |
| Western Digital WD740GD | $179 | Very fast system drive |
| Maxtor DiamondMax 300 | $205 | Fast and Big data drive |
| Ever Case 4252 | $80 | Very quiet case |
| Globe 120 | 2x$12 | 5" fans for CPU and case |
| Seasonic Silent Tornado 400 | $100 | Very quiet power supply |
| Total | $1875 | Without monitor, keyboard, mouse |
There is about a $200 premium for SLI and the 6800GT. If you don't have quite the need or want to buy it in December then you can get the AGP socket 939 and substitue the MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum for $135 and also get the ASUS 6800GT for $330.
This lowers the $1850 by $225 so it is $1625 right now and a good buy. Only small thing to consider is that the 6800gt is older than the 6600GT and that the new ATI line is not yet available but also coming out in January. The entire ATI X-series is very hard to get right now.
Finally, if you want a monitor, then the Viewsonic Q190mb is about $465
a little ludwig goes a long way: The Exploding PC?. Another smart post by John. He's right that you want to take the long term storage bank out of the PC.
It happened with LANs long ago with SANs and NASes. I've been trying to get this to work reliably in my own house for two years. First a Windows server that would actually shut down and then when the network request comes in, it would wake up.
I could never get that to work because Windows never shut down fans properly in standby and wouldn't wake up fast enough so the thing would disappear from the network.
Current experiment is with the Linksys NSLU2 and soon the Wifi enclosure thing. Main problems here have been the reliability of these cheap things for Connie et al.
The right answer IMHO given the low cost of hard disks is that you really want lots of caching. Right now, all my music, video and photos are cached across all the machines at home and there isn't a center to the system. I have to hand manage this with Beyond Compare, but it actually works pretty well.
Lacking a single reliable file server, this is where I live right now. BTW, I don't think that this means PCs are diskless, disks are so cheap and fast that they should just be caches.
a little ludwig goes a long way: Going all voip at home. John has a great list of SIP and other products. The open source PBX is cool.
In terms of cheap the existing analog phone sets, that is what these media gateways do. They normally have 2-4 analog ports that convert into SIP on the backside. So you can gang these things up. That's what the discussion about the open source PBX is all about. You really want these things to ring simultaneously for instance rather than each being an actual phone with an actual phone number (the living is 206-656-1112 and the family room is a different number would be very strange).
So there are these boxes that are IP PBX es that are ideal, but they are priced for enterprises in the thousands. I can't find a $100 box that has an open source PBX in it. That is the dream device. So for instance with Digium, the guys who created the Asterisk, here is what you'd need:
This actually doesn't work for our house since we have these Panasonic proprietary phones with an old key system. So, I just need a gateway from SIP plus a few phone analog phone connections. In that case, I actually do want each analog phone connection to be a separate Vonage phone line.
In terms of cheap SIP handsets, I have not seen really cheap yet, but they are coming as I understand it.
Thought: Wifi Hotspot Finder on a USB Key. Steve is right, there should be more combo devices rather than standalone.
t-break - MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum. Good review of a nForce4 board. This one is not SLI but it has about the same performance as the others. Doesn't seem to be much difference in performance between different nVidia nForce4 boards, so main difference is SLI to put two graphics cards in.
The SLI version is due December 28 at Zipzoomfly for $209. This is about a $100 premium to the nForce3 250Gb boards and it performs the same. The $100 buys you the dual card option so it is kind of a bad deal if you are never going to put two cards in.
The value deal right now is to get a nForce3 chipset with a AGP graphics card.
Red Chair Software, Inc.. The commercial version of making an iPod just a hard drive. Like Ephpod, but it is supposed to be more fully functional. Integrates as a real drive.
Another hat tip to iPod lounge, some more undocumented commands:
A: There iPod has a special Disk Scan utility that can be used to check the hard drive. Follow these steps:
Defragmentation Q: Do I need to defragment my iPod's hard drive?
A: Apple does not recommend running disk utilities like Norton Speed Disk, Disk Scan and Disk Defragmenter. It's not really needed as the drive is not written to and erased nearly as much as a typical hard drive. If you're emphatic about cleaning up your drive it's best just to do a full Restore with the Apple Software Updater. This reformats the drive (defragmenting it in the process) and has the added benefit of creating a new clean iPod database which over extended periods of use can get corrupted.
Personally I find this hard to believe, everything gets fragmented, but I bet there are bugs if you really drive the iPod hard with Speed Disk
iPodlounge | All Things iPod | Ephpod. For me itunes is a mixed blessing. I actually like Musicmatch better because it has all the smart tagging and I use Exact Audio Copy for CD ripping. Its a nerd thing, but I love them. And, I really don't like the way that if you make one mistake, you can delete all the music on your iPod because it always asks do you want to sync with the current PC and if you say YES, it silently deleted EVERYTHING on your iPod!
But with EphPod, you don't have to use itunes. It lets you see the music on an iPod. The iPod when docked with a Windows PC does look just like a hard disk, but they hide the music files, otherwise I could just use Beyond Compare 2 to synchronize.
So, what to do. There are two utilities. One is called EphPod which is a freeware viewer of things on your iPod. That is OK, but it would still be nice to make it just a hard drive and expose all the music files.
I've tried it now and it is a great geek tool. Even lets you synchronize. For instance, with my Dad's new iPod, we don't want ever song to go in, but Ephpod (pronouned eff-pod) let's you have a directory of shortcuts to music. You can then sync to that and only pick up the music that he likes. Kind of cool if a bit nerdy. Very fast, runs at 7-10MBps so pretty much the speed of the drive and USB 2.0 I think. It is much faster than dBPowerAmp which is very slow copying. There are bunch of tips and tricks to using Ephpod (for instance, you want to make sure it preserved MP3 names otherwise, you get a bunch of numeric .MP3s on the iPod). Also, you want to make sure that when you synchronize, you use the shortcut trick because if you have lots of synchronization files, the user interface doesn't know how to scroll, so you can lots of sync directories, but you can't see