Recently in Hardware Category

Well it's been a year and a half since I built the Mediacenter PC. So far everything goes well or mostly well. Hardware has changed in the mean time and my Radeon HD 2400 Pro is 2 generations old. The hard drive feels small with all the TV shows, movies, and music stored on it. And for some reason with very little actually installed Windows Vista has managed to chew through a 40GB partition. Leaving just under 6GB of free space. When I first installed the system it had ran consumed 20GB from a fresh install. This doesn't really bother me but, eventually, strange things start to happen when disk space gets really low.

As with all Windows system. The computer gets slower and slower from the accumulated sludge of system updates, software updates, restore points, and fragmentation. The only solution is to do a clean reinstall. But for a device that only does one thing, doing this can be really inconvenient. Even more so by the fact that I'm not the only one using the PC. My son has his cartoons and DVDs, my wife has her TV shows and movies. 98% of the time this setup works normally with no problems. It's just the last 2% that I can't stand. That really make me want to start over. But the family thinks everything is fine and for the foreseeable future that's the way it's going to stay.

I've been struggling with my custom PC over the weekend. After ordering, waiting, and assembling the parts it just didn't go all the way like I wanted it to. My Gigabyte P35-DS3R was stuck at "Verifying DMI Pool...". I searched all over the internet about why I would be stuck at "Verifying DMI Pool......" after assembling everything correctly. I tested the motherboard to see if overclocking the easily overclockable Q6600 was the proper. Not. I thought the order of SATA drives was the problem. Not. I thought the drive had gone bad between the time I plugged it in the first time and the time I restarted the computer. A disk check later, not. So I disabled the ACHI capabilities. Meaning I would loose Hot-disconnect, NCQ, and RAID. This basically made the computer I planned to build with nearly unlimited capabilities, incapable of doing some of the things I would like in the near future.

So I browsed the forums and checked other posts on the same board, and I got nothing. One day I was browsing the OSx86 forums and someone with an ABIT IP35 (a similar chipset with similar features) mentioned the Boot Order in BIOS.

Apparently, my Pioneer DVD Drive is no longer recognized as CDROM, but as PIONEER-DVR... down in the bottom of the list if bootable devices in BIOS. It's important that CDROM is not selected if you are using AHCI or else it will hang everytime. Realizing this might be the problem I'm having I changed the BIOS, booted and got the "Press any key to boot from CDROM". Yes!

I posted this here in case someone else with a gigabyte P35-DS3R motherboard also encounters this Verifying DMI Pool error. Maybe the search engine gods will have this in a useful search.

Most of the posts on this blog comes from my problematic laptop. Recently on slashdot.org there was the announcement of the 5.0 release of Truecrypt. For a long time I've been looking for a solution to secure my files and my laptop. There has been other programs that create encrypted partitions or encrypted disk images. On windows this encrypts some of your data but rarely most of it. And for these there was no solution to secure your Local folder, where the meat of your information is (outlook.pst, thunderbird, firefox, etc). But the great thing about Truecrypt is it can do the filesystem level encryption on a running system partition. No need to boot up into a seperate system or CD and run an encryption script. In fact it makes securing your system so easy (and for laptop users, not having to swap drives around is a godsend) that there is no reason that it shouldn't be included with every computer sold. I've been using it for less that 24 hours and there hasn't been any visible performance hit (generally 5%) or lost files, or unrecoverable boots.

After weeks of screwing around with this laptop and thinking I was having a software problem. I blew away my windows partition. Twice. Installed Ubuntu and then Fedora Core Linux. I was still out of a fully functional laptop. I even went as far booting various LiveCDs and scanning the hardware and hard drive for errors. But this problem would still persist. The keyboard and mouse would lockup after a few minutes and be unrecoverable. Well now I'm back on Windows Vista...Basic. After using Business for a few weeks late last year I was hardly getting anything done. Click and wait was the operation of the day. Basic is supposed to be the lighter brethren of all things Vista. And frankly it's marginally better. Lots of features have been dropped in the name of making you pay more for the slightly better and resource intensive Premium. Turns out the same thing did happen. But after poking around on the internet I found other people who had the same problem.

Turns out there is a bug in Acer laptops. A bug where when the battery goes kaput it manages to lock the keyboard and causes hellish amount of problems. All this from a fooking battery? I should really slap the taste out of the engineers mouth that managed to let this slip by. I should also slap the design team for integrating the rubber standoffs into the battery. In my case I can't use it and I can't through it away unless I also enjoy trying to work on a three legged square table. You see the battery holds the ass end of the laptop up. And there you have it. The worlds largest manufacturer of portable PCs couldn't bother to think what would happen if someone tried to use the PC without the battery in the by. In other words "Get a Mac".

The past weekend was another Chin TV weekend. Since I'm sort of late getting caught up on watching my favourite programmes (can you taste the britishness) every now and then I dedicate the entire day to watching what's left of the TV shows in my queue. This weekend happened to be Veronica Mars S1 and Heroes S2. I tried to follow VM a long time ago when I lived in Miami and Boca. But I just didn't have the time.
The advantage of living in a subtropical area is you have a reason to go out. To the beach, to the mall, to the race track, you just go somewhere. Paris is cold and gray at the moment. You only go out if you have a death wish and love the cold. Plus, getting Mac ready is like putting a coat on wet noodle. In the end I lose because all the time I spent getting him ready is for not. Now he's hungry/wet/sleepy and it all has to be undone. So TV weekend it is.

I did make it to the BHV. And bought power tools. Lots of them. I'm still on the look for SMD desolderers and extra fine point soldering tip. And some electronics to hack.

I can't wait for the next productive TV Weekend

It's done and running. For a few weeks in fact. So to wrap up lets see what we've done:

• Intel Core 2 Duo 4300. It's been overclocked to 2.16 GHz. I've run Prime95 to burn it in and no crashes or lockups so far.


• ASROCK Conroe945G-DVI Motherboard. It was a good bargain and it has a limited ability to be tweaked. Since this is going into a MediaCenter a micro-ATX was essential. It also had to be silent and not use a lot of power since it was going to be running most of the time.


• 2GB of DDR2-6400 RAM. Plenty of memory for a hungry Vista.


• 500GB Seagate SATA2 hard drive. I've always liked seagate, They have pretty fast drives and a good warranty (5 years). But damn this thing is loud. If I knew I would have gotten the WD which, I've read, is much quieter.


• Cheap noname brand case. I really have no idea who made it, but the form factor was right (desktop case with CD drive door oriented in the proper direction) and it had the newer power supply that is required for the motherboard.

I also bought a few odds and ends and got a great deal on Windows Vista Home Premium at the same time. Since this is the media center PC I wanted lots of storage since most of my iTunes catalog will be stored here. I also bought an DVI-HDMI cable to connect it to my HDTV TV. Eventually I'm going to upgrade the video card to something beefier than the built in Intel 950GMA. Windows Vista gives my setup a 3 due to the weak performance of the card. I'm also looking for a proper windows media center remote. And especially the new Sideshow enabled media remotes.

Okay, it's been almost a week since I ordered the parts for my new HTPC. I haven't seen anything or a confirmation yet. Barring the weekend, I'll be waiting 4 days. Thursday makes it an official business week and nothing. So far this sucks. I thought I would have it by the weekend or the start of the week. If it's not sent tomorrow I'm pulling the plug and go shop elsewhere.

I think it's been ages since I put together a computer. I had a Mac for a while and it served me well. I know I can get a Dell or HP for cheap but I want to do it my way. After futzing around for a long time I finally put in the order for a few components. I've acquired a lot of computer parts and it costs me a lot less than I assumed it would.
But this is no top of the line rig. I'm building a Media Center PC, and it will be used for a few games but nothing like Crysis. I've got a Packard Bell that's barely keeping up with what I throw at it. basically watching a few DVDs, torrents, and iTunes. I love iTunes but it's a real monster on such a old PC.

Iago's been doing good by me for the last 3 years. I can't believe I've held onto this little beast for the last 3 years. (Technically 2.6) And its still going strong. Not shiny new hardware strong, but it does what it does day in and day out without wincing.

(Hint: Wanna mess with a Windows user? Print the uptime. In my case: uptime
13:23 up 73 days, 15:38, 2 users, load averages: 1.72 2.35 2.88). 73 days straight, including editing video, working on files, compiling, and writing emails.

But alas, it can't last forever. The system updates have been stacking up, my VM is getting outta hand ( < 8 GB), and I'm sure I have a few dead processes taking up memory somewhere. Ahh what the hell, let's see how far he'll go before he croaks. If you haven't bought a UPS for your computer yet, its the best investment you can make. I used to be afraid of leaving unfinished work on the screen, now I save before I go to sleep, but I know it'll still be there in the morning.

Now the PowerMac G5, it's a nice computer, the system architect is topnotch, but I prefer the elegance of a QuickSilver, if they have a way to squeeze an dual G5 into a Quicksilver case then I'll put money on that.
It's unfortunate that a computer has more presence than most people. But anyone who sees it is drawn to it. What do you do with it? Is that a Mac? I've never seen one like that? I know I know. I'll leave him alone for now. He's ripping DVDs and it's quite a strain on our relationship. I've got work to do, but I can't get it to multitask the way I want it to. I need two processors! Maybe more...

This blog is now being written from the ecto. I'm evaluating it right now because I may use it in the longrun instead of the CGI interface.

If you haven't heard you should check out my homegirl M.I.A. Artist out of the UK. Beats are made crazy and I'm digging the colloquialism. You can also cop it on Amazon.

Listening to: Hombre from the album "Arular" by M.I.A.

It was bound to happen. I've been sleeping on them for a while and as soon as I find a decent HVAC system that will fit in the closet, I'm getting one. That's right my own Supercomputer. A Cray T3E-1200E to be exact. In just 6 years this beast went from $4 Million to 10% of that. Now I don't feel so bad about having my 2G 20GB iPod (it was $500 2 years ago, now you can get it for half that). Too bad it's not a Cray XMP. That would make a killer couch, being octoganol shaped and all.

Happy bidding folks.