Jul 11
15
Clementine was lucky enough to get yet another unplanned upgrade recently, this time a new video card. Why? Because her previous one failed (specifically, it blew a capacitor). I’m a big fan of the card that was previously in Clementine — an EVGA GeForce 7100GS. It’s an Nvidia chipset; it’s a silent, fanless card; and it’s not super powerful, since I don’t game, so it was very reasonably priced.
But, all of a sudden one day, it started acting up. While using Clementine, you would randomly get multi-colored pixelization, and after a while of the pixelization, the machine would hang. From the beginning I suspected this was the video card failing, but I did try other easy things first — update driver, update Windows, reduce resolution, turn off Aero… the last two helped prolong the time before Clementine would hang, but nothing actually fixed the problem.
So I ordered a more modern, but very similar card to replace the failing one — an EVGA GeForce 210. Still nVidia, still silent, and still modestly powerful but well-priced. Since it’s four years later, it’s significantly more powerful than the 7100GS it replaces. It also adds an HDMI port in place of the S-Video port my previous card had. Great card so far. And it’s a PCI Express 2.0 card, so my current motherboard is holding it back, but I’m planning to replace the motherboard next year, so this card will grow with that upgrade as well.
Apr 11
30
Clementine got an unplanned upgrade — a front panel card reader! I’ve never gone out of my way to include card readers in my machines, but over the last couple years I’ve really started using flash cards for cameras, phones, and other devices, so it made sense to make it easier to get files off of the cards and onto my computer. Back in August, I bought a simple external USB card reader (the kind that looks like a flash drive, but a card plugs into). But then I lost it! And as I was considering replacing it, I decided that that’s the sort of thing that’s likely to get lost again. So I decided to get an internal one that becomes part of the front panel. It’s a Koutech model which fits in a 3.5-inch drive bay, so it’s not terribly obtrusive, and it supports just about every card format on the market — it even has a dedicated MicroSD slot, so no need for adapters! And it also adds an additional USB port to the front panel. I already have the two that are part of the case, but this puts one higher up — so I’ll probably actually use this one more. A good unit as far as I can tell!
Feb 11
25
Clementine‘s Canon printer and Epson scanner have both been replaced with a wireless Canon MG6120 Photo All-In-One printer. Since this is a wireless printer/scanner/copier (through Wifi), it’s no longer considered a part of Clementine and is now instead considered a shared resource.
Both the previous printer and scanner were great and largely working fine, but this will be a beneficial upgrade on several fronts. The fact that it’s wireless means it’s no longer dependent on anyone computer. Sure, Windows can share printers, but then you have to make sure the host computer is powered on. In my computing environment, where I have 3 computers spread over 2 floors, there’s no guarantee that Clementine will be powered on and it might be inconvenient to go and turn it on. In this vein, the new printer can actually automatically open up the paper output tray when a print job comes in. So, as long as the printer is on (in a standby mode), any other computer can print. Great!
Also, over time it has become more and more desirable to be able to occasionally do a quick copy, without having to start up a photo editing program, scan, save, and print. This new multifunction unit will streamline that workflow quite a bit.
So far, I really like this printer / scanner. It was very easy to set up, and the features all seem to work really well and are easy to use. I already love Canon printers, and the scan quality is quite good as well. I’ve always been weary of multifunction devices, but I did a lot of research and this particular one seems to be great.
Lastly, it’s worth noting that the old printer and scanner were two of the oldest components in Clementine. The Canon printer was 5 years old, but the Epson scanner is an amazing 10 years old — it’s seen many computers come and go and has continued to perform well in all that time. You will be missed, Epson!
Dec 10
30
My holiday upgrade this year was adding a Blu-ray burner to Clementine. I’ve always been interested in the large storage capacities of Blu-ray discs (25GB on a single layer), so had long planned on getting a burner in 2011. However, recently I bought an HD camcorder, so I decided to speed up the acquisition of a Blu-ray burner so that the videos could be stored in their full-HD glory. So far, so good. Blu-ray burners are still somewhat in their infancy, but this drive (an LG 10x model) had consistently good reviews and was at a good price point. I’ve only had it a few days, so I haven’t tested it exhaustively, but I did burn one Blu-ray video disc using Pinnacle Studio and it turned out successfully, so I’m optimistic about it.
This drive replaces a basic Compaq OEM DVD-ROM drive. I decided to replace this drive because it was one of the oldest components in Clementine, and that drive was long and sometimes hard to work with inside the case. Since I chose to replace the DVD-ROM, that means I still have my Plextor DVD burner as well, so now Clementine has two optical disc burners. I figure that’s OK — the Plextor drive is newer and better than the older Compaq drive, so even if it only gets used for reading now, I’d rather hold on to that drive. And who knows — maybe I’ll want to burn two DVDs at once someday!
Nov 10
17
Scooter, my home theater PC, recently got upgraded from 2GB RAM to 3GB. Scooter came from Dell with two 1GB modules, so I replaced one with a 2GB module to achieve the 3GB total.
This is also a reasonable time to give an update — Scooter is working out great! This was my first foray into home theater PCs, and it’s a great addition to my home theater. I wasn’t sure if I really would use a PC like this, but it gets used all the time. Netflix streaming, Youtube watching, Pandora or iTunes music to my wireless speakers throughout the house, or just sticking an SD card in to view digital pictures. It’s amazing how often it comes in handy to have a decent computer permanently set up in the family room, attached to the TV and the home’s sound system. And I still love the appearance of the Dell Zino HD — it blends in great with the other A/V equiment.
If you’re on the fence about getting a home theater PC in general or a Zino HD in particular — they both have high recommendations from me.
Aug 10
6
I bought my laptop, Beaker, in 2008, and haven’t done upgrades to him at all in that time. So, finally, I increased the amount of memory. Beaker came with two 1GB modules, so I replaced one of them with a 2GB Crucial module, bringing the total to 3GB. Interestingly, this means that Beaker has the most RAM of all of my computers. But that’s not too bad of an idea — laptops benefit greatly from RAM because they typically have slower hard drives, and more RAM means hitting the hard drive less. Still very happy with Beaker, and may go ahead and replace the other 1GB module at some point.
Mar 10
17
I recently added a new computer my family — a home theater PC named Scooter. I’ve been planning on getting a home theater PC for over a year now, but it was a long process of finding just the right device that met my needs. I had two main use cases for this PC: 1) To be a computer that is permanently attached to my TV so that it’s more convenient to watch Netflix streaming moves and other video content on my TV, rather than manually hooking up a laptop on-demand, and 2) To also be attached to my wireless speakers that I have sprinkled throughout the house and provide a music-control interface on the first floor, rather than running upstairs to the office whenever I want to change playlists. Although these are my current primary use cases, I really wanted a computer that, as much as possible, would not restrict me down the road, as I have no idea what services I will want to use in the future. So I wanted it to support these use cases well, but not be too specialized.
Due to being permanently attached to the TV and thus becoming part of my home theater, aesthetics were important to me. I didn’t want to just set up a regular desktop next to my TV. And input matters too — my couch is about 10 feet back from the TV, so wireless is a must, and I don’t want to just have a full keyboard and mouse sitting on my coffee table. Aesthetics were important to this project.
My original plan was to built an HTPC myself. I looked into Micro-ATX motherboards, and was able to piece together a decent system at a reasonable price. The sticking point, though, was case design. I really wanted something compact and discrete, but micro-ATX cases are still, on the whole, much larger than what I had in mind. The best ones were roughly the width of a cable set top box (foot and half, perhaps), but were suprisingly tall — on the order of 7 inches. That’s quite an imposing box, and none that I saw really looked attractive in terms of home theater equipment.
So I scrapped that idea and began to consider pre-built systems. There is a new desktop form factor recently called “Nettop”, which is inspired by Netbooks — very small cases with reasonable, but lower-powered hardware. For the most part, nettops are designed for exactly my scenario of a home theater PC.
The problem was, when I started looking into nettops from manufacturers like Asus and Acer, they were either too low powered (I want to make sure the machine can grow somewhat with my needs) or, again, too ugly.
Until I discovered the Dell Zino HD. This computer is exactly what I was looking for — small and compact (8 inches by 8 inches, about 3 inches tall), attractive (you can pick colors, but mine is glossy black with a minimal number of ports on the front), and reasonably powerful (mine has a 1.5GHz dual-core AMD CPU, and runs Windows 7 just fine).
On the input side, I looked at tons of small keyboards and remotes, and decided on the Logitech diNovo Mini, which is a really compact wireless keyboard/touchpad combination. It’s about the size of a Blackberry, and is great if you’re OK with thumb-typing. you certainly wouldn’t want to type a thesis on this keyboard, but it’s perfectly fine for typing in URLs, movie names into Netflix, and that sort of thing. And the touchpad works well too. This way, I have full control over the computer, but in a nice little input device that doesn’t look out of place in the family room.
On the software side, I was open to the idea of all-in-one media center packages, like Windows Media Center, that provide a 10-foot interface and provide easy access to all your media, but I couldn’t find one that really did a good job of integrating with both Netflix and iTunes. So for now, I am just running iTunes and accessing Netflix through a web browser. Since I have my full input device and this is a decently-spec’ed computer, this works just fine, although I am still passively on the lookout for a great media center software package.
In the end, I love this setup, and have no real criticisms for either the Zino HD nor the diNovo Mini. For my purposes (wanting a relatively general-purpose computer), I think they are a great combination and are easy to use. For people who had already bought into a particular media center software package, there may be other better options of lower-powered computers and specialized remotes. But even in that case, I would argue that, based on what I’ve seen, no nettop computer looks as good in a home theater as the Zino HD.
Oct 09
23
As I mentioned in my last post, Clementine recently evolved from being a computer just for my wife, into being a computer for both of us. As a result, she needed a boost in a few areas to better suit the needs of both of us combined. Also, with all the stuff going on over the last few months related to buying a house, I haven’t gotten to do much computer work, and was starting to feel the itch to do some upgrades!
First, I added memory. I had long intended on increasing Clementine from 1GB to 2GB, and finally did it. The memory module that came was, apparently, low-profile. It’s about half the height of a regular module. I didn’t know this when I ordered it, but it doesn’t really affect me, for good or bad. Just have never seen that before.
Second, I added a Firewire card, which provides a 2 external Firewire ports (one 6-pin, one 4-pin) and 1 internal port. This was desirable because my wife’s digital camcorder is able to connect to computers via Firewire, but we’ve never had a firewire port. Now we can back videos up to the computer. The firewire card with a cable, which is nice, but it turned out the cable was defective. I ordered a $3 cable from Amazon, and now it works great.
Third, I replaced both hard drives. The old 120GB data drive is now replaced with a 500GB drive, and the old 160GB OS/backup drive is replaced with a 750GB drive. Both are Western Digital drives.
Lastly, since I was going to need to re-install Windows anyways due to the hard drive replacements, I upgraded the computer to Windows Vista. Of course, this was just days before Windows 7 came out, but oh well. I don’t like adopting an OS until a few months after release anyways. But I think this computer is well-suited to Vista, so it’s nice to finally have a modern OS on here.
Oct 09
12
Life has been busy recently, and as such, I’ve been lax in updating this site. But here’s a recap of the last couple months:
My wife and I bought a house (hence life busy)! Which has resulted in several computer changes. Most importantly, we decided that instead of each having a separate computer, we’d consolidate onto just one computer, in order to make the office more manageable. Since Clementine, my wife’s computer, was overall newer than my computer, Fozzie, we decided to consolidate on Clementine.
This lead the significant event of Fozzie being decommissioned, after a lineage going back almost 10 years. Of course, nothing remains of the Fozzie that existed 10 years ago, but along the way it’s just been incremental upgrades, and so I still view it as the same computer. This was a big deal to me, as Fozzie was the first computer that I really did significant upgrades to and built myself. But, the decision to move towards Clementine makes sense. And Clementine holds a special place in my heart as well — it’s the first computer I built entirely from the ground up, rather than upgrading an existing computer. So I bid a sad farewell to Fozzie, but not too sad, as I look forward to the future with Clementine.
However, consolidating also meant taking components out of Fozzie and installing them in Clementine if they’re better than what was already in the computer. This lead to several upgrades to Clementine. Her existing 80GB data drive just didn’t cut it anymore for two people, so I replaced it (temporarily) with Fozzie’s 120GB data drive. Even that is tight; I intend on upgrading soon. Fozzie just recently got a new Altec Lansing speaker set, so I used that to replace Clementine’s existing speakers, which were the oldest componet in Clementine. Clementine also gained Fozzie’s Canon printer, Epson scanner, and Logitech gamepad, as she lacked those components. And lastly (and coolest), I now found myself with two identical, great, monitors. So I added Fozzie’s 19-inch Samsung to Clementine, resulting in an amazing dual-monitor setup at home. I’ve gotten used to this sort of setup at work — it’s hard to explain why two monitors are so great, but once you experience it, you’ll never go back to just one.
With the two computers merged, now I plan on doing some specific upgrades to Clementine to make her better suited to serving the needs of both me and my wife. Look for those soon.
Also, my trusty D-Link wireless router was replaced in favor of an Actiontec router provided to me as part of my new Verizon FiOS service. It wasn’t necessarily by choice, but the new router actually seems quite good — better than the wireless router Verizon provided me as part of DSL, which I ended up not using. And it’s necessary for some FiOS features, such as On Demand, so I might as well use it.
Overall, a busy few months, both in terms of computer upgrades and general life events.
Feb 09
25
Fozzie got upgraded to Windows Vista recently, sort of by accident.
It all started with the fact that I had been running Vista within a virtual machine for awhile, and wanted to finally try running it on the base hardware to see if my beloved computer could handle the notoriously resource-hungry Vista. So, I started with a dual boot setup of XP and Vista. I was happy to discover that Vista actually perfectly fine on my computer, even getting a respectable 4.0 Windows Experience Index score.
The dual boot worked fine for awhile, with me occassionally going back and forth between the two OSes. But one day, I booted into XP and scandisk gave me a message during boot that one of the hard drives should be scanned. I skipped it. Then, the next time I booted into Vista, it gave me the same message. This time, I said “OK” and let it scan and fix the drive. Which proceeded to take on the order of 3 hours. During this time it processed through every file on my hard drive, saying they all had invalid security IDs and replacing them with default IDs. When it finished, Vista worked fine still, but XP was competely unusable, with tons of odd problems — the taskbar has half it’s normal height, open windows didn’t appear on the taskbar, copy and paste didn’t work, drag and drop didn’t work, the sound system didn’t work, and probably lots of other things I didn’t get a chance to notice before giving up and booting back into Vista.
After some research online, I discovered that I was actually not the first person to have this problem. It appears to be somewhat common when dual-booting between Vista and XP. The problem lies with the NTFS file system. In NTFS, all files have security permissions (such as, everyone can read/write the file, or only a certain user can write it, and so on). Additionally, all files have owners, which is the user that has the ability to set the permissions on the file. Some permissions can refer to the owner indirectly, such as “only the owner can read this file, whoever the owner is right now”.
Internally, the operating system associated an ID with each user of the system. So, say, the user “Greg” might be assigned the ID “1234″. This association is store within the operating system. The ID is what is stored in the filesystem to identify the owner of a particular file. So, the file system may say that the owner of “test.txt” has an ID of “1234″, and the operating system is then able to figure out that that means “Greg”. You might now see where I’m going with this.
The problem appears to be that since the association is stored within the OS, the IDs that were set by XP don’t mean anything to Vista, and vice versa. So, these appear to be invalid. So, the OS tries to fix them, which makes things work that operating system, but completely breaks things for the other operating system. Especially if the read/write permissions on the file referenced the owner — the OS may now be unable to read its own files.
At least, this is what I can decipher from what I observed and what I read online. There must be a way to successfully boot between the two operating systems — maybe the problem only starts to occur if you access files on one system drive from the other operating system? I don’t know.
At any rate, I decided to wipe out both installations and just go with Vista, since it seemed to work fine on my computer. No data was lost (my data is kept on a separate physical drive, and has loose permissions set so that owenrship issue didn’t really matter). However, I was hoping to soon do a similar dual-boot setup on Clementine to test it’s Vista-readiness, but now am very reluctant to do so until I can figure out a solution.