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.

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.

I eventually decided on the Altec Lansing FX4021. This is a 2.1 setup, so it matches my desired configuration. The satellites are significantly smaller in every dimension than the Klipsch ones were. The subwoofer is smaller length and width-wise, but is taller — but that’s OK, at least it takes up less floor space. Sound quality is very good — it’s really hard to tell much of a difference between these and the Klipsch set.

One interesting note here is that the Klipsch speakers were the single oldest part of Fozzie, and in fact were the only component left that dates back to Fozzie’s original December 1999 configuration. So, this upgrade is historic in that Fozzie now shares nothing with that original Compaq Presario 5900Z I got for Christmas senior year of high school.

Another recent change — Waldorf has been decomissioned and replaced with a Dell Inspiron 530. Waldorf, for those that don’t know, was a computer who’s original goal was to be completely built out of parts cycled out of Fozzie. Originally Waldorf was my Linux computer. I didn’t use it much, though, and it eventually became my mother’s computer. For this transition, I dropped the “recycled-only” requirement, and began replacing its peripherals (monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer) with new parts. The computer itself was still very old (700MHz Athlon CPU, for example) and was running very slowly. So, the decision was made to replace Waldorf with a new pre-built Dell, which I custom configured for my parents, and re-use the new peripherals from Waldorf. So, Waldorf is no more, but that’s OK — it was only ever intended as a transition computer anyways. The more significant fact is that this marks the end of the usable line for several old components in Waldorf — the aforementioned CPU, the motherboard, the TNT2 video card, and the Sound Blaster Live sound card.

So, after re-evaluating all of my options for headsets, I’ve decided that I still believe the previous configuration to be the best. That is, a good mobile phone headet connected via a Radio Shack headphone/speaker switch that allows mobile phone headsets to connect to a PC. And after re-evaluating mobile phone headsets for this purpose, I’ve similarly decided that headset I used to use is still the best available — a Plantronics MX-505. Currently my old headset and switch are being successfully used on my wife’s computer, Clementine, so I’ve acquired a second Radio Shack switch (hard to come by now, they’re no longer manufactured) and a second Plantronics MX-505 headset, this time in black.

This serves as my secondary hard drive; it only stores my user data. That’s why it is smaller than the other hard drive, which is 250 GB. I need to be able to back up my secondary drive onto my primary drive, so my primary drive needs to be big enough to hold both the contents of the secondary drive as well as the operating system and applications. So, when I upgrade my primary drive, I can buy one as big as I want. But when I upgrade my secondary drive, I have to keep it smaller than the primary drive.

The biggest reason for doing this upgrade at this time was that I plan on renovating Fozzie again sometime this summer. When I do so, it’s quite likely that whatever motherboard I end up buying will only support one IDE channel (2 devices), as IDE is being phased out. My current board supports 2 IDE channels (4 devices), and my existing setup was 1 SATA hard drive, 1 IDE hard drive, and 2 IDE optical drives. So, I felt it would be prudent to replace the IDE hard drive with a SATA drive, so now I only have 2 IDE devices.

I’m very impressed with this new drive. Yes, it’s bigger (120 GB vs. 80 GB) and faster (SATA vs. IDE), but what really impresses me is how quiet it is. As I soon I turned my computer on for the first time with this drive in, I instantly noticed that the noise level had dropped dramatically. I assumed that my older drive was causing some noise, but not nearly as much as it actually was. And I always like to make computers as quiet as possible, so that’s a great benefit.

I’m happy to say it works great with my computer (and with my cell phone, too!). One change I had to make was that I needed to move the Bluetooth dongle from the back of my computer to my desktop, using an extra USB extension/stand that I have. It seems that line of sight is very critical to Bluetooth working correctly, especially for real-time audio. But once that change was made, the audio is very clear in both directions, and I have continued to reduce wires!

With this change in place, I was able to move my existing headset setup (a wired Plantronics MX-505 and Radio Shack speaker/headset switch) to Clementine, which had lacked a headset. That’s still a pretty recent headset model, I only got it about a year and a half ago.

After reading lots of reviews on Bluetooth adapters, I found that they range in price from $7 all the way up to $60 or more. But, they had almost universally bad reviews, except one — the Anycom USB-250. It seemed that for most adapters, no matter the price, some people could get it to work, while lots of people could not. To be fair, Bluetooth can be complex because compatibility depends on both the adapter as well as the device you’re connecting to (in my case, my cell phone). There are so many possible combinations that it’s not surprising that there are compatibility problems. But, it seemed that more people had success with the Anycom adapter than with others.

Since I got it, I have found that it works perfectly with my phone. I am able to transfer files, use my phone as a modem, and use my computer as a speaker phone. Some of it was non-obvious (step #1: Get rid of the CD that comes with the adapter and download the latest software from Anycom’s web site), so I may end up writing a how-to for my blog.

Now that I have Bluetooth connectivity on my computer, I am excited to start getting more Bluetooth-compatible devices. Printers, mice, keyboards, media players… lots of things are supporting Bluetooth nowadays. And now I can take part in the wireless fun!

Case in point: In my last post, I talked about adding an XFX GeForce 7300GT video card to my computer. However, at that time I had not really pushed it very much. I played Doom 3 for a couple of minutes, was amazed by the quality of the rendering, and posted to this blog. Later, I continued to play Doom 3, and found that, consistently, after about 5 – 10 minutes of playing, the computer would lock up. So, I downloaded a video card stability tester, and the card would fail the test (i.e., crash the computer) within just a few seconds of the test running. After reading online and reviewing the specs for the video card, I began to suspect that the card was attempting to pull more power than my 400W power supply could, well, supply.

So, I went onto NewEgg, read some reviews, and ordered an Antec TrueControl 550W power supply. This time around, I wanted to go with Antec since they are consistently well reviewed and have a very good reputation for producing high-quality power supplies.

A few days went buy, and it came. I installed it, and it completely solved the problem. Doom 3 runs perpetually, and the video card stability test runs without crashing. However, this is not the end of the story.

The TrueControl line of power supplies come with a control panel you can mount on the front of your computer. This panel has several dials which allow you to tweak the voltage and fan speed of the power supply. I have two issues with this control panel: One, I don’t overclock so I don’t need to tweak my voltage levels. Two, the panel is incredibly, incredibly, ugly. Perhaps if you’re one of those people who put neon lights in your case, it wouldn’t be so bad, but that is not the look I’m going for at all.

When ordering the power supply, I assumed that if you didn’t set up the control panel, the power supply would just run like a normal power supply and produce the rated voltages and whatnot. However, it turns out that without the front panel connected, the power supply actually runs all the voltages at their minimum rated levels, and fans at full speed. Incredible.

It’s perfectly safe to have voltages at the bottom of the rated range, but the problem is that if that voltage were to fluctuate at all, you’d suddenly be outside of that safe range. I didn’t want to pay top dollar for an Antec power supply, and always be worried about my voltage levels. Nor did I want to have to install the horrible front panel.

So, I returned it to NewEgg. Luckily, they are good about things like this. In its place, I ordered a standard TruePower Trio 550W power supply. No front panel.

Upon installing this power supply, the video card still functions correctly, and voltage levels are where they should be. I’m pretty impressed with the Antec power supply so far. It’s quiet, powerful, and puts out incredibly steady voltages.

But in the end, this is a lesson — always assume that something is going to go wrong when upgrading parts. Not that that’s bad — you’ll learn a lot along the way — but it’s just important to keep in mind.

The biggest change is that I’ve upgraded the video card in my primary desktop computer, Fozzie. The new video card is an XFX GeForce 7300GT, replacing the existing PNY Verto GeForce 5200FX. The reason for this upgrade is that my system is AGP-based, and the graphics card industry has recently switched to PCI-Express, so AGP cards will be becoming more rare. As such, I wanted to put a rather high-end AGP card in Fozzie, effectively maximizing its graphics capabilities, until the time comes that I upgrade the whole system to a PCI-Express-capable motherboard. I’m very happy with the GeForce 7300GT card so far. It runs Doom 3 amazingly well, and also lets me use the digital connection to my recently upgraded LCD monitor.

On Fozzie, I also upgraded both the keyboard and mouse with a new desktop set, the Logitech LX710 cordless desktop. There were several motivations for this upgrade. On the keyboard side, the keyboard that I had (a Logitech Cordless Access keyboard) was relatively low-end when I bought it, and the “feel” of the keys has significantly degraded over time. Since I am a software engineer, I do a lot of typing, and the feel of the keys is very important to me. This new keyboard is a slim profile, with quiet keys. On the mouse side, the mouse I had (a Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse Blue) was getting to be 4 years old (the longest I have ever had a mouse!), and was showing significant wear-and-tear on the surface. Additionally, in the four years that have passed, new optical mouse technologies have come out, most notably laser mice. I am quite impressed with this new mouse — with the laser technology, it seems to perform almost identically to a corded mouse. I always felt that my previous cordless mouse was very, very good for a cordless mouse, but it was noticably different than using a corded mouse. Not so with this laser mouse. Also, going to this new set allowed me to consolidate the two different wireless receivers I had into just one. And, this one receiver is just a USB dongle, so it doesn’t even need to sit on my desk. Amazing.

Lastly, Waldorf saw an upgrade in that I added a printer, a Canon Pixma iP4200 to it. Waldorf previously had no printer. Waldorf is a computer I originally built out of spare parts for myself, but now it is serving as my mother’s computer, so it warranted having a new printer. The last three printers I have purchased have been Canons, and I have been consistently impressed.

This replaces a 15″ Samsung SyncMaster 570V, which I’ve had since sophomore year of college. I still remember when I first got that monitor, it was a big deal because at that time not many people had LCD monitors. That monitor was very good for its time, and is still actually a very nice monitor (no dead pixels there either!). My primary reason for wanting to upgrade was because I wanted a little more screen real estate than a 15″, 1024×768 monitor can offer. So, that monitor has been moved to my fiance’s computer, which is a nice upgrade from her previous CRT monitor.

The monitor was one of the three oldest parts of my computer, upgrading it now puts my >4 year old, 80GB secondary hard drive into that category.