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.
Feb 09
4
For many many years now, I’ve had a tiered approach to backups. On one tier, I do automatic nightly backups from one hard drive to the other, protecting against drive failure and accidental deletion. On the next tier, I have done manual monthly backups to DVD-RWs (and CD-RWs before that), protecting against power surges, malware that may corrupt all attached disks, and physical damage to the computer. On the last tier, I do manual yearly backups to DVD-Rs, which are then stored off-site, protecting against fire, flood, and natural disaster. I pretty much have all my bases covered.
Except for the troublesome middle tier — the DVD-RW backups. Since I do it every month maually, I don’t want it to be too involved or take too much time. So, to cut down on the number of discs required I’ve usually just backed up my regular data, minus music and movies. That cuts it down a lot. But, even that subset has grown and recently has spanned 4 DVDs, which is just time-consuming to do every month. I had a similar problem several years ago when I used to back up to CDs, which prompted me to move to DVDs. Logically, I could progress now to Blu-Ray discs, but I think history is telling me that moving to new media will only buy me a couple years before I exceed the capacity again. It’s a flawed process.
So, I recently decided to switch my middle-tier backups to a big external hard drive instead. This way, I can do a full backup every month (rather than a subset), and all I have to do is start the backup process, and then let it go. No switching of media. And it’s important to note that this external hard drive will always be disconnected from the computer, sitting in a drawer, so it is as safe as the DVD-RWs. The whole point of this backup tier is to be easily accessible, but generally disconnected, and this still satisfies this requirement.
You can buy pre-made external hard drives, but after much research I decided that it was more cost-effective to build my own, not to mention that doing so means I can get more capacity, and in the future it is easier to upgrade just the drive if needed. Plus, I like building stuff myself.
For the external enclosure, I decided on a Rosewill Aluminum 3.5″ SATA-to-USB enclosure. It’s made of aluminum, which helps dissipate heat generated by the drive, and had overall very good reviews on NewEgg. External enclosures can be a hit-or-miss category, and this particular one seems to be a best-of-breed component.
For the hard drive itself, there was a lot of drama. I had initially decided on a 500GB Seagate drive. I’ve always been a big fan of Seagate, historically they seem to make the highest-quality drives. However, in the last month or so they’ve been having many firmware issues with a particular subset of their drives, and this 500GB model was within that subset. As I was deciding on hard drives, Seagate had yet to resolve the issues they were having with this drive. So, I decided on a 320GB Seagate model, which was unaffected by the firmware issue. However, looking at the reviews on NewEgg, an amazing 40% of the reviews were 1-star, and they all were experiencing the same issues — drive completely dies within 2 months or so. You expect some reasonable failure rate — maybe 5% — but having 40% of reviewers report failure is amazing. So, that drive was out.
I finally decided on a 640GB Western Digital drive, which actually cost the same as the 320GB Seagate. It’s been a long time since I’ve owned a Western Digital drive, but they really seemed like the best option right now. Maybe they will become the new Seagate in terms of reliability, or maybe Seagate will recover from this.
At any rate, the external hard drive assembled very easily, and seems to be working great so far. I’ve added a new page to this site of “Shared Resources“, which allows me to show and track components which aren’t really a part of any one computer, but are shared amongst several, such as this drive.
Jan 09
22
Clementine finally got an uninterruptible power supply. Specifically, an APC Back-UPS ES BE750G. I’ve long planned to add a UPS to Clementine, and finally got around to doing it. I think a UPS is a great addition to any machine; it adds an extra layer of reliability, and it just feels great when the power goes out and your computer keeps going. Adds to the mystique of a custom-built machine. Not to mention the wear-and-tear it saves you by allowing for a safe shutdown (even if you’re not around!).
This is pretty much the same UPS as Fozzie has, although it’s a slightly newer version. Slightly slimmer and nicer looking, but effectively the same specifications. I’ve been well-served so far by APC (better than the two previous CyberPower models) and I look forward to having it as a part of Clementine.
Fozzie got a new set of speakers. I’ve been wanting to upgrade Fozzie’s speakers for several years now, but year after year I had a lot of trouble trying to find a new set that I thought would be a good replacement for what I had. Fozzie’s old speakers were a Klipsch ProMedia 4.1 set, widely considered to be one of the best-sounding sound systems available for PCs. This set was starting to crackle when the volume was adjusted, which was annoying (and, from reading forums online, common for this set). Additionally, the satellites are rather large and take up significant desk space. Lastly, this was a 4.1 set, but in the entire time that I’ve had them, I’ve only ever used the 2.1 configuration (due to space constraints and not really needing surround sound on my PC), so I’ve always had an extra two satellites just taking up room in a box. So, I wanted to get a new set which addressed these three concerns.
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.
Dec 08
5
New laptop! My existing laptop, Camilla, is going on five years old soon, and is starting to show her age, so it was time for her to be replaced. The new laptop — named Beaker — is a Dell Inspiron 1420. As a 14-inch laptop, it’s slightly smaller and lighter than Camilla, but also significantly more powerful, with a modern Intel Core 2 Duo processor.
Bunch of neat integrated features: webcam, Bluetooth, wireless, card reader. And it meets my number 1 requirement for laptops, in that it has a standard S-Video/component/composite connection for TV-out capabilities. Lots of smaller laptops either drop that feature or have moved to HDMI, but I place a value on being able to connect to a wide range of TVs as opposed to the smaller percentage supporting HDMI.
Another cool thing is that this is the only 14-inch laptop I found which supported the 1440×900 resolution, every other was a lower resolution. Since I do development, I greatly value having more screen real estate, and this resolution really does not seem too high for this size screen. Text is still crisp and readable.
Lastly, this laptop is my first exposure to Windows Vista. So far, I’m not-unimpressed. Lots of small changes to the GUI, but overall I think they are positive changes. It resolves many long-standard pet-peeves I’ve had with the XP interface: the term “Start button”, preceding everything with “My”, and over use of primary colors. Other than that, lots of configuration options have moved around, mostly in ways that are neither good nor bad. I haven’t had negative experiences so far with it. It’s not earth-shatteringly amazing, but it’s not horrible either. Just some slight improvements. I’m OK with that.
Overall, I am very happy with this laptop so far. It does everything I need it to, performs well, looks pretty sleek, and was a good value. Farewell Camilla, you’ve served me well the last five years.
Nov 08
9
Well, after a year of experimenting with using a Bluetooth headset on my primary desktop, Fozzie, I’ve come to a conclusion — the technology isn’t quite there yet. Even after adjusting to ensure line-of-sight with the receiver, the sound quality was never consistently good enough to rely on. When it was good, it was really good. But when it was bad — it was horrible. So that headset now will become solely for cell phone use, where it seems to work perfectly fine. But not with a computer.
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.
Waldorf got a new keyboard — a Microsoft Wired Keyboard 500. It’s a pretty nice keyboard, simple, but effective. It’s wired because this particular computer has no need for wireless peripherals, and the addition of batteries would really just be detrimental. And the keyboard is simple, no LCD screens or multitudes of media buttons which no one would ever use. Just a good, soft-touch, quiet, keyboard. Which is surprisingly hard to find nowadays.
This replaces a generic Compaq keyboard, which dates back to the earliest days of Fozzie (1999!). In addition to just being generally old, the keys were starting to lose responsiveness. I think it’s understandable that it started to die after almost 10 years of use.
This keyboard marks one of the last components of Waldorf that can be upgraded without a major renovation — everything else is tied to the motherboard in one way or another. This computer was originally built from parts cycled out of Fozzie, and I have been systematically upgrading all of the individually replaceable parts ever since. Now we’re at the point where the next step will be to renovate the remaining parts of the computer — motherboard, CPU, PSU, case, video card, and memory.
Mar 08
6
Got a new monitor for Clementine — a 19-inch Samsung SyncMaster 940BX. Great monitor: 1000:1 contrast ratio, adjustable height, and can be rotated.
Attentive readers may remember that this is actually the same monitor I added to Fozzie back in December 2006. Even over a year later, I still couldn’t find a better monitor than this, particularly at this price point. I didn’t start out saying that I was going to get the same monitor, but after looking at all of them, this one still won.
It’s also worth noting that this replaces a Samsung SyncMaster 570VTFT that Clementine was using. Before Clementine, this monitor was used with Fozzie, and was in fact the first LCD monitor I acquired, back in July of 2001. I am amazed at how well this monitor has held up over time. Other than being a slightly small 15 inches (which is still a common size), it has otherwise been great monitor to use over the years. That monitor — and the 4 subsequent Samsung monitors I’ve purchased — has made me a big Samsung fan. I’m continually impressed with the quality of their monitors. 5 LCD monitors and no dead pixels!