Posted by Ub3rG33k on Feb 19, 2009 in
Microsoft 
I’ve decided to give Windows 7 another go, as there have been a few driver updates. This time in changed my SATA2 drive to Native mode instead of AHCI, and the install went flawless.
Once up, Windows downloaded 5 updates, and had 4 additional drivers for my Bluetooth dongle, Marvell 88E8001 Gigabit LAN, ATI 2900 Graphics card, Razer Copperhead gaming mouse.
The spec of my machine is as follows
ASUS M2R32-MVP
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+
4Gb OCZ 6400 Memory
ATI 1Gb HD2900 XT PCI-e
1 x 500Gb Western Digital SATA2 Drive
2 x 250Gb Western Digital SATA2 Drives
1 x Pioneer 112 DVD-RW (Again wiped out the Pioneer 212 SATA drive as this again caused issues)
Onboard ADI 1988A Soundcard (Wiped out the SoundBlaster Xtreme Gamer sound card, don’t ask !)
Acer AL2216 Monitor
Acer AL1916 Monitor
Razer Copperhead Gaming Mouse
Logitech G15 Gaming keyboard
Creative 5.1 Surround speakers.
Windows 7 now works fine, with the new driver updates, and the download of the Logitech G15 driver and utility, everything seems smooth. I did however have a problem where every 5 minutes or so, Windows would give me a BSOD with a tdx.sys error message, however after a little bit of googling, it seems Windows 7 has a problem with AVG Free anti-virus.
Granted I was only up and running for a few hours last night, but I did a little bit of testing.
Steam, worked fine, all games apart from World of Goo seemed to work ok, apart from all games being at a status of “Download Started…”
Warcraft worked fine, infact better than fine, I saw an increase of over 20 frames per second.
Itunes, worked flawlessly
Left 4 Dead work, and worked very well, without a glitch
Gadgets I’ve tried, and worked.
WhetherBug
Multi Meter (D)
Network Meter v2.1
GMail Checker
Utorrent Gadget
Now this is running fine on my main machine, I will create further blogs as I decide if I love/hate Microsoft’s latest operating system. So far I think it’s quicker, uses resources better, is stable, however it’s still early days.
I would like to point out that I have a lot of 720p content on my NAS drive, and without installing any video or audio codec, it played the videos straight out of the box, very impressive
Tags: 112, 1988a, 2900, 4, 7, acer, adi, ahci, al1916, al2216, amd athlon 64, amd athlon 64 x2 6000, asus, ati, Beta, bluetooth dongle, bsod, card, copperhead, dead, digital, Download, drive, driver, driver updates, fine, free anti virus, g15, gaming, gaming mouse, gigabit lan, googling, graphics card, itunes, LAN, left, logitech, logitech g15 gaming keyboard, M2R32, machine, Monitor, mouse, mouse logitech, MVP, native mode, pioneer, problem, razer, razer copperhead, sata, soundblaster, soundcard, steam, tdx, tdx.sys, warcraft, Western, windows
Posted by Ub3rG33k on Feb 3, 2009 in
Apple,
IPod Touch As mention in my post (Gear4 AirZone FM ‘Follow Me’ ), It seems my Ipod Touch can’t power external accessories.
Spent an evening googling, reading forums, restoring the Ipod to defaults, Restored via ITunes, updated to version 2.2.1, but still no joy. Decided I’d have to goto the Mecca in Leicester (Apple store in HighCross), and seek guidance. The guy ran through what I’d already done, and booked me in with a techy, unfortunately I had the option of 5.30 on the day as it was early afternoon, this was no good, so booked in for this afternoon at 1pm.
While we were there, C decided to pick up a Ipod Touch 2G 8Gb (Guess she was sick of me never putting mine down, and thought she’d get in on it).
Went back to the Apple store today, and well you get what you pay for with Apple, appointment was at 1pm, within 5 mins, the tech guy had plugged the ipod in, ran a diagnostic, and replaced it there and then ! I was shocked, I expected to be without it for a couple of weeks, while it was being repaired !
Stunning service, and only hope the service at all other Apple stores is the same 
Got home, synced everything back up when I got home, and we’re all good again. The only slight snag, is that I’ve been playing the Mafia Live App for the last week or so, but all my money, and property are gone, I can only assume it works on my serial number. Oh well, could have been worse, I could have been playing for months
Tags: afternoon, AirZone, Apple, apple store, apple stores, appointment, early afternoon, evening, external accessories, Gear, good, guidance, guy, highcross, home, ipod, ipod touch, itunes, joy, leicester, Mafia, mecca, mention, money, post, reading, Restored, serial number, service, snag, Spent, store, t power, techy, touch, version
Posted by Ub3rG33k on Jan 15, 2009 in
Tech 
I’ve added to my toy collection, I’ve bought (as the title would suggest) a new NAS Drive.
I’ve has for the pass couple of years a 500Gb Western Digital MyBookWorld, which as ….well ok, well, slow, unstable, and over heats all the time.
I had quite a manual process to back this up too, I had to keep a machine on all the time, to run a scheduled task, to sync all the contents on the NAS drive to an external 500Gb hard drive, this was effective, however kind of overkill for a simple backup solution.
btw, the reason I’m so paranoid about backup, is a new firmware came out for the NAS drive, so I thought “OOOO, possible speed increase”, so upgraded, and it fell over Grrrrrr !, you can only imagine the paid and suffering I went though to a retrieve the content from the drive, the rebuild the linux partitions….not something I really want go through again.
Anyway, back to the Acer NAS drive, this drive is quick !, and I mean really quick !! (ok, getting around 18Mb /sec transfer speed, so about 3 times faster that the MyBookWorld)
It’s got an Itunes and Media server which supports Vob files (a god send for me streaming HD content to my PS3.
Currently running in Raid 5 (as raid 10 (0+1) isn’t available, so getting high read speeds, ok’ish write speeds, and 1.5TB of parity backup storage
It does come with Wireless access too, however this is switched off as it’s connected to my Gigabit network.
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4 x Serial ATA Hard Drives |
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10/100/1000 Ethernet, auto MDI/MDIX |
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MP3, WAV/PCM, WMA, AC3/AAC, OGG, AIF/AIFF |
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VOB, AVI, MPEG2, MPEG4, WMV9 |
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19 V 150 W external power adapter |
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Tags: 500gb hard drive, acer, aspire, AVI, backup, backup solution, backup storage, client, content, digital, disk, drive, gigabit, gigabit network, hard, hard disk drive, itunes, Linux, Mac OS, media server, MPEG, mybookworld, nas, Network, parity, power, Raid, raid 10, raid 5, raid level, serial ata hard drives, server, SMB, speed, speed increase, support, technical specifications, time, toy collection, transfer speed, vob, vob files, Western, western digital, windows, wireless access, X
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