Posted by Ub3rG33k on Feb 3, 2009 in
Microsoft 
I’ve now been using windows 7 beta on my spare machine for a couple of weeks, and it pains me to say, I’m impressed. It’s rock solid, and not fallen over once.
The machine I’m running it on is a Dell Vostro 220 that I bought toward the end of last year.
The Spec is as follows
2Ghz Core 2 Duo
2Gb Ram
2 x 150Gb Sata Hard Drives
ATI 3450 256Mb Dedicated Graphics
Onboard sound
All driver I’m using are in inbuilt Windows drivers, apart from the ATI drivers which are beta.
I’m currently running, Tversity, Utorrent, MKV2VOB, Imgburn, Epson CDprint. Now granted I’m not really pushing it, well apart from the Vob encoding, and the Tversity encoding, but it’s worked flawlessly since I installed it on the 21st Jan 2009.
Taking the above into consideration, I decided to ghost my hard drive on my main gaming PC, and install it on the main drive, big mistake !
Now I will be honest, my machine isn’t the best example of a standard machine, as I’ve had a number of issues with it. There is nothing phyically wrong with it, hardware wise, it’s just have had some (Microsoft hates ATI, and ATI can’t write drivers for toffee issues)
The spec is as follows
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ Dual Core CPU
4GB DDR2 5400 OCZ Memory
Asus M2R32-MVP SB600 chipset Motherboard
1 x Pioneer 212 DVD-Multi Drive
1 x WD 500Gb 7200 Hard Drive
2 x WB 250GB 7200 Hard Drive
ATI 2900HD 1Gb Video Card
Now the initial problems I had were with the installation, As I have a SATA DVD drive the AHCI doesn’t like working, however I was able to crowbar the operating system on, this worked ok, however the system paused every couple of seconds, and the hard drive light lit up like a Christmas tree.
So based on this, I put the hard drives into IDE Native mode, and reinstalled, and this fixed the pausing problem.
Driver support….well apart from ATI, NONE ! I know the software is in beta stages, but Geeez, didn’t manufacturers learn thier lesson from the Vista release, I remember waiting for months for Soundblaster to release stable drivers, I ended up taking my XFI card out and using the onboard card instead.
The ATI drivers were Video only, so I have no motherboard drivers, which mean much slowness. I attempted to use the Vista drivers, nope, forget it, just hung. I found that any vista drivers I tried, just made the system hang (fair enough, they ain’t for Windows 7)
I tried to run a few games with the current machine, and they run bad. If they would run at all, they were slow and choppy.
Now I do understand, that the majority of the issues are driver related, so I’ll keep an eye on these and retest at a later date.
As an operating system, I actually can’t wait for it to come out, it’s what Vista should have, and hopefully everybody will forget Vista even happened (kinda like Windows ME).
I like the way the Widgets are no longer on the windows sidebar, I love the preview Window when you scroll over the bottom bar, like the management of the taskbar menu.
Will update when more drivers are available, but at the moment a 2 thumbs up
Tags: 2900, 7, asus, athlon 64 x2 6000, ati, ati drivers, Beta, beta stages, card, chipset motherboard, christmas tree, core, couple, dell, Dell Vostro, drive, drive ati, driver, drivers, dual core cpu, duo, gaming pc, graphics, hard, HD, imgburn, initial problems, M2R32, machine, Me, mkv2vob, Motherboard, MVP, native mode, ocz memory, Onboard, rock, sata, sata hard drives, sb600, Spec, system, toffee, tversity, utorrent, Video, video card, vista, vob, vostro, windows, windows drivers, XFI
Posted by Ub3rG33k on Jan 21, 2009 in
Microsoft
Well, I have a spare machine, so thought I’d download the Vista 7 Beta, and see what’s in store for windows users.
Currently I’ve spent only an hour or so using it, however I thought I’d give my first impressions.
It’s quick, it’s stable and so far no crashing.
The UI is improved, however seems more and more like Mac OS
The below are just first impressions, and the resolution is possible, however not clear.
Currently don’t like to the fact that that you can’t change the control panel to classic mode.
There is no longer a quick launch toolbar (I need this in my life)
Unable to turn off UAC
I’m a little curious how it was able to access my NAS drive (which requires name/password), and have full access ?
as I’ve said, this are first impressions, and I will add posts when I’ve sussed out how to do the above.
edit: Ok, now I’ve had a little more time, I’ve now answered my questions. Instead of UAC, you now have a feature that gives you a sliding scale of how often you want Windows to annoy you, turning this to never, allows your to do what you like.
Sussed the taskbar, I had it locked…now I can drag and “pin to toolbar”
Sussed how it was able to access my NAS drive, it seems to be smart enough to use the NT/Authentication setting that I logged onto Windows 7 with, and try these…and it worked.
Finally as for the control panel, you are unable to change it to classic mode, but you can “show all control panel”, and this displays the log, however it does seem to reset when you go back in.
The playing will continue
Tags: 7, authentication, Beta, classic mode, control, control panel, Download, drive, fact, First, first impressions, hour, Impression, launch, life, Mac OS, machine, mode, name, nas, nas drive, panel, password, quick launch, resolution, store, Sussed, taskbar, toolbar, UAC, ui, vista, windows, windows users
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.
| Technical specifications |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
4 x Serial ATA Hard Drives |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
10/100/1000 Ethernet, auto MDI/MDIX |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Network service protocols |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
MP3, WAV/PCM, WMA, AC3/AAC, OGG, AIF/AIFF |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
VOB, AVI, MPEG2, MPEG4, WMV9 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
19 V 150 W external power adapter |
|
|
|
|
|
|
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
Dimensions