Xblog: Tag Vista

Still Standing

Christopher Smith — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:09:00 -0700

For those of you who still care about Vista, I “upgraded” to SP1 and didn’t encounter any of the problems that a lot of others have had.

The 127 MB download took forever (like 45 minutes despite our pricey DSL connection), and then the installer popped up a dialogue saying that it needed at least 3GB of disk space on the main Windows partition and wouldn’t install until I made room. I’m trying to figure out how a rational person could think that a 127MB download might need 3GB of disk space to complete (yeah, I can see contrived situations where it’d be possible, but come on!). I dutifully cleared away like 15GB of downloads that were just sitting around on my drive, ran the install, dutifully rebooted the system as one would expect from Windows, and then confirmed that the entire install had consumed ~800MB of disk space (I’m guessing a 2:1 compression ratio, binary diffs, plus backing up the old files for rollback pretty much explains all of that).

You know, it is sad enough watching those progress bars behave like meandering drunks stumbling to the next bar during the later hours of a pub crawl, but really, is it so hard to have a reasonably accurate estimate of how much disk space is needed for an install?

OOopps!

Christopher Smith — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 10:21:00 -0800

I was just to curious about what could be causing problems with Vista when I swapped out my motherboard, so I had to explore further. I had forgotten that my old motherboard had died in the middle of a Vista update, so the OS was understandibly in a bit of an ugly state. Booting up the OS install DVD repaired the problem and I was off to the races….. then I installed the updates.

It turns out I’m effected by a bug in one of the updates that appears to be effecting a lot of people. I’m not surprised. If my BSOD is to be believed, my AHCI driver is busted. I can’t imagine what it is like for people who have their system set to automatically install updates, but at least I was able to recover quickly by reverting to a previous configuration.

I’d love to hear the inside scoop on what was going on there.

Finally Got Anti-Virus Software On Vista 64-bit

Christopher Smith — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 01:34:00 -0800

Yes, I’m lazy.

I waited and waited to install anti-virus software on my 64-bit Vista Ultimate (how you can label some edition of Vista as “Ultimate” but not bundle anti-virus software is beyond me….). I was basically waiting for two things: a sale on anti-virus software and some anti-virus software that cockily proclaimed it supported 64-bit Vista. Most anti-virus software includes kernel-level hooks these days, so it didn’t seem likely that dirty ol’ 32-bit software would do the trick. Newegg decided to have a sale on Trend Micro’s Internet Security such that after rebate the cost was basically just taxes and shipping and the product label said “64-bit Vista supported”, so I went for it.

The install was pretty straight forward until a message appeared indicating that Trend Micro needed a software update that “optimized performance” be installed on my Vista system before it could itself install. Then a dialog popped up asking me if I’d like to install the hotfix for KB931365. Unlike on this blog there was no link to get more information on the hotfix, and of course the installer had helpfully suggested that all windows and all additional software be shut down during the install, so if this was your only computer, you were kind of SOL for uncovering what KB93165 was before approving the install.

Fortunately, I had other computers from which to look this kind of thing up, and from that I learned what those of you who followed the above link already know: this wasn’t just some performance fix, it was a fix for a BSOD, and would be triggered by the install of any anti-virus filter driver!

But wait, it gets better: the hotfix for this has been around in its present form since March 2007, and it looks like it first appeared at least as far back as January. Microsoft’s regular security update rounds have yet to include a fix for this.

The implications seem clear to me: either Microsoft doesn’t have much confidence in this fix or they don’t feel installing anti-virus software on Vista is important… most likely both. This is a bug that literally crashes a computer when installing software everyone should be installing… and yet they haven’t been able to roll out a long term fix after 10+ months? Please.

Here’s looking to see if it makes SP1.

Living in a 64-bit world

Christopher Smith — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 14:54:00 -0700

So, after upgrading to a 64-bit version of Vista, I now have all of my machines running 64-bit OS’s. Our only 32-bit OS in the house now is on my wife’s MacBook Pro. Living in a 64-bit world has been…. interesting.

The bottom line is that it seems like the whole 64-bit experience is still not that well supported by anyway, and those that tell you that you get perfect 32-bit emulation are… missing the point.

First of all, there are drivers. Gentoo had problems dealing with my IDE controller with x86-64, as did several other distributions. Ubuntu was the first one I found that did the right thing. The Linux experience is mostly there, but of course 64-bit browser means no 32-bit plugins, so flash doesn’t work so well (more a plus than anything else, although it is shocking sometimes finding sites whose most basic functionality seems to depend on flash doing things that HTML does just fine). I could use a 32-bit browser, but Ubuntu doesn’t seem to support that too well.

Finding a JVM that works well on 64-bit Linux is… tricky. Gcj does the trick fairly well, but it has the occasional problem. The Sun VM’s are available from Ubuntu in 32-bit form… only they don’t seem to work too well.

It turns out there aren’t a lot of Smalltalk VM’s for 64-bit Linux either. Niether Cincom nor Squeak have something ready made, although it looks like there has been some effort to address that on Squeak’s side. Either way, 32-bit VM’s seem likely to work just fine.

Windows is another story. It is clearly 64-bit in the OS only. Hardly anything is available for Vista in 64-bit, although you can launch a 64-bit IE (which promptly will be without plugins). That’s fine, so long as everything works well in 32-bit mode, which for the most part is absolutely true.

The main catch was in the driver space (where everything must be 64-bit). It seems like I’ve traded one set of problems for another. Before I had occasional problems with my nVidia drivers. The 64-bit ones seem to work quite well, but now my sound driver is a tad funky. Specifically, the driver doesn’t seem to recognize when I plug something in to the front panel. It does fine with the back panel, and Linux seems to be able to still work fine with the front panel. No idea what is going on there.

The killer one for Vista though is this road rally game that came with my video card. I got a fairly nice overclocked, passively cooled Gigabyte GeForce 7600GS and the game was bundled to presumably demonstrate just how cool the card is. Despite being a freebie, the game is heavily copy protected. The copy protection system works by… (wait for it..) installing a driver. Said driver is only available for 32-bit Windows systems. So, even though the game itself will run fine on 64-bit Windows systems (as a 32-bit program) and was basically given away, I can’t play the game because the copy protection system can’t verify that I haven’t copied it somehow. How insane is that?

I gotta say, nothing has motivated me to work on WINE more than this experience.

The Death and Rebirth of My Desktop

Christopher Smith — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 19:31:00 -0700

So, one unfortunate night a week or so ago, a foul stench emerged from my desk, and for once it wasn’t me or some food that had been left there too long. No, it was the smell of some electronic component burning out. Thus began my adventure…

Two things have emerged from my experiences with the old machine. One is an appreciation for cheap computers. Cheap computers don’t lose much value over time, and they remain useful for remarkably long periods of time. The other, was an appreciation for a small and quiet computer, because the old desktop met neither criteria.

Thus began my search for a new desktop. At first I looked for really small machines. Things like the AOpen miniPC or Shuttle’s X100. It became clear though that such systems involved making compromises in terms of performance and price that I wasn’t entirely happy with. The X100 looked like it almost might be good enough, but it was pricey and it required living with an ATI graphics card that might not make Linux too happy, nor would it be terribly great at driving WoW at 1920x1200. Then I looked at Shuttle’s larger units and some truly exotic stuff like Zalman’s TNN 300 which provides total silence and a very compact size, but is just ridiculously expensive.

In the end I ended up going with the a design built around the Antec NSK1300. It provides a small, quiet enclosure at a very reasonable price, but like the TNN 300 it conforms to the micro-ATX form factor allowing me to choose from a variety of cost effective motherboards, processors and graphics cards. For $100, I got the case and a quiet but efficient 300w PSU. I also snagged an e4300 at bargain rates (hint: the prices will be even better if you can wait until the end of the month). I stumbled across a deal at Fry’s that let me get 4GB of DDR-6400 RAM at a bargain price. The real hard part was coming up with a motherboard and graphics card. It turns out that basically all the built in graphics on motherboards are good enough for normal tasks but tend to be lacking when it comes to games (so bad, even WoW performs poorly). ATI seems to have some nice passively cooled cards in the midrange, but ATI and Linux don’t get along super well these days. After getting some advice from a variety of sources I focused on getting a passively cooled but overclocked nVidia 7600GS based card. That left the motherboard.

It turns out that the combination of micro-ATX and Core2 duo doesn’t give you a lot of options for motherboards. I probably would have had a better set of choices if I’d gone AMD. In the end I went with the abit Fatal1ty F-190HD. The deciding factor is that it seemed to be the only board available with decent overclocking potential, plus it could support up to 16GB of memory, and it was reasonable cheap (Gigabyte has a new micro-ATX board in their solid state capacitor line coming out, but I couldn’t find it for sale anywhere).

That’s when the real adventure started: putting it together. I used to put together machines all the time, but it until recently it had been years since I’d had to. Rusty fingers + cramped confines of NSK1300 = a challenge. I’ll try to get pictures up soon to give people an idea of just how tricky it all was. I upped the ante by throwing in a Zalman CNPS-8000 HSF, which had been selected because Fry’s had it in stock so I could return it if it didn’t quite fit.

As it turns out, the fan just barely fits, with a little bit of scraping of the bottom of the case and the motherboard as they rub together. The memory didn’t fit in easy either (I always find it harder than it should be to get DIMMs in their sockets, but the F-190 took it to a new level). Getting the auxilliary power connector in was a bit of a trick, as the F-190 and NSK1300 conspire to hide it underneath the PSU with maybe an inch and a half of clearance.

The whole ordeal didn’t get to be laughable until it came time to stuff the drives in. I stole the drives from my old system, so I was still going with good old PATA. At some point I realized this wasn’t going to work so well as the F-190 has only one PATA port, so I limited myself to the Windows drive and the DVD-ROM (I always find it easier to move my Linux stuff over to a new drive).

The NSK1300 has a clever fold out drive bay mechanism like a lot of small form factor cases (it is somewhat unique in letting you hang drives off the side of the mechanism). That is all well and good until you look at the PATA cable they provide. It’s one of those ones designed to maximize air flow (good idea, as the case is invariably terribly cramped). Unfortunately, while the length to IDE “master” connection leaves some room for play, the IDE “secondary” connection is just barely far enough away from the end of the cable for it to reach the hard disk bay (no hope of it reaching the side bays). That means you have to hook it up with the drive bay closed. At this point I thought a bit about moving to a country without child labour laws, so I could hire some ten year old with small hands to finish the job.

XP was sufficiently cheezed off with all my changes to the hardware that the old Windows install wouldn’t boot even in safe mode. So, I took the plunge and installed…. Vista Home. That was when this adventure took on a whole new dimension.

The Vista installer kept complaining that my BIOS was not fully ACPI compatible. This was odd to me as the F-190 is a very new motherboard. How could it not work with Vista? How could it have problems with ACPI compatibility. After seeing BSOD after BSOD, I finally found out the problem: I had disabled the SATA controller (sure, I was going to use it later, but not for right now). I’m guessing Vista saw the controller but the ACPI BIOS wouldn’t provide instructions for powering it on, so it got mad.

After that, thing actually worked pretty well. Vista really doesn’t seem to be bad at all. It actually moved all my old windows stuff in to a “windows.old” folder, but amazingly I can still run games and such that were installed on XP. The F-190 has overclocked my e4300 with ease and grace, although I have yet to really push the limits.

So, nitpicks:

The NSK1300 could really use the nice cable management features that I found in my P150 and most of the rest of Antec’s product line. At the very least it’d be nice if the power cables come out of the top of the PSU instead of coming out of the bottom so that they have to be bent away from the motherboard.
The NSK1300 has these silly blue LED’s that chew up one of the hard disk plugs from the power supply. Surely these could be powered through the motherboard’s “power on” LED jack, and it’d make cable management much easier.
The F-190’s BIOS configuration screens somehow use a VGA mode that isn’t agreeable with the DVI interface to my 2405FPW. POST screen works fine. Analog works fine. How weird is that?
The F-190 seems more than a bit touchy. A couple of times I would plug in the system, press the power button and then: nothing. By reseating the *power cable*, I could get the thing to boot. I’m still trying to decide if this is worth going through the Fry’s return mess.
Speaking of Fry’s, my F-190 box was missing the back plate. I went back to get one, and they gave me the back plate from a different abit motherboard. Nice guys. That’s the kind of stuff that breeds customer loyalty. How is it that there isn’t some other computer components store that is kicking them out of business?
I wish Zalman would get off their hardware based fan regulation systems. Just trust the software to do it for you okay?
The CNPS-8000 came with Zalman Thermal Grease. It compares poorly with Zalman *Super* Thermal Grease that came with my other Zalman fan. I don’t know why exactly, but the latter isn’t all dried up and chunky plus it comes with a brush that makes it easier to spread around.
While Vista’s UI is cleaned up, its security UI is almost as annoying as those Mac ads make it seem.