Category Archives: computer

Windows Vista Revisited

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Very early on after its release, I gave Windows Vista a try on one of my secondary computers.  I was primarily interested in the Media Center funcitonalty of the Operating System.  I had and am currently still am using Windows XP MCE 2005 and like it alot.  So Vista MCE was seemed very interesting to me.

I installed it, and initially I liked it quite a bit.  But then the bad Vista came to bite me.  The audio drivers for the Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Platinum Pro were clearly not designed for Vista.  The Nvidia drivers for my Geforce 8800 GTS Card were also clearly immature.  But most of all, the Media Center software that was the reason for my testing out Vista COMPLETELY disappeared from the computer.  There was no sign of it at all.  It happened all of a sudden too, I had turned off my computer prior to a thunderstorm and when I turned it back on after the storm, Vista was there, but the Media Center had been erased from existance.  VERY WEIRD.  These things caused me to give up on Vista for around a year.

I recently purchased a new motherboard, processor and ram.  I went with the EVGA 780i SLI motherboard and the Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 CPU with 4 gigs of Corsair Dominator ram.  Everythign else, I kept the same in my system as the other components are all fairly current.  In the older system, I was running Windows XP MCE 205.  With such a major change in componenets, it is necessary to reinstall the Operating System.  So I decided to give Vista a 2nd chance as Service Pack 1 was already available.

The installation was not super smooth.  I only have SATA optical drives in my computer now.  The LG Bluray-HDDVD combo drive is very nice, but is not available in PATA/IDE.  Windows Vista does not seem to like to install from SATA optical drives from waht I can tell.  Luckily, I had an old external USB DVD recorder which allowed me to install Vista Ultimate with ho hitches.

Once installed, the system seemed to function well, after updating all my drivers to Vista approved versions.  All of the software I use seems to be fully functional in Vista when I turn off the User Account Control.  UAC is just an annoyance to me.  I consider myself to be a power user, and UAC is very invasive — that said — I feel the SUDO in Linux is also annoying.  If I am capable, I should be able to run as root.  I realize its a bit of a security risk, but I have a pretty good idea what I am doing.  Therefor, the ability to completely disable UAC is good foresight by Microsoft.  Anyway, all seemed well and I decided to let Vista run for a few months.

Spring forward to today —

At the present I have been running Vista on my main computer for about 3 months and on a Dell XPS m1330 laptop for about 4 months.  At this point, I have to say, I notice very little difference in performance between Vista and XP now.  I think Vista is at least equivalent in both categories and may actually perform better than XP in some things.  I have figured out where all the settings have been moved to on Vista, so tweaking things is about the same as XP.  Gaming performance is on par with XP now too.  In fact on the main computer with an Nvidia Geforce 8800GTS with 768 megs of ram, gaming runs very very smoothly.  I have no complaints really.  I game either at 1270X800 or 1920X1200, depending on the game.  Anything I have tried works well.

Part of my job is running Autodesk Maya and MotionBuilder along with Vicon Nexus.  Thse programs run fine as well.  I notice absolutely zero difference between Vista and XP as far as speed or stability goes.  Infact, Vista may be slightly MORE stable at this point.

The laptop doesnt get used for gaming, so I can not comment there.  I have another m1330 that has a Geforce 8400GS M in it, that does get used for gaming, but I have XP MCE 2005 currently on that machine.  The Vista laptop is very stable and seems runs very quickly.  This laptop was purchased 5 months ago for around $700 USD.

I have no complaints at this point with Windows Vista — aside from the complaints I have with all computers.  It seems to have most of the bugs worked out, and Nvidia seems to have their act together on the drivers at this point.  If you read any review or critique of Vista at this point in time, make sure you check the date of the article.  My feeling is that it is working and can at this point be adopted by the masses as a decent operating system.

Comcast “admits” to blocking vonage

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I have been trying to figure this one out for almost 1 year now.

I have a slingbox connected to my Dad’s Satellite.  I can watch his DirecTV stream anywhere I am and since he has 2 tuners connected to it, I dont change the channel he is watching either.  It is a pretty nice setup and it ran great for 2 years without a single glitch until my Dad decided to fire Verizon as his phone company and opt to try VOIP from Vonage.

Initially everything seemed to be working great.  Vonage phone calls worked nicely.  Sling was working as usual and all other internet services seemed to be unaffected by the new Vonage box plugged into the router.

Then one night, I was watching a hockey game when I wanted to call my Dad.  I noticed a very big change in the quality of the phone call while streaming via Sling.  I decided to change some settings in the router to compensate for this.  I am using a Linksys WRT54GL router with Tomato firmware installed on it.  I set up the QOS to give the higest precidence to Vonage and to limit the bandwidth of the Slingbox to 300kbps as I have my Sling Player set to stream at 300kbps on myside.

This change had some benefit, but did not alleviate the problem like it should have.  Next, my Dad decided to opt in for Comcast’s Performance PLUS with PowerBoost package.  This package came at quite a premium over the regular cable internet service, but was guaranteed to have 2mbps upstream.  This would be plenty for the 300kbps Slingbox and 90kbps for Vonage to function together seamlessly.  Or so I thought.

After checking the upload speeds with serveral websites as well as running a straight FTP transfer of a 100 megabyte file to my server at work, I decided that my Dad was indeed getting between 2 and 4 mbps uploads.  Really pretty good.

So we tried the Vonage with Sling at the same time test again .  Same results — choppy phone conversation but Sling worked well.  This was really odd as I gave Sling the lowest QOS priority in the router.  At this point I tried 2 other routers with exactly the same results.

I then decided to try the test in reverse.  I would run my sling box while my Dad watched it during a phone conversation.  I do not have a phone, but rater use the Skype In and Out services for my phone, but he remained using Vonage.

This test revealed an interesting finding.  There was no sound issues at all and he could watch my sling box perfectly.  I set my WRT54GL router up the same as his and tried 2 other routers as well for thoroughness.  The only way to get the choppy phone conversation was when he was streaming something up to the internet while talking on Vonage.  We checked the bandwidth during these tests and he was never even using more than 1mbps even though he clearly tested up to 2-4 mbps every time.  Also, at this point I should say that I use Time Warner Cable for my Internet.

I was stumped as to how to solve this problem.  My dad can upload files to my FTP server at close to 4mbps, but when he uses Vonage the total bandwidth he is uploading seems to be capped at under 700kbps.  During a file transfer the speed will not just be split between the 2 applications, but rather the overal maximum transfer speed drops to this 700kbps.  When we hang up the phone, it goes back up to 4mbps.  Although I could not find a solution to the problem, I did suspect there was a casue.

I assumed at this point that Comcast was doing some kind of throttling on the bandwidth during Vonage calls.  I believe that Comcast can easily tell that you are using VOIP with Vonage and could very easily change things to screw up your connection to make it seem like Vonage isnt working well.  I thought my test of the changing FTP speed proved this point, but I had no idea what to do.

Then today, I read this news at the Wall Street Journal.  This pretty much proved my theory.  If Comcast gives their guarantee NOW that they will work with Vonage to make sure the connection is clear., this pretty much indicates to me that something was up eariler even though Comcast Denies it.  They also denied (falsely) that they were throttling P2P traffic ealier this year.

I am positive that Comcast was doing something to make it seem like Vonage VOIP was an inferior product — this article further supports my theory.  I will test Sling and Vonage again over the next weeks and see if my results are different.

Mozilla Weave

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As per my previous post on the discontinuation of the Google Browser Sync (GBS), I have tried using Mozilla Weave.  It does seem to be quite similar in its advertised functions to GBS, however, it is clearly alpha software at this point.  I think it will be definitely the way to go in the near future, but as of this posting, I do have some issues with Weave.

Although weave seems a bit slow at times,  the main issue I am currently experiencing is the now syncing window when I close Firefox.  This window (most of the time) NEVER cloeses even after 24 hours.  Sometimes when the little window does close, it closes any new Firefox windows I have created since it started its sync.  This was my experience at Weave V 0.1.  As of updating to V 0.2, I find this problem has somewhat been eliminated, but the sync on close is still very slow.  Maybe this is due to the fact that I am syncing all the things Weave does, but I am not sure at this point.

Overall, I think the product will be a fine replacement to GBS, but its still clearly in development, so I would recommend not using it yet if you are a beginner.  Firefox veterans will have no issues with Weave, and should probably give it a try.

On another note, Google seems to have released the source code to GBS.  Hopefully, Mozilla will use this to help make Weave a better product.  In addition to this, I noticed that most of the plugins and themes I use have been updated to work with Firefox 3.0.  I am impressed at the speed.  I initially hoped it would take weeks rather than months to get the updates, but pleasently it took days rather than weeks for most.  There are still a few plugins that aren’t working at this point, but nothing important.  I am currently working with Firefox 3.0 strictly on my laptop and plan to move it to my main system this weekend.

Firefox 3

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I downloaded the portable version of Firefox 3 the other day to test out the new browser.  It seems to work fine and offers what seems to be, a speed boost over Firefox 2 when it comes to loading websites.  I personally didn’t measure this, but it does feel faster.

The first thing I notices was how many of the add-ons I use that are incompatible.  A few notable plug-ins as of this posting are:

  1. All-in-One Sidebar
  2. Auto Copy
  3. Exch (a currency coverter)
  4. Fingerfox
  5. Google Browser Sync (this is a biggie)
  6. Google Pagerank Status
  7. Google Send to Phone
  8. Google Web Accelerator
  9. Minimize to Tray
  10. Tab Effect
  11. Tab Preview
  12. Tabbrowser Preferences

Some of these plug-ins are totally unnecessary (tab effect), while others have become integral in my decision not to use Internet Explorer.  The other thing I was surprised about is the Noia 2.0 Extreme Theme is currently not compatible with Firefox 3.  I am sure some, if not all of these add-ons will be updated in the near future, but others such as the Google Browser Sync will not (according to Google).  A suggestion is to use Mozilla Weave, but at the time of writing this the site is down and I can not test it to post my opinion.

My general opinion of Firefox 3 is that its a bit of an improvement over V2, but I people should give the developers a bit more time to get their plugins running before you make the switch permanently.  Hopefully this happens in weeks rather than months.

Computer format

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I recently decided to install Windows Vista on my main computer, and during the install process I ran into some issues with a hard drive controller.  To make a long story short, I lost some data, which included the old website data, so I am starting new with a new look.