Ho hum
So much for trying out Windows 7 ...
First try - needed to burn another install dvd because the first one didn't burn correctly. Using the bundled Power2Go software (and leaving the laptop alone to do the burn without playing music at the same time ...) worked where Active ISO Burner failed.
Next tries - why's it giving a "Starting Windows" black screen and not much else ... Apart from a little red dot in the middle of the screen. This "Starting Windows" screen was staying up there for quite some time too without it getting any further.
Troubleshooting things - tried the boot without both hard discs, no joy.
Which is when you start hunting on the interweb ... (Google knows all). Finding this forum post (linked) answered a few questions ... It pointed the finger at the disc interface. The fella in the forum post struggled with an Abit UL8 motherboard using a ULI M1689 chipset. He identified his issue by switching his disc interface from SATA mode to RAID mode. The Win 7 install procedure could then start but would then have trouble seeing drives.
My Asus A8R32-MVP motherboard is subtly different but shares ULI hardware dealing with its disc interfaces. There's a ULI M1575 South Bridge in there which is what the disc drives connect to. It has a Silicon Image chip in there too for another hard disc but I'm a bit wary about trying that one. There's another hard disc in the machine that I want to keep totally separate from the Windows 7 test and I'm not sure how it would interact with a drive on the Silicon Image chip.
So - troubleshooting steps, based on the forum post above :
There's 3 options in the Bios :
SATA Mode - Emulated PATA Mode
Default mode, works with 2x WinXP drives flawlessly. Stuck at "Starting Windows" screen, not allowing the Windows 7 installation to start.
SATA Mode - AHCI Mode
Not used this before, trying it with a WinXP drive led to a BSOD as Windows was starting. (Not good). Tapping this blog post on the laptop now while watching the cricket, seeing if a Long Wait will see any action with the Windows 7 installation. (Not hopeful)
RAID Mode
This gets the Windows 7 install starting but because I don't have a RAID compatible setup, no drives appear to the system. So the Win7 install gets as far as asking "ok, where to?" before it cannot continue due to no drives.
The next place to look would be "ok, just get Windows7 compatible drivers for the mainboard" but digging a little further it looks like there's been some naughty business going on here. The ULI chipset in my A8R32MVP is part of an ATI Crossfire setup. And it looks like nVidia have bought out ULI and quietly killed off the driver support.
So - looks like I now have a choice between : Spend Money on upgrade, Abandon Windows 7 test.
Because my main system still works pretty well for games, I'll be saving my money. And maybe even trying Linux for a change :-) At least this one got caught before anything got deleted off my 2 hard discs, so it's not a trashing of the system. Phew !
PS At least it gives me an excuse for continuing my Anti-Nvidia thing a little bit longer :-) I've always been rather perturbed by their habit of allowing drivers to get into the public domain before they're ready.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Opening a window
I've been curious about other OS's for a little while ago, even to the point of looking seriously at jumping ship to Apple. One thing that disturbs me though about Apple is the indoctrination that most Apple users appear to undergo as soon as they open the box. As soon as that Pandora wakes up, you're no longer able to have a sensible IT conversation with the converted.
Plus Apple tend to be triple (at least) the price of the equivalent Windows box. And while they'll run the work type apps and have a Windows emulation mode, I've got little confidence that performance in that emulation mode would be acceptable for running games. So I'm now looking elsewhere ...
Enter Windows 7 ...
I don't know too much about this one, apart from what's on the glossy pages. Cos I lost faith with the computing media (don't get me started about Computer Shopper magazine), I've not been keeping up with the other marketing blurb so I'll have the chance to get an independent peek at it uncoloured by other people's opinions.
Sooo - later today, I'll be refitting the Apps drive on my desktop (the trashed one) with the Windows 7 Release Candidate. It's available as a free download via the link above, although they'll remove the download after 20th August. So not much time left if you want to try it out. Word of caution though, if you do try it then put it on a hard disc that you were going to reformat anyway as you'll be wanting to remove it at some point due to a timelock in the release candidate.
Also make sure the box you're trying it on can cope with the probably more bloated system you'll be putting on it. The specs of mine are :
Asus A8R32MVP - motherboard, if this doesn't like the OS, you're screwed.
Athlon X2-3800+ - dual core cpu
2Gb RAM - could be a weak point, more memory could be needed
Radeon X4850
It'll be shifting from 32 bit WinXP Pro to 64 bit Windows 7 RC, so there will hopefully be a boost from using that other half of the instruction set.
I'd like to be having a look at it now, as the things of interest have been backed up and the ISO has been burnt to a DVD. But ... I have a little bit of frustration cos the thing I was waiting to get finished (ClimatePrediction model) has done its number crunching but the servers are down so it can't report.
Grr.
Will give it a few more hours but Boredom Threshold (can't play games on the Apps drive cos it's that trashed) may kick in leading me to start the process off before the ClimatePrediction monkeys have fed their hamsters. Will report back on how things go, I've sadly missed the pre-order offer that Microsoft were doing (thanks to those ClimatePrediction guys) but the test of the RC will inform me on what my next laptop is highly likely to run on.
Plus Apple tend to be triple (at least) the price of the equivalent Windows box. And while they'll run the work type apps and have a Windows emulation mode, I've got little confidence that performance in that emulation mode would be acceptable for running games. So I'm now looking elsewhere ...
Enter Windows 7 ...
I don't know too much about this one, apart from what's on the glossy pages. Cos I lost faith with the computing media (don't get me started about Computer Shopper magazine), I've not been keeping up with the other marketing blurb so I'll have the chance to get an independent peek at it uncoloured by other people's opinions.
Sooo - later today, I'll be refitting the Apps drive on my desktop (the trashed one) with the Windows 7 Release Candidate. It's available as a free download via the link above, although they'll remove the download after 20th August. So not much time left if you want to try it out. Word of caution though, if you do try it then put it on a hard disc that you were going to reformat anyway as you'll be wanting to remove it at some point due to a timelock in the release candidate.
Also make sure the box you're trying it on can cope with the probably more bloated system you'll be putting on it. The specs of mine are :
Asus A8R32MVP - motherboard, if this doesn't like the OS, you're screwed.
Athlon X2-3800+ - dual core cpu
2Gb RAM - could be a weak point, more memory could be needed
Radeon X4850
It'll be shifting from 32 bit WinXP Pro to 64 bit Windows 7 RC, so there will hopefully be a boost from using that other half of the instruction set.
I'd like to be having a look at it now, as the things of interest have been backed up and the ISO has been burnt to a DVD. But ... I have a little bit of frustration cos the thing I was waiting to get finished (ClimatePrediction model) has done its number crunching but the servers are down so it can't report.
Grr.
Will give it a few more hours but Boredom Threshold (can't play games on the Apps drive cos it's that trashed) may kick in leading me to start the process off before the ClimatePrediction monkeys have fed their hamsters. Will report back on how things go, I've sadly missed the pre-order offer that Microsoft were doing (thanks to those ClimatePrediction guys) but the test of the RC will inform me on what my next laptop is highly likely to run on.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Living with the bits
Most of the reviews that you read are usually along the lines of "this is so great, I got it out the box and it worked immediately !" and more fanboi stuff like that. Reviews don't usually apply the benefit of hindsight that comes with actually using stuff for a while. You see this in game reviews as well, where the magazine will go nuts about a game, without actually playing it through to the point where the Game Killing Bug hits.
So how about my recent acquisitions ? I do actually have some rather key things to pass on with them. Let's have a look at them :
Laptop - still liking this one and having opened up the old lappy, I reckon the HP I now have was a Very Good Buy indeed. I've noticed a few Vista Quirks but they've not really gotten in the way of using the applications I want to use. It's been near-faultless (more on this later) on the music streaming and I love Vista's active preview of other windows. For instance, I have cricket on the telly, this blog entry being edited in another and I have the Monaco Grand Prix coverage from BBC in a thumbnail preview of another window. Vista's a better OS all round than WinXP but it really shows where bad press can kill the reputation of a piece of techie kit. It insulates the user from its gubbins more than XP does but I wouldn't go back to XP after getting used to Vista.
So the 5 months later verdict on the laptop is : Quality buy. If I had to replace it today, I'd get another as close as possible to the spec I have. I'd get the same size too, although it is very difficult indeed to find bags to put a 17" laptop into. The 17" screen has me considering acquiring a widescreen monitor for my desktop.
Apple Airport Express - I'm a big fan of this Little White Box. It got acquired as a Christmas present to allow me to stream music from laptop to speakers and it's certainly acquitted itself beyond all expectations in that role. It's also highly portable, I carry it in my laptop bag when going to my parents' house, where it gets hooked up to their Denon amp and Tannoy speakers for cd quality playback.
It's not just about the music though, this little white box has been pressed into service for a while as a router after I lost faith with my Philips thing. Just a shame the Belkin wifi card in my desktop wasn't up to the job.
Belkin wifi G network card - This is the big letdown. See the post below for how badly it performed on a large scale copy and it's also guilty for some extremely horrid latency performance in games. And it's definitely the card because the horrid performance was repeated with my other routers. Almost certainly the last piece of Belkin hardware I'll buy, because there's no point buying cheap rubbish when there's quality competition out there.
Linksys WRT54G2 wifi router for cable modems - The jury's currently still out on this one. It's giving me extremely good internet performance but ... there's a couple of major But's with it :
But 1 - when asking the laptop to look at my desktop, I'm getting "Network error - Windows cannot access desktop". The desktop on the other hand can see the laptop ok. So the peer to peer local area networking isn't working nearly as well as it should. (I'm investigating on this one)
Addon - This But is now sorted :-) I'd enabled Internet Connection Sharing on the desktop, so it must have thought the laptop was an Internet Interloper, with the firewall blocking it. Unsharing the connection (running the Network Setup Wizard again) sorted out the problem. The actual error was number 80070035, hopefully this solution will answer other people's questions :-)
Addon 2 - No such luck. My laptop can see desktop but had exact same error with someone else's laptop. I have a hunch ... but I can't test it yet. If you're connecting via wi-fi, try disabling any other network adaptors and see what happens.
But 2 - whereas the Airport Airtunes streaming has been faultless before, it's now tending to lost its feed : The sound breaks up and disappears, while the network streaming rate goes up. It sometimes comes back given a lot of time but I've been using the "reboot router and airport" option as a quickfix. Could be related to But 3 :
But 3 - occasionally laptop boot would fail, it would get into Vista but then it looks like the Explorer shell freezes. Laptop goes unresponsive, until the Explorer.exe shell process is restarted. After a reboot (an Explorer.exe shell restart is traumatic) the laptop tends to be fine. I'm suspecting this problem is related to But 2 and I believe the cause was the Linksys Easylink Advisor software as that's been the only software I've added for a little while. That software has now been removed ... I have a zero tolerance attitude to buggy software !
Apart from those "But"'s, the Linksys appears to be a highly competent router. I'm concerned about the firewall on it though, I've not seen much log evidence to suggest it actually does have a firewall. And I'm very reluctant to introduce the wild card of Zonealarm to any of my PCs again. I'm hoping I'll crack But 1 today by tweaking settings and But's 2 and 3 will require extensive research (i.e. lots of music listening) to see if that Easylink software is the cause.
Last piece of new hardware :
VirginMedia V+ cable tv box - Me Likey Very Muchly. Need an HD telly now to show it off properly but even without HD, it does more and at higher quality than a SkyPlus box. Interface is slightly clunky but On Demand TV and no signal interference through weather makes up for that.
I still have a bunch of gadgets that I want to buy but they're dependent on my current telly breaking before I go shopping. It's actually showing less signs of breaking now with the cable tv box, the high pitched whine it had with the SkyPlus box has gone away. The shopping list is currently :
TFT HD telly at 27-32". Any bigger will swamp the room. Has to be 1080p.
Sony BDSP350 Blu-Ray player.
Surround sound speakers & amp. My ageing Creative Labs DTT2500 speaker set has done the business pretty well for 10 years now but it hasn't got the optical digital inputs demanded by my V+ box and it occasionally goes "grumpy" giving a very flat sound output.
Update - But 1 with the networking appears to have been cracked. Tried a few things to solve an "Error 80070035 - cannot connect to \\dev" where "dev" is my desktop. I'm not sure what exactly cracked it as I made the mistake of changing more than one thing but I suspect it's Internet Connection Sharing. Disabling that on the XP desktop appears to have allowed the Vista laptop to connect to it again.
So how about my recent acquisitions ? I do actually have some rather key things to pass on with them. Let's have a look at them :
Laptop - still liking this one and having opened up the old lappy, I reckon the HP I now have was a Very Good Buy indeed. I've noticed a few Vista Quirks but they've not really gotten in the way of using the applications I want to use. It's been near-faultless (more on this later) on the music streaming and I love Vista's active preview of other windows. For instance, I have cricket on the telly, this blog entry being edited in another and I have the Monaco Grand Prix coverage from BBC in a thumbnail preview of another window. Vista's a better OS all round than WinXP but it really shows where bad press can kill the reputation of a piece of techie kit. It insulates the user from its gubbins more than XP does but I wouldn't go back to XP after getting used to Vista.
So the 5 months later verdict on the laptop is : Quality buy. If I had to replace it today, I'd get another as close as possible to the spec I have. I'd get the same size too, although it is very difficult indeed to find bags to put a 17" laptop into. The 17" screen has me considering acquiring a widescreen monitor for my desktop.
Apple Airport Express - I'm a big fan of this Little White Box. It got acquired as a Christmas present to allow me to stream music from laptop to speakers and it's certainly acquitted itself beyond all expectations in that role. It's also highly portable, I carry it in my laptop bag when going to my parents' house, where it gets hooked up to their Denon amp and Tannoy speakers for cd quality playback.
It's not just about the music though, this little white box has been pressed into service for a while as a router after I lost faith with my Philips thing. Just a shame the Belkin wifi card in my desktop wasn't up to the job.
Belkin wifi G network card - This is the big letdown. See the post below for how badly it performed on a large scale copy and it's also guilty for some extremely horrid latency performance in games. And it's definitely the card because the horrid performance was repeated with my other routers. Almost certainly the last piece of Belkin hardware I'll buy, because there's no point buying cheap rubbish when there's quality competition out there.
Linksys WRT54G2 wifi router for cable modems - The jury's currently still out on this one. It's giving me extremely good internet performance but ... there's a couple of major But's with it :
But 1 - when asking the laptop to look at my desktop, I'm getting "Network error - Windows cannot access desktop". The desktop on the other hand can see the laptop ok. So the peer to peer local area networking isn't working nearly as well as it should. (I'm investigating on this one)
Addon - This But is now sorted :-) I'd enabled Internet Connection Sharing on the desktop, so it must have thought the laptop was an Internet Interloper, with the firewall blocking it. Unsharing the connection (running the Network Setup Wizard again) sorted out the problem. The actual error was number 80070035, hopefully this solution will answer other people's questions :-)
Addon 2 - No such luck. My laptop can see desktop but had exact same error with someone else's laptop. I have a hunch ... but I can't test it yet. If you're connecting via wi-fi, try disabling any other network adaptors and see what happens.
But 2 - whereas the Airport Airtunes streaming has been faultless before, it's now tending to lost its feed : The sound breaks up and disappears, while the network streaming rate goes up. It sometimes comes back given a lot of time but I've been using the "reboot router and airport" option as a quickfix. Could be related to But 3 :
But 3 - occasionally laptop boot would fail, it would get into Vista but then it looks like the Explorer shell freezes. Laptop goes unresponsive, until the Explorer.exe shell process is restarted. After a reboot (an Explorer.exe shell restart is traumatic) the laptop tends to be fine. I'm suspecting this problem is related to But 2 and I believe the cause was the Linksys Easylink Advisor software as that's been the only software I've added for a little while. That software has now been removed ... I have a zero tolerance attitude to buggy software !
Apart from those "But"'s, the Linksys appears to be a highly competent router. I'm concerned about the firewall on it though, I've not seen much log evidence to suggest it actually does have a firewall. And I'm very reluctant to introduce the wild card of Zonealarm to any of my PCs again. I'm hoping I'll crack But 1 today by tweaking settings and But's 2 and 3 will require extensive research (i.e. lots of music listening) to see if that Easylink software is the cause.
Last piece of new hardware :
VirginMedia V+ cable tv box - Me Likey Very Muchly. Need an HD telly now to show it off properly but even without HD, it does more and at higher quality than a SkyPlus box. Interface is slightly clunky but On Demand TV and no signal interference through weather makes up for that.
I still have a bunch of gadgets that I want to buy but they're dependent on my current telly breaking before I go shopping. It's actually showing less signs of breaking now with the cable tv box, the high pitched whine it had with the SkyPlus box has gone away. The shopping list is currently :
TFT HD telly at 27-32". Any bigger will swamp the room. Has to be 1080p.
Sony BDSP350 Blu-Ray player.
Surround sound speakers & amp. My ageing Creative Labs DTT2500 speaker set has done the business pretty well for 10 years now but it hasn't got the optical digital inputs demanded by my V+ box and it occasionally goes "grumpy" giving a very flat sound output.
Update - But 1 with the networking appears to have been cracked. Tried a few things to solve an "Error 80070035 - cannot connect to \\dev" where "dev" is my desktop. I'm not sure what exactly cracked it as I made the mistake of changing more than one thing but I suspect it's Internet Connection Sharing. Disabling that on the XP desktop appears to have allowed the Vista laptop to connect to it again.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Network speed testing
My internet issues last week have sparked off one of those "Science Project" ideas ... I'm curious as to how fast my various networking bits go. The objective is to figure out how good the various pieces of hardware are. So - let's introduce the bits and pieces on show :
Laptop 1 - HP G70 120EA, pretty new with a 160GB SATA hard disc
Desktop - Homebrew machine, with a 250GB Seagate and 70GB WD Raptor hard discs
Router 1 - Apple Airport Express, the older model that does 802.11g only
Router 2 - Philips router working off 802.11g for wifi and Ethernet for wire
No Router - I have an Ethernet crossover cable that lets me connect 2 machines up without a router.
The laptop and desktop are working off fairly respectable parts, so any speed restrictions should be due to the networking alone.
The files I'll be transferring will be my iTunes library :-) Approximately 11GB in around 3400 files. Should be a fairly representative test, although I'd have liked there to be a better mix between Huge and ickle files. The iTunes library will be files of mostly 2MB to 8MB with not too many tiny (10 KB) or big (100 MB) files. But with the number of files to transfer being 3400, it should be fairly representative to see if there's an effect from seek time.
Total size to copy is 11.3 GB (12,202,749,873 bytes) in 3,407 files. For the calcs, bear in mind that the bytes has to be multiplied by 8 to turn it into the Bits/Second which all the sales figures use ...
If I get chance, I'll do the same test on my old laptop but that's restricted to testing with the Philips router only, as it can't do wifi networking any more. This will be where non-network speed restrictions show up as I know it has a much slower hard disc compared to the others.
Currently waiting for defragging to complete and then I can start with the heavy copying :-)
Configuration 1 : Laptop 1 to Desktop, Apple WiFi
So this is my good laptop, copying to the Desktop with its 250GB Seagate drive (has the most space) using the Apple Airport Express. Transfer link is 802.11g, the laptop is using the built in wifi, the desktop is using a Belkin 54g PCI card. Both machines are reporting "Excellent" signal quality and are claiming 54 Mbit/s transfer speeds.
Time taken to transfer the library : 3 hours 28 minutes ...
and the behaviour is as in the picture.
The 11Mbits/s is about the maximum achieved on this link but the up and down nature of the graph will tell you that it's by no means a reliable link. It also doesn't mention that streaming music to remote speakers from iTunes via the Airport doesn't work when doing a copy of this magnitude.
Sustained Data Transfer Rate = 7.46 Mbits/s - way below the 54 Mbits/s claimed speed and slower than my internet connection.
Test 2 - Desktop HD to Desktop HD
My desktop has 2 hard discs, one is a gaming install and the other is a WinXP install that's too crippled now to be viable for gaming.
Transfer time = 288 seconds
Transfer rate = 323.3 Mbits/s (40Mbyte/s)
I have good hard discs :-) Although I'm not quite sure if I believe the 323 Mbits/s, that seems too fast although they are working off independent SATA channels.
Reader hard disc = Seagate 250Gb drive, no fragmentation
Writer hard disc = Western Digital Raptor 74Gb, reasonable fragmentation
That's the best possible combination of disc to read from and disc to write to.
Test 3 - Wifi to Wifi via the Philips router
Good laptop again, trying to copy to the desktop using my old router. Case of Look Ma No Wires, with both machines connecting via wifi. I actually abandoned this test after 2 attempts because the performance was that bad. The first attempt was abandoned before I even got the chance to start the copy and the second abandoned after getting bored of seeing it occasionally hit a max of 7Mbits/s.
What this does is eliminate the Apple Airport Express as the main suspect in my poor latency in Warcraft ...
Test 4 - Laptop Wifi, Philips router, Desktop wire
This is almost certainly going to be my "gaming" configuration, when I pick up a better router :-). Laptop connects to wifi router using 802.11g and the desktop hooks up via a standard Ethernet cable. It's not a permanent fit as cable stretch leaves the router sitting in the middle of the floor ... Anyway : specs !
Laptop - wifi 802.11g claiming 54Mbits/s and Excellent signal strength
Desktop - 1Gb/s adaptor claiming a connection speed of 100Mbits/s
Copy completed in exactly 95 minutes 0 seconds (heh - give or take a second or two, one reason for the massive copy size was so that I didn't have to be ultra precise with the stopwatch :-).
5700 seconds for the transfer, giving 16.33 Mbits/s.
And as you'll see from the first network meter screenie, a much smoother transfer. There's a reasonably periodic dip in there, I'm putting that down to Vista & XP taking a ciggy break between copying one file and starting another.
Out of curiosity, I've attached a second Network Meter screenie from near the end of the copy. The way the test worked, lots of big files copied first, followed by lots of little files. The step halfway through the graph shows where the transition between big and little files came, you can see how the network performed much worse on the little files compared to the big ones.
Test 4 - Laptop to Desktop without a router
This one involved turning off the wifi adaptors on both Laptop & Desktop so they wouldn't interfere with the transfer and then hooking them together with an Ethernet Crossover cable. Normally with Ethernet nowadays, you'll have a phone type cable with separate Transmit and Receive lines. What a router/switch/hub will do is to connect one computer's Transmit to another's Receive. The more intelligent the router, switch or hub, the more efficient it is at doing that. A hub is quite dumb, it'll send all traffic to all machines. A router is smarter, it'll keep Laptop -> Desktop traffic separate from Laptop -> Speakers traffic. It will also do stuff like send Windows Live Messenger traffic to just the laptop and Warcraft traffic to just the desktop. (Network Address Translation - the outside world sees just the IP address, the router translates outside IP addresses to internal IP network addresses)
Urg - sidetracked into GeekyTalk there :-) A Crossover cable switches the Transmit & Receive around, so you can connect two machines together without using another box.
Right - Laptop has a 100Mbps adapter that's claiming 100Mbps
Desktop has a 1Gbps adapter claiming 100Mbps
(actually a different adapter as my back moans at me if I rummage in the place where the leads plug in)
Time to transfer - 24 minutes 50 seconds (1490 seconds)
Transfer rate - 62.48 Mbits/s
I've about exhausted all the testing I can do for now, save pulling out my old laptop and hooking that one up ... (would also involve reclaiming a cable from under the sofa :-) So it's time to put the results all together :
Airport Express router - wifi to wifi - 7.5 Mbits/s sustained, 11 Mbits/s max
Philips router - wifi to wifi - test failed, 8 Mbits/s max observed
Philips router - wifi to wire - 16.33 Mbits/s sustained, 18 Mbits/s max
No router - crossover cable - 62.48 Mbits/s
(worth mentioning that desktop to old laptop on this setup could only do about 33 Mbits/s)
Desktop only - hard disc to hard disc - 323 Mbits/s
I'll grab another Ethernet cable at the weekend, so I'll be able to try a Wire to Wire copy using a router :-) That'll tell me how much inefficiency comes from having a router in circuit. Even though the writing on the packet will claim 54 Mbits/s or 100 Mbits/s or even Gigabit Ethernet, you'll never get that due to protocol overhead.
Protocol overhead - splitting big files into network packets, addition of error checking and correction, wireless encryption and decryption. There's a 1 Mbit/s bus out there that will never get above 800kbits/s actual transfer, due to the operating rules it follows.
I think I've learned something and I've got a much better idea for where my poor latency in Warcraft comes from. Wifi G seems good for convenience but it's not really up to the job of chucking big files around. Wifi N would have more headroom but will still be subject to the overheads that come in through encryption.
Do I need Wifi N ? Nope. When I want the extra performance, I'll be able to use the wire hookup. Plus, as the laptop to Philips link could manage 18Mbps, that's comfortably better than my 10Mbps internet connection. So the extra speed of Wifi N would be gold plating.
Probably the last update or so for now until I buy some new bits n bobs :
This laptop to Dad's laptop via wifi - 11Mbps constant.
This laptop to Dad's laptop via wire - up to 20Mbps but a bit inconsistent.
Next steps :
New Linksys router will arrive :-) And a long cable so I can use a wire for my internet gaming ...
Addendum - I showed this post to someone at work, who got curious about the gadget in the screenies ... It's a gadget that runs in the Vista sidebar called "Network Meter", available via AddGadget.Com. Keeps my inner geek happy :-)
Laptop 1 - HP G70 120EA, pretty new with a 160GB SATA hard disc
Desktop - Homebrew machine, with a 250GB Seagate and 70GB WD Raptor hard discs
Router 1 - Apple Airport Express, the older model that does 802.11g only
Router 2 - Philips router working off 802.11g for wifi and Ethernet for wire
No Router - I have an Ethernet crossover cable that lets me connect 2 machines up without a router.
The laptop and desktop are working off fairly respectable parts, so any speed restrictions should be due to the networking alone.
The files I'll be transferring will be my iTunes library :-) Approximately 11GB in around 3400 files. Should be a fairly representative test, although I'd have liked there to be a better mix between Huge and ickle files. The iTunes library will be files of mostly 2MB to 8MB with not too many tiny (10 KB) or big (100 MB) files. But with the number of files to transfer being 3400, it should be fairly representative to see if there's an effect from seek time.
Total size to copy is 11.3 GB (12,202,749,873 bytes) in 3,407 files. For the calcs, bear in mind that the bytes has to be multiplied by 8 to turn it into the Bits/Second which all the sales figures use ...
If I get chance, I'll do the same test on my old laptop but that's restricted to testing with the Philips router only, as it can't do wifi networking any more. This will be where non-network speed restrictions show up as I know it has a much slower hard disc compared to the others.
Currently waiting for defragging to complete and then I can start with the heavy copying :-)
Configuration 1 : Laptop 1 to Desktop, Apple WiFi
So this is my good laptop, copying to the Desktop with its 250GB Seagate drive (has the most space) using the Apple Airport Express. Transfer link is 802.11g, the laptop is using the built in wifi, the desktop is using a Belkin 54g PCI card. Both machines are reporting "Excellent" signal quality and are claiming 54 Mbit/s transfer speeds.Time taken to transfer the library : 3 hours 28 minutes ...
and the behaviour is as in the picture.
The 11Mbits/s is about the maximum achieved on this link but the up and down nature of the graph will tell you that it's by no means a reliable link. It also doesn't mention that streaming music to remote speakers from iTunes via the Airport doesn't work when doing a copy of this magnitude.
Sustained Data Transfer Rate = 7.46 Mbits/s - way below the 54 Mbits/s claimed speed and slower than my internet connection.
Test 2 - Desktop HD to Desktop HD
My desktop has 2 hard discs, one is a gaming install and the other is a WinXP install that's too crippled now to be viable for gaming.
Transfer time = 288 seconds
Transfer rate = 323.3 Mbits/s (40Mbyte/s)
I have good hard discs :-) Although I'm not quite sure if I believe the 323 Mbits/s, that seems too fast although they are working off independent SATA channels.
Reader hard disc = Seagate 250Gb drive, no fragmentation
Writer hard disc = Western Digital Raptor 74Gb, reasonable fragmentation
That's the best possible combination of disc to read from and disc to write to.
Test 3 - Wifi to Wifi via the Philips router
Good laptop again, trying to copy to the desktop using my old router. Case of Look Ma No Wires, with both machines connecting via wifi. I actually abandoned this test after 2 attempts because the performance was that bad. The first attempt was abandoned before I even got the chance to start the copy and the second abandoned after getting bored of seeing it occasionally hit a max of 7Mbits/s.
What this does is eliminate the Apple Airport Express as the main suspect in my poor latency in Warcraft ...
Test 4 - Laptop Wifi, Philips router, Desktop wire
This is almost certainly going to be my "gaming" configuration, when I pick up a better router :-). Laptop connects to wifi router using 802.11g and the desktop hooks up via a standard Ethernet cable. It's not a permanent fit as cable stretch leaves the router sitting in the middle of the floor ... Anyway : specs !Laptop - wifi 802.11g claiming 54Mbits/s and Excellent signal strength
Desktop - 1Gb/s adaptor claiming a connection speed of 100Mbits/s
Copy completed in exactly 95 minutes 0 seconds (heh - give or take a second or two, one reason for the massive copy size was so that I didn't have to be ultra precise with the stopwatch :-).
5700 seconds for the transfer, giving 16.33 Mbits/s.
And as you'll see from the first network meter screenie, a much smoother transfer. There's a reasonably periodic dip in there, I'm putting that down to Vista & XP taking a ciggy break between copying one file and starting another.Out of curiosity, I've attached a second Network Meter screenie from near the end of the copy. The way the test worked, lots of big files copied first, followed by lots of little files. The step halfway through the graph shows where the transition between big and little files came, you can see how the network performed much worse on the little files compared to the big ones.
Test 4 - Laptop to Desktop without a router
This one involved turning off the wifi adaptors on both Laptop & Desktop so they wouldn't interfere with the transfer and then hooking them together with an Ethernet Crossover cable. Normally with Ethernet nowadays, you'll have a phone type cable with separate Transmit and Receive lines. What a router/switch/hub will do is to connect one computer's Transmit to another's Receive. The more intelligent the router, switch or hub, the more efficient it is at doing that. A hub is quite dumb, it'll send all traffic to all machines. A router is smarter, it'll keep Laptop -> Desktop traffic separate from Laptop -> Speakers traffic. It will also do stuff like send Windows Live Messenger traffic to just the laptop and Warcraft traffic to just the desktop. (Network Address Translation - the outside world sees just the IP address, the router translates outside IP addresses to internal IP network addresses)
Urg - sidetracked into GeekyTalk there :-) A Crossover cable switches the Transmit & Receive around, so you can connect two machines together without using another box.
Right - Laptop has a 100Mbps adapter that's claiming 100Mbps
Desktop has a 1Gbps adapter claiming 100Mbps
(actually a different adapter as my back moans at me if I rummage in the place where the leads plug in)
Time to transfer - 24 minutes 50 seconds (1490 seconds)
Transfer rate - 62.48 Mbits/s
I've about exhausted all the testing I can do for now, save pulling out my old laptop and hooking that one up ... (would also involve reclaiming a cable from under the sofa :-) So it's time to put the results all together :
Airport Express router - wifi to wifi - 7.5 Mbits/s sustained, 11 Mbits/s max
Philips router - wifi to wifi - test failed, 8 Mbits/s max observed
Philips router - wifi to wire - 16.33 Mbits/s sustained, 18 Mbits/s max
No router - crossover cable - 62.48 Mbits/s
(worth mentioning that desktop to old laptop on this setup could only do about 33 Mbits/s)
Desktop only - hard disc to hard disc - 323 Mbits/s
I'll grab another Ethernet cable at the weekend, so I'll be able to try a Wire to Wire copy using a router :-) That'll tell me how much inefficiency comes from having a router in circuit. Even though the writing on the packet will claim 54 Mbits/s or 100 Mbits/s or even Gigabit Ethernet, you'll never get that due to protocol overhead.
Protocol overhead - splitting big files into network packets, addition of error checking and correction, wireless encryption and decryption. There's a 1 Mbit/s bus out there that will never get above 800kbits/s actual transfer, due to the operating rules it follows.
I think I've learned something and I've got a much better idea for where my poor latency in Warcraft comes from. Wifi G seems good for convenience but it's not really up to the job of chucking big files around. Wifi N would have more headroom but will still be subject to the overheads that come in through encryption.
Do I need Wifi N ? Nope. When I want the extra performance, I'll be able to use the wire hookup. Plus, as the laptop to Philips link could manage 18Mbps, that's comfortably better than my 10Mbps internet connection. So the extra speed of Wifi N would be gold plating.
Probably the last update or so for now until I buy some new bits n bobs :
This laptop to Dad's laptop via wifi - 11Mbps constant.
This laptop to Dad's laptop via wire - up to 20Mbps but a bit inconsistent.
Next steps :
New Linksys router will arrive :-) And a long cable so I can use a wire for my internet gaming ...
Addendum - I showed this post to someone at work, who got curious about the gadget in the screenies ... It's a gadget that runs in the Vista sidebar called "Network Meter", available via AddGadget.Com. Keeps my inner geek happy :-)
Sunday, April 5, 2009
More networking - iTunes 8.1 vs Airport ...
This is one I call "Very Strange" and I'm fairly relieved that it has sorted itself out ...
Issue 1, very minor. Itunes 7.6 wasn't picking up album covers any more, so I went for the 8.1 update ... Oops.
Issue 2 - serious. Laptop reboots after iTunes 8.1 loads but it can't see the network :-( I'm still running an Airport Express as my router and it's been unspectacularly* (see below) reliable since I switched to it.
Diagnostic 1 - switch to main PC, see if it still has internet - yes, so it's not my adopted router at fault.
The culprit was fairly obviously the iTunes 8.1 install, as that's when the problem started. Laptop just couldn't see the Airport Express over the wi-fi link, so no intranet or internet. So I try various things :
Reboot to check if the laptop is "Doing A Microsoft"
System Restore back various steps
System Restore is a reasonably useful feature, it allows you to click a couple of buttons and go back before that software nastie crept in. Works some of the times and it's well worth a look. When it works and when it can be found. XP has it in a reasonably accessible place but it's far better hidden in Vista.
No joy here, laptop would occasionally let me know it could see my Airport but would refuse to connect. And as soon as you tried to connect, the Airport would disappear from the list of available connections. I'm back on the net though, after trying my old router out again. How's this for a weird sequence :
1 - Laptop can't see Airport.
2 - Old router plugged back in.
3 - Laptop starts saying Hello to old router.
4 - Laptop successfully connects to old router.
5 - User turns his back.
6 - Laptop starts connecting to Airport.
It's still connected and is streaming music to the speakers. Leaving me mystified as to why turning on another piece of hardware would fix communications between laptop and Airport. Maybe it bootstrapped the wifi hardware on the laptop to reset it to a state where it could talk to the Airport.
Hopefully problem solved - but we shall see tomorrow when I turn the laptop on again, without the old router to bootstrap it.
*Unspectacular performance of Airport. It's doing a job, not had any significant dropouts of connection since switching to the Airport as a main router. However, I'm still suffering a lot of frustrating lag in Warcraft. Not enough to kill a character but enough to make me seriously think about spending money on the problem later in the week. The old router is not fit for purpose now, as my old desktop has trouble connecting to it. So I'll be looking to buy another wifi router, with gaming being done by a wire link that I'll stretch under the sofa.
Normal times - desktop to connect via wifi.
Gaming online - desktop to connect by wire under sofa.
And readers have probably guessed that I live on my own, as any sane partner would go spare at the thought of the above :-)
PS Last touch - I have iTunes downloading cover art again :-)
Issue 1, very minor. Itunes 7.6 wasn't picking up album covers any more, so I went for the 8.1 update ... Oops.
Issue 2 - serious. Laptop reboots after iTunes 8.1 loads but it can't see the network :-( I'm still running an Airport Express as my router and it's been unspectacularly* (see below) reliable since I switched to it.
Diagnostic 1 - switch to main PC, see if it still has internet - yes, so it's not my adopted router at fault.
The culprit was fairly obviously the iTunes 8.1 install, as that's when the problem started. Laptop just couldn't see the Airport Express over the wi-fi link, so no intranet or internet. So I try various things :
Reboot to check if the laptop is "Doing A Microsoft"
System Restore back various steps
System Restore is a reasonably useful feature, it allows you to click a couple of buttons and go back before that software nastie crept in. Works some of the times and it's well worth a look. When it works and when it can be found. XP has it in a reasonably accessible place but it's far better hidden in Vista.
No joy here, laptop would occasionally let me know it could see my Airport but would refuse to connect. And as soon as you tried to connect, the Airport would disappear from the list of available connections. I'm back on the net though, after trying my old router out again. How's this for a weird sequence :
1 - Laptop can't see Airport.
2 - Old router plugged back in.
3 - Laptop starts saying Hello to old router.
4 - Laptop successfully connects to old router.
5 - User turns his back.
6 - Laptop starts connecting to Airport.
It's still connected and is streaming music to the speakers. Leaving me mystified as to why turning on another piece of hardware would fix communications between laptop and Airport. Maybe it bootstrapped the wifi hardware on the laptop to reset it to a state where it could talk to the Airport.
Hopefully problem solved - but we shall see tomorrow when I turn the laptop on again, without the old router to bootstrap it.
*Unspectacular performance of Airport. It's doing a job, not had any significant dropouts of connection since switching to the Airport as a main router. However, I'm still suffering a lot of frustrating lag in Warcraft. Not enough to kill a character but enough to make me seriously think about spending money on the problem later in the week. The old router is not fit for purpose now, as my old desktop has trouble connecting to it. So I'll be looking to buy another wifi router, with gaming being done by a wire link that I'll stretch under the sofa.
Normal times - desktop to connect via wifi.
Gaming online - desktop to connect by wire under sofa.
And readers have probably guessed that I live on my own, as any sane partner would go spare at the thought of the above :-)
PS Last touch - I have iTunes downloading cover art again :-)
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Networking blues
I put a bit of the story of my cable modem on my main blog last week ... Had a few more network issues since then. Apparently the new Belkin wi-fi card on my main PC doesn't like my old router very much. When finishing a game session on Thursday, I looked to reboot back to the applications drive but was greeted by a Total failure to get a connection going to the router and therefore the internet.
Networking can be extremely fiddly at the best of times, even if everything is working to satisfaction. Which was definitely not the case with my old router. The Router story is a fairly old one now, it had a habit of knocking me off the internet with the logs telling me about a series of "SYN Flood" attacks coming from my computer. (Translation - it thought my PCs were trying to hack the net and blocked all traffic). That problem escalated into the router going to sleep entirely, needing a Power Off / Power On to fix. Bit irritating when the music you're listening to gets cut off mid-song.
Bit like the giggling sailor in the advert - sometimes all it takes is the switch going off and then on. I used to be able to do that in software (and then get issues with laptop not seeing the router!) but after a while had to resort to pulling the plug.
Anyway ... old Philips router is now one step away from the garbage bin, having :
I'm now using the Apple Airport Express as my router, more about that a couple of posts down from this one. Seems trouble free so far, although I've only had one gaming session with it so far. I'm impressed with the Little White Box (aka Airport Express), it's handled what I've asked of it so far without batting a virtual eyelid. Unlike the objectionable Philips item which needed constant prodding to keep it alive.
So that's the home network, now for mum's & dad's ...
I had warnings that I'd need the Techie Hat on for this Mother's Day weekend because my dad's laptop had lost its internet. We tried the usual suspects :
Usual suspects if your internet doesn't work :
Idea 2 was to do a bunch of restarts on my dad's laptop and to use my Little White Box again to give it something else to look at. Laptop couldn't see Little White Box either, which is where I was starting to get worried due to running out of ideas.
Was it a hardware issue where the laptop's wifi connection had got borken ? Quite possibly.
Did I have my now-spare PCMCIA wifi card with me ? Noooo ...
The screensaver came up while I was pondering (translation - peeking at stuff from my own laptop :-) and inspired a little ... erm ... inspiration. If something isn't working for you, have a root around in the Power Management settings in case the Green Fanatics have caused some trouble for you. I'll all for being Green but they do cause problems by going nuts with it. Things like low activity power downs on hard discs causing hard disc failures, energy saving lightbulbs that will contaminate your room with Mercury if they break. Catalytic convertors that use up all the platinum while also making engines thirstier. Greenies causing the destruction of a Space Shuttle by enforcing a change in how the fuel tank is made.
In this case, Network Crippled By Power Saving Feature. Shoulda known really. As soon as the laptop's transmitter got turned back on, it connected up immediately.
It turned out as 2-1 in the Techie Stakes this weekend :
Win - laptop now connects to internet again.
Loss - couldn't fix my nan's Sky. Think the box is fried, which will actually be an easier fix than if it's the cable to the Sky box as we have a spare.
Win - their microwave doesn't just nuke food, it nukes the reception on their telly too.
PS I got told off by my mom for swearing on realising it was the Green Power Save that had disabled the internet on that laptop.
Networking can be extremely fiddly at the best of times, even if everything is working to satisfaction. Which was definitely not the case with my old router. The Router story is a fairly old one now, it had a habit of knocking me off the internet with the logs telling me about a series of "SYN Flood" attacks coming from my computer. (Translation - it thought my PCs were trying to hack the net and blocked all traffic). That problem escalated into the router going to sleep entirely, needing a Power Off / Power On to fix. Bit irritating when the music you're listening to gets cut off mid-song.
Bit like the giggling sailor in the advert - sometimes all it takes is the switch going off and then on. I used to be able to do that in software (and then get issues with laptop not seeing the router!) but after a while had to resort to pulling the plug.
Anyway ... old Philips router is now one step away from the garbage bin, having :
- a habit of knocking me off the net
- unexplained crashes needing a power off/power on
- difficulty getting new laptop to connect to it after a router reset
- Extreme difficulty getting the new wifi card in the desktop to connect
I'm now using the Apple Airport Express as my router, more about that a couple of posts down from this one. Seems trouble free so far, although I've only had one gaming session with it so far. I'm impressed with the Little White Box (aka Airport Express), it's handled what I've asked of it so far without batting a virtual eyelid. Unlike the objectionable Philips item which needed constant prodding to keep it alive.
So that's the home network, now for mum's & dad's ...
I had warnings that I'd need the Techie Hat on for this Mother's Day weekend because my dad's laptop had lost its internet. We tried the usual suspects :
Usual suspects if your internet doesn't work :
- Unplug router/modem, plug it back in again. A power cycle can often get a locked-up device working again.
- Try the "repair connection" option from the networking. That does a power cycle too but restricts it to the network hardware inside your machine.
- Check whether a signal is coming through.
Idea 2 was to do a bunch of restarts on my dad's laptop and to use my Little White Box again to give it something else to look at. Laptop couldn't see Little White Box either, which is where I was starting to get worried due to running out of ideas.
Was it a hardware issue where the laptop's wifi connection had got borken ? Quite possibly.
Did I have my now-spare PCMCIA wifi card with me ? Noooo ...
The screensaver came up while I was pondering (translation - peeking at stuff from my own laptop :-) and inspired a little ... erm ... inspiration. If something isn't working for you, have a root around in the Power Management settings in case the Green Fanatics have caused some trouble for you. I'll all for being Green but they do cause problems by going nuts with it. Things like low activity power downs on hard discs causing hard disc failures, energy saving lightbulbs that will contaminate your room with Mercury if they break. Catalytic convertors that use up all the platinum while also making engines thirstier. Greenies causing the destruction of a Space Shuttle by enforcing a change in how the fuel tank is made.
In this case, Network Crippled By Power Saving Feature. Shoulda known really. As soon as the laptop's transmitter got turned back on, it connected up immediately.
It turned out as 2-1 in the Techie Stakes this weekend :
Win - laptop now connects to internet again.
Loss - couldn't fix my nan's Sky. Think the box is fried, which will actually be an easier fix than if it's the cable to the Sky box as we have a spare.
Win - their microwave doesn't just nuke food, it nukes the reception on their telly too.
PS I got told off by my mom for swearing on realising it was the Green Power Save that had disabled the internet on that laptop.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
DIY Blogroll
As mentioned on my "proper" blog, I've kicked Blogrolling off the template, replacing it with something DIY homebrew.
I started by copying all the links into MS Word, which "helpfully" added all sorts of MS coding into what it saved as an HTML file. A handy start though and I'd actually recommend it for long blogrolls. There's just a need to cut out all the unnecessary garbage that turn the formatting of the links into something 'orrible.
So how do I make a Blogroll ? Your tool of choice (on a Windows PC) will be the ever useful Notepad. An excellently simple and crude text editor, it will save things exactly as you want them saved, without the MS Crud that Word will add. Probably best if I give the whole block code and then natter about little bits of it :
Additional note - just spotted the vertical line between the Sleepy's Techie Stuff line and the last "br" ... It shouldn't be there ! I took the screenshot of the window at the same time as the cursor was doing the opposite of blinking ... There's nothing there on that line, honest !
I'm no HTML expert and an HTML expert will know exactly what's going on up there ... But this post isn't aimed at those people ! Plus an HTML expert will probably point & snigger at the above and say it looks 'orrible. It works though :-)
Where you see the <>, that's where your web browser has a look at the HTML and turns whatever's inside into links, spaces, pictures, all that fancy web stuff. I'm having to cut all those out below cos otherwise your web browser will turn them into fancy web stuff, hiding what I'm talking about. (Insert "lol" here!) Note that all tags need to be closed, where you see [h2] or [li], there needs to be a [/h2] or [/li] to close it.
(replace [ and ] with <> in your template!)
!-- This is a comment - comments don't appear on the page but adds something that lets you break up an otherwise anarchic mess of Stuff that you won't understand when you come back to it in a year. Comments Are A Good Thing. This one tells me exactly what part of the template belongs to the Links.
"h2 class= ..." This line makes the word "Links" look distinct from the ... ermmm ... links.
br - apart from reinforcing feelings of being cold (the heating went off 5 minutes ago), these act as carriage returns, adding a gap between one line and another. They're scattered around in various places to stop the various Walls Of Text running into each other.
[a href="url"]Something to call your link[/a] - This is your hyperlink ... The href= is the bit that tells your browser where to look for the page it points to. The "Something to call your link" gives it something more meaningful than (e.g.) http://sleepypetestories.blogspot.com. Note the [/a] to close the tag at the end.
[li][/li] - I confess ! I stole these. Dunno what they're supposed to do but they turn the links from a mishmash of continuous text into a nice ordered list. With bullet point thingys at the side.
There's just one link in the piccy above, to add more just copy the [li][a href="url"]text[/a][/li] line and replace the url and the description as required.
So that's how I've sorted my Blogroll out, if you see the above and have trouble applying it then drop me an email at the iceangel.mercs@ address (in the profile) and I'll have a peek. Word of caution there though, I know even less about XML than I do HTML !
PS This post probably destroys my credibility as a clued up Techie Bod. Muahaha - I have my "not caring" face on there :-) I could easily look up what all the HTML tags above mean but as they work (which is what really matters), I'll accept the pointing fingers of the HTML experts.
I started by copying all the links into MS Word, which "helpfully" added all sorts of MS coding into what it saved as an HTML file. A handy start though and I'd actually recommend it for long blogrolls. There's just a need to cut out all the unnecessary garbage that turn the formatting of the links into something 'orrible.
So how do I make a Blogroll ? Your tool of choice (on a Windows PC) will be the ever useful Notepad. An excellently simple and crude text editor, it will save things exactly as you want them saved, without the MS Crud that Word will add. Probably best if I give the whole block code and then natter about little bits of it :
Additional note - just spotted the vertical line between the Sleepy's Techie Stuff line and the last "br" ... It shouldn't be there ! I took the screenshot of the window at the same time as the cursor was doing the opposite of blinking ... There's nothing there on that line, honest !
I'm no HTML expert and an HTML expert will know exactly what's going on up there ... But this post isn't aimed at those people ! Plus an HTML expert will probably point & snigger at the above and say it looks 'orrible. It works though :-)
Where you see the <>, that's where your web browser has a look at the HTML and turns whatever's inside into links, spaces, pictures, all that fancy web stuff. I'm having to cut all those out below cos otherwise your web browser will turn them into fancy web stuff, hiding what I'm talking about. (Insert "lol" here!) Note that all tags need to be closed, where you see [h2] or [li], there needs to be a [/h2] or [/li] to close it.
(replace [ and ] with <> in your template!)
!-- This is a comment - comments don't appear on the page but adds something that lets you break up an otherwise anarchic mess of Stuff that you won't understand when you come back to it in a year. Comments Are A Good Thing. This one tells me exactly what part of the template belongs to the Links.
"h2 class= ..." This line makes the word "Links" look distinct from the ... ermmm ... links.
br - apart from reinforcing feelings of being cold (the heating went off 5 minutes ago), these act as carriage returns, adding a gap between one line and another. They're scattered around in various places to stop the various Walls Of Text running into each other.
[a href="url"]Something to call your link[/a] - This is your hyperlink ... The href= is the bit that tells your browser where to look for the page it points to. The "Something to call your link" gives it something more meaningful than (e.g.) http://sleepypetestories.blogspot.com. Note the [/a] to close the tag at the end.
[li][/li] - I confess ! I stole these. Dunno what they're supposed to do but they turn the links from a mishmash of continuous text into a nice ordered list. With bullet point thingys at the side.
There's just one link in the piccy above, to add more just copy the [li][a href="url"]text[/a][/li] line and replace the url and the description as required.
So that's how I've sorted my Blogroll out, if you see the above and have trouble applying it then drop me an email at the iceangel.mercs@ address (in the profile) and I'll have a peek. Word of caution there though, I know even less about XML than I do HTML !
PS This post probably destroys my credibility as a clued up Techie Bod. Muahaha - I have my "not caring" face on there :-) I could easily look up what all the HTML tags above mean but as they work (which is what really matters), I'll accept the pointing fingers of the HTML experts.
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