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.