Wow - almost a year since the last post here. Let's make up for that with a recommendation for a seriously useful piece of software.
I'm an information junkie. Even though I knew I wasn't likely to have any earthshattering info come in that wouldn't come by mibile phone, I still had to keep checking. However, how do you do that when you're away from your normal internet connection.
Enter :
Laptop +
Android phone +
EasyTether Lite
The Easytether software comes in two parts. One is an app for the mobile, the other is a driver for the laptop. It's available from the Android Market and the link above. The free version is a little crippled, although you won't notice that if you don't use what it limits. The limits (https, games and messenger apps are blocked) are listed in the FAQ and are removed in the $10/£6 paid version (not tested)
How's it work ?
After the software is in, connect your phone like you would to sync or charge it. Easytether (if set to auto) will detect it and activate the internet connection. Job done. Simple as that. It really is as seamless as just plugging it in. The only tweaking to do on the phone is to enable USB debugging, which is how the data goes from internet -> phone -> laptop. No need to root the phone to enable superuser access.
The end result is that you're using the phone as a 3g dongle.
Taking it a step further, you can then use Internet Connection Sharing via the Windows laptop to get other machines hooking up to the net. My current Acer laptop runs Windows 7 and we got good results with an ad-hoc WiFi network. Well, after a little tweaking of course to ensure an old Dell WinXP laptop could see it (the Dell laptop was limited to WEP encryption).
So that's :
Easytether + Win7 laptop = seamless internet access
Win7 + adhoc wifi + ICS = internet access to several laptops
It just worked. No hassle (see below) and it was a lot more efficient than a friend's 3g dongle that was trying to connect via Virginmedia. Latency was as good as my 10Mbit cable internet back home and I was seeing download speeds of around 2.5-3.5Mbits/s when a bit of rogue iTunes downloading was going on ...
I'd fully recommend this app and I'm heavily considering actually paying for it. Quality devs need cash to keep them going.
Hardware in use :
Acer Aspire 7540 Win7 laptop
Sony Ericsson X10i Mini Android phone at 2.1 update 1
Apple Airport Express mk1 (802.11b/g version)
What issues did we see ? All of these are either Windows issues or Apple issues.
Sharing via Airport Express - nogo. Didn't want to happen. Suspect this is a Working As Intended, as while the Airport Express is capable of routing an internet connection that comes in via its Ethernet port, it is not intended to share internet coming in from its wifi.
ICS vs Airplay. This is a curious one ... When Win7 Internet Connection Sharing was enabled, I could not use iTunes remote speakers, iTunes would not allow selection of the Airplay speakers. Looks like a critical clash between ICS and the Apple Airplay protocol. When ICS was disabled, I could connect to Airplay again. I could also see the net while streaming to Airplay, I just couldn't share the connection.
Overuse of internet :-) Lol - this is a sign of the app working maybe a bit too well. I didn't use all of my monthly allocation, I still have about 40MB left ...
Reconfiguring Win7 ad-hoc wifi networks. Seems like these are a "Set up once, step back, leave well alone" thing. The only reconfiguration options I could see were "Create New" or "Delete old".
Closing out - really impressed with this app. It just sits in the background after waiting to do its thing it performs with silent efficiency.
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Kaspersky and Internet Security
Wow - not posted here for ages. Sadly I'm breaking the silence with a rant ...
As part of a discount thing, I got a 5 licence copy of Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 a few months ago. The 5 licences went to my laptop, my desktop, my dad's laptop and my sister's laptop with one being held in reserve for when I eventually rebuild my desktop.
On the whole, it's a competent product. It doesn't cause a temporary whole machine freeze like McAfee did, plus it has spotted a few nasties come in. McAfee was allegedly on guard when my Eve account details got stolen. Kaspersky looks like it does the job and it installs and runs easily. You get the occasional alert "Kaspersky is turned off" when starting Windows but that's the Race Condition you sometimes get. I.e. Windows has checked for active AV before the AV has gone active. No big deal.
What is a big deal is when a piece of software does too much. I used to use a program called Zonealarm as a personal firewall, until I got annoyed at it Doing Too Much.
Kaspersky does this as well but how :
Application blocking - if it doesn't trust it, then it'll add it to the restricted applications list. It won't tell you that it's done this. I discovered after asking "why is my BOINC Climateprediction not doing anything?" Kaspersky had decided it didn't like the look of the mini executables that BOINC uses and just blocked them with the only notification being an entry in the Restricted apps list.
Network blocking - If you connect to a wireless SSID and click on "Location : Home", you would expect it to work properly. Not so, Kaspersky will say "I don't know this" and block it. This has the effect of disabling network file shares (Windows workgroups) and network printing. People may be able to see the machine on the LAN but can't connect to it. Again, the only notification is an entry in the Networks list that says "Public". This is sadly avoidable as Kaspersky should really be asking Windows whether the network is Public or Home.
Looking at the problems with cold, hard logic would say "Nothing wrong here, it's attempting to do its best to protect the system it is installed on." Which is fair enough, however the critical aspect is "It hasn't told me".
First noticed this on the Snowdon weekend where I couldn't transfer pictures across the wifi LAN at the house there. Thought it was Windows doing a Funny and dismissed it as network transfers worked when I got home. However, I've changed my wifi SSID here (to prevent jamming of the audio streaming) and when Kaspersky saw that, it decided to block it. No more network transfers ... This continued with my dad reporting problems with his printing, where he has a printer hooked up to a rarely used desktop. His laptop couldn't see the desktop to allow printing.
To troubleshoot, I did the standard thing of thinking Windows had done a Funny and went through setting the filesharing options back to default. No joy, except seeing a desktop that could see the 2 laptops but laptops that couldn't see anything. The "Odd One Out" theory strikes here, the desktop is the only one not running Kaspersky. A quick look in the deeper options of Kaspersky spots the issue, it had tagged the networks as "Public" thereby firewalling the computers.
This is a problem I'd only expect a Nerd Level User to fix, due to the lack of feedback from the application at fault. To be an issue with an all in one product like a major name's Internet Security product is inexcusable. Even with my Nerd Level Knowledge, it was sheer luck that I joined the dots enough to identify the cause of the problem.
I will be voting with my feet, when my Kaspersky licences run out I will be changing who I have my anti virus protection from. I can see the logic behind the protection measures but the lack of any feedback as to what it has blocked just causes a critical level of confusion.
Now then - who knows a competent anti virus supplier ? My blacklist is getting ever longer ...
As part of a discount thing, I got a 5 licence copy of Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 a few months ago. The 5 licences went to my laptop, my desktop, my dad's laptop and my sister's laptop with one being held in reserve for when I eventually rebuild my desktop.
On the whole, it's a competent product. It doesn't cause a temporary whole machine freeze like McAfee did, plus it has spotted a few nasties come in. McAfee was allegedly on guard when my Eve account details got stolen. Kaspersky looks like it does the job and it installs and runs easily. You get the occasional alert "Kaspersky is turned off" when starting Windows but that's the Race Condition you sometimes get. I.e. Windows has checked for active AV before the AV has gone active. No big deal.
What is a big deal is when a piece of software does too much. I used to use a program called Zonealarm as a personal firewall, until I got annoyed at it Doing Too Much.
Kaspersky does this as well but how :
Application blocking - if it doesn't trust it, then it'll add it to the restricted applications list. It won't tell you that it's done this. I discovered after asking "why is my BOINC Climateprediction not doing anything?" Kaspersky had decided it didn't like the look of the mini executables that BOINC uses and just blocked them with the only notification being an entry in the Restricted apps list.
Network blocking - If you connect to a wireless SSID and click on "Location : Home", you would expect it to work properly. Not so, Kaspersky will say "I don't know this" and block it. This has the effect of disabling network file shares (Windows workgroups) and network printing. People may be able to see the machine on the LAN but can't connect to it. Again, the only notification is an entry in the Networks list that says "Public". This is sadly avoidable as Kaspersky should really be asking Windows whether the network is Public or Home.
Looking at the problems with cold, hard logic would say "Nothing wrong here, it's attempting to do its best to protect the system it is installed on." Which is fair enough, however the critical aspect is "It hasn't told me".
First noticed this on the Snowdon weekend where I couldn't transfer pictures across the wifi LAN at the house there. Thought it was Windows doing a Funny and dismissed it as network transfers worked when I got home. However, I've changed my wifi SSID here (to prevent jamming of the audio streaming) and when Kaspersky saw that, it decided to block it. No more network transfers ... This continued with my dad reporting problems with his printing, where he has a printer hooked up to a rarely used desktop. His laptop couldn't see the desktop to allow printing.
To troubleshoot, I did the standard thing of thinking Windows had done a Funny and went through setting the filesharing options back to default. No joy, except seeing a desktop that could see the 2 laptops but laptops that couldn't see anything. The "Odd One Out" theory strikes here, the desktop is the only one not running Kaspersky. A quick look in the deeper options of Kaspersky spots the issue, it had tagged the networks as "Public" thereby firewalling the computers.
This is a problem I'd only expect a Nerd Level User to fix, due to the lack of feedback from the application at fault. To be an issue with an all in one product like a major name's Internet Security product is inexcusable. Even with my Nerd Level Knowledge, it was sheer luck that I joined the dots enough to identify the cause of the problem.
I will be voting with my feet, when my Kaspersky licences run out I will be changing who I have my anti virus protection from. I can see the logic behind the protection measures but the lack of any feedback as to what it has blocked just causes a critical level of confusion.
Now then - who knows a competent anti virus supplier ? My blacklist is getting ever longer ...
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Acer laptop mini review
This new toy kinda got lost in the noise with all the other bits of kit I bought at the end of last year ...
I had to retire my old laptop, a G70-120EA made by Hewlett Packard. The post I did that talks about that one after a couple of weeks is still on this blog, here's a link. I was quite positive towards the G70 back then, it was a lot of laptop for the money. I was also happy to overlook the flaws, like the poor build quality. The Vista experience hadn't quite hit by then, although I'd been getting the UAC popups regularly asking me if I was sure I wanted to do stuff. As a laptop, it did well for about 6 months and then the fan started to die.
The problem with the HP was the location of the fan. It hadn't been built with support in mind, so to replace a simple item like the fan required the disassembly of the entire machine. I guess this is also where the poor build quality came from too. Most engineers will just find a way to make something work, they won't bother making it particularly efficient or clean. Good engineers take a little more pride in their designs and attempt to make them easier to put together, take apart, fix and all those other little things that separate Fiats from Ferraris.
Or Acers from HP's ...
Ahh - that fan. By the time the end came, I'd cut the HP back to 40% cpu power to stop it from overheating. That kept it stable, although it wasn't comfortable with 5's On Demand video service. That didn't last though, with the fan dying the Sunday morning after I'd finished with work for 2009. Cue one emergency trip to the Mall to investigate a replacement ...
After a steady bit of research through the year I'd settled between 2 choices, Apple and Acer. Apple got a look through curiosity at them being "different", with the interest in Acer coming from their reliability record. Apple is still up at the premium end of the market, i.e. too expensive for too few features. My eye got caught by 2 Acers, a 15" and a 17". Good features and cheap. I ended up being seduced by the lure of wrapping my fingers around a few more inches :-)
Out of the box, the Acer (an Aspire 7540) felt heavier than the HP. I'm not bothered about extra weight, it usually means "sturdier". The keyboard seems fairly Apple inspired. I have to class it as "reasonable". I haven't caught my fingers on the keys like on the HP but it does miss the odd keystroke. The trackpad is not great.
The Aspire 7540 came with Windows 7 and the much vaunted Multi-touch and Gesture features. After a couple of days, they got disabled because they just plain got in the way. I think the laptop was getting confused over "is it a click ?" "is he trying to gesture control ?" with the result being much reduced responsiveness to taps on the trackpad. So I just turned off the multitouch features (kept scroll gestures - those work) and trackpad responsiveness improved considerably.
Multitouch gestures tend to be Drag, Zoom and Rotate type operations. Seriously, how often do you alter the Zoom, how often do you Rotate something and isn't it easier to hold a mouse button when you're dragging ? I really can't see any point in the multitouch gestures on a laptop. Touchscreen and tablets - fine, there's no mouse button there. But on a trackpad that's not got the "I'm tapping there" feedback of a touchscreen, nope - gets in the way.
Heh heh heh - that's more a whinge at Windows 7 functionality instead of saying what the laptop's like. Still, keyboard - good, trackpad - poor. I have to be careful when browsing shopping sites because the tap-click of the trackpad can be a little ... random. Sometimes it takes a couple of Big Taps, sometimes it seems to do a click from what must be the electric charge on my fingers. Did I mention it likes to do those phantom clicks when the pointer is over a "Buy" button ? :-)
Muahaha - had to clear out Shopping Baskets a few times cos the laptop is a shopaholic.
The screen is excellent. It claims to have LED technology, which like the tellies is intended to give more definition to those colours. It works too, there's a Facebook game I keep up with that has blocks of colour in its interface that I hadn't noticed on the HP. The screen is 1600x900 so not quite 1080p. There's a HDMI port plus a VGA D-Sub port to allow hooking up to a telly or projector. I've tried both, I have to say I'm impressed with HDMI's ability to send video + audio on the same cable. BBC's Day of the Triffids via iPlayer played pretty well, although the HD version coming from the V+ box looked better.
Memory - 3GB again, same as the G70. Windows 7 seems a little less hungry on memory. The load is currently 50% with 10 Firefox tabs active, as well as iTunes, Outlook and Messenger. On the G70 and Vista the load would be 60-65%, although a couple of the baseline apps are different. I'm still running the baseline McAfee trial instead of Kaspersky and Evemon isn't loaded while my Eve account is inactive.
Software - You get the usual trials, one of those bits being a 60 day trial of McAfee. I've put an opinion of McAfee up before (linky!) and that opinion has sadly been reinforced by my experience on the 7540. There's 2 key performance indicators on Anti-Virus - does it slow the machine down ? does it work. McAfee's update is annoying because it effectively hangs the machine for a few seconds, annoying and unnecessary. Does it work ? NO! I had my Eve account info stolen by a keylogger which slipped through McAfee.
Important lesson when buying new kit - Don't trust that it's ok out of the box, give it a security scan before putting any passwords in. I can't prove where my keylogger came from but one suspicion is that it was on the machine when I opened the box. McAfee did nothing to prevent the keylogger from doing its stuff.
Windows 7 - it's an improvement over Vista. It seems more likable too, although I have a feeling that part of the design brief involved "let's get people looking at their desktop pics more". The sidebar changes are a step back. On Vista, I liked the ability to click the sidebar to bring the gadgets to the front. That's gone from Windows 7, so I had to move my Evemon skill plan window left a bit to keep the sidebar visible. Apart from that, the interface is a logical step forward and works a bit better. I like the ability to Pin programs to the task bar, when starting up I can tap 1,2,3 and Messenger, Outlook and Firefox start up.
Performance - no problems here. I don't push my laptops particularly hard, my key point with them is screen size and having lots of windows open while I listen to iTunes on them. My desktop is the gaming machine. Got my doubts as to whether this puppy has the performance to run graphically demanding games but it was perfectly happy playing that iPlayer video on the telly.
Something I suspect is that a little bit of extra Hamster Power means that it gets more out of the iTunes to remote speaker link. I think it sounds better and gets more detail across but that could just be a placebo effect. Bit like my blu-ray player getting more out of dvds because of having Hamsters On Steroids.
No blu-ray - the G70 had a blu-ray drive. My opinion on this is that blu-ray is a bit of a gimmick. Comparing blu-ray movies to dvds suggests that blu-ray doesn't add that much value in terms of improved picture quality. It is better ... but when you're sitting back and watching the telly from the other side of the room, dvd movies look just as good.
Laptops are Vastly Overrated as movie playing machines. Spending an extra £100 on a Sony BDP-S360 (happily recommend those, I'm a fan of mine) is well worth it due to the extra connectivity it offers. Surround sound adds a lot to movies and it's a lot easier to get that from a standalone player, as trying to do it through the crippleware programs that come with PCs tends to be ... awkward if not doomed. So - sound connectivity means hardly any laptops will be suitable as movie players. Video connectivity is irrelevant as HDMI is the only valid connector here, it's the only one that allows HD playback.
Oh yeah - it's easier to surf forums if the movie is playing back on a different machine than the one you're using for forums and Facebook :-) :-) :-)
Overall - it's got the thumbs up so far. I can live with the quirks of the trackpad (by making sure it doesn't one-click buy stuff!) because it's more than made up for by the overall build quality.
The Acer cost more than last year's HP but I think I got an exceptional deal there last year. Hopefully it will last longer :-)
I had to retire my old laptop, a G70-120EA made by Hewlett Packard. The post I did that talks about that one after a couple of weeks is still on this blog, here's a link. I was quite positive towards the G70 back then, it was a lot of laptop for the money. I was also happy to overlook the flaws, like the poor build quality. The Vista experience hadn't quite hit by then, although I'd been getting the UAC popups regularly asking me if I was sure I wanted to do stuff. As a laptop, it did well for about 6 months and then the fan started to die.
The problem with the HP was the location of the fan. It hadn't been built with support in mind, so to replace a simple item like the fan required the disassembly of the entire machine. I guess this is also where the poor build quality came from too. Most engineers will just find a way to make something work, they won't bother making it particularly efficient or clean. Good engineers take a little more pride in their designs and attempt to make them easier to put together, take apart, fix and all those other little things that separate Fiats from Ferraris.
Or Acers from HP's ...
Ahh - that fan. By the time the end came, I'd cut the HP back to 40% cpu power to stop it from overheating. That kept it stable, although it wasn't comfortable with 5's On Demand video service. That didn't last though, with the fan dying the Sunday morning after I'd finished with work for 2009. Cue one emergency trip to the Mall to investigate a replacement ...
After a steady bit of research through the year I'd settled between 2 choices, Apple and Acer. Apple got a look through curiosity at them being "different", with the interest in Acer coming from their reliability record. Apple is still up at the premium end of the market, i.e. too expensive for too few features. My eye got caught by 2 Acers, a 15" and a 17". Good features and cheap. I ended up being seduced by the lure of wrapping my fingers around a few more inches :-)
Out of the box, the Acer (an Aspire 7540) felt heavier than the HP. I'm not bothered about extra weight, it usually means "sturdier". The keyboard seems fairly Apple inspired. I have to class it as "reasonable". I haven't caught my fingers on the keys like on the HP but it does miss the odd keystroke. The trackpad is not great.
The Aspire 7540 came with Windows 7 and the much vaunted Multi-touch and Gesture features. After a couple of days, they got disabled because they just plain got in the way. I think the laptop was getting confused over "is it a click ?" "is he trying to gesture control ?" with the result being much reduced responsiveness to taps on the trackpad. So I just turned off the multitouch features (kept scroll gestures - those work) and trackpad responsiveness improved considerably.
Multitouch gestures tend to be Drag, Zoom and Rotate type operations. Seriously, how often do you alter the Zoom, how often do you Rotate something and isn't it easier to hold a mouse button when you're dragging ? I really can't see any point in the multitouch gestures on a laptop. Touchscreen and tablets - fine, there's no mouse button there. But on a trackpad that's not got the "I'm tapping there" feedback of a touchscreen, nope - gets in the way.
Heh heh heh - that's more a whinge at Windows 7 functionality instead of saying what the laptop's like. Still, keyboard - good, trackpad - poor. I have to be careful when browsing shopping sites because the tap-click of the trackpad can be a little ... random. Sometimes it takes a couple of Big Taps, sometimes it seems to do a click from what must be the electric charge on my fingers. Did I mention it likes to do those phantom clicks when the pointer is over a "Buy" button ? :-)
Muahaha - had to clear out Shopping Baskets a few times cos the laptop is a shopaholic.
The screen is excellent. It claims to have LED technology, which like the tellies is intended to give more definition to those colours. It works too, there's a Facebook game I keep up with that has blocks of colour in its interface that I hadn't noticed on the HP. The screen is 1600x900 so not quite 1080p. There's a HDMI port plus a VGA D-Sub port to allow hooking up to a telly or projector. I've tried both, I have to say I'm impressed with HDMI's ability to send video + audio on the same cable. BBC's Day of the Triffids via iPlayer played pretty well, although the HD version coming from the V+ box looked better.
Memory - 3GB again, same as the G70. Windows 7 seems a little less hungry on memory. The load is currently 50% with 10 Firefox tabs active, as well as iTunes, Outlook and Messenger. On the G70 and Vista the load would be 60-65%, although a couple of the baseline apps are different. I'm still running the baseline McAfee trial instead of Kaspersky and Evemon isn't loaded while my Eve account is inactive.
Software - You get the usual trials, one of those bits being a 60 day trial of McAfee. I've put an opinion of McAfee up before (linky!) and that opinion has sadly been reinforced by my experience on the 7540. There's 2 key performance indicators on Anti-Virus - does it slow the machine down ? does it work. McAfee's update is annoying because it effectively hangs the machine for a few seconds, annoying and unnecessary. Does it work ? NO! I had my Eve account info stolen by a keylogger which slipped through McAfee.
Important lesson when buying new kit - Don't trust that it's ok out of the box, give it a security scan before putting any passwords in. I can't prove where my keylogger came from but one suspicion is that it was on the machine when I opened the box. McAfee did nothing to prevent the keylogger from doing its stuff.
Windows 7 - it's an improvement over Vista. It seems more likable too, although I have a feeling that part of the design brief involved "let's get people looking at their desktop pics more". The sidebar changes are a step back. On Vista, I liked the ability to click the sidebar to bring the gadgets to the front. That's gone from Windows 7, so I had to move my Evemon skill plan window left a bit to keep the sidebar visible. Apart from that, the interface is a logical step forward and works a bit better. I like the ability to Pin programs to the task bar, when starting up I can tap 1,2,3 and Messenger, Outlook and Firefox start up.
Performance - no problems here. I don't push my laptops particularly hard, my key point with them is screen size and having lots of windows open while I listen to iTunes on them. My desktop is the gaming machine. Got my doubts as to whether this puppy has the performance to run graphically demanding games but it was perfectly happy playing that iPlayer video on the telly.
Something I suspect is that a little bit of extra Hamster Power means that it gets more out of the iTunes to remote speaker link. I think it sounds better and gets more detail across but that could just be a placebo effect. Bit like my blu-ray player getting more out of dvds because of having Hamsters On Steroids.
No blu-ray - the G70 had a blu-ray drive. My opinion on this is that blu-ray is a bit of a gimmick. Comparing blu-ray movies to dvds suggests that blu-ray doesn't add that much value in terms of improved picture quality. It is better ... but when you're sitting back and watching the telly from the other side of the room, dvd movies look just as good.
Laptops are Vastly Overrated as movie playing machines. Spending an extra £100 on a Sony BDP-S360 (happily recommend those, I'm a fan of mine) is well worth it due to the extra connectivity it offers. Surround sound adds a lot to movies and it's a lot easier to get that from a standalone player, as trying to do it through the crippleware programs that come with PCs tends to be ... awkward if not doomed. So - sound connectivity means hardly any laptops will be suitable as movie players. Video connectivity is irrelevant as HDMI is the only valid connector here, it's the only one that allows HD playback.
Oh yeah - it's easier to surf forums if the movie is playing back on a different machine than the one you're using for forums and Facebook :-) :-) :-)
Overall - it's got the thumbs up so far. I can live with the quirks of the trackpad (by making sure it doesn't one-click buy stuff!) because it's more than made up for by the overall build quality.
The Acer cost more than last year's HP but I think I got an exceptional deal there last year. Hopefully it will last longer :-)
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
V+ box vs HDMI
Technology 1 Sleepypete 2
This one's an additional to the post below ... Got my HDMI leads today and hooked them both up. Turned the V+ box back on - instant trouble ...
I could get a picture through to the telly but the picture would blank to black screen every 5 seconds or so. Just as if the lead was connecting-disconnecting. Cue the logical problem solving step sequence ...
Blu-ray player through HDMI - ok. This proves that one lead and that input into the telly are ok.
Swap the leads over, use that lead&socket for V+ - no joy
Put Blu-ray into the HDMI socket & lead I'd first used for the V+. Blu-ray happy.
Try hooking the laptop up to the telly via the HDMI leads, this is happy too. A little fuzzy though when watching Day of Triffids Part 1, possibly because I was watching in the laptop's native resolution of 1600x900 instead of 1080p which is 1920x1080, there's always a little mushyness that comes in when you upscale an image.
This proves that the telly is ok and the two leads are ok, so the problem is with the V+ box. I then have a peek online for V+ box problems with HDMI, not as much reported as you'd think but there's still reports out there telling of faulty HDMI sockets in the Scientific American V+ boxes. Ho hum.
Time for Plan B ...
Which involves going for the Component Video solution I mention in the original post. 5 leads instead of 1, which is a bit of a pain to wire up but when it's done you can hide the wires out of sight. It does sadly mean I don't get the full 1080p thing but 1080i ain't so bad. Looks pretty darn good at the moment cos I'm halfway through the second episode of Day of the Triffids. It's better than watching it from the laptop iPlayer, sharper and much more detailed.
(Plan B should really be ringing up the Cable Guy to get me a 100% working order cable box but that's not really an option cos it'll take me a few days to clear what's recorded on it)
So - Technology 1 Sleepypete 2 and I have a spare HDMI lead I can use for hooking up laptops to tellies which will go in the laptop bag.
PS Another "additional" to the post below - Star Trek dvd quite happily plays back at 1080p through an HDMI lead, so that's a confirmation on Component being limited to 576p only due to DRM restrictions.
This one's an additional to the post below ... Got my HDMI leads today and hooked them both up. Turned the V+ box back on - instant trouble ...
I could get a picture through to the telly but the picture would blank to black screen every 5 seconds or so. Just as if the lead was connecting-disconnecting. Cue the logical problem solving step sequence ...
Blu-ray player through HDMI - ok. This proves that one lead and that input into the telly are ok.
Swap the leads over, use that lead&socket for V+ - no joy
Put Blu-ray into the HDMI socket & lead I'd first used for the V+. Blu-ray happy.
Try hooking the laptop up to the telly via the HDMI leads, this is happy too. A little fuzzy though when watching Day of Triffids Part 1, possibly because I was watching in the laptop's native resolution of 1600x900 instead of 1080p which is 1920x1080, there's always a little mushyness that comes in when you upscale an image.
This proves that the telly is ok and the two leads are ok, so the problem is with the V+ box. I then have a peek online for V+ box problems with HDMI, not as much reported as you'd think but there's still reports out there telling of faulty HDMI sockets in the Scientific American V+ boxes. Ho hum.
Time for Plan B ...
Which involves going for the Component Video solution I mention in the original post. 5 leads instead of 1, which is a bit of a pain to wire up but when it's done you can hide the wires out of sight. It does sadly mean I don't get the full 1080p thing but 1080i ain't so bad. Looks pretty darn good at the moment cos I'm halfway through the second episode of Day of the Triffids. It's better than watching it from the laptop iPlayer, sharper and much more detailed.
(Plan B should really be ringing up the Cable Guy to get me a 100% working order cable box but that's not really an option cos it'll take me a few days to clear what's recorded on it)
So - Technology 1 Sleepypete 2 and I have a spare HDMI lead I can use for hooking up laptops to tellies which will go in the laptop bag.
PS Another "additional" to the post below - Star Trek dvd quite happily plays back at 1080p through an HDMI lead, so that's a confirmation on Component being limited to 576p only due to DRM restrictions.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Adventures with new AV kit
Been spending rather too much money lately. There was the laptop last week that I talked about on my main blog but the more interesting one is what I've been up to today.
Today's new arrivals are a Samsung LE32B530p LCD telly, 32 inch with 1080p. Bit cheap but perfectly functional. I'd have liked an LED telly but they're significantly more expensive. The other new arrival is a Sony BDP-S360 blu ray player.
Sadly I don't have the kit yet to show them off at full potential as I have a pair of HDMI leads on order hopefully arriving tomorrow. I've been having fun exploring the options for connecting everything up :-) The telly has just 1 Scart input, favouring 3 HDMI sockets. It also has a PC monitor input plus component (3 RCA Phono leads) and composite video (1 RCA phono leads). I'll be hooking up a few bits of kit :
Virginmedia V+ cable TV box
Sony blu-ray player
Desktop PC for gaming
The V+ box was relatively simple, it's hooked up via the Scart lead it had before. I'll be replacing that with an HDMI link when the lead arrives. The Blu-ray player is a little more interesting ... I don't have a proper Component Video lead set so I improvised. The link is the same as the typical RCA Phono lead that's used for digital audio and composite video, so I've done a little scrounging. Time for a little aside on the various ways to connect up :
HDMI - wide flat plug that carries audio and video in digital format. Use this wherever possible as it gives best and simplest results
Component Video - 3x phono leads labelled Y, PR/CR and PB/CB (I dunno what that stands for !). Capable of nearly as good quality as HDMI but has other limits I'll go into below.
S-Video - 1 lead, 4 active pins inside with a false one to help you put it in the right place.
Composite - 1 lead coloured yellow.
VGA - otherwise known as D-Sub, it's the one you connect your PC to the monitor with.
So - HDMI gives the best picture plus it's just one lead. There's a sneaky reason to that though and that's based around the paranoia rampant in the people who provide us with all that content out there. You see Digital Rights Management uses the HDMI link to tell a player that it's sending the signal to something kosher, these signals aren't sent back through the other links. So although your Component Video link is capable of 1080i resolution, your dvd and blu-ray discs will only play back at standard definition : 576p.
Obvious question time - Huh ? What does that actually mean ? Based on what I think from watching the new Star Trek film through the combination, not very much in practice. Excellent sharp picture, no complaints. If the telly is up to the job, it'll fill in the gaps. I'll have to watch it again after the HDMI leads arrive, just for research purposes of course :-)
So that's the Blu-ray player :-). As mentioned above, I have it hooked up through the Component Video link however I'm using scrounged leads to do so. Two are the yellow leads that should really be used for Composite Video, another is a digital audio SP/DIF lead. It works :-). The audio link I'm using is the same as always, it's a digital SP/DIF lead going to an ooold Creative Labs 5.1 surround speaker set that's still going strong. Looks and sounds great.
Oh by the way, what I've mentioned above is tame compared to what I did after ...
Ingredients :
1 desktop PC equipped with a 1 year old Radeon 4850.
KVM switch
2x looong KVM hookup leads (keyboard video and mouse)
Telly
Mass Effect game
The mayhem starts with hooking up the KVM to the desktop. I still have a PS/2 keyboard though, so I have to unplug that. This uses the second display port on the graphics card. The KVM can stay fairly permanently connected and I can hide it between sofa and side table when not in use (errmmm - side table = old PC box in disguise). My main mouse can stay connected to the main PC.
So that's a long lead going to a KVM switch that will end up in the middle of the floor. The output of the KVM switch goes to the telly through the second long hookup lead. Keyboard can plug into the KVM beside the sofa, which is also where the second mouse goes. I upgraded my last mouse to one with more buttons (for voice comms), so I had an excellent Logitech mouse available for use.
End result : PC stays behind the sofa. Long leads go to a KVM in the middle of the floor. Monitor lead goes to telly, keyboard and mouse go on my lap. Having the KVM makes it act as an easy way of cutting the cable when not in use, I can separate the link there instead of pulling leads out of telly or PC. Not quite got the sound arranged yet but that'll be an easy one as I have another suitable Long lead lying idle :-)
On goes the PC - bit of a fiddly arrangement to get the picture on the screen though. The resolution allowed by the telly is 1920x1080, which is far more pixels than there are available on my 1280x1024 monitor. I needed to enable the telly as a second screen and then make it primary. Lots of potential confusion with WinXP here, as I then needed to do a log-off/log-on to get the telly properly recognised as primary. That being the screen upon which the game would appear ...
I got it going in the end though :-) Mass Effect looks rather spectacular at 1920x1080 on the 32" screen :-) Must get the sound hookup done so I can get some proper playtime in. Eve should be amazing on there too, although I have a worry about text size. I could barely read the text on Windows icons due to them being a leeetle bit smaller than I'm used to :-) Big screen but rather more distant than the typical monitor.
I've packed it all away now so there's only one lead trailing (laptop power lead). A very successful first night of testing, looking forward to the HDMI leads appearing as well as the 2 blu-ray discs I ordered off Amazon today.
PS There will be a minor drawback to gaming on the telly ... I'll either have to go back to listening to music on the laptop speakers (yuk) or I see how the speaker set behaves with it mixing game audio and Airtunes audio.
PS2 Not recommended to hook up laptop direct to telly as a monitor - it'll get confused over screen resolutions and move all your windows around on first connection. Annoying if you have them arranged just-so.
Today's new arrivals are a Samsung LE32B530p LCD telly, 32 inch with 1080p. Bit cheap but perfectly functional. I'd have liked an LED telly but they're significantly more expensive. The other new arrival is a Sony BDP-S360 blu ray player.
Sadly I don't have the kit yet to show them off at full potential as I have a pair of HDMI leads on order hopefully arriving tomorrow. I've been having fun exploring the options for connecting everything up :-) The telly has just 1 Scart input, favouring 3 HDMI sockets. It also has a PC monitor input plus component (3 RCA Phono leads) and composite video (1 RCA phono leads). I'll be hooking up a few bits of kit :
Virginmedia V+ cable TV box
Sony blu-ray player
Desktop PC for gaming
The V+ box was relatively simple, it's hooked up via the Scart lead it had before. I'll be replacing that with an HDMI link when the lead arrives. The Blu-ray player is a little more interesting ... I don't have a proper Component Video lead set so I improvised. The link is the same as the typical RCA Phono lead that's used for digital audio and composite video, so I've done a little scrounging. Time for a little aside on the various ways to connect up :
HDMI - wide flat plug that carries audio and video in digital format. Use this wherever possible as it gives best and simplest results
Component Video - 3x phono leads labelled Y, PR/CR and PB/CB (I dunno what that stands for !). Capable of nearly as good quality as HDMI but has other limits I'll go into below.
S-Video - 1 lead, 4 active pins inside with a false one to help you put it in the right place.
Composite - 1 lead coloured yellow.
VGA - otherwise known as D-Sub, it's the one you connect your PC to the monitor with.
So - HDMI gives the best picture plus it's just one lead. There's a sneaky reason to that though and that's based around the paranoia rampant in the people who provide us with all that content out there. You see Digital Rights Management uses the HDMI link to tell a player that it's sending the signal to something kosher, these signals aren't sent back through the other links. So although your Component Video link is capable of 1080i resolution, your dvd and blu-ray discs will only play back at standard definition : 576p.
Obvious question time - Huh ? What does that actually mean ? Based on what I think from watching the new Star Trek film through the combination, not very much in practice. Excellent sharp picture, no complaints. If the telly is up to the job, it'll fill in the gaps. I'll have to watch it again after the HDMI leads arrive, just for research purposes of course :-)
So that's the Blu-ray player :-). As mentioned above, I have it hooked up through the Component Video link however I'm using scrounged leads to do so. Two are the yellow leads that should really be used for Composite Video, another is a digital audio SP/DIF lead. It works :-). The audio link I'm using is the same as always, it's a digital SP/DIF lead going to an ooold Creative Labs 5.1 surround speaker set that's still going strong. Looks and sounds great.
Oh by the way, what I've mentioned above is tame compared to what I did after ...
Ingredients :
1 desktop PC equipped with a 1 year old Radeon 4850.
KVM switch
2x looong KVM hookup leads (keyboard video and mouse)
Telly
Mass Effect game
The mayhem starts with hooking up the KVM to the desktop. I still have a PS/2 keyboard though, so I have to unplug that. This uses the second display port on the graphics card. The KVM can stay fairly permanently connected and I can hide it between sofa and side table when not in use (errmmm - side table = old PC box in disguise). My main mouse can stay connected to the main PC.
So that's a long lead going to a KVM switch that will end up in the middle of the floor. The output of the KVM switch goes to the telly through the second long hookup lead. Keyboard can plug into the KVM beside the sofa, which is also where the second mouse goes. I upgraded my last mouse to one with more buttons (for voice comms), so I had an excellent Logitech mouse available for use.
End result : PC stays behind the sofa. Long leads go to a KVM in the middle of the floor. Monitor lead goes to telly, keyboard and mouse go on my lap. Having the KVM makes it act as an easy way of cutting the cable when not in use, I can separate the link there instead of pulling leads out of telly or PC. Not quite got the sound arranged yet but that'll be an easy one as I have another suitable Long lead lying idle :-)
On goes the PC - bit of a fiddly arrangement to get the picture on the screen though. The resolution allowed by the telly is 1920x1080, which is far more pixels than there are available on my 1280x1024 monitor. I needed to enable the telly as a second screen and then make it primary. Lots of potential confusion with WinXP here, as I then needed to do a log-off/log-on to get the telly properly recognised as primary. That being the screen upon which the game would appear ...
I got it going in the end though :-) Mass Effect looks rather spectacular at 1920x1080 on the 32" screen :-) Must get the sound hookup done so I can get some proper playtime in. Eve should be amazing on there too, although I have a worry about text size. I could barely read the text on Windows icons due to them being a leeetle bit smaller than I'm used to :-) Big screen but rather more distant than the typical monitor.
I've packed it all away now so there's only one lead trailing (laptop power lead). A very successful first night of testing, looking forward to the HDMI leads appearing as well as the 2 blu-ray discs I ordered off Amazon today.
PS There will be a minor drawback to gaming on the telly ... I'll either have to go back to listening to music on the laptop speakers (yuk) or I see how the speaker set behaves with it mixing game audio and Airtunes audio.
PS2 Not recommended to hook up laptop direct to telly as a monitor - it'll get confused over screen resolutions and move all your windows around on first connection. Annoying if you have them arranged just-so.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
TV On Demand
With increasing internet speeds and more demand for ... "on demand" services, I thought I'd give a post on what I've seen so far ...
I have access to On Demand telly via two conduits : my V+ cable TV box and the general internet via my laptop. I'm including the V+ box there as it has a collection of On Demand sources available to it, including BBC's iPlayer, ITV Net Player, 4 on Demand and the Virgin1 Player. I currently use it for watching stuff like the Doctor Who repeats, as the V+ box hooks up to a telly that my laptop isn't compatible with (explanation later).
How does the V+ manage ? The best description is "competent" :-) I only have an old CRT telly due to being forced to buy it at completely the wrong time ... (link attached for the "why"!) so it's not capable of showing HD. If it did, then I'd have the option to upgrade that "competent" a bit. As it is, BBC iPlayer through it gives playback as you'd expect to see on a live broadcast or from a recording. The interface on the V+ box is a little slow but that and a tendency for it to take a few hours for shows to become available are the only drawbacks.
So a good showing from the V+ box, the only downsides being noticed because I'm an impatient button presser :-)
How about the laptop ? Here's the techie part :-)
My current laptop is a G70-120EA made by Hewlett Packard. It's powered by an Intel Core 2 Duo T5800 capable of running at 2GHz. It's got 3GB of RAM and it's hooked up via wifi-G to a 10Mb/s internet connection. The internet comes in through a cable modem hooked up to a Linksys WRT54G2 wifi-router. However, I have to de-rate the cpu (Power Options) by 50% to stop it overheating due to a duff cooling fan. There's still plenty of power available in there though. Unfortunately I have to suffer watching via the laptop screen, due to my old CRT telly not having inputs that can take the D-SUB and HDMI outputs from the laptop. Upside, there's a 17" screen on the laptop :-)
I've tried 3 internet based on-demand services so far : SkyPlayer, BBC iPlayer and Channel 5's On Demand service. How do each fare ?
Sky Player : In the final days of me being with Sky, this allowed me to keep up with a few shows that my Sky Box + Dish weren't able to pick up. I've not used it since switching away from Sky though, so my knowledge is a little old. Impressions - high quality playback, no issues with download rates, good choice for movies etc but limited otherwise.
All On Demand suffers a little from lack of choice, you're dependent on what the providers of the service are interested in squirting down the pipe. Some providers are better than others and for what they don't show, there's always DVDs :-)
Back to Sky Player - very competent on downloaded programmes, although live streaming was VERY susceptible to jamming via other internet activity. As in, I used their streaming Sky Player News programme to test the Airfoil utility I've described in a post below and the conflicting streams rendered the news programme unwatchable. That's about 700kbits/s coming in and 1Mb/s going out. There were other issues being caused by glitches in their login code, where the Skyplayer app would kick you out, unless you knew the trick to logging in. It also required its own player application, although IIRC that branched to Windows Media Player.
(note - this could also have been a router issue, I've changed from a rubbish Philips to the mostly good Linksys but can't remember when ... the conflicting stream issue could have been the Philips getting in the way, plus Airfoil streaming got kicked to touch for other reasons)
Verdict - Good for Sky owners :-) No use whatsoever for other people. Let me watch Star Wars Clone Wars when my Skybox decided it would block Sky Movies Premier. Last word here - Examine the T's & C's closely ... I couldn't get SkySports streams through it, even though I had that as part of my Skybox package.
BBC iPlayer : UK people will know (and love) this service well. It's been around for a while now (in internet terms !) and has evolved since day 1. If I called the V+ "competent", then this can only be described as "excellent". BBC make most of their programmes available quickly after they're broadcast and in the UK, it's free to view. No adverts either. Quality depends on the stream you're using :
Normal - uses about 750kbits/s bandwidth and is Not broadcast quality
High-Def - about 2-2.5Mbits/s and is definitely broadcast quality
I'm also able to do other stuff over the internet while iPlayer is doing its thing. Think frenzied internet browsing with an iPlayer window showing Grand Prix coverage while cricket is on the telly. (I will freely admit to being an Information Junkie)
Ok, Ok, that temptation to play was too much. I'm now listening to music from iTunes (Portishead) streaming over the network to remote speakers while an iPlayer window is playing back coverage from the earlier MotoGP. Here's how it behaves :
What you're seeing there is the output from a Vista gadget called Network meter, that I have monitoring the wifi coming and going from my laptop. The green line is approx 1Mbit/s going from laptop to my remote speakers via an Apple Airport Express. The yellow spikes are from iPlayer grabbing data from the server. They peak at 10Mbits/s, so it's taking its bites in at the maximum potential of my cable modem, with no interference in my music playing. That's probably due to buffering both in the Airport and from iPlayer.
iPlayer used to come in as a separate app but has compressed into being Flash now. That's good although Flash does come with certain vulnerabilities, which is why I use Firefox with the Flashblock app so I can control when Flash apps load. No compatibility issues to report there.
Verdict - they've steadily improved a service that's been outstanding for a while. Yet they've still improved it. Quality of playback is excellent, although it's giving me a Lol moment on the test I'm running now because the subtitles on the MotoGP coverage seem to be from a political environmental programme instead of MotoGP.
Finally, 5 On Demand : I checked this one out because I've been watching the series Warship on Channel 5. Normally I catch it off the V+ box recordings but for some reason, it decided to eat the final episode. Cue internet research ... and finding 5's On Demand service :-) Saves the day again, just like Skyplayer in the last days of my Skybox.
You need a login for this one, in the name of parental protection. That doesn't seem to achieve very much, as although it asks for an email and a date of birth, it doesn't request any bounceback confirmation. So the parental protection is torpedoed from the start because it's trivial to insert a false year into an age. There is email notification of the creation of a new account but because there's no bounceback authentication, it doesn't have to be valid.
Quality of playback ? Good but not as good as iPlayer. Possibly suffers from trying to be too good with an app that isn't as well developed as iPlayer. Instant comparisons are that playback is jumpy and the cpu runs hot. So the player isn't as efficient as iPlayer. (Can't remember bandwidth consumption). Technically I could have boosted playback performance by letting my laptop go at full speed but it would have likely crashed 5 minutes after I did so ... Doesn't bode well for people attempting to use this on machines that aren't as well specced.
Big minus - not even the commercial Skyplayer suffers from adverts mid programme but the adverts are in the 5 On Demand player. Can't even fast forward them. Bah. Can't blame them though, they have to pay the rent, without the ads we wouldn't have the catch up service and you can always alt+tab away to check email & stuff.
Verdict - early days here, they'll hopefully have the time and cash to introduce improvements that make the player more efficient.
So - summary time :-)
Things have moved on a bit since On Demand facilities got introduced and they've improved over time. BBC's iPlayer in particular is particularly impressive (not least cos it lets me watch Grand Prix at the same time as Cricket !) and hopefully 5's offering will improve to match it.
Because episodes only tend to be available for a week or so, they won't replace Digital Video Recorders, except when the DVRs have issues like the V+ box with the Doctor Who's (attempting to schedule a recording of the first show on a channel with a turn-on time was crashing the box). And the picture quality and most importantly the sound is better off DVD. Questions are also present on equipment compatibility, like the roundhole-squarepeg of my laptop to telly hookup.
I better explain that DVD comment : Picture quality isn't visibly different (noting I don't have access to High-Def) but sound is. Both picture and sound are "broadcast" quality, i.e. picture is good but sound is just stereo. I've gotten used to the greater atmosphere of 5.1 playback off DVDs, which the streaming players don't offer.
That said though, the facility is improving into an excellent catch up service for stuff where you're not wanting to buy the DVDs. And it's great to see a facility like iPlayer get integrated into the V+ box :-)
I have access to On Demand telly via two conduits : my V+ cable TV box and the general internet via my laptop. I'm including the V+ box there as it has a collection of On Demand sources available to it, including BBC's iPlayer, ITV Net Player, 4 on Demand and the Virgin1 Player. I currently use it for watching stuff like the Doctor Who repeats, as the V+ box hooks up to a telly that my laptop isn't compatible with (explanation later).
How does the V+ manage ? The best description is "competent" :-) I only have an old CRT telly due to being forced to buy it at completely the wrong time ... (link attached for the "why"!) so it's not capable of showing HD. If it did, then I'd have the option to upgrade that "competent" a bit. As it is, BBC iPlayer through it gives playback as you'd expect to see on a live broadcast or from a recording. The interface on the V+ box is a little slow but that and a tendency for it to take a few hours for shows to become available are the only drawbacks.
So a good showing from the V+ box, the only downsides being noticed because I'm an impatient button presser :-)
How about the laptop ? Here's the techie part :-)
My current laptop is a G70-120EA made by Hewlett Packard. It's powered by an Intel Core 2 Duo T5800 capable of running at 2GHz. It's got 3GB of RAM and it's hooked up via wifi-G to a 10Mb/s internet connection. The internet comes in through a cable modem hooked up to a Linksys WRT54G2 wifi-router. However, I have to de-rate the cpu (Power Options) by 50% to stop it overheating due to a duff cooling fan. There's still plenty of power available in there though. Unfortunately I have to suffer watching via the laptop screen, due to my old CRT telly not having inputs that can take the D-SUB and HDMI outputs from the laptop. Upside, there's a 17" screen on the laptop :-)
I've tried 3 internet based on-demand services so far : SkyPlayer, BBC iPlayer and Channel 5's On Demand service. How do each fare ?
Sky Player : In the final days of me being with Sky, this allowed me to keep up with a few shows that my Sky Box + Dish weren't able to pick up. I've not used it since switching away from Sky though, so my knowledge is a little old. Impressions - high quality playback, no issues with download rates, good choice for movies etc but limited otherwise.
All On Demand suffers a little from lack of choice, you're dependent on what the providers of the service are interested in squirting down the pipe. Some providers are better than others and for what they don't show, there's always DVDs :-)
Back to Sky Player - very competent on downloaded programmes, although live streaming was VERY susceptible to jamming via other internet activity. As in, I used their streaming Sky Player News programme to test the Airfoil utility I've described in a post below and the conflicting streams rendered the news programme unwatchable. That's about 700kbits/s coming in and 1Mb/s going out. There were other issues being caused by glitches in their login code, where the Skyplayer app would kick you out, unless you knew the trick to logging in. It also required its own player application, although IIRC that branched to Windows Media Player.
(note - this could also have been a router issue, I've changed from a rubbish Philips to the mostly good Linksys but can't remember when ... the conflicting stream issue could have been the Philips getting in the way, plus Airfoil streaming got kicked to touch for other reasons)
Verdict - Good for Sky owners :-) No use whatsoever for other people. Let me watch Star Wars Clone Wars when my Skybox decided it would block Sky Movies Premier. Last word here - Examine the T's & C's closely ... I couldn't get SkySports streams through it, even though I had that as part of my Skybox package.
BBC iPlayer : UK people will know (and love) this service well. It's been around for a while now (in internet terms !) and has evolved since day 1. If I called the V+ "competent", then this can only be described as "excellent". BBC make most of their programmes available quickly after they're broadcast and in the UK, it's free to view. No adverts either. Quality depends on the stream you're using :
Normal - uses about 750kbits/s bandwidth and is Not broadcast quality
High-Def - about 2-2.5Mbits/s and is definitely broadcast quality
I'm also able to do other stuff over the internet while iPlayer is doing its thing. Think frenzied internet browsing with an iPlayer window showing Grand Prix coverage while cricket is on the telly. (I will freely admit to being an Information Junkie)
Ok, Ok, that temptation to play was too much. I'm now listening to music from iTunes (Portishead) streaming over the network to remote speakers while an iPlayer window is playing back coverage from the earlier MotoGP. Here's how it behaves :
What you're seeing there is the output from a Vista gadget called Network meter, that I have monitoring the wifi coming and going from my laptop. The green line is approx 1Mbit/s going from laptop to my remote speakers via an Apple Airport Express. The yellow spikes are from iPlayer grabbing data from the server. They peak at 10Mbits/s, so it's taking its bites in at the maximum potential of my cable modem, with no interference in my music playing. That's probably due to buffering both in the Airport and from iPlayer.
iPlayer used to come in as a separate app but has compressed into being Flash now. That's good although Flash does come with certain vulnerabilities, which is why I use Firefox with the Flashblock app so I can control when Flash apps load. No compatibility issues to report there.
Verdict - they've steadily improved a service that's been outstanding for a while. Yet they've still improved it. Quality of playback is excellent, although it's giving me a Lol moment on the test I'm running now because the subtitles on the MotoGP coverage seem to be from a political environmental programme instead of MotoGP.
Finally, 5 On Demand : I checked this one out because I've been watching the series Warship on Channel 5. Normally I catch it off the V+ box recordings but for some reason, it decided to eat the final episode. Cue internet research ... and finding 5's On Demand service :-) Saves the day again, just like Skyplayer in the last days of my Skybox.
You need a login for this one, in the name of parental protection. That doesn't seem to achieve very much, as although it asks for an email and a date of birth, it doesn't request any bounceback confirmation. So the parental protection is torpedoed from the start because it's trivial to insert a false year into an age. There is email notification of the creation of a new account but because there's no bounceback authentication, it doesn't have to be valid.
Quality of playback ? Good but not as good as iPlayer. Possibly suffers from trying to be too good with an app that isn't as well developed as iPlayer. Instant comparisons are that playback is jumpy and the cpu runs hot. So the player isn't as efficient as iPlayer. (Can't remember bandwidth consumption). Technically I could have boosted playback performance by letting my laptop go at full speed but it would have likely crashed 5 minutes after I did so ... Doesn't bode well for people attempting to use this on machines that aren't as well specced.
Big minus - not even the commercial Skyplayer suffers from adverts mid programme but the adverts are in the 5 On Demand player. Can't even fast forward them. Bah. Can't blame them though, they have to pay the rent, without the ads we wouldn't have the catch up service and you can always alt+tab away to check email & stuff.
Verdict - early days here, they'll hopefully have the time and cash to introduce improvements that make the player more efficient.
So - summary time :-)
Things have moved on a bit since On Demand facilities got introduced and they've improved over time. BBC's iPlayer in particular is particularly impressive (not least cos it lets me watch Grand Prix at the same time as Cricket !) and hopefully 5's offering will improve to match it.
Because episodes only tend to be available for a week or so, they won't replace Digital Video Recorders, except when the DVRs have issues like the V+ box with the Doctor Who's (attempting to schedule a recording of the first show on a channel with a turn-on time was crashing the box). And the picture quality and most importantly the sound is better off DVD. Questions are also present on equipment compatibility, like the roundhole-squarepeg of my laptop to telly hookup.
I better explain that DVD comment : Picture quality isn't visibly different (noting I don't have access to High-Def) but sound is. Both picture and sound are "broadcast" quality, i.e. picture is good but sound is just stereo. I've gotten used to the greater atmosphere of 5.1 playback off DVDs, which the streaming players don't offer.
That said though, the facility is improving into an excellent catch up service for stuff where you're not wanting to buy the DVDs. And it's great to see a facility like iPlayer get integrated into the V+ box :-)
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Malware sucks, MalwareBytes doesn't :-)
Just finished up the tidying up from being caught out ...
Cause - clicking on a link from a Facebook app that took me to a site that downloads software in return for "Warchips". Long story short, it was a quest to boost my chances in that particular game.
The symptom - clicking on links in Firefox (and presumably other browsers too judging by the folder structure of the Nastie) occasionally caused an extra new Firefox window to open, with an advert in it.
Fix attempt 1 - run a full machine Kaspersky scan. I'm surprised here cos Kaspersky is an AV well recognised for its ability to spot the nasties. Gotta admit, it spotted something suspicious while the installer software was running, which made me immediately cancel the install. But ... it didn't stop the Nastie getting in and it couldn't spot it on a full machine high sensitivity scan. Disappointing.
Fix attempt 2 - and this one is looking successful :-) - MalwareBytes Anti-Malware (search Google for MBAM) is getting a good reputation for being an excellent Nastie Squisher. I found it a couple of months ago when a colleague at work brought a sick laptop in. It had been infected by an adserver like mine. Bit different in its attack vector but same kind of theory.
Three hours later (to be fair to MBAM, this laptop is still operating at half power and Kaspersky was also scanning), the MBAM software had successfully identified all parts of the nastie and removed it.
Good job and thumbs up for MBAM :-)
I guess I probably got away with this one because I spotted the Nastie relatively quickly due to it being so intrusive. I should count myself lucky that it wasn't a keylogger sitting quietly in the background picking up the keystrokes. Although I'm probably not as vulnerable there cos I keep my passwords in (encrypted?) cookies where the keyloggers won't be reading the key taps.
Fingers crossed that this particular nastie (DoubleD) won't come back and big thanks to MalwareBytes for making that excellent piece of software.
Lesson - mind your IT Security ! And listen to your inner voice that says that you shouldn't install non-essential software ...
Cause - clicking on a link from a Facebook app that took me to a site that downloads software in return for "Warchips". Long story short, it was a quest to boost my chances in that particular game.
The symptom - clicking on links in Firefox (and presumably other browsers too judging by the folder structure of the Nastie) occasionally caused an extra new Firefox window to open, with an advert in it.
Fix attempt 1 - run a full machine Kaspersky scan. I'm surprised here cos Kaspersky is an AV well recognised for its ability to spot the nasties. Gotta admit, it spotted something suspicious while the installer software was running, which made me immediately cancel the install. But ... it didn't stop the Nastie getting in and it couldn't spot it on a full machine high sensitivity scan. Disappointing.
Fix attempt 2 - and this one is looking successful :-) - MalwareBytes Anti-Malware (search Google for MBAM) is getting a good reputation for being an excellent Nastie Squisher. I found it a couple of months ago when a colleague at work brought a sick laptop in. It had been infected by an adserver like mine. Bit different in its attack vector but same kind of theory.
Three hours later (to be fair to MBAM, this laptop is still operating at half power and Kaspersky was also scanning), the MBAM software had successfully identified all parts of the nastie and removed it.
Good job and thumbs up for MBAM :-)
I guess I probably got away with this one because I spotted the Nastie relatively quickly due to it being so intrusive. I should count myself lucky that it wasn't a keylogger sitting quietly in the background picking up the keystrokes. Although I'm probably not as vulnerable there cos I keep my passwords in (encrypted?) cookies where the keyloggers won't be reading the key taps.
Fingers crossed that this particular nastie (DoubleD) won't come back and big thanks to MalwareBytes for making that excellent piece of software.
Lesson - mind your IT Security ! And listen to your inner voice that says that you shouldn't install non-essential software ...
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Closing a window ...
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.
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.
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.
Friday, February 27, 2009
HP Laptop - question and answer
A little while ago, I had an email asking about a few points of the HP laptop review. There's some good stuff in there, so here's the highlights. I hope they're useful for people looking to spend money on shiny new toys !
On the one hand, there's my HP laptop as reviewed below. The competition was a Sony, with a couple of interesting differences but sadly a price tag of about £100 more ...
Screen resolution : Sony has 1600x900, the HP does 1440x900. A bigger resolution gives better definition but more pixels also means the graphics is having to work harder. So on my desktop machine before I changed the graphics card, I'd been running Fallout 3 in 800x600 to give a decent frame rate. Running it at 1024x768 or 1200x1024 would give a sharper picture but the game as a whole would be less playable because the frame rate would be lower and jerkier.
Not too sure I'd get too excited by a higher possible resolution - the 1440x900 on the HP laptop gives a good sharp picture with the small text in the various Windows apps, with the text being where you'd notice the benefit most. More pixels give more dots per inch but there's a point past which the eye won't see much improvement.
Bigger hard disc : Sony has 250Gb, HP has 160Gb. I'm a bad one to ask here :-) My desktop's second hard disc has a 250Gb drive, of which only 110Gb is set up for use ! Big hard discs are nice but it depends on how much it's going to be used. My iTunes library is about 10Gb now and I've been keeping the really space heavy stuff off the laptop (I don't download videos ...) You can put more stuff on to a bigger hard disc but you can get by with a smaller one by uninstalling the programs you aren't using.
A couple of months on now from buying the laptop and I'm at 73.2Gb free of 139Gb available. I'm using the space so far for my iTunes library but I don't tend to keep videos cluttering up the drive. If I need more space, I'll be able to use external or network drives. The 73Gb spare is with Football Manager 2009 on the machine, although that's not that big a game in terms of needing space.
Who makes the Graphics : There's 3 major competitors for gpus - Intel, ATI, nVidia. Not sure about how Intel's newer designs are doing but ATI and nVidia have always been very close to each other. The HP's nVidia is actually the first nVidia chip I've had since GeForce2 days :-) Much of a muchness here, the Sony's ATI and nVidia will both be quick, although the fanboys will tell you different. One fanboy will tell you ATI are far better than nVidia and an nVidia fan boy will tell you the opposite. The way to really annoy the ATI and nVIdia fanatics is to tell them that both are fast :-)
Processors : The HP is the first Intel chip I've had for a while, I've gone AMD since way back with a 486 (well - I had a 166MHz Cyrix chip too but that kinda counts as non-Intel). Similar to the nVidia vs ATi argument here, although Intel have made strides lately with their Core 2 Duo which AMD are struggling to match. It's like tuning an old engine a little bit more each month adding new bits to make it go faster, while the other guy has his brand new fuel injected modern engine. AMD have been tuning their Athlon designs for many years now, the Intel Core Duo has taken the step ahead by doing something new.
The result - AMD chips always push their envelope a little further, so they run hotter and a little bit faster. Intel's have usually been more conservative. You can notice it in things like heat output, my old HP running an Athlon XP-M2400+ used to need to spin its fan faster when I worked it hard. The Intel based new HP barely noticed me running Football Manager on it for hours last night :-) (while playing iTunes constantly and running other minor apps)
Two months on - the Intel chip has coped admirably. The whirry noise I notice most on the laptop is not the processor fan, it's the blu-ray drive spinning up as Kaspersky takes a virus scan peek at the disk I leave in there ! Still having difficulty in pushing this laptop enough to get it warm. Could be an issue if I have to use the laptop to apply heat treatment to my RSI afflicted wrist :-)
On running games on a laptop : I've not tried Warcraft on there and only done a cursory look at Eve Online on the laptop, so I don't really know how they'd stand up under pressure. The HP has a useful little button that disables the trackpad. If you picture playing the game on the keyboard with a separate mouse and suddenly the screen goes waaay off in a strange direction, you've probably brushed an arm over the trackpad :-) The HP's tend to have the button that lets you disable the trackpad in favour of an external mouse. Handy, plus I'm not sure I'd want to be playing a first person shooter style game using the laptop trackpad :-)
Unless you go external keyboard, mouse and screen, I'm not sure that the experience of playing a "twitch" game would be too much fun on a laptop. Running a slow strategy game like Football Manager is fine, it doesn't involve much in the way of direct interaction or quick tapping of keys or mouse. I think for a Warcraft, a Mass Effect or a Call Of Duty (not got that, heard lots about it!) I'd trip myself up on the keyboard and pad or break them through pressing too hard. I get excitable with twitch games :-)
Important detail to look out for : TV Output. It's a royal pain to arrange a TV Output for a laptop that doesn't have it and it can prove very expensive and tedious to find a device to make it happen. The best option I can see at the moment is a Linksys network streaming multimedia box. So firstly, check for a TV Output, secondly bear in mind whether it's compatible with your TV. The HDMI output of this laptop is something I'll use in the future but for now, I'm unable to connect laptop to telly like I could with the old one. It's worse up norf with my dad's Acer, that one doesn't have a TV Output. The option there is to either use one of those Linksys boxes (£100+!) or to press my old retired laptop into service as a source for iPlayer and SkyPlayer.
Sheer size of laptop. 17 inches gives more screen space and a bigger keyboard ... But. When it comes to hunting for a bag for a laptop bigger than the 15.4" standard, you might end up with frustration ... The bag making market hasn't really caught up with 17", with there not being much out there that's armoured enough to keep a laptop unscratched. It's not so much of an issue for me a my laptop only tends to move between pooter-perch (to the side of the sofa) and my sofa-perch. If you're looking to travel with a laptop, a 15.4" with much greater selections of bag might be a better choice.
More pearls of wisdom to come ! But for now I'll close by saying that I was quite happily watching the France v Wales rugby off iPlayer on the laptop while West Indies v England cricket was occupying the telly :-)
On the one hand, there's my HP laptop as reviewed below. The competition was a Sony, with a couple of interesting differences but sadly a price tag of about £100 more ...
Screen resolution : Sony has 1600x900, the HP does 1440x900. A bigger resolution gives better definition but more pixels also means the graphics is having to work harder. So on my desktop machine before I changed the graphics card, I'd been running Fallout 3 in 800x600 to give a decent frame rate. Running it at 1024x768 or 1200x1024 would give a sharper picture but the game as a whole would be less playable because the frame rate would be lower and jerkier.
Not too sure I'd get too excited by a higher possible resolution - the 1440x900 on the HP laptop gives a good sharp picture with the small text in the various Windows apps, with the text being where you'd notice the benefit most. More pixels give more dots per inch but there's a point past which the eye won't see much improvement.
Bigger hard disc : Sony has 250Gb, HP has 160Gb.
A couple of months on now from buying the laptop and I'm at 73.2Gb free of 139Gb available. I'm using the space so far for my iTunes library but I don't tend to keep videos cluttering up the drive. If I need more space, I'll be able to use external or network drives. The 73Gb spare is with Football Manager 2009 on the machine, although that's not that big a game in terms of needing space.
Who makes the Graphics : There's 3 major competitors for gpus - Intel, ATI, nVidia. Not sure about how Intel's newer designs are doing but ATI and nVidia have always been very close to each other. The HP's nVidia is actually the first nVidia chip I've had since GeForce2 days :-) Much of a muchness here, the Sony's ATI and nVidia will both be quick, although the fanboys will tell you different. One fanboy will tell you ATI are far better than nVidia and an nVidia fan boy will tell you the opposite. The way to really annoy the ATI and nVIdia fanatics is to tell them that both are fast :-)
Processors : The HP is the first Intel chip I've had for a while, I've gone AMD since way back with a 486 (well - I had a 166MHz Cyrix chip too but that kinda counts as non-Intel). Similar to the nVidia vs ATi argument here, although Intel have made strides lately with their Core 2 Duo which AMD are struggling to match. It's like tuning an old engine a little bit more each month adding new bits to make it go faster, while the other guy has his brand new fuel injected modern engine. AMD have been tuning their Athlon designs for many years now, the Intel Core Duo has taken the step ahead by doing something new.
The result - AMD chips always push their envelope a little further, so they run hotter and a little bit faster. Intel's have usually been more conservative. You can notice it in things like heat output, my old HP running an Athlon XP-M2400+ used to need to spin its fan faster when I worked it hard. The Intel based new HP barely noticed me running Football Manager on it for hours last night :-) (while playing iTunes constantly and running other minor apps)
Two months on - the Intel chip has coped admirably. The whirry noise I notice most on the laptop is not the processor fan, it's the blu-ray drive spinning up as Kaspersky takes a virus scan peek at the disk I leave in there ! Still having difficulty in pushing this laptop enough to get it warm. Could be an issue if I have to use the laptop to apply heat treatment to my RSI afflicted wrist :-)
On running games on a laptop : I've not tried Warcraft on there and only done a cursory look at Eve Online on the laptop, so I don't really know how they'd stand up under pressure. The HP has a useful little button that disables the trackpad. If you picture playing the game on the keyboard with a separate mouse and suddenly the screen goes waaay off in a strange direction, you've probably brushed an arm over the trackpad :-) The HP's tend to have the button that lets you disable the trackpad in favour of an external mouse. Handy, plus I'm not sure I'd want to be playing a first person shooter style game using the laptop trackpad :-)
Unless you go external keyboard, mouse and screen, I'm not sure that the experience of playing a "twitch" game would be too much fun on a laptop. Running a slow strategy game like Football Manager is fine, it doesn't involve much in the way of direct interaction or quick tapping of keys or mouse. I think for a Warcraft, a Mass Effect or a Call Of Duty (not got that, heard lots about it!) I'd trip myself up on the keyboard and pad or break them through pressing too hard. I get excitable with twitch games :-)
Important detail to look out for : TV Output. It's a royal pain to arrange a TV Output for a laptop that doesn't have it and it can prove very expensive and tedious to find a device to make it happen. The best option I can see at the moment is a Linksys network streaming multimedia box. So firstly, check for a TV Output, secondly bear in mind whether it's compatible with your TV. The HDMI output of this laptop is something I'll use in the future but for now, I'm unable to connect laptop to telly like I could with the old one. It's worse up norf with my dad's Acer, that one doesn't have a TV Output. The option there is to either use one of those Linksys boxes (£100+!) or to press my old retired laptop into service as a source for iPlayer and SkyPlayer.
Sheer size of laptop. 17 inches gives more screen space and a bigger keyboard ... But. When it comes to hunting for a bag for a laptop bigger than the 15.4" standard, you might end up with frustration ... The bag making market hasn't really caught up with 17", with there not being much out there that's armoured enough to keep a laptop unscratched. It's not so much of an issue for me a my laptop only tends to move between pooter-perch (to the side of the sofa) and my sofa-perch. If you're looking to travel with a laptop, a 15.4" with much greater selections of bag might be a better choice.
More pearls of wisdom to come ! But for now I'll close by saying that I was quite happily watching the France v Wales rugby off iPlayer on the laptop while West Indies v England cricket was occupying the telly :-)
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Anti Virus comparison site
Found this site earlier via one of the game forums I keep an eye on :
AV Comparatives
Interesting to see how the various antivirus work out against each other and you can only really do that with (hopefully!) unbiased sites like this one. It's how I first got aware of Kaspersky antivirus, which scored very highly for Overclockers.com.
I won't repeat what's in any of the reports on the AV Comparatives site but they are well worth a look. What they will do is throw a heap of suspicious files at the various AV products and see how many they detect. It may alarm you to see how badly your selected AV product will do against the malware threats that are out there.
What's my own experience with AV ? I have experience with several :
The Good :
Kaspersky - spots viruses in emails, not had a problem with it. Continuing to buy it.
Avira - "interesting", been using this on my laptops, although it's been replaced by Kaspersky on the new laptop. Not clear on its detection ability but didn't become of malware getting through. Free option available but watch out here, I suspect the higher resource loading with Kaspersky is due to Avira's free option not looking for as much as Kaspersky looks for.
The Bad :
Sophos - was responsible for virus protection at work, yet it allowed a virus brought in on a floppy to neutralise a network of several thousand PCs for almost a week. That's not acceptable.
McAfee - similar story, different infection route.
(you have to wonder here though if management decisions made the above two infections worse than they needed to be)
The Ugly :
AVG - for a free product, it's a rip off. Offers no significant protection and I had several viruses go active after slipping through its non-existent detection.
So personally, I'd go for Avira if you don't want to spend any money on your AV protection or Kaspersky if you don't mind spending £20-£30 (depending on offers!) on peace of mind for a year.
Please do have a peek at AV Comparative, they have far more scientifically derived results than mine above !
AV Comparatives
Interesting to see how the various antivirus work out against each other and you can only really do that with (hopefully!) unbiased sites like this one. It's how I first got aware of Kaspersky antivirus, which scored very highly for Overclockers.com.
I won't repeat what's in any of the reports on the AV Comparatives site but they are well worth a look. What they will do is throw a heap of suspicious files at the various AV products and see how many they detect. It may alarm you to see how badly your selected AV product will do against the malware threats that are out there.
What's my own experience with AV ? I have experience with several :
The Good :
Kaspersky - spots viruses in emails, not had a problem with it. Continuing to buy it.
Avira - "interesting", been using this on my laptops, although it's been replaced by Kaspersky on the new laptop. Not clear on its detection ability but didn't become of malware getting through. Free option available but watch out here, I suspect the higher resource loading with Kaspersky is due to Avira's free option not looking for as much as Kaspersky looks for.
The Bad :
Sophos - was responsible for virus protection at work, yet it allowed a virus brought in on a floppy to neutralise a network of several thousand PCs for almost a week. That's not acceptable.
McAfee - similar story, different infection route.
(you have to wonder here though if management decisions made the above two infections worse than they needed to be)
The Ugly :
AVG - for a free product, it's a rip off. Offers no significant protection and I had several viruses go active after slipping through its non-existent detection.
So personally, I'd go for Avira if you don't want to spend any money on your AV protection or Kaspersky if you don't mind spending £20-£30 (depending on offers!) on peace of mind for a year.
Please do have a peek at AV Comparative, they have far more scientifically derived results than mine above !
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Apple Airport Express
Unless I'm watching something, I'm usually listening to music. Before Ipod, that used to be compact discs played through proper (ish!) speakers. When the iPod appeared, I got used to playing my music off the laptop housing the iTunes library. The plus point is that I now listen to a much wider variety of music and Party Shuffle means it just keeps on going picking new tracks out for me.
The big negative was the relative lack of sound quality coming out of the laptop speakers. That's gotten a little bit worse with Laptop 2 (reviewed below). Laptop 2 (aka Wideboy - yep I have lack of imagination when it comes to network names !) still has acceptable sound but it's nowhere near the quality of a decent speaker set up.
This is where the Airport Express from Apple comes in. Here's a link to Apple's official page with the marketing blurb. To summarise, it's a white box which you plug into the mains. It can act as a wifi router, in other words you can connect it to the internet via a modem that plugs into an Ethernet port. So I could use it to be a router for my cable modem (possible future plan). It's also a network Printer Server and has the usual features of a wifi router, i.e. firewall and wifi encryption. It will also connect up to your existing router to extend the network, supporting the WEP and WPA/WPA2 encryption protocols.
But the absolute key thing that makes this device unique is the audio output. There's a port that can be used as either a headphone analogue output or a mini-TOS optical digital output. I'm using the analogue output.
I've had my laptop hooked up to one of these for a few weeks now, what's my impression of it ? I'll admit to a false start on this gadget. It was a tad embarassing when I tried it out at my mum's & dad's place only to have it suffer the sound break up problem. That seems to be an iTunes 8 issue, which seems to be getting confirmed by what I've observed here.
My configuration at the moment is : Vista, iTunes 7.6.2.9, Airport Express (old version), Philips wifi router. It's gone through some extensive testing .... which over the last fortnight has involved playing over 2.6 days worth of different music tracks :-)
Ease of connection - hiccup again at mum's and dad's place but here it was connected very easily.
Quality of sound - excellent. I'd say "almost perfect" here. It is that good. The odd comment on my main blog will show how I'm enjoying the hi-fi equivalent sound quality. When the mp3 format came out, I was skeptical due to the lossly compression algorithm it uses. It may be lossy but at 128kbit/s encoding, you can still pick out all the subtleties in the music. So when you get intricate music like on Dire Straits Making Movies, you can pick out the interplay between piano, guitar, voice, percussion. There's also things like being able to hear Tori Amos tapping pedals on the piano while playing.
I'm not sure how it would match up to playing the songs off the cd but I'm not sure if the difference would be too audible. I've also not listened to much classical as I've mostly kept the classical music away from the iTunes library. However I will say that the odd track off Peer Gynt and parts of the Conan soundtrack sounded good :-)
Overall verdict - fully satisfied with this gadget, it's done a lot to improve my enjoyment of the music I listen to. I've not totally explored its functionality but it does an excellent job of wirelessly sending iTunes music to my remote speakers without having another wire draped across the room. It sits there, does its job quietly and competently, which is all you can ask of a gadget.
Recommended for iTunes people but watch out for needing to change your iTunes version backwards to an earlier one than version 8.
But ... out of the box it only supports sending audio from iTunes. It is possible to get audio from other applications across to the Airport Express but that requires third party software in the form of Airfoil. It's an interesting utility, which I've had a short look at. It allows sending of audio from Any application to the Airport Express. However, it has limitations which may become apparent when trying to use it. You see, to do its job it needs to break into the Digital Rights Management chain, which can and will cause fights between Vista and its applications. I was unsuccessful in getting Airfoil to send one of the sample audio tracks I got with Laptop 2 but managed to get audio sent across that originated in Skyplayer.
(see geek-note below for Skyplayer vs Airport)
An interesting little utility. However, try the free trial before paying for the licence in case it doesn't play nicely with the applications you want to use with it. Personally, I don't have a need to send audio other than through iTunes, so I'm waiting until the dollar exchange rate is better before I spend the $25 :-).
Airport Express - recommended. It gets a Me Like.
Airfoil - interesting ... will be keeping this one in mind for when "want" turns into "need" :-)
Geeky things to finish with - the Network Meter Gadget I have installed in Vista says that the Airport uses 1 Mbit/s of bandwidth. That's pretty consistent, although it can double if you jump between parts of a track due to there being about 5 seconds of buffering on the audio stream. That's easy meat for a 802.11 G set up but may be awkward for 802.11 B. I have a big but though. I need to test this more but it was looking like that 1Mb/s stream was upsetting the ability of Skyplayer to stream live telly properly. The Airport stream was ok but the Skyplayer stream was breaking up badly. I suspect that might be a fault of my router though.
The two reviews I've posted so far have been glowing ones it seems - but they won't always be :-) Some day I'll get pushed into a rant by my router, which could end up being fun to read :-).
The big negative was the relative lack of sound quality coming out of the laptop speakers. That's gotten a little bit worse with Laptop 2 (reviewed below). Laptop 2 (aka Wideboy - yep I have lack of imagination when it comes to network names !) still has acceptable sound but it's nowhere near the quality of a decent speaker set up.
This is where the Airport Express from Apple comes in. Here's a link to Apple's official page with the marketing blurb. To summarise, it's a white box which you plug into the mains. It can act as a wifi router, in other words you can connect it to the internet via a modem that plugs into an Ethernet port. So I could use it to be a router for my cable modem (possible future plan). It's also a network Printer Server and has the usual features of a wifi router, i.e. firewall and wifi encryption. It will also connect up to your existing router to extend the network, supporting the WEP and WPA/WPA2 encryption protocols.
But the absolute key thing that makes this device unique is the audio output. There's a port that can be used as either a headphone analogue output or a mini-TOS optical digital output. I'm using the analogue output.
I've had my laptop hooked up to one of these for a few weeks now, what's my impression of it ? I'll admit to a false start on this gadget. It was a tad embarassing when I tried it out at my mum's & dad's place only to have it suffer the sound break up problem. That seems to be an iTunes 8 issue, which seems to be getting confirmed by what I've observed here.
My configuration at the moment is : Vista, iTunes 7.6.2.9, Airport Express (old version), Philips wifi router. It's gone through some extensive testing .... which over the last fortnight has involved playing over 2.6 days worth of different music tracks :-)
Ease of connection - hiccup again at mum's and dad's place but here it was connected very easily.
Quality of sound - excellent. I'd say "almost perfect" here. It is that good. The odd comment on my main blog will show how I'm enjoying the hi-fi equivalent sound quality. When the mp3 format came out, I was skeptical due to the lossly compression algorithm it uses. It may be lossy but at 128kbit/s encoding, you can still pick out all the subtleties in the music. So when you get intricate music like on Dire Straits Making Movies, you can pick out the interplay between piano, guitar, voice, percussion. There's also things like being able to hear Tori Amos tapping pedals on the piano while playing.
I'm not sure how it would match up to playing the songs off the cd but I'm not sure if the difference would be too audible. I've also not listened to much classical as I've mostly kept the classical music away from the iTunes library. However I will say that the odd track off Peer Gynt and parts of the Conan soundtrack sounded good :-)
Overall verdict - fully satisfied with this gadget, it's done a lot to improve my enjoyment of the music I listen to. I've not totally explored its functionality but it does an excellent job of wirelessly sending iTunes music to my remote speakers without having another wire draped across the room. It sits there, does its job quietly and competently, which is all you can ask of a gadget.
Recommended for iTunes people but watch out for needing to change your iTunes version backwards to an earlier one than version 8.
But ... out of the box it only supports sending audio from iTunes. It is possible to get audio from other applications across to the Airport Express but that requires third party software in the form of Airfoil. It's an interesting utility, which I've had a short look at. It allows sending of audio from Any application to the Airport Express. However, it has limitations which may become apparent when trying to use it. You see, to do its job it needs to break into the Digital Rights Management chain, which can and will cause fights between Vista and its applications. I was unsuccessful in getting Airfoil to send one of the sample audio tracks I got with Laptop 2 but managed to get audio sent across that originated in Skyplayer.
(see geek-note below for Skyplayer vs Airport)
An interesting little utility. However, try the free trial before paying for the licence in case it doesn't play nicely with the applications you want to use with it. Personally, I don't have a need to send audio other than through iTunes, so I'm waiting until the dollar exchange rate is better before I spend the $25 :-).
Airport Express - recommended. It gets a Me Like.
Airfoil - interesting ... will be keeping this one in mind for when "want" turns into "need" :-)
Geeky things to finish with - the Network Meter Gadget I have installed in Vista says that the Airport uses 1 Mbit/s of bandwidth. That's pretty consistent, although it can double if you jump between parts of a track due to there being about 5 seconds of buffering on the audio stream. That's easy meat for a 802.11 G set up but may be awkward for 802.11 B. I have a big but though. I need to test this more but it was looking like that 1Mb/s stream was upsetting the ability of Skyplayer to stream live telly properly. The Airport stream was ok but the Skyplayer stream was breaking up badly. I suspect that might be a fault of my router though.
The two reviews I've posted so far have been glowing ones it seems - but they won't always be :-) Some day I'll get pushed into a rant by my router, which could end up being fun to read :-).
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Hewlett Packard G70-120EA laptop
First of the toy reviews !
My last laptop is retired now, due to death of a thousand little faults. Ok, that's a bit of an exaggeration but being dropped on a PCMCIA card broke the slot, meaning no more Wi-Fi. So along comes the new laptop. It's an HP G70-120EA, which means :
Pentium Core 2 Duo T5800 processor (not too relevant)
GeForce 9200 mobile (v relevant)
17" widescreen (not bothered about screen size)
160 Gb hard disc (not too relevant again)
Wi-Fi G capable (needed!)
Blu-Ray reader with DVDRW write (meh!)
When picking out the new laptop, I had 4 things in mind. Firstly, Reliability and Robustness ! Absolutely key. Desktop machines tend to stay put so they just need good ventilation to keep running. Laptops get bounced around more, so they need to hold together. My last laptop was a Hewlett Packard and actually survived pretty well, albeit with a group of minor faults that I could happily ignore.
Thing 2 - decent graphics ... I've reduced a bit but still play an unhealthy amount of games. You can't improve the graphics easily in a laptop, so they need to be adequate for your purpose. For me, that means something with a GeForce or ATi Radeon label on it. TV output is a curiosity here. I have a HDMI socket and 15 pin VGA socket but not Composite Video or S-Video. Could cause issues until I upgrade my telly to an HD as I currently can't hook up laptop to my conventional CRT.
Need 3 - Core 2 Duo. I've had AMD chips for a little while now. They're good but Intel have pushed the boundaries a bit further than AMD could do. Things may change again in 6 months :-)
Essential 4 - Power Socket ! When I'm gaming, my laptop is pushed up against the side of the sofa, which means if the power socket was on the right hand side, it would clash with the sofa. Not good. The socket is on the left, which means this laptop is fine. (My sister's Toshiba has it on the right, so it would be trickier to accommodate it here). It's a detail thing but the silly little details can be make or break.
There's a few other items in that spec that I haven't marked "Essential" - why is that ? There's so much choice now that I pick out a few specifics to choose by and pretty much ignore the other differences.
17" widescreen - big screen is nice but small screens do just as well. Although I did exclude the new tiny notebooks because I don't think I'd get on with their keyboards.
Wifi N - Wifi B/G is pretty much standard now and give the performance any home network will require. Hell ! My old laptop wasn't capable of using WiFi G to the full because its hard disc was too slow ! Wifi G can do 54Mbps, that hard disc could pump out 33Mbps. The wireless link between iTunes and the Airport Express is using 1 Mbit/s to stream audio, so wireless N is a luxury that isn't really needed. Despite what a certain computer shopping magazine may say, you can stream video over WiFi G. (BBC iPlayer from the internet over a 8Mbps link)
Blu-Ray drive - meh. Nice to have the capability but ... small screen and how are you going to get the audio to surround sound speakers ? A classy Blu-Ray standalone drive will cost you £160. (Sony's BDPS350)
Memory - don't settle for less than 2Gb in a new machine, apart from that - memory hugeness isn't too relevant unless you're video editing.
Urk - been saying about choosing laptops and not saying anything about what I think of this one ! Here goes :
First impressions :
Not much manual but then you don't really need one. There's a cardboard thing with pictures that tells you how to put the battery in and that's all that's really needed. Boot it up and you get Vista's opening sequences. A short time later and you're looking at Vista's interface. Not much to be afraid of here.
Wifi connected up ok, although I did need to reset my router (blaming the router) before it would see the internet. The connection to the router itself is now rock solid stable and supports 1Mbit/s worth of continuous streaming of iTunes music to remote speakers.
Screen quality is very good, allowing a native resolution of 1440x960. It's brighter than I need and nice and sharp. On testing with Eve Online, graphics chip and screen kept up with the pretty pictures as I took a spaceship from station to stargate and back again. Very Satisfactory.
Sound isn't so good. I suspect there's a driver issue at work here as iTunes will jump and skip a bit when playing songs over the laptop speakers, this doesn't happen on the Airport link. They're Altec Lansing hardware like my old HP laptop but the sound quality isn't as good. Passable.
It's a Vista machine and I've actually been pleasantly surprised there. Vista's earned itself a very bad reputation in techie circles due to the changes made under the skin. I approached it with an open mind and as I mention above, I'm preferring it to WinXP. Looks like a big effort has been made to improve usability and user friendliness. That comes at a cost of the geeky parts being harder to find but for day to day usage, is that such a hardship ? The objective of a good computer setup is that you turn it on and do what you want with it, instead of fighting it like in the Win98 days.
Muahaha - will have to see if my opinion of Vista changes after the honeymoon period wears off ! It's still in honeymoon, as it's done everything I've asked of it so far.
Extras - there's a few bits of software with the package. Things like a small heap of games (I'm a Mahjongg addict) plus you get a 60 day trial period for Office 2007. Enough time for you to get used to it before it runs out. I'll be acquiring Office 2007 in due course through a work's deal. A Norton trial is also on the machine, which actually removed itself easily on command. Current antivirus is Avira, to be replaced by Kaspersky when it becomes economic to get a 3 PC licence. Not tried Cyberlink's DVD suite, although that's here too.
Soo - would I recommend this laptop to other people ? Hell yeah :-) There's two acid tests of a successful PC upgrade :
1 - Does it provide an improvement worth the money. I have to say Yes here as the wifi lets me stream iTunes music to the remote speakers. And that quality of life improvement is IMHO worth the cash. Another boost is that I can now change skill on Eve without needing to reboot my desktop machine. My old laptop could open the Classic (graphics-lite) version of Eve but tended to need a reboot due to a software problem that would have needed a back-to-factory-settings reinstall.
2 - Do you start thinking "Oh bother, shoulda got the other model" after you've bought the toy. Still happy with what I've got here, the only downer I can think of is the weak speakers. Apart from the interesting time I'll have finding a bag big enough to put it in, there are no other sore thumbs. Not even a noisy fan. I've not pushed it too hard yet but it's been absolutely silent so far.
Summary :
A very competent, capable and smooth running laptop, let down just a little by weak sound. Has slotted into my domestic network very nicely.
Luxury or Austere ?
This laptop is probably better than I needed. If you're not insisting on the graphics hardware, then that particular aspect is a definite luxury. The price was good though :-)
My last laptop is retired now, due to death of a thousand little faults. Ok, that's a bit of an exaggeration but being dropped on a PCMCIA card broke the slot, meaning no more Wi-Fi. So along comes the new laptop. It's an HP G70-120EA, which means :
Pentium Core 2 Duo T5800 processor (not too relevant)
GeForce 9200 mobile (v relevant)
17" widescreen (not bothered about screen size)
160 Gb hard disc (not too relevant again)
Wi-Fi G capable (needed!)
Blu-Ray reader with DVDRW write (meh!)
When picking out the new laptop, I had 4 things in mind. Firstly, Reliability and Robustness ! Absolutely key. Desktop machines tend to stay put so they just need good ventilation to keep running. Laptops get bounced around more, so they need to hold together. My last laptop was a Hewlett Packard and actually survived pretty well, albeit with a group of minor faults that I could happily ignore.
Thing 2 - decent graphics ... I've reduced a bit but still play an unhealthy amount of games. You can't improve the graphics easily in a laptop, so they need to be adequate for your purpose. For me, that means something with a GeForce or ATi Radeon label on it. TV output is a curiosity here. I have a HDMI socket and 15 pin VGA socket but not Composite Video or S-Video. Could cause issues until I upgrade my telly to an HD as I currently can't hook up laptop to my conventional CRT.
Need 3 - Core 2 Duo. I've had AMD chips for a little while now. They're good but Intel have pushed the boundaries a bit further than AMD could do. Things may change again in 6 months :-)
Essential 4 - Power Socket ! When I'm gaming, my laptop is pushed up against the side of the sofa, which means if the power socket was on the right hand side, it would clash with the sofa. Not good. The socket is on the left, which means this laptop is fine. (My sister's Toshiba has it on the right, so it would be trickier to accommodate it here). It's a detail thing but the silly little details can be make or break.
There's a few other items in that spec that I haven't marked "Essential" - why is that ? There's so much choice now that I pick out a few specifics to choose by and pretty much ignore the other differences.
17" widescreen - big screen is nice but small screens do just as well. Although I did exclude the new tiny notebooks because I don't think I'd get on with their keyboards.
Wifi N - Wifi B/G is pretty much standard now and give the performance any home network will require. Hell ! My old laptop wasn't capable of using WiFi G to the full because its hard disc was too slow ! Wifi G can do 54Mbps, that hard disc could pump out 33Mbps. The wireless link between iTunes and the Airport Express is using 1 Mbit/s to stream audio, so wireless N is a luxury that isn't really needed. Despite what a certain computer shopping magazine may say, you can stream video over WiFi G. (BBC iPlayer from the internet over a 8Mbps link)
Blu-Ray drive - meh. Nice to have the capability but ... small screen and how are you going to get the audio to surround sound speakers ? A classy Blu-Ray standalone drive will cost you £160. (Sony's BDPS350)
Memory - don't settle for less than 2Gb in a new machine, apart from that - memory hugeness isn't too relevant unless you're video editing.
Urk - been saying about choosing laptops and not saying anything about what I think of this one ! Here goes :
First impressions :
Not much manual but then you don't really need one. There's a cardboard thing with pictures that tells you how to put the battery in and that's all that's really needed. Boot it up and you get Vista's opening sequences. A short time later and you're looking at Vista's interface. Not much to be afraid of here.
Wifi connected up ok, although I did need to reset my router (blaming the router) before it would see the internet. The connection to the router itself is now rock solid stable and supports 1Mbit/s worth of continuous streaming of iTunes music to remote speakers.
Screen quality is very good, allowing a native resolution of 1440x960. It's brighter than I need and nice and sharp. On testing with Eve Online, graphics chip and screen kept up with the pretty pictures as I took a spaceship from station to stargate and back again. Very Satisfactory.
Sound isn't so good. I suspect there's a driver issue at work here as iTunes will jump and skip a bit when playing songs over the laptop speakers, this doesn't happen on the Airport link. They're Altec Lansing hardware like my old HP laptop but the sound quality isn't as good. Passable.
It's a Vista machine and I've actually been pleasantly surprised there. Vista's earned itself a very bad reputation in techie circles due to the changes made under the skin. I approached it with an open mind and as I mention above, I'm preferring it to WinXP. Looks like a big effort has been made to improve usability and user friendliness. That comes at a cost of the geeky parts being harder to find but for day to day usage, is that such a hardship ? The objective of a good computer setup is that you turn it on and do what you want with it, instead of fighting it like in the Win98 days.
Muahaha - will have to see if my opinion of Vista changes after the honeymoon period wears off ! It's still in honeymoon, as it's done everything I've asked of it so far.
Extras - there's a few bits of software with the package. Things like a small heap of games (I'm a Mahjongg addict) plus you get a 60 day trial period for Office 2007. Enough time for you to get used to it before it runs out. I'll be acquiring Office 2007 in due course through a work's deal. A Norton trial is also on the machine, which actually removed itself easily on command. Current antivirus is Avira, to be replaced by Kaspersky when it becomes economic to get a 3 PC licence. Not tried Cyberlink's DVD suite, although that's here too.
Soo - would I recommend this laptop to other people ? Hell yeah :-) There's two acid tests of a successful PC upgrade :
1 - Does it provide an improvement worth the money. I have to say Yes here as the wifi lets me stream iTunes music to the remote speakers. And that quality of life improvement is IMHO worth the cash. Another boost is that I can now change skill on Eve without needing to reboot my desktop machine. My old laptop could open the Classic (graphics-lite) version of Eve but tended to need a reboot due to a software problem that would have needed a back-to-factory-settings reinstall.
2 - Do you start thinking "Oh bother, shoulda got the other model" after you've bought the toy. Still happy with what I've got here, the only downer I can think of is the weak speakers. Apart from the interesting time I'll have finding a bag big enough to put it in, there are no other sore thumbs. Not even a noisy fan. I've not pushed it too hard yet but it's been absolutely silent so far.
Summary :
A very competent, capable and smooth running laptop, let down just a little by weak sound. Has slotted into my domestic network very nicely.
Luxury or Austere ?
This laptop is probably better than I needed. If you're not insisting on the graphics hardware, then that particular aspect is a definite luxury. The price was good though :-)
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