March 2007 Archives

Back in the late 80's, actor Matt Frewer starred as the pop culture icon Max Headroom in a series entitled "20 Minutes into the Future: The Max Headroom Show". This sci-fi series had Frewer playing investigative reported Edison Carter as well as his alter ego, Max Headroom. It was a series as ahead of its time as its title implied. It stands up quite well today even though it aired almost 20 years ago.

In one episode of the series, entitled "Whacketts", a tragedy strikes an area and people are rummaging through the rubble to rescue their television sets. They are even risking their lives to do it, all to watch some outrageous game show on an obscure channel. Edison Carter can't believe what he's seeing. Someone makes a comment about how the government will "provide free TV sets to the needy" so it doesn't make sense people will risk their lives to save a TV. It turns out that the TV show they're all watching is a carrier for a kind of "video drug" that makes people feel euphoric and very quickly addicts them.

While I think we are a long way from having video drugs (though this might explain the fascination with American Idol), I found this article on Slashdot very interesting. To quote:

"SFGate has the story of the cutoff date for those rabbit ear antennas that some of us grew up with (Feb. 19, 2009). Now while the story of analog vs. digital TV has been beaten to death, still I think there is something more here. 'The Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration... said it is setting aside $990 million to pay for the boxes. Each home can request up to two $40 coupons for a digital-to-analog converter box, which consumer electronics makers such as RCA and LG plan to produce.' Beyond my disdain for most TV to begin with, I am blown away that with all of our current problems -- homelessness and crime on the home front, war fighting and terrorism abroad -- our government is seriously going to spend this much money on upgrading peoples' televisions."

No, our government isn't quite at the point where it will give television sets to the needy, but apparently it IS about to spend almost a billion dollars to make sure people with outdated televisions can watch digital broadcasts on their old analog TVs.

Art (the Max Headroom Show) is here being somewhat imitated by life...

So, last night I got home and got back to work at figuring out why Vista kept dropping the network connection.

Vista itself pointed the finger at my router, which I replaced with a new one. Things definitely got better. Instead of dropping large downloads at the 15-30MB level, it got closer to 60-100MB.

A bit of research on Microsoft's KB revealed that there is a power setting that allows Vista to turn off the network card to save energy, apparently whenever it feels like it, even if it's busy doing something. (At least it seems that way.) I turned that setting off and was able to get to about 500MB before it lost all network connection.

At this point, I took a look in the BIOS and the machine actually hung while I was looking at network card settings in the BIOS, making me wonder if there was a hardware problem with the board and/or a BIOS issue.

I downloaded the latest BIOS for the board from the Asus web site. I fired up the system, went into the "EZ Flash" utility and had it save a copy of the current BIOS to a USB drive. I copied the new BIOS to that drive, then told the utility to flash it. The flash utility confirmed that the BIOS file was a good one, erased the existing BIOS, flashed some kind of message too quickly to read, then said it was checking the version of the BIOS it had just erased. When it couldn't find any version information, it displayed an error to that effect and stopped responding to all user input. I let it sit there for several minutes, hoping it would sort itself out. No good. I rebooted it, hoping for the best. No, the BIOS was wiped out. Lovely. The machine was now effectively dead.

I submitted a request for support on the Asus web site after digging out the ridiculous lot of detail they wanted. I received a response email telling me I can expect it to take 48 hours for them to reply. The response, most likely, will be that I need to send the board back in to them for repair. I'm hoping I can convince them to just sell me a pre-programmed BIOS chip I can install myself into the board to save time, but I doubt that will happen.

So my Vista experience so far has been less than pleasant. It began with some odd hardware issues that weren't Vista's fault, some install problems that definitely WERE Vista's fault, a network problem still unresolved, and a dead BIOS thanks to the built-in utility for flashing it.

Stay tuned for more in Part 3.

Microsoft released Windows Vista a little while back. Although I had no need for any of its features, I knew that we would be using Vista in the office sooner or later, so it would be to my advantage to know a little something about it before I was asked to support it. Toward that end, I purchased a retail copy of Windows Vista Ultimate upgrade version using some gift certificates I had received. I was going to install it on my main PC at home, until I thought a bit more about its activation requirements. I realized that the odds were I would want to upgrade that machine within 6 months of moving to Vista, and might end up having to buy another license as a result of that. Better, I thought, to get the hardware in place first and then install the OS.

With that in mind, I logged on to Newegg.com. I bought the Asus Striker Extreme Motherboard, a Core 2 Duo E6400 CPU, an Asus GeForce 880 GTS video card with 640MB of DDR3 memory, 2GB of Corsair's fastest RAM, and a 250GB high-speed SATA drive. This set me back a whopping $1400. However, I had a machine that was much closer to the "curve" than I've ever had, and one I wouldn't be as likely to replace within a year (aside from maybe a processor upgrade). All the components I chose were Vista Ready, all were certified to work together, and where appropriate I had located 64-bit Vista drivers beforehand.

To this pile of new hardware I would add four hard drives from my existing system, an IDE RAID card based on the Sil 0680A chipset, a 16x DVD burner, a 625-watt power supply, a floppy drive, and quiet cooling fans.

I had read online that it was possible to clean-install the upgrade version of Vista by first installing it without entering the serial number, then "upgrading" it on top of itself using the serial number.

Thus began the Vista installation saga...

First, I installed the Core 2 Duo onto the Striker Extreme. I then installed the cooling fan. Then, I installed the RAM. I removed the motherboard, video card, and RAID card from my existing system case. I installed the Striker Extreme, the new video card, the RAID card, and hooked it all up. I left the RAID card disconnected because I knew I had experienced install problems in XP Pro with it plugged in during the install. I wanted to avoid that with Vista if I could. When I had everything all buttoned down nicely, I plugged in the monitor, keyboard, mouse, network cable, and power cord and pressed the power switch.

Something happened, but not much. Lights on the motherboard began to glow, but no tell-tale signs of booting up. I looked at the "LCD Poster" on the back of the machine, which indicated the machine was stuck at "CPU INIT". Guessing this probably meant that it couldn't talk to the CPU, but not sure, I looked in the manual. I couldn't find any listing of POST codes. I looked on the Asus web site. Still no listing of POST codes. I did a Google search and found on a tech forum somewhere a user who indicated that he'd had this same message on a different Asus board, and that the problem turned out to be a tiny piece of plastic on the pins on the CPU socket of the motherboard.

I removed the heat sink from the board (no easy task), un-did the CPU retaining clip, and looked carefully at the socket. No plastic on the pins. I turned the CPU over and, sure enough, there was a small piece of plastic wrap (or something that looked like it) covering a couple of the pins. I gently blew it off and looked for any more potential connection problems. Seeing none, I reinstalled the CPU, clipped it down, put the heat sink back on (which was hard to do with the motherboard in the machine), and reconnected everything. This time, it fired up on the first try.

Unfortunately, I heard the tell-tale sign of a dead hard drive. (Experienced techs will know what I mean when I say one of the drives started "tick-tick-ticking".) I removed the drive and replaced it with another I had. This time the system fired up and the Vista 64-bit DVD began booting. I began the installation, telling it I wasn't entering the serial number now.

Vista asked me where I wanted to install it. No matter which drive I selected, it kept telling me that it didn't think my BIOS would let it boot from that drive. Finally, after a couple of abortive attempts, it begain installing.

It seemed to be installing slowly, incredibly slowly, excruciatingly slowly. (We're talking a couple of hours here.) It was somewhere around this time that I began noticing one of the brand new hard drives making a kind of high-pitched chip. At first, I thought this was due to it being a high-speed model and moving at a higher rate of speed than I was used to. Later, I discovered that when I disconnected the drive Windows Vista installed considerably faster. It also stopped bugging me about the drive not being suitable for installing Vista. I'll have to see if I can return that drive for repair.

Regardless, I eventually had Vista 64-bit installed and working. I rebooted from the DVD and "upgraded" Vista Ultimate to Vista Ultimate. That also went flawlessly. When I logged in for the first time, all my hardware had been detected and had drivers installed for it. I was rather impressed. Now all I needed was to attach the RAID card and load drivers for it. I shut down the system and inserted the card. I rebooted. I removed the Vista DVD, since I no longer needed it.

I went into the BIOS and adjusted boot settings to boot of the SATA drive I'd installed Vista on, pushing the CD-ROM to a lower spot in the boot order so the machine would boot more rapidly. Again, a reboot to make the settings change take effect.

The RAID card BIOS kicked in and told me I had properly connected all four hard drives to it. Then I got the error that there was no disk to boot from. What? What do you mean no bootable disk? What do you think I installed Vista on, twice? OK. Not thinking this through, I installed Vista yet again. I attached the RAID card again. I rebooted and found that it would only boot with the Vista DVD in the drive. I decided I'd sort that out later and moved on to working on the RAID card.

Meanwhile, I noticed some Windows files on the IDE drive attached to the PATA channel. I tried to delete them to recover the lost space. No dice. Windows said it needed those files and was using them. Right... I'll deal with this later, too.

Vista detected the RAID card, but said it had no drivers. Odd, since XP x64 had them built-in. I downloaded them from the manufacturer's web site, making sure I had the final 64-bit Windows Vista drivers. Again, Vista said it couldn't find drivers, even when I pointed it right at the directory they were in. A few web searches revealed that the 64-bit version of Vista has "problems with certain RAID cards", mine being one of them. The same messages indicated that the 32-bit version has no such limitations. OK, fine, I'd install the 32-bit version. Why not? What's one more install among friends (or at least casual acquaintence)?

I completed the 32-bit install with the RAID card out of the system and all went well. I rebooted again, with the Vista DVD out of the box. Once again, I was told that it could not find a bootable disk. I figured this meant that the problem was the lack of a Master Boot Record on the SATA drive. Using a utility I had around, I saw what had happened. Vista had placed the MBR and some other files on the IDE drive, and the rest of Vista on the SATA drive... even though I'd told it to install on the SATA drive.

That was easily fixed. I disconnected the IDE drive and booted off the Vista DVD. Then, I had the DVD repair the Vista installation and, sure enough, I was in business. I was ready to install the RAID card again, and I did. Vista detected it and loaded the drivers immediately. It worked! A check in the Device Manager showed that not only was it working, all the drivers were there and doing their jobs. Gotta like that!

My Vista saga was over. Or was it? I had another box in the room that I wanted to put the 64-bit Linux on, to do some code-breaking work for the Zodiac 340 Cipher (mentioned elsewhere on this site). I told Vista to begin downloading the first 3 of the Red Hat Fedora Core 6 CD images from different mirror sites, so I could maximize the download speed. About 10-20MB into each download, the downloads began to slow down and finally stop completely. At that point, Vista had no network connectivity until it had been rebooted.

I asked Vista what was going on. It said that my router wasn't responding to it, and that I should reboot the router. I looked across the desk and my XP Pro machine was busily downloading away, through the same hub, bridge, and router. No, the router was working fine. Maybe it was the drivers for the motherboard's network card. I downloaded new drivers and installed them. Same problem. I tried getting Vista to renew its IP address. It appeared to hang. Something was definitely wrong.

I came to the conclusion that the problem had to be one of three things. Either the RAID card was conflicting with the IRQ used by the network card, causing a problem that prevented the network card from working, or the drivers were still faulty regardless of what the Device Manager said, or maybe the router WAS at fault somehow and needed a firmware upgrade or replacement.

A search of the Microsoft knowledgebase (KB) turned up an article stating that Vista implements a number of new networking improvements that "older routers" might have a problem with. A quick check of my router's manufacturer web site turned up the fact that my router's firmware could not be any NEWER than 2001, since that was the last time they'd released an updated version. Score one for Vista. Maybe.

I happened to have ordered a 4-port Wireless router to resolve another problem I had, and that router was relatively new. Hopefully it will be "new enough" that Vista presents no problem for it. If so, when I unbox and connect that router tonight I will once again have unfettered network access. If not, time to look for that IRQ (or other resource) conflict.

On the bright side, the Vista interface is slick. It makes OS X look as dated as OS X makes Windows 3.1 look. The window animations are nice, but not distracting or cartoonish like some of the ones in OS X. When it wants your attention, it asks for it in subtle but effective ways like flashing a button in orange, rather than making a Dock icon hop up and down "like a f-cking Jack Russell terrier" (as the Mac commercial parody said). Sounds have a soothing effect. In fact, the whole interface has a kind of soothing effect on me. I like it. There are things I don't like, though. Some things that I used to be able to get to quickly, like Network card settings, are buried a couple of levels deeper than they were. Vista also likes to go out of its way to simplify the language it uses, to the point that (as a techie) I don't know for sure what the heck it's doing. And, like the spinning beach ball in OS X, the spinning ring used in Vista is (as my step-son pointed out) not as easy to associate with "you need to wait while I do this) as the hourglass in Windows XP was. Still, on balance, I think I like Vista. If I get this network problem resolved. And if the applications I care about actually work on Vista. And the games look good. And I can do stuff I need to do, like submit articles to this site...

I'll share more of my Windows Vista experience in Part 2. Look for it here on the site in a day or two.