Peter's Blog

Since I got my Dell 2405FPW 24 inch Widescreen Monitor I have overall been happy with it apart from it's annoying tendency to show certain pixels pink. It looked as if certain colours were transposed to pink so a mountain for example may have pink stripes where it happened to be a certain shade and colour. On the whole it was distracting and sometimes it would degrade to the extent where the image looked like something the Predator would see.

My solution to the problem was to give the monitor a thump at a certain point on the back panel towards the left. This solution was reasonable and normally i would need to do it at least once per session although sometimes I would have a few pink-free days.

As time passed the problem got worse, thumping would reduce the amount of pink but not completely eliminate it. Sometimes I would thump the monitor and the screen would turn white or freeze which was most annoying when trying to play WoW.

By yesterday the problem was so bad that I was having to bang my desk with my knee as I played to avoid the freezing problem.

Time to have the back off.

The back of the monitor came off using the time honoured prising with a flat-blade screwdriver technique: there were four screws under the mounting point for the stand but the case was snapped on around the edge. Interestingly the circuit boards were all marked 'Benq'.

The fact that thumping would relieve the symptoms made me suspect a loose connector so I checked all I could see. No problems apparent so I plugged it into the computer with the back off to try banging it in various places to locate the problem. Unfortunately the screen was now dead. This was disturbing but I decided the only course was to further dismantle it and look for more connectors. I managed to get the LCD panel out quite easily. It was surprisingly light, most of the weight of the monitor was in the metal chassis. This panel had a circuit board on it with two flat ribbon cables, the kind where a flat flexible circuit plugs into a connector. The one to the right came out of the connector too easily, as if it had been loose. The cable itself was stuck down with transparent tape and it looked as if whoever assembled it had left no slack at all.

I put it all together and was relieved when it showed it's normal start up screen with no pink pixels.

I'm happy, the picture is now perfect.

Moral: be brave, get the screwdrivers out, rip it apart, what can go wrong? Oh, and warrantys are for wimps.

I had some work done on the TV aerial in my house, moving it from inside the loft to outside. I didn't do it myself due to extreme vertigo. The digital TV signal is now much stronger, no more artifacts and stuttering on BBC channels. This was a good excuse to dig out my old Slingbox which has been sitting on a shelf since I moved last september.

I have set it up with it's internal DVB TV tuner which allows me to watch something vaguely interesting on the pc while my daughter watches 'In the Midnight Garden' on the main TV in the computer room. This TV is connected to my Humax PVR which is very good for recording kids tv to repeat ad-infinitum. She's been watching the same episodes of Balamory since christmas, they sing christmas songs between the episodes.

The picture is very good on the whole. If I maximise it on my 24" widescreen monitor it is pretty pixellated and nasty but I watch it in a little box, maybe 4", in the corner of the screen and there is still plenty of space to work. Alternatively I can watch TV wirelessly at the bottom of the garden on the laptop. I did a proof of principal at the weekend but not for long as watching TV in the bright sunshine in the garden just seems wrong.

During my slinging haitus Slingmedia seem to have started selling the Pocket PC version of the player software in the UK. It's £20. I dug out my old Dell Axim v51 as it is in the compatibility list, I charged it up and all the programs are still there, stored in flash but it had lost the current time. I haven't installed the sling player software on it, I'll see how riveting TV has become during my nine months of televisual apathy.

Another option to investigate is the BBC's new streaming video service, only available to UK licence payers (ya boo). This has the advantage of being PVR like, being able to choose when to watch something. This is the main limitation of the slingbox, it cannot record or timeshift unless you connect it to a PVR. Channel 4 have a similar service and more interesting programs (none of those endless talent shows with judges, one of them a baddy), must investigate that too.

Now I have a strong TV signal and a powerful pc I may investigate the options for recording, timeshifting and streaming on the PC. Hopefully the technology has moved on from the awful state it was in last time I tried a few years back now.

UPDATE: fate succombed to the temptation and the signal was too weak when I got home to watch anything but BBC. OK next morning. Slingbox's aerial feed is chained after the Humax PVR which was working fine. An inline booster may fix the problem but that's more power consumption and cables.

No, not WoW, something techy for a change, how to migrate a Dell Precision 390 to Raid.

My Dell Precision 390 came with a SAS Raid controller and a pair of 143G disks. However it had been configured with one disk as a plain drive C and the other unconfigured. I had the following options:

• format the spare drive and use it as drive G: or mount it as a folder under the C drive. I didn't want to do this as it involves having to manage two drives which I don't want to worry about which disk a file will be stored on.
• reconfigure the system for Raid 0. Raid 0 would give me in effect a fast single 270G drive but it would have half the reliability of the single drive: if either drive dies I lose all my data.
• reconfigure the system for Raid 1. Raid 1 would store everything on both drives, giving me two copies of everything. If one drive dies, the data is already on the other drive. They call this mirroring, it is not exactly like a real-time backup as if you accidently delete a file, both copies on both disks are instantly deleted. Raid 1 only saves you from drive failures, not OS level errors.

I decided on (drum roll) Raid 0. Raid 0 and Raid 1 will give some speed improvements (maybe 10-20%) but I wanted the advantages of 270G of linear disk space. This is my home PC and apart from family photos there is not much 'critical' data on it: I won't lose my job if it went pear shaped.

How to reconfigure it? The OS is on one of the disks that will go into the Raid array which makes things interesting. Here are the steps:

• Download the trial version of True Image 10
• Use it to create a recovery CD
• Make sure you can boot from the recovery CD. Since my system was SAS (serial SCSI) I used the 'full' recovery program, not the simple DOS one.
• Reboot to windows
• Use True Image to backup the windows partition to a USB hard disk. This took about an hour, 46G of data used 35.6G of disk space.
• Reboot PC into Dell SAS bios and set up your disks in a Raid array (0 or 1). When it warns about you losing all your data laugh in it's face.
• Reboot from Windows XP installation disk. Go through the part of the setup that creates an NTFS partition. After this, when windows starts copying files, kill the setup. This step is necessary because the trial edition of True Image cannot create NTFS partitions.
• Reboot from the True Image recovery CD.
• Use the Restore option to restore the backup of the partition to your new NTFS partition. This took less than two hours.
• Reboot into Windows Installation CD. This time go into the recovery console.
• Run the following commands:

  fixmbr
  fixboot
  bootscan /rebuild
  

  Bootscan will prompt you for a name for the partition and boot parameters. Give it a name that shows suitable contempt for Windows and leave the options blank. My Dell came with two partitions, one containing Dell Diagnostics and one containing Windows. When I restored I had zapped the Dell Diagnostics partition as all that stuff is on a CD anyway. However it meant that my restored Windows system didn't boot because the boot.ini file was telling the boot loader that it was on the second partition rather than the first. Hence I needed the bootscan /rebuild to get the restored partition added to the boot.ini. True Image will restore the MBR itself, I just did all this to make sure (it takes ages to boot the recovery console so I did everything I could there to get things working).
• Reboot into Windows. You may be prompted which partition to boot from, choose the one you added with bootscan.
• Clean up boot.ini. The following should be ok:

  [boot loader]
  timeout=30
  default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
  [operating systems]
  multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
  

For some idea of speed, Firefox nows boots in three seconds. Open Office Write boots in four seconds. It's quick.

I was very impressed with True Image and could be tempted to buy it ($50):

• It can be used for daily incremental backups that are easily capable of restoring the system and not just to the original hard drive but to any other drive if necessary.
• It handles USB and SCSI without blinking.
• It can resize partitions as it restores them.
• It will 'clone' disks (copy contents of one to another). This is the first time I've used a tool like this that has actually worked.
• You can restore individual files from the backup

For $50 I could have True Image handling daily backups to my USB disk and still be able to sleep nights with my unreliable Raid 0 array.

Here is a recipe for happiness:

Ingredients

• World of Warcraft up and running after three days
• The beast, my bargain powerhouse pc
• Dell 24 inch widescreen monitor

Directions

• Start up computer
• Log on to World of Warcraft
• Up display settings to 1920x1200 widescreen
• Enjoy

I found myself admiring the scenery: rolling snow covered hills, pine forests, sun filled skies. Because I had been offline for three days resting in an inn the game decided to boost my experience and I was soon on level 8 (not sure of the logic of doing nothing increasing experience). Bought a big hammer and can now dispatch level 8 monsters with ease.

And it's friday!!!

Life is good.

When I decided to get the Beast I decided to treat myself to a BIG monitor. I felt the 30inch Dell monitor was too big, even after seeing 30 inch monitors in the apple shop. They also have pretty demanding video card requirements. After a while I decided on a Dell 24 inch, mainly because although it is widescreen, vertically it is still taller than the 19 inch CRTs I am used to. I cherish height more than width and 19 inch widescreen monitors I've seen look too small. Europc were selling the Dell 24 inch cheap (relatively).

It came today and it is pretty breathtaking:

• I set the video resolution to 1920x1200 and there is so much screen space, I have to turn my head to pan from corner to corner.
• It has a built in four port USB hub.
• It has a built in flash card reader (compact, SD etc).
• It does picture in picture: I could have a TV picture in the corner via the svideo input if I so desired (and there would be plenty of screen left).
• I downloaded some 1920x1200 wallpapers and these look amazing. Loaded up picasa and looked at my photo album and whee.
• Height and tilt adjustable
• Screen rotates 90 degrees, should I want about 20 inches vertical height.

May have to start using my glasses at home.

My new battery has come and the battery meter is predicting seven hours of operation. That's fine for surfing, I very rarely get anywhere near that much spare time for a good surf. The old battery was down to 50 minutes from a full charge.

Running wow it remains to be seen how long it will last. It will be a lot less than seven hours but an hour or so will make me happy.

According to this very blog, I have had my Dell D410 laptop since 17th Oct 2005, just over a year (seems longer). I was playing World of Warcraft on it when suddenly it went into standby after only about 20 minutes from a fresh charge.

Looks like the battery is on it's way to battery heaven. After a full charge, when doing nothing the laptop is reporting 50 minutes estimated running time.

Looked up to see whether the battery was subject to the Dell exploding battery recall but it wasn't on the list so I don't get a free one

Found a new battery on ebay, looks like someone selling the 9 cell extended battery (80Wh vs 55Wh) for the same price as the going ebay rate for the standard battery. The extended one is a bit bigger, it will stick out the front a bit, but it will be able to run WoW longer.

Waiting for it to arrive. Must look again into options for extending lifespan of lithium ion batterys (no deep discharging etc). I haven't been that brutal with it, I leave it charging in the docking station every night.

Ripped Stadium Arcadium with the Beast and iTunes (CD Sainsburys £9, iTunes store £15). It ripped it at 20x where the old celeron 2G managed about 6x. It only took a couple of minutes, I was impressed. Ripping definitely still cpu limited or it would manage 52x (like the CD drive) but I'm happy.

Should I keep using the term 'ripped'? Should I be saying 'imported into iTunes for my own private use'?

Beast only has a DVD-ROM. I have a DVD writer to fit but unfortunately it is beige and would spoil the Dell Black colour scheme. Must get some black paint.

UPDATE: Stadium Arcadium: very good. Great bass riffs. Can't understand the lyrics, either the enunciation or the semantics.

The Beast continues to amaze.

I've never really thought about it before but here is cpu utilisation while playing 'Freak on a Leash' by Korn in iTunes:

This is the windows task manager. Points to note:

• two cpu cores so two cpus displayed
• neither is working very hard: 0%. The little spikes are where the track started. While running it normally shows 0% with the occasional 1% glitch.

I've never tried this on a lesser pc. Thinking about it now, a pair of 2.4Ghz cpu's should have no trouble generating a pair of 44kHz audio signals: simplistically, that's 54545 clock cycles for each 44kHz cycle. Decoding mp4 files is probably more challenging than shifting the contents of a wav file to a dac but 54545 clock cycles seems like plenty to play with.

The Beast arrived five days early. Only an hour or so to play with it what with life and all. First impressions:

• Heavy. Solidly built case. Nice quality, nicest desktop case I've ever laid hands on.
• Side panel comes off really easily. Disk drives unclip, can tell I have a pair of Maxtor Atlas 140G 10,000rpm drives.
• Microphone and Heaphone jacks on the front: very thoughtful. Also a couple of USB holes. No sign of a reset button! Big dropoff for a Windows box.
• Takes 30 seconds to boot, most of this seems to be the serial scsi controller looking for the drives.
• Fairly quiet, not silent it does make a low hum. There's a huge fan inside with vents about 6 inches square. Big fan = slower rotation = quieter. Could live with it running all the time.
• When it booted it was infected with McAfee Security stuff. Had to spend a few minutes figuring out how to disable it enough for the uninstall to work.
• It is fast: it installed firefox virtually instantly. Silly things that shouldn't have ever been slow like the control panel pop up immediately.
• The programs menu includes the 'Dell SAS Raid Storage Manager' which asks for a username and password. Beast came with no manuals so I'm going to have to google for those at some point. Doesn't seem to be configured for Raid, have to think about that one. Do I care?
• Came with keyboard and mouse and a couple of Install CD's but no mains cable or manual. Keyboard is a black Dell one with a useless windows button but I'm keeping the Cherry one I was using as it has a nicer feel.

Happy thus far. Using it to type this. Can you tell the difference?

Have to find something taxing for it to do.