Wednesday January 27
 
14:40
 
Lenovo one key recovery – how to fix it

Before I bought my Acer netbook, I bought a Lenovo netbook.

Right from the beginning, I got disk error. I decided wipe the C drive and install Windows 7 over the Japanese OS. It worked OK, but the initial disk errors bothered me, so I decided to restore the laptop to original state and return it. And there I hit a problem. Windows 7 had repartitioned the disk and one key recovery (OKR) no longer worked.

Eventually after a day of investigating, I did finally manage to get OKR to work again, restore the netbook to original state, and return it for a refund. So that time isn’t wasted, I’m going to post what I found out about OKR – because after searching around, I know lots of people are having issues with it.

Switched off, the OKR button is supposed to boot you to recovery mode to restore the hard drive. But if anything alters the partition information of the HDD, it stops working – instead it boot you into Windows.

The reason for this is that the recovery partition is special – it has a #12 partition ID, which is a Compay Configuration/Diagnostics Partition (details here). Most partitioning software doesn’t know about this partition ID and when you change partition information, such as by adjusting partition sizes or creating a new partition, that ID gets reset to something the partitioning software knows about. That stops the OKR key working.

To restore the ID, you need gparted on a USB key or on CD. Search Google and you can get it easily enough. Method:

1. Boot into gparted.
2. Identify the disk identifier for the recovery partition – eg /dev/sda4
3. Open up the gparted console
4. Type fdisk /dev/sda (ie. take the number off the identifier)
5. Type m for help if you want
6. Type p to print the partition table – check you get the same number as above
7. Type t, then 4 for the partition number (replace with the number of your partition)
8. If you want, type L to list codes
9. The code you want is 12, enter 12 and then type w to write
10. Do not use the GUI from this point – if you do, it will remove the code 12
11. Exit gparted and try the OKR button. It should work.

An alternative is to set the boot flag on the recovery partition. The lenovo will then boot using the recovery partition.

Tuesday December 8
 
11:50
 
New Netbook

Back in May 2007 I bought one of the first so-called “Netbooks”, the Kohjinsha SA1. It had an 800×600 swivel inaccurate touchscreen and ran like a dog – and I don’t mean a greyhound, I mean one of those small fat wobbly dogs that pensioners have.

It cost 104,800 yen. It was probably one of the most disappointing PC purchases I ever bought. The keyboard was worse than that of a ZX Spectrum. IE ran so slow that it was almost going backwards.

A month after I bought it, Kohjinsha brought out a new model. Same price. Higher res screen. Decent keyboard. New processor. All the problems fixed. Grrrr.

Fastforward to 2009 and it’s fair to say that I’m still cautious of Netbooks. One bitten, twice shy they say.

But Netbooks really have come on by leaps and bounds. Last week I bought one of the new Acer Aspire One AOD250 netbooks. Looks wise, it’s just like this – but with it has the new N280 processor and a 1280×720 screen. With the larger screen, it doesn’t feel constrained like a 1024×600 netbook. Battery life is around 7 hours – in the week that I’ve had it, using it for about an hour on the sofa each night, I’ve not yet had to recharge it once.

Good keyboard, large screen, useable battery life, and very decent speed running Chrome, it is perfectly usable – unlike the Kohjinsha trash I bought before. And it only cost 35,760 yen – almost 70,000 less than the crap I bought before.

The only problem? It has two screen defects – one single RGB gone at the top left, and one full RGB set, a full pixel, at the bottom left.

Usually dead pixels would bother the hell out of me – but with the pitch on the 1280×720 screen being so small, I can’t notice the single RGB defect and can only notice the full dead pixel if I look for it. I started the process of sending it back to exchange it, but in the end I couldn’t be bothered. If it was a bright always-on pixel then I’d care more. If I’d bought a 110,000 yen MacBook then I’d care. But on a cheap-as-chips netbook that has a life of 1-2 year max? It’s not worth my time getting a new one, running the risk that it has bright pixel defects, setting up Windows 7 again, etc etc.  Yeah, I’d prefer it was perfect, but I guess they have low tolerances on these cheapo computers. And the price on Amazon has gone up now by around 10%, so I kinda got it at a discount.

Bottom line: Netbooks can actually handle internet use now, which is splendid – and they are almost at throwaway prices.

For what it’s worth, I’ve read that Acer’s screen policy is 8-16 dead/bright “spots” across the whole screen or one in centerbefore they’ll consider a return. Whether spot means “RGB” value or “pixel”, I’m not quite sure.

One of the nice things about this new Netbook is that it came with Windows 7 Starter. Why is that nice? I have an MSDN subscription and I was able to enter my Ultimate serial number into the “Upgrade Anytime” control panel and Windows immediately upgraded the installation to Ultimate, without needing to download anything. I then downloaded the English language pack and could switch the UI to English – dumping the Japanese. OK, so it isn’t as easy as having a Mac and it requires Ultimate, but it’s better than having to install Windows again from scratch.

Thursday December 3
 
17:04
 
Windows 7 monitor problem

I had the weirdest display problem with Windows 7. If I switched off and on my LCD monitor with Windows then all the windows would be resized down to 1024×768 and moved to the top left corner of the screen. Turns out that when I switched off the LCD, Win7 was defaulting to a standard VGA monitor.

I typically never powerdown or sleep my PC so that I can VNC into it from my iPhone – instead I just switch off the monitor, so this was a big problem for me. And I’m not the only one it’s a problem for:

My issue is that every time i turn my monitor off, Windows 7 rearrange and resize my desktop windows. This probably happens because win7 change the resolution of the desktop when the monitor gets ‘un-plugged’ (in reality just turned off).

I tried everything fix this – even disabling TMM (Transient Multi-monitor Manager) didn’t fix it. In the end I found a workaround using VNC and my iPhone!

1. With VNC running on my PC, I switched off the monitor. Real VNC free version works in Win7 if you run it in User mode and not as a Service.
2. From my iPhone, use Mocha VNC to connect to the PC. (VNC also allows connections via a standard web browser - if you don’t have an iPhone you could try that.)
3. In ATI Catalyst, under Monitor Properties – Attributes, untick “Use Extended Display Identification Data (EDID)” and set the resolution to 1920 x 1200 (the resolution of my LCD) and refresh rate to 60Hz. (If you don’t have an ATI card, look for the relevant option to force display resolution in your graphics card driver software.)
4. Go to Control Panel – Display – Adjust Resolution – Advanced settings. Under “Monitor”, uncheck “Hide modes that this monitor cannot display”, then under “Adapter” click “List All Modes” and select one of the 1920 x 1200 options.
5. After applying this, I get kicked out of VNC. Very quickly I need to VNC in again to click OK on the “Do you want to keep these display settings?” box.

Voila! Now when I switch off my LCD, Windows 7 still detects the monitor is gone and switches to the default monitor – but because that resolution matches my LCD display, the windows dont resize.

Funny that I used an iPhone to fix Windows though – haha…

If you want to disable TMM under Windows 7, here’s how. This didn’t work for me, but I know there’s a lot of people out there who want to disable TMM for KVM switches.

1. Open Windows 7 registry editor by clicking Start, type regedit.
2. Right click on regedit, click on Run as Administartor.
3. Navigate to the location: Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\TMM
4. Click UseIViewHelper in the right pane.
5. Set the value data to “0” {zero} to disable TMM feature in Windows 7.
6. If you want to re-enable TMM feature, set the value data to “1”.
7. Click OK and reboot you computer for the changes to take effect.

Monday April 6
 
16:29
 
PC Upgrade – Part 1

I’ve been very happy with the 26,000 yen PC I built at the end of last year except for one thing: Lightroom. It runs like a dog. A lame dog. A lame dog that hasn’t been fed for a month.

Everything else runs perfectly – even iTunes is as ok as you can expect from iTunes! – but not Lightroom. It’s just too slow and clunky.

It’s probably something to do with my 120GB+ photo library and the fact that most of my photos now are RAW, but that’s not the whole story. Lightroom was useable on my Mac with a comparable load. On my PC it isn’t.

So yesterday I decided to upgrade – I bought a Phenom II X4 920 (2.8GHz x 4) CPU and two 1TB hard drives to set up as RAID 0. With CPU and hard disk upgrade, I should get much better speed.

PassMark CPU Mark
5200+ X2 (2.7Ghz x 2): 1,280
920 X4 (2.8Ghz x 4): 3,285
i7 920 (2.67GHz x 4 x 2): 5,456

On the processor alone that’s a 2 1/2 times speed up from my current setup for 19,000 yen. Yes, the i7 would be faster, but I’d need to invest around 90,000 yen on a new motherboard, graphics card, and memory. I’d rather wait for the moment. The new processor brings the cost of my PC to 45,000 yen – 39,000 yen if I take out the cost of the old processor (I’m not including the price of the hard drives in these figures).

I did a quick test in Lightroom before and after installing the new processor, without installing the hard drives. Exporting 43 RAW files to 500 pixel JPEGs took 3m 45s with the old processor and 1m 27s with the new – which is almost exactly 2 1/2 times quicker. Nice.

Recalculating my Vista Experience Index score, I got a bit of a surprise. Not only did the processor rating go up, but graphics performance also went up! Once again, this score puzzles me. Not sure why the score for graphics should change because I thought that was all handled by the GPU. Maybe it’s related to the BIOS upgrade I did? Or maybe not everything is done by the GPU.

Processor: Old 5.2 New 5.9
Memory (RAM) 8.00 GB: 5.9 (No change)
Graphics – ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics: Old 3.5 New 4.1
Gaming graphics – 3323 MB total available graphics memory: Old 3.6 New 4.0
Primary hard disk: 5.4 (No change)

Hopefully when I’ve added RAID 0 for the photo storage I’ll get even better results from the Lightroom test – Lightroom is very disk intensive. I’ll post the results in part 2.

Sunday February 22
 
21:07
 
Language B*tch

My Vista is set to English. My web browsers are set for English as the default language. Despite that, when I go to google.com, it brings me Japanese Google.

Yeah, my OS is English and my web browser encoding is set to English, but pah! What does that matter? I really want my websites to display in Japanese. I was just playing silly buggers when I selected English. Didn’t know what I was doing. Wouldn’t know me arse from me elbow if I didn’t have “arse” and “elbow” tattoo’d on them. Perhaps Google would prefer I changed those tattoos to the Japanese for arse and elbow? (That would be a-roo-soo and e-roo-bo.)

Skype is even worse. I go to skype.com and it brings me the Japanese site. I find the option to switch to English and download Skype. The installer runs in English, then Skype runs… in Korean. WTF? Because I set the “Language for non-Unicode programs” to Korean in control panel? That’s because Windows wont read a disk with Korean files unless I have this setting (which makes no sense, because it’s not a “program”). And no recent program should be looking at this setting – it’s there for badly written hacked together old software.

Grrr….

(Oh, and the experience on the Mac isn’t much better – it can’t even read Korean from my NAS.)

Rant over.