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.

Thursday January 22
 
00:35
 
Speedtest

XP via Wifi; laptop:

Vista via Wifi; laptop:

 

Vista via LAN; desktop:

Both machines are connected to the same Wifi router - one by Wifi, one by LAN. Slower Ping seems to be a Vista/XP difference.

Saturday January 10
 
11:48
 
Crimson Herring

It appears I was wrong about Syncback SE causing this problem.

While the problem occurred with Syncback SE, I was also able to reproduce the issue just doing a plain network copy. It appears to be an issue copying between Vista and one of my NAS drives - the same drive which required the configuration change to get authentication to work. My other NAS drives work fine, both with copy and Syncback.

After a random amount of time - somewhere between 5 to 20 minutes usually - copying files to that NAS (a Netorage), the computer will just lock up. No screen output, no reaction from the keyboard, can’t remote login via logmein. It’s not in sleep or hibernation, but it’s not working - the only option is to reboot.

I’m not best chuffed that Vista and my NAS don’t play well together. Vista really shouldn’t crash so badly, and, more importantly, it’s the only NAS I have which both accepts Korean characters and has enough disk space to be my backup NAS. I wonder if it will work with XP under virtualisation?

Wednesday January 7
 
15:50
 
Confused

Last night I replaced Vista Home Premium 64 with Vista Ultimate 64 on my home PC… and my Vista graphics score dropped 0.3 points.

Both installs were clean installs, both using the exact same drivers, both are SP1 and updated via Windows Update with all the latest updates, both are 64 bit - yet a difference of 0.3 points. I don’t get it. I tried playing about with drivers to get the score from Ultimate to match Premium but it doesn’t budge.

Update: No Longer Confused

I finally found what was causing the difference. From 0.3 points, 0.2 points was lost because I had a second monitor plugged it. Even though the second monitor wasn’t powered on, it seems like the display was being mirrored.

The final 0.1 was reclaimed when I removed Microsoft Dreamscene. I can’t think of anything more pointless than an animated desktop - if I’d know what it was, I would never have downloaded it in the first place. I’m surprised Dreamscene reduces the Vista graphics score by 0.1. I mean, if it makes a difference to performance, you’d think the score would drop by more than 0.1. And why should just having it installed make a difference? I’m not running it.

Final score:

Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5200+ 5.2
Memory (RAM) 8.00 GB: 5.9
Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics 3.5
Gaming graphics: 3323 MB Total available graphics memory 3.6
Primary hard disk: 36GB Free (70GB Total) 5.4
Windows Vista (TM) Ultimate

Base score 3.5
Determined by lowest subscore

System

Manufacturer: System manufacturer
Model System: Product Name
Total amount of system memory: 8.00 GB RAM
System type: 64-bit operating system
Number of processor cores: 2

Storage

Total size of hard disk(s) 549 GB
Disk partition (C:) 36 GB Free (70 GB Total)
Disk partition (D:) 70 GB Free (199 GB Total)
Disk partition (E:) 129 GB Free (279 GB Total)

Graphics

Display adapter type: ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics
Total available graphics memory: 3323 MB
Dedicated graphics memory: 256 MB
Dedicated system memory: 0 MB
Shared system memory: 3067 MB
Display adapter driver version: 8.510.0.0
Primary monitor resolution: 1920×1200
DirectX version: DirectX 10

Network

Network Adapter: Realtek RTL8168C(P)/8111C(P) Family PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet NIC (NDIS 6.0)
Network Adapter: Microsoft Tun Miniport Adapter

I’m pretty happy with that. The lower score is the graphics, and given that I’ve not played a single game in the last two years, that doesn’t bother me at all. Aero, HD playback, etc are all sweet.