Friday May 23
 
18:22
 
How To Video Chat With A PC User From The Mac

It was surprisingly difficult to find a way to video chat with PC user from the Mac.

Apple provide iChat - but that’s pretty useless. The only PC client iChat will video chat with is AIM - and who uses AIM outside the US? From the reports I’ve read, even that compatibility isn’t great - with iChat only working with certain versions of the AIM client. In the end, I ruled out AIM - I didn’t want to have to ask my friends to install AIM, go through all the hassles of getting an ID, and then find out it doesn’t work.

Ideally I would have liked something which worked with MSN Messenger (Windows Live Messenger), because all my Korean friends use MSN for video chat. So far the only way I have been able to video chat with MSN users is to run XP using VMWare Fusion - that works, but it is sluggish, and it seems to use only the center part of the iSight image.

What I wanted was something that would work reliably and effortlessly. I would need to get my friends to install a new chat client to be able to talk with me, so I wanted something which “just works”. In the end, I found three options:

1. Yahoo Messenger (to other Yahoo users only - video chat doesn’t work to MSN users).

2. Skype

3. Sightspeed

Since I use Skype anyway on the PC, I went with Skype. It’s a bit of a heavy client, but it works well - and that’s what matters. Plus, these days many people have Skype installed anyway for international calling.

It is slightly surprising, though, that iChat is so limited. In my view, Apple should do more to make it easy to communicate with PC users. It doesn’t project a good image of the Mac when Mac users are forced to say to Windows users: “Mac doesn’t work with XXX.” It only reiterates the image that Mac is limited.

Tuesday May 20
 
11:19
 
Moving iTunes From Windows To Mac

Finally I think I have my iTunes working on the iMac. By following Apple’s recommended procedure, it should have been simple - but I ended up with corrupt Korean ID3 tags (artist, song name, album, etc).

I’ve heard of others who have had the same problem with Japanese tags becoming garbage, and Chinese, and Thai. It seems to be related to unicode and tag encoding. Since I couldn’t find a single webpage which had a solution that worked, so here’s the procedure I followed to fix things. Hope it helps someone else someday.

Tuesday May 13
 
00:18
 
New Toy

The only way I could be sure to get a PC that will run XP: buy a Mac. In this case, the top of the range iMac: 24″ widescreen, 3.06Ghz Dual Core 6MB L2 cache, 500 GB Hard Disk, 512MB Nvidia Graphics Card, 4GB Memory. Just a sliver under a whopping 270,000 yen.

I know I swore I’d never get another Nvidia again, but the only way I could get a 500GB hard drive in the Apple store was to go for the top of the range model - with Nvidia. However, since Apple gives a guarantee that they have prepared all the drivers to get the machine working under XP and Vista (”Everything you need to make your Mac work with Windows is right there.” on the Bootcamp page), I decided to take the risk.

Buying this machine once again raised the horrid issue of bad LCD pixels. My Nikon D40x has one bad pixel on the LCD screen. It annoys me and I wish it wasn’t there, but I accepted it because the body plays so nicely with my Sigma F1.4 lens I have. That lens is known for back focus issues, and you really have to luck-out and get a body which matches the lens. While the shop agreed to swap my D40x for another, when I tried the replacement with the Sigma, it had backfocus - possibly a different batch of cameras. So in the end I kept the bad pixel, since I’d rather have the body working with my lens.

So on something cheap, or where the LCD is not of primary importance, I could potentially accept a bad or bright or dead pixel. Even if I bought a PC which had a monitor with a bad pixel, at a push I could accept it - because I could always replace the monitor later.

But spending over 2000USD on an iMac, I wanted to be sure it had no bad pixels. I would feel so crap if I spent that much money, switched on my iMac, and found a white dot slap bang in the middle of the screen. There would be nothing I could do about it - Apple’s policy, so I’m told, is that they don’t replace screens with just one bad pixel.

Apple, etc, say that it would be unrealistic to expect every monitor to be perfect, but, to be honest, I can’t understand that stance. In Korea, almost every manufacturer gives you the choice of “guarantee of no faults” and “you take your chances” - the latter being about 10-20USD cheaper. It seems like a much better way to do things rather than forcing you to take the risk.

In Hong Kong and Korea, when I bought a laptop, the shops always let me test to see whether there were defective pixels. In Japan, that seems to be impossible. Nowhere would let me test, and nowhere would replace if there was a problem.

In the end, after trying other places, I went to the Apple store and I lucked out. By sheer fluke, the guy I talked to was the store manager, and he was quite happy to let me test the machine before buying. I was told later, by another staff member, that usually such tests are not allowed, and it was only because I’d talked to the store manager that it was possible.

For anyone buying a Mac in Japan, the other staff member (ie. not the store manager) also let slip something else interesting. He said that if you buy from the Apple Store and there’s a dodgy pixel, because you bought from that Apple store, you’re much more likely to get an on the spot replacement. If, I was told, you buy from a reseller, they’re much more likely to just send you away with an “it’s in normal limits” explanation.

So I lucked out - and I have a perfect iMac. In honestly, if they had not let me test the screen, I wouldn’t have taken the risk in buying. I’d have built my own PC instead, and run OSX on that. I’ve seen it done. I’ll probably do it on my LG.

It’s fantastic to have a Mac again - and even better now that I can use Mac OS but still have a window open which has an XP desktop, thank to VMWare Fusion. So the few things that I can’t do on a Mac - such as Video Chat on MSN Messenger and use Korean websites - I can do within an XP desktop from within Mac OS. Splendid.

Thursday May 8
 
23:34
 
Sleep N Shake

Last night was the worst earthquake I’ve felt in Tokyo. Again, it was during the night and it woke me up - and it seemed to last forever. Just when I thought it had stopped, a few minutes later it would start back up again. It was very scary.

My computers seem to be having similar ups and downs. After the problems with the Acer, today I was playing with my Kohjinsha SA1 - increasing the Video RAM in BIOS and plugging in an external monitor - and I managed to bluescreen it. Continually. As soon as Windows started, it would find a new USB peripheral (why?!), then crash. Thankfully after switching it off and leaving it cold for 15 minutes, it recovered. I guess after allocating more memory to the graphics card in bios, some garbage must have been left in memory somewhere that caused problems. Who knows.

Then I came home, and as I was playing with my LG laptop (LW25), I noticed that the fan wasn’t on. I tried toggling the fan speed and no joy, so I turned it over and looked at the fan. There looked to be a little bit of dust, so I got a toothpick and pulled out… what can only be described as a hairball.

There’s a cat living inside my LG.

The fan started to whizz away again. I wonder how long it has been like that? I noticed it had been getting hot lately, but I thought it was just normal heat from being switch on all the time. Now that I feel the laptop being cool again, I wonder what damage I - or the cat - has done.

Spurred on by a bit of success, I decided to take a big risk. My LG has 2GB of memory - 2 x 1GB. According to the online documentation and everything that I can find on the LW25 on the internet, the maximum memory is 2GB - but then again, the online documentation says my computer has a Pentium M, and that’s poppycock. It has a 2GHz Core Duo.

I read elsewhere that some manufacturers specified “maximum RAM” not by what the BIOS or motherboard actually allows, but by what chips were available at the time of machine launch. Since I have a 2GB module hanging around from the Acer - the one that I bought to put in the Acer - I thought I’d whack it in the LG and see what happened. If all went well, I’d have 3GB (2GB + 1GB). If all went tits up, I’d have a burning mess.

With my luck with computers lately, it probably wasn’t a good thing to experiment with - potentially blowing up my long-time-reliable PC - but it worked. I now have 3GB running quite happily. It’s also a relief because I did wonder whether the 2GB card was dodgy and had caused the Acer problems, but since it’s working fine in the LG, I know that the card is OK (I also used ran the Microsoft memory test program that comes on the Vista DVD to verify the chip was OK in the Acer and it gave no errors - but I still had slight worries until now).

My experience with the Acer was annoying - I thought I’d be left with a non-refundable 2GB memory chip, as well as the time I wasted - but as things have turned out, it’s thanks to the Acer that I realised I could upgrade my LG to 3GB, and my Kohjinsha to 1GB. So even though I lost 3+ days out my life, I’ll hopefully gain them back slowly through increased computer performance ;)

Wednesday May 7
 
19:31
 
I Tried - I Really Tried 2

I was all happy because I managed to wipe Vista from my 5520 and install XP instead. Unfortunately not all was as grand as I thought it to me.

Despite installing well, surviving several reboots, and running nice and fast, I found that after leaving the machine OFF for 1-2 hours and then rebooting into Windows, I was presented with a VGA screen. Going into Display - Settings, I was presented with the error:

The currently selected graphics display driver cannot be used. It was written for a previous version of Windows, and is no longer compatible with this version of windows. The system has been started using the default VGA driver. Please contact your hardware manufacturer to get an updated driver, or select one of the Microsoft provided drivers.

There’s a Knowledge Base article about the error here - but it seems irrelevant to the times when the error hits me, and it’s supposed to have been fixed by now.

I tried reinstalling XP again, even updating to SP3. It appeared to work - then wham! Same error.

What’s most strange is that by rebooting the PC, it starts working again. So what seems to be happening is that after booting from cold, the display driver doesn’t work - but every reboot after that is fine.

So, I have a lovely Acer laptop with a NVidia GeForce 7000M graphics card which crashes with “Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding but has successfully recovered” every five minutes under Vista, and fails to load the display driver correctly after a cold boot in XP - ie. a laptop that I effectively can’t used.

I called Bic Camera and they agreed to collect the machine and refund, though they did say the refund could be delayed until next month due to timings in credit card processing. That makes me very wary - but there’s not much else I can do.

The saga doesn’t end there, however. Since the machine is going back tomorrow, I decided to use the opportunity to try the Vista DVD that I grabbed from torrent - it was going to be my “fallback” incase I couldn’t get English menus in the Japanese edition. Since I have a Vista license, it’s not illegal to download an install CD.

As expected, a fresh install with that DVD gave me the same “Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding but has successfully recovered” error - as soon as I switched on Aero.

Experiment complete, I whacked in the Recovery DVD that I’d made with the Acer eRecovery suite when my machine arrived. It should have reformatted my hard drive and restored the machine to the state it was when I first received it. Instead it gave me a pop-up with:

Type Mismatch

Doh!

I tried Alt F10 to being up the recovery mechanism from Bios. No response.

Owch!

If I send the machine back with XP or a non Japanese version of Vista installed, it’s asking for trouble.

I tried searching around on the net and found that Vista has most likely changed the partition details so that Alt F10 no longer was responding.

I also found out that the C and D drive should exist and be formatted to FAT32 - since I don’t remember my Acer being formatted FAT32, that seemed wrong to me.

In the end, I was able to get the machine to boot from the recovery DVDs I’d made and restore Vista without “Type Mismatch” by doing the following:

1. Use the XP Pro CD and boot into XP setup.
2. Remove all partitions EXCEPT the recovery partition (F: on my machine, 10GB in size).
3. Create C and D partitions with half of the available space each (70GB each in my case).
4. Start XP installing onto C, but reboot after formatting has taken place.
5. Start XP installing onto D - again reboot after formatting has taken place.
6. Recovery can now take place WITHOUT a “Type Mismatch” error.

What a pain in the neck, eh? A recovery mechanism should do just that - recover. Offer the option to format the disks if necessary, not breakdown and cry and shout “Type Mismatch”.

I know that I’ll never buy another Acer laptop again, or any laptop with NVidia graphics. I’ve no idea why PC makers keep using graphics cards from a company that caused almost 30% of logged Vista crashes in 2007.

In fact, faced with being FORCED to buy a machine with Vista installed and not be sure that it’ll work properly, it seems that the only way I can get a machine which is guaranteed to run XP properly is to buy an Apple! Ironic, eh?