I left Vista running last night with the monitors switched off and copying files to a NAS. The machine was still working this morning - yet more evidence that Syncback SE was the issue.

However there was a different error and I wonder if it could be related (ie. it is an error which Syncback SE doesn’t handle gracefully): the file copy stopped midway with an error claiming Vista couldn’t read the source disk.

This is strange because the source disk is a local disk. I could understand the NAS communication failing, but not the source disk. From searching google, I see others having a similar issue with Vista. However my files are in the 5-10MB range rather than the multi-GB range. I am copying thousands of them though, so it may be related.

Unfortunately I no longer have the exact wording of the error and I realise now that I wont be able to get the error back because I selected “don’t bug me”. Doh. Hopefully I’ll be able to reproduce it on my second Vista machine.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that copying files over the network is slower than I expected under Vista, as is internet browsing (connection speed, etc). This happens on both my Vista machines. Over 100Mbit lan I’m only getting a speed of around 1-2MB/s doing file copy, and about half of that via Wifi.

On the advice of several sites, I’ve switched off auto tuning:

1. Click: Start
2. Type cmd in the search box and finish with ctrl/shift/enter
3. Enter: netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

This seems to improve things by about 20% via Wifi. I’ve yet to test it via Lan.

One of the nice things about Vista is that it reports speeds in MB/s. But it’s a double edged sword. Even thought I’ve tested copying to/from a USB2 HDD in XP and Vista and know Vista to be faster, I still perceive it as slower when I see Vista only reporting 15-20MB/s copy speed. I wonder if that is causing me to perceive network file copy as slower also.

Sometimes I really don’t think Vista helps itself get a good reputation. For example, after seeing the USB copy speed I looked into the USB driver setup on my machine to check everything was installed OK and found USB Root Hub reporting “Hub is operating at full-speed”. In USB2 terms, “full speed” means 1.5MB/s, rather than the 60MB/s of “high speed”. However clearly the hub is operating at high speed otherwise I wouldn’t reach 15-20MB/s, so why report it using the USB2 “full speed”? It’s confusing.

Priority at the moment is tuning the network and then installing encryption on my drives. I had a USB hard drive failure earlier this week and I wasn’t too pleased about having to return the disk without being able to wipe it completely. Not that I have much to be secret about, I just don’t like the thought of personal files, photos, etc being open to prying eyes.

The thing about red herrings is that they’re not red and they don’t smell like fish, but they do hurt when you’re being slapped in the face with them.

It turns out my strange issue was nothing to do with my monitor or my install, but a program that I had trusted in XP crashing its bollocks off under Vista.

The program with sore bollocks is Syncback SE. I used to run the non-SE version in XP. What Syncback does is this: point it at a source directory and a destination directory and every time you run it it will copy the changed files from source to destination. Worked a charm in XP. Works like Dark Magic, it seems, under Vista 64-bit.

Building a PC was my New Year vacation ”project”. As long as I never hit this problem again, I’ll be happy - because today was the end of my NY vacation! I’ll try Syncback (non-SE version) to see whether it works OK, but I certainly wont be using Syncback SE again.

What happens is this: When I switch off the monitor, the computer keeps working for a few minutes and then suddenly “half stops”. When I switch back on the monitor, I can’t get the desktop back.

For example, if I am copying files from the local HDD to a network drive (NAS) and then switch off the monitor, the copying continues. However after a few minutes, the HDD light stops flashing, and when I switch back on the monitor, I can’t get back the desktop (no signal from the PC, no reaction to keyboard/mouse, reconnecting the monitor doesn’t help).

I know the computer is not sleeping or in hibernation because I can hear the fans working. I know it isn’t an HDMI issue, because that wouldn’t stop the activity on the PC - and I have tried with VGA. And if I don’t switch off the monitor, I don’t get this issue - so it has to be related to the monitor being switched off.

I’ve tried everything I can think of to get this working, but nothing seems to make a difference. I also can’t seem to find any connection between various settings and how long it takes for this to happen.

- Used HDMI and VGA connectors
- Reinstalled graphics drivers
- Looked at BIOS settings (nothing strange; BIOS is uptodate)
- Changed power options (no display or hdd sleep; no power management for pci)
- Set “Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power” to OFF for the network card
- Reinstalled Vista several times
- Disabling ATI External Event Utility

With the external monitor switched on, everything works fine. Why should switching off the external monitor cause an issue? Does that trigger something within Vista?

I’m stumped. Any ideas? Just when I think I have something that works, suddenly it stops working again. It’s driving me nuts!

Asus M3A78-EM motherboard, Vista 64-bit Home Premium, Iiyama ProLite E2607WS 26″ Widescreen LCD.

I can’t reproduce this on my laptop since my laptop display never seems to sleep.

I avoided the i7 for three reasons.

Firstly, while there’s no doubt that an i7 system would be fast, at the moment the market it too immature. For example, Gigabyte and Asus motherboards range from about 24000 yen to over 40000 yen, but it’s almost impossible to tell what the differences between them are: sites have only reviewed premium models, and that review that are out there are inconsistent or indicate BIOS issues; manufacturers sites and boxes don’t include photographs. And there seems to be some strange decisions out there - for example, the cheapest Gigabyte board has 4 memory slots - crazy since the i7 memory controller is optimised for 3 or 6 banks for memory.

Secondly, if I go for an i7 then I’ll be wanting max speed - so everything I buy will need to be the fastest. 10,000 disks or SSD, the best graphics card and memory, etc. To not get the fastest would defeat the purpose. That will cost a bomb.

Thirdly - and perhaps this is more important - I’m Scottish, and I can’t resist a bargain.

Going for price/performance appealed in so many levels to me. If I make mistakes, I can make them on the cheap. I can whack in 8GB and see whether it really gets utilised. Most importantly, it will be fun to do and I’ll still get a machine which would be in no way “past it”.

My criteria was:

- RAID support
- eSATA port
- SATA and PATA disk suport
- Digital output via HDMI/DVI; two heads preferred
- Support for upto 8GB DDR2 RAM
- Dual core processor faster than my laptop (2GHz Dual Core) 
- Hardware HD decoding 

This is what I got:

- ASUS M3A78-EM motherboard: Raid, eSATA, HDMI/DVI/VGA/Displayport output, Hardward HD (ATI 3200HD)
- AMD Athlon X2 5200+ (2.7MHz)
- 8GB DDR2 800Mhz memory
- Case with front and rear fans, side ventalition for CPU fan, and 420W

For the DVD drive, I used a USB DVD writer that I already had. For the hard drives, I reused two PATA drives that I had available.

No one could argue that compared to an i7 this system screams, but the price - wow. The whole lot cost 26,000 yen. With today’s exchange rate, that’s 290 USD - but that rate really distorts the real price of this. To put the cost into perspective looking at cost of living in Japan:

- 26,000 yen is the cost of 26 pints of beer in a pub
- 26,000 yen is the same as 2×1TB USB hard drives
- 26,000 yen is 22,000 yen LESS than this year’s Christmas dinner - table for 3 people in a restaurant
- 26,000 yen is the price of a return train ticket between Tokyo and Osaka (approx 500km)

In short, 26,000 yen is nothing. It is throwaway money. And that’s quite important - because at the moment I don’t know how long I’m going to be in Japan. Should I move, a desktop might end up finding itself packed up in a box for several months.

In reality, however, the cost was less than 26,000 yen. The day after buying this new setup, my USB hard drive failed. It was only two weeks old so instead of replacing it, I just refunded it - I don’t need it now that I have the two PATA disks installed. The refund was 13,000 yen - so this whole setup cost just 13,000 yen. Bargain.

In honesty, I would have preferred an Intel. However budget motherboards for Intel either do not have HDMI/DVI or they have terrible HD support. The price of a similar intel build would have been 10000 yen more, without dual digital output. And as the price starts to edge up, I would soon find myself saying “well it’s not that much more for a quad core”, and soon I would be back to buying an i7 because “it’s not that much more”. I wanted cheap, fun, and something that when I do move to an i7, I wont have regrets about throwing away.

Expect lots of PC related posts over the next weeks.

After switching to Vista, I found that I couldn’t access one of my NAS drives from within Vista. Even though I gave the correct username and password, I always got this error:

System error 86 has occurred. The specified network password is not correct.

Turns out this is a SMB (samba) negotiation “issue” with Vista. The solution is different depending on the version of Vista being used.

For Home Premium, use regedit to edit the registry for the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\LMCompatibilityLevel

Change the default of 0×3 (NTLMv2 only) to 0×1 (use NTLMv2 if available, or older versions if not) and reboot.

For Ultimate, run (Windows key + R) secpol.msc and go to “Local Policies > Security Options”. Find “Network Security: LAN Manager authentication level” and change the setting from “Send NTLMv2 response only” to “Send LM & NTLM - use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated”.

NAS can be difficult or impossible to firmware update - I certainly don’t want to firmware update my Netorage since it has been running flawlessly for 3+ years and I’m no longer in Korea (when I bought it). Still at least the settings above work! I could never get MacOS X to read the Korean character set of my NAS.

02.01.2009  14:33:31  Network Shield: blocked access to malicious site dns://www.maxpcsecure.com [ C:\Windows\system32\svchost.exe ]

02.01.2009  14:33:31  Network Shield: blocked access to malicious site dns://www.sofotex.com [ C:\Windows\system32\svchost.exe ]

02.01.2009  14:34:03  Network Shield: blocked access to malicious site dns://www.afreecodec.com [ C:\Windows\system32\svchost.exe ]

The messages would appear when browsing webpages or doing a Google search. Instant thought: Malware.

Since I’ve just installed Vista and redownloaded a whole load of the standard utilities I previously used in XP, careful though I am, something could have slipped though. Even download.com is distributing software with trojans these days.

I scanned and rescanned my PC with various anti-virus and anti-spyware apps and found nothing. I did the same in safe more - nothing. I looked at running processes and the only one I could find strange was BeepApp.exe - strange because there’s almost nothing about it in Google. I tried killing it as administrator and it restarted again, a distinct malware trend.

In the end, frustrated that nothing could detect anything wrong with my system, I decided to just wipe my hard disk and reinstall Vista, watching for anything suspicious at each step.

Half way though that process I started to use my other PC, which also has Vista, and started searching for some of the same terms which had caused the errors on the first PC. Instantly I started getting the warnings. What was going on? How could both PCs be infected? My other PC had nothing except “trusted” softward such as Chrome, Lightroom, iTunes, and Avast.

And then I suddenly twigged. “No! It can’t be!” I exclaimed. Into Google Chrome options, I switched off “Use DNS pre-fetching to improve page load performance” - and lo and behold, the warnings stopped.

Damn Chrome. I’ve ended up reinstalling Vista for nothing, all because Chrome was prefetching DNS for all sites referenced in the webpages I was viewing, triggering Avast to alert me. Here was me thinking spyware was attempting to open links to those sites and it was just Chrome.

Grrrrrr. Relief that I have no virus - frustration at the cause.

Oh - Happy New Year!

Updated: I tried booting into XP and searched for “maxpcsecure” - no warning. Avast then came up with its standard “There is a new version available. Do you want to download?” message. I updated Avast, rebooted, and tried searching for “maxpcsecure” - this time the warnings appeared. Looks like these warnings are a feature of the latest Avast, which is why I never noticed them until installing Vista and hence thinking there was malware.

Update2: BeepApp.exe comes from the “AMD RAID/AHCI RaidXpert” program on my Asus motherboard DVD. I assume, therefore, it is harmless.

I’m very tempted by the power system. I have over 200,000 yen refunded from my iMac, so I have the dosh. For about 110,000 yen I could have a core i7 with 6GB of DDR3 memory and 1GB SATA0 main disk (ie 2 x 500GB). That would be a stonkingly fast system.

Trouble is, I’ve been monitoring my CPU usage, and apart from when I’m running Lightroom I rarely get close to peaking my 2Ghz dual core 3GB ram Intel (Windows seems so much better at handling memory and CPU than the Mac was - I would peak out consistently on Os X running iTunes, Virtual PC, and Lightroom, and those seem find together under Windows).

So I don’t NEED an i7. I might want one, but I certainly don’t need it.

At the other end of the spectrum, I can get a AMD Athlon 64 X2 motherboard with HDMI and HD support for around 8000 yen. A 2.6Ghz-ish dual core Athlon 64 would be about the same price. All in - reusing my IDE disks - I’ve have a dual core, 4GB ram, HDMI system for about 36,000 yen. The great thing about this setup is that it gives me experience building a kit without worrying about whether I blow something, and then I can expand it later with and extra 4GB memory and SATA when I need to. I can even replace the processor with a quad-core once the prices drop.

The bad point, though, is that I would almost certainly throw it away at some point.

In the middle we have a Q6600 setup - around 70,000yen. It has the best of both worlds - eg. cheap enough to not worry about screwing something up (would be an arse if I bought the wrong memory modules for the i7 system, for example) - but also the worst of both worlds (I would still want something better).

My thoughts at the moment are to just build the cheapo system. At 36,000 yen, it’s almost throwaway month - it will give me experience building a kit, it will be faster than my current laptop, and by the time I have finished playing with it, hopefully DDR3 and i7 CPU/motherboard prices will have dropped by 36,000 yen!

Hmm, have I made my decision already? Build something cheap and useful for fun?

This is more likely due to drivers than anything else. My suspicion is that due to Aero’s requirements (needing a Graphics score of 3.0) and the class action about what “Vista Capable” really means, Intel and Microsoft have been forced to pay attention to driver implementation for common chipsets, hence the better overally quality. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the initial GMA950 (945GM) driver upon installing Vista rated 2.2 and the later driver installed during Windows Update meets the exact minimum for Aero.

The other problems with Vista may still be there - I’ve yet to try out network shares - but this one change alone makes Vista a keeper for me. I’m actually astounded the VGA output is now clear - I expected the issue to be with the power of my laptop’s analog D-SUB output rather than a driver issue (I’m sure my XP drivers are up to date).

Why did I install Vista? Two reasons. Firstly, everyone I know now that asks me for PC help has Vista. Secondly, if I do build my own PC, it will have 64-bit Vista to take advantage of 4/8Gb memory.

I am now completely Macless. Due to limited disk space, I had to replace the Macos X installation on my LG with Vista. I’m now Windows only. I should probably have tried the VGA output from Mac before scrubbing the installation - don’t know why I didn’t think about doing that.

My iMac was suffering from a creature inside. No problem, Apple said, we’ll replace the LCD. That was two weeks ago. 

This week I went down to pick up the repaired machine. Last time Apple touched the inside of my iMac, I was left with big wipe marks inside the glass. This time, no wipe marks but dust. Dust between the LCD and glass, which, obviously, I couldn’t wipe away. Reluctantly - as if I should accept dust there - the “Genius” took the machine away for the dust to be cleaned off.

Twenty minutes later and the iMac was back. Initial impressions were not good - the front of the screen was covered by a layer of dust and little bits of packing foam. This time not only was there dust inside the screen, but wipe marks inside the glass. Exactly the same streaks that I found last time.

An hour later and the iMac was back again. No streaks but dust and what looked to be a small hair.

“We’re never going to get it perfectly right,” I was told, “Did you buy it at this store?”

And without me asking for it, I was promptly offered a full refund. Quite frankly, I was astonished - the machine is 6 months old - but since this is the 6th time I’ve lugged my iMac back and forward from Apple, and since every time my iMac is repaired it seems to come back with something inside the LCD, I decided to accept. Why they open the iMacs in a dusty environment - which they clearly do from the second time the machines was brought back - I don’t know. 

So that’s it. I’m now Macless - or at least, officially Macless since my LG still runs MacOSX. In honestly, I was getting to the stage where I was wondering why I was using Mac anyway - nothing I was running was Mac specific, and it was a hassle to backup to a network drive.

My Lightroom library opened on Windows no problem (just had to open the Mac library and then tell Lightroom the location of my top level photo folders). iTunes was trouble as usual, but after going through each of my Korean songs one by one - about 1000 of them - it was working again.

Now I’m looking at doing the same as Eyal - building my own machine. It wont run Macos, but it might run 64-bit Vista with 8GB of memory, Quad core (I do a lot of multitasking), and RAID0 on SATA disks for performance. Half the price of the iMac, double the performance.

I don’t remember watching any borrowed DVDs recently.