Give Our Abilities Time

Having a son has really cut into my blogging but a weight has hung over my head since I noticed a week or so ago that I actually have 10 subscribers on Google Reader. Instead of writing some long-ass blog entry with detailed, researched complaints, here are some short ones:

• Treo and Palm in general -- that company is dead. I switched to Blackberry. The incredible stability of the Verizon Blackberry 8830 has been amazing compared to the Treo 600, 650, and 700p I suffered with for four years.
  
• Windows Media Center -- I actually still use it but not to record TV. I got an HD DVR from my cable company for $9/mo and there is no way that will ever exceed all the money I spent on Media Center (PC, OTA HD tuner, extender, hard drives, antennas for OTA HD, etc.) and I still only get one HD channel reliably. And the SD cable picture sucked. When my cable company finally switched to digital (e.g. scrambled) cable it was time to choose Media Center or choose against Media Center. I chose against and so far, I miss 30-second skip (have to fast forward through commercials now) but other than that I have a much better picture and much more reliable recordings and behavior.
  
• Motorola S9 Bluetooth headphones -- these are cool and I got them with gift certificates so I'm not, like, burning with anger at these flaws, but I'm hard pressed to find situations in which the music stream doesn't skip. And, Blackberry's media player won't play audio through the S9 when playing a video, which was a huge disappointment (I was hoping to stop using the iPod and to just use these on my BB to watch videos). And, the iPod connector thing is so flaky that for days I didn't think it worked with my model of iPod (G5 Video). (The truth is that you have to wake up the iPod from deep suspended mode (where it shows the Apple logo to boot up) with the Bluetooth adapter connected, then play some music, and only then can you play video. If you let the music or video playing stop, you can't get it to start the Bluetooth thing again.) I like the idea of having these lightweight headphones that can play music on my Blackberry, and sometimes it works great (like if you are standing still on the subway, and turn off the Blackberry's cellular antenna) for music, and at the gym it is useful to go cordless with the iPod, but the connection is just flaky. I will someday get an iPod Touch but I do hope that it has A2DP Bluetooth built in by that point, working with video.
  
• Converting video -- I do this a lot as I grow obsessed with a TV series, buy the DVD or download all episodes from the newsgroups, and want to watch them on Media Center Extender at home or on iPod on my commute or on the treadmill at the gym. For the extender, make sure you get XVID video and MP3 audio. XVID + AC3 = pitch-shifted audio with silence every 5 seconds. (I heard that if you used stereo RCA jacks AC3 would be fine but that seems like a pain when I have an expensive Yamaha YSP amp with a coax digital connection which works fine for everything else.) So, basically no HD unless you find WMV content specifically converted for Xbox but I've found that can skip or have problems as well on the generally underpowered extender. For iPod, I use this random Aimersoft thing that has worked great (though not with AC3). Since I have to convert AC3 stuff to MP3 with AutoGK for the extender anyway, that leaves the extra step as conversions for the iPod. But basically it means that my PC is typically running some conversion process at all times.
  
• ThinkPad X60 Tablet with Vista -- This is my work PC and has been for close to two years now. I am growing to hate it but I'm not sure what would be better given that the weight, the battery life with the big 9-cell battery, and the 1400x1050 12" screen are all great. Wireless is flaky as hell (lately I can't switch it off with the hardware switch and then get it working again without a reboot), docking takes minutes and it never remembers that the monitor extends to the left, and the fingerprint reader only lasts for about 6 sleep/wake-up cycles before it is no longer recognized. That happens with a lot of stuff. I am rebooting every other day these days and that's BS. If anyone has suggestions on a business tablet that is a real speed improvement with equivalent weight and screen resolution, I'm all ears.
  

I have a much longer entry about the Treo/Blackberry thing among my OneNote pages here but I'll save that for another time or maybe it will never leave the drafts. I'm going to try to blog more and write less in 2009. Happy New Year,

--sbreck

I've been waiting for a few months and my wait is now over -- the Linksys DMA 2100 was finally released. Dell has it for $250, but Amazon didn't; too bad 'cause I have Amazon Prime (free 2-day shipping) for free this month. Anyway, I ordered it New Year's Eve, and it was delivered today.

In my pre-purchase research, I noted from the Linksys product page that it has an HDMI connection, which is obviously the desired way to connect to the TV. Unfortunately, I didn't have a cable so I popped my 7-month-old Oscar into a Baby Bjorn and set out for Radio Shack. WTF? No way am I paying $80 for an HMDI cable. And they have $130 HDMI cables? Who in hell would pay that? I hopped on the subway down to 79th Street and went over to Circuit City to find -- the same thing! Fucking Monster cables for $100+! Even the cheap cables, hidden over on the other side of the store, were $55! I'm sorry, but I'm too damn cheap to pay that for any cable. I walked up to Circuit City on 86th (by this time Oscar had fallen asleep) and they had $80 RCA (brand) cables! Fuck that, some Googling showed practically the same damned cable from Monoprice, who everyone loves, for $4.50 plus $2.50 in shipping and handling. What a scam these HDMI cables are! Even Radio Shack, who I used to think of as trustworthy and where I spent many a happy childhood hour, has gotten in on the scam.

Further research led me to sound output -- it has a digital coax output and my brand new Yamaha YSP-800 has one as well. This was all pre-arranged before the YSP-800 was allowed for purchase. I'm not entirely sure what to say about this thing but once I get rid of the extremely loud HP z552 and put it back in my office I'll have a better sense. So far I feel like it's been a good purchase, but there's still some weird audio nuances that I was trying to solve with surround sound, mainly having to have the thing turned all the way up to hear dialog but then being blasted out of my seat by music or sound effects. It's better with the YSP than with the 2.1 speakers I have been using but it will be easier still to tell once the z552 moves out with all its loud fans blowing all the time.

Additional items that helped my research were this TGB thread full of generally good reviews, which noted that the remote has a learning feature, so it could work the speaker volume and turn the TV on and off, and that 100Mbit (as it is not a Gbit device) is fine for streaming HD content. Some people said the remote sucks, and suggested the Logitech Harmony, but I figured I'd try it first before committing the money. (I don't love the remote because it does seem to miss one out of maybe like 10 button presses, but it hasn't been annoying enough to ask for additional monies to spend.) Ed Bott also wrote a nice review so that was all I needed to hear to go ahead and buy the thing. (He didn't mention the remote.)

totally as an aside:

TGB thread on ripping DVDs; I should do this for kiddi DVDs because we'll lose that functionality and for ease of use

The DMA 2100 showed up today and I set it up before dinner. Since my HDMI cable hadn't shipped yet (should have thought about that when I ordered) I had to go component video. Initially it looked kind of crappy but it picked 480p mode, and I was able to set it up in 1080i mode on my TV (Proview RX326, a 32" LCD with a purported 1366 x 768 resolution) and it looked reasonably clear. The colors seem a little washed out compared to how they look on the media center PC directly through DVI --> HDMI, but videos look fine. Supposedly when I attach it to the TV via HDMI it will automatically detect this stuff.

I had some problems with the setup but mainly it was my own stubbornness. First, I tried to set it up without installing the drivers, because Media Center seemed to recognize the extender. Then, I wasn't really reading the error that clearly when it suggested TURNING OFF the extender AND THEN BACK ON to try to resolve the problem in which it wasn't being found. Doing that made Media Center see the extender just fine.

Here are some problems I had:

No rights to see network shares.

This was a major problem for which a variety of solutions have been put forth on the Internet. I tried this suggestion to put shortcuts in Public Videos, but I didn't see them on the Extender. Upon reading that blog's comments, I ran MKLINK /D and was able to create links that were visible on the extender, but they appeared as empty folders. I then went to my PC and added ANONYMOUS LOGON rights to the shares but I didn't know how to grant that right to the directories themselves. And of course it didn't work. (Note to self: remove them when you get back at your home PC. I am blogging on my laptop in front of the TV :)

The Windows Perl Blog was the first thing I found suggesting a login script which explicitly enters your share credentials, but I was unsure of where to put the login script until I found this, which gave a very simple solution of sharing your own NETLOGON. It seemed inelegant to create explicit mappings, so I tried it with the symbolic links and it worked! So a summary of what I did is:

• in C:\Users\Public\Public Videos, execute MKLINK /D MyVideos //myserver/myshare
  
• create some directory and share it as NETLOGON, granting MCX1, or whichever extender user is appropriate, read-only access
  
• create a batch file called mcx1.cmd or whatever you like. It need only contain NET USE \\MYSERVER\MYSHARE /user:someone-with-rights-to-your-share that-user's-password, but maybe it needs to contain @echo off as the first line and exit as the last, it is second nature for my batch files to contain that
  
• execute lusrmgr.msc, open up your extender user (MCX1 for those of us with only a single extender), and assign that batch file (mcx1.cmd in my case), with no path, as the logon script
  
  • Note: must have Vista Ultimate for this step to work
    
  • Repeat: you must have Vista Ultimate for this step to work, otherwise lusrmgr.msc will throw an error stating this same fact.
    

Weirdly, after I did all this, I noticed that the shares I was watching before had returned to the Video Library, so, with the symlinks, I had two copies. Oh well, something to solve another day.

Any questions, please comment and I will try to answer.

Xvid is only supported codec

I knew this going in and so far most of my stuff seems playable. The main problem is that, nowadays on the Internet, it would seem that HD content is not in Xvid but rather in x264. If you have a lot of that, it won't work on your extender. Also, my prized copy of Repo Man doesn't play for some reason. Boy, I'm sure my wife will hate that. (To quote one of my many beloved quotes from that movie, "And then what, you woke up in a puddle?")

It does seem that Xvid stuff from a share is kind of slow to start. But, with one exception, it plays and tracks fine.

Missing Zoom #4 mode

That's the "hourglass" mode that I usually had broadcast (non-widescreen) TV set to. Without it, regular TV is either in a smaller window in the middle of the screen in Zoom #1, overlapping so that screen crawls are cut off at the bottom with Zoom #2, or crushed into 16:9 with Zoom #3. Zoom #2 is best but you notice it for credits and crawls and whatnot. Most crawls are ads which I don't need to see but, shit, most of the time I just watch TV shows I downloaded off the Internet so I don't see those crawls anyway.

A little more disturbing is that, with non-broadcast materials (OK, yeah, I'm talking about downloaded movies and TV shows), the zoom buttons don't work at all. So no matter what, that stuff is in zoom mode 2 and is getting cut off..

I'll write more as I work with this thing further. Tomorrow I have to cut the cord and move the MCE PC back to my office so my wife can see the real promised benefit of the extender -- a quiet living room like normal people have :D

Good night,

--sbreck

P.S. I am slowly assembling posts on the DMA 2100 from random problems, annoyances, bugs and fixes that I see. I'll keep posting them when a fully formed post on one or more issues appears, and will update this ending as I see them:

…or just click the DMA 2100 label over on the right.

(This article is the third in a fascinating series which includes analyses of my work laptop and my Media Center PC.)

Though I've had Vista at work for longer than I've had it at home, the longest-lasting OS install is my home PC, a Dell XPS 710 with the factory load. Reliability & Performance Monitor on this PC has data going back to May 2nd or just about 8 months. Here are the application crash statistics collected in that time:

… and 11 other one-off crashes.

DllHost.exe:
I can explain this. I was testing various software to convert videos from my camera to YouTube-suitable format and also to iPod MP4 format. One such piece of shit software called Apex Video Converter installed some ancient-ass xvid.dll that basically threw these errors every time I opened an Explorer window in a directory containing some videos. That was an annoying couple of days until I tracked this down.

Firefox.exe:
As I said before, I think Firefox can be unreliable on Vista, particularly with a bunch of add-ons. But at least it saves state periodically so it's not such a big deal. Lately the problem has gotten worse, but, without going into too much incriminating detail, I have started leaving something called NOVA running which runs up Firefox's RAM usage from its usual 200MB to numbers as high as 600MB or however high it gets until I catch it. So it's easy to blame Firefox but it probably is poorly written code in the NOVA interface. Or Java. Seriously, whenever sites launch the Java tray applet, I cross my fingers against a crash.

VideoConverter.exe:
This was the winner in the video conversion testing but mostly for convenience reasons that I won't go into and are probably the cause of the crashes. The less said, the less trouble I get myself into.

iexplore.exe:
I only use IE7 at home to check my work email through OWA 2007. And, if left running for some period of time, IE won't restore and instead shows the title bar with whatever is behind it, behind it. I don't know if this happens with other websites because I browse everything but work stuff with Firefox.

wmplayer.exe:
I have a slight suspicion that the indexing process that Media Player uses is not stable or handles ripped audio and video material from, er, various sources without much grace. Most of the time wmplayer is doing something with its database when it crashes.

Explorer.exe:
See the first (DllHost) explanation.

Acrobat.exe:
This is standard Acrobat Reader. A program I hate with a passion.

HP_IZE.EXE:
This I think is the HP Image Zone (or whatever) thing that installed with a photo printer I bought. I actually thought it might be nice to try another tool besides Windows Photo Gallery to manage my photos, particularly if it offered features like printing four wallet-sized photos on 4x6 glossy paper, but every time this thing indexes my pictures it gets about 96% through them in 10 minutes and then crashes. I have a lot of pictures in my \Users\me\Pictures folder but Pictures\Public Pictures are the ones from my camera. (The rest are my digital artwork and found pictures (mostly source material for art).) So something is not in whatever format HP_IZE can handle, and it crashes. Sloppy...

mcproxy.exe:
I had to look this one up to find that it's the McAfee Proxy Service. My feelings on the McAfee security products which came bundled with my Dell are in a previous blog entry so there's not much more to say about this piece of crap software.

Others:
Several crashes are related to the bad xvid.dll that I got from the wonderful Apex Video Converter -- they're other video conversion products that presumably called upon xvid.dll to try and convert the sample file (a downloaded episode of Grey's Anatomy for my wife to watch on her iPod, if you must know). The rest are just random crashes that you pretty much expect. I also averaged one "disruptive shutdown" a day from early August to early September, which I determined was due to problems with SATA Native Command Queuing. And, I've had five blue screens. Can't remember what I was doing and Reliability Monitor doesn't say much about it.

There you go. This concludes a fascinating examination of problems with my three computers. Stay tuned for an analysis of my event log, followed by the contents of my Start Menu. I hope I'm kidding...

--sbreck

When writing my prior entry examining my work TabletPC, I thought to take a look at what Reliability Monitor shows on my home PCs. Since I spent a lot of time starting early this morning hanging out in the living room with my 7-month-old, during a brief nap I screen-capped my Media Center PC's Reliability Monitor and pasted it into a WordPad document for later analysis. (I also confirmed that there's no good way to export the data to do something less time-consuming with it.)

Since this PC for the most part spends its entire life playing TV and, shall we say, downloaded TV, for my wife and I, its key application is ehShell.exe or the Media Center 10-foot interface. This PC has had a fresh install of Vista on it since May 26th so that is the timeframe we're working with. Here is the chart of failures:

Note that this is EVERY failure I've experienced since I put my first clean install of Vista on my Media Center PC. This PC is used almost every night to watch TV and has been on a daily reboot schedule for about six months. (It will be moved back to my office within a week as I have a Linksys DMA 2100 on order -- keep an eye on the blog for details. This will move the UI work off of this PC, and make for a MUCH quieter living room.)

Why does ehRecvr.exe crash more than ehShell? What does it even do? (I assume it is the headless service that talks to the tuners, records stuff, etc.) Seeing these stats, I do remember that frequently when I resume from standby I see that error on screen, and no real descriptive information is given. Poking around on Google (constrained by site:microsoft.com; searching any process name has become a hell of shady "spyware prevention" sites), I see that there is a hotfix for those who have more than one tuner (which I do) that patches Qdvd.dll and one related to MPEG-2 decoders. Both are that wonderful type of hotfix that require a call to Microsoft. A search against site:msdn.com shows this comment on Aaron Stebner's blog (which I subscribe to and heartily recommend); following that advice I looked for ehrecvr.log but found only a zero-byte file in C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\NetworkService\AppData\Local\Temp. I suppose these crashes will remain a mystery for now; hopefully leaving the Media Center running all the time instead of waking it up for use and letting it go back to sleep all the time, or using an extender instead of the direct UI, will reduce the problem.

Onto ehShell crashes, which are annoying because, well, you've just been booted out of the "TV" back to Windows. As per Aaron's suggestion, I found an ehshell.crash from 8:30 this morning. I happen to remember this crash because before I went to bed, I left the Media Center PC in the Video Library looking at my "TV" sharee on my primary home PC. This folder contains a lot of, uh, found TV shows encoded in a variety of ways, and occasionally my Media Center PC will crash when in this folder, attempting to index TV shows for which it may not have a codec. I resumed the PC this morning to find it in that folder, and the shell would not respond to anything. Maybe returning to a networked location that wasn't quite available yet (due perhaps to DHCP renewal delay) crapped it out? Regardless, ehshell.crash was pretty useless as all it said was "Generic failure from Win32 that did not SetLastError()" followed by a bunch of messages related to layout.

In summary, I have no idea what is causing my primary ehRecvr crash (perhaps old drivers for my tuner cards?), and I am pretty sure what causes the ehShell crashes (TV rips with esoteric codecs). Since the two crashes do not seem to occur together (according to Reliability Monitor, ehShell has not crashed since November 14th) I guess it is safe to say that, on average, my Media Center PC experiences a crash 10 times a month -- though the trend is downward lately (6 crashes per month for the last two months). Still, think about it: your TV crashing on you more than once a week, despite rebooting it EVERY DAY, is sort of like a joke you might have made 10 years ago if someone suggested that Microsoft was going to make software for TVs.

--sbreck

First, my usual disclaimer:
Sorry I am such a lackadaisical blogger. Bizarrely, my traffic is basically the same whether I blog or not -- between 70 and 90 visits a day according to Google Analytics; although lately the trend is downward. I will try to get a series of shorter posts out more often than every 60 days. This is not one of these shorter posts.

Is there no way to gather more usable data from the Reliability Monitor? I ran it at work and it had data going back for three months, but seemingly no export capability. To get at the data, I screen-captured and pasted each screenful of data into OneNote, used "Copy text from picture", pasted them into TextPad to fix and put back into tabbed columns, and then pasted them into Excel. Now I can pull statistics like the following:

...and 11 other apps crashed once.

So what information can we draw from this?

Outlook:
It's somewhat unfair to taint Outlook by problems caused by its add-ons, or the size (~2GB) of my OST file, but 13 crashes in two months (none were logged in December, it would seem) is a couple crashes a week. And also, I'm probably like everyone else in that Outlook is far and away my most used app. So I don't know if I rebuilt my OST in the December timeframe, or some add-on that was causing instability got disabled and I never noticed, but I guess it's been better lately. I'll have to revisit after running Office 2007 SP1 for awhile.

OneNote:
OneNote has no add-ons, so I would have to blame its instability on a) poor handling of the online/internet/offline transition and b) LiveSessions. I have a notebook that I use constantly that's on a file share at work, a few notebooks on SharePoint that I edit throughout the day, and maybe 15% I am in meetings taking handwritten notes with my tablet. I also spend about 15 - 20% of my time in LiveSessions with one or two colleagues, taking shared notes in meetings. Handwriting is pretty stable, I think it's the LiveSessions that cause some crashing, and some of it is just random lock-ups.

Firefox:
Before I looked at the above statistics, I would have sworn to you that, at work, far and away my least reliable application was Firefox, and I still feel that these stats don't capture every crash or lock-up that I experience with Firefox. It is telling that Windows Reliability monitor didn't log any Firefox crash for almost two months, between 9/20 and 11/15, while I guess it was on version 1.8.20070.25881 (or maybe some interim, extremely stable version between that and 1.8.20071.2514). I like to think that I have minimal add-ons in my work Firefox but I must have enough to cause a persistent instability, like freezing when I resize the window with an IE Tab page selected, or a freeze that just happens without using Firefox for awhile.

Why do I stick with Firefox because it's so unreliable? I guess my IE 7 experience was worse, or sufficiently different and lacking in functionality as compared to Firefox that it wasn't worth it. IE 7 didn't seem to have as robust a tab saving mechanism as Firefox, and it crashed often enough that a group of tabs that I meant to leave open were gone, and that really got on my nerves after awhile.

TabTip:
This is a TabletPC thing that Vista is convinced has some compatibility issue. I can't remember the error but Vista seems to periodically close it and throw some error message. Mind you, this has never happened when I'm actually in tablet mode or using tablet features, it happens when I'm doing something else altogether.

Communicator:
I don't remember this crashing, to be honest, so I don't know why.

DeskSite:
DeskSite likes to freeze up when you launch a document out of it -- it's not just a Vista problem, it happened a lot when I had XP, too. With the Vista error reporting feature turned on, most of the time I can actually find out why this is hanging -- typically it is Firefox but it can also be OneNote, Outlook, or Visio (which isn't really integrated with Interwoven yet and basically causes problems whenever it is launched).

I think I've already ranted about legal-specific software vendors, and I know this will be a popular search result because it contains the terms "Interwoven" and "SharePoint", so I will be gentle and note that despite my enmity towards the Interwoven product, its competitor (Open Text LiveLink eDOCS and whatever else they called it, formerly Hummingbird DM5) just a few days ago released their Office 2007 product. So, like, a full year after Office 2007 shipped. Shows you where the Open Text product is going -- down the toilet. (Disclaimer: The previous view is mine alone and does not represent the view of my employer)

Procmon:
If you forget about procmon and leave it running, you use up all your RAM and your computer falls to shit. Of course, you usually RUN procmon so you can figure out why something else is going to shit on your computer, so sometimes procmon is a symptom rather than a cause. Regardless, that's what's going on with my 4 procmon crashes, I think.

SPCSCM.exe:
I don't even know what the hell this is so I looked it up to find that it's the Sprint PCS Connection Manager. I delivered (and then took back two months later) an EVDO card to my colleague and so of course I installed the software for use on the trips to and from Chicago. I have a Treo 700p with PDAnet and the PCS software, despite the 3 crashes, was like 300 times more reliable than that piece of shit PDAnet. I'm glad I can get Internet access for free and only expensed $25 or whatever to my company. But I'd way rather not have to spend 20 minutes fucking with, and ultimately rebooting, my laptop to get stupid PDAnet to work. As I have said before, PDAnet is better than not having any Internet access, but not by much.

The rest:
I realize I'm detailing the apps that crashed on my work computer, which is inherently a fool's errand to begin with. But since I started it I might as well finish:

Visio: Visio 2007 Interwoven integration is non-existent, but for some reason it is enough to leave Visio.exe in memory, using 50% CPU and fucking up all other Interwoven calls, until you kill it. Hence the three crashes. I like to think that I am really good at Visio, but with 2007, if I can avoid using it, I will.

Excel: Excel is usually really good so I'm surprised to see these two crashes. I blame Interwoven for this, also. Maybe unfairly ;)

Enteo NetInstall: This company has like three support people in the U.S. and after two years of terrible service my company has ceased recommending its products. I try, on my computer, not to run NetInstall but there are some apps our IT people packaged that I need so I have to from time to time. This then leads to the inventory app running up my CPU utilization until the app is killed.

I was going to check my home PC against this, as I would think the results are very different, but I didn't realize how long this blog entry would turn out to be. I think that, in summary:

• Reliability Monitor would be even more useful if it could export its data to help you pinpoint your worst-behaved apps
  
• I think Reliability Monitor misses some crashes and hangs
  
• Firefox is totally unreliable on my work PC but is excellent at home with the same add-ons plus a dozen more; WTF?
  
• Interwoven DeskSite can cause unreliability
  
• Microsoft products crash the most :D
  

Back soon,

--sbreck

I have blogged before about my problems with my work laptop, a Lenovo ThinkPad X60 Tablet, but not so much about the probably more serious problems I've been struggling with on my relatively new (May 2007) Dell XPS 710. The XPS 710 is both the most expensive home computer I've ever bought and the most problematic. Put succinctly, it frequently locks up, hangs, freezes -- whatever you want to call it -- and I have to hard power it off. As I was using this blog entry as research to build my tech support call, I noted the following symptoms:

• Things weren't too bad until I applied the latest series of patches, specifically the two Performance and Reliability patches
  
• Lockups have occurred while searching from the Start Menu and choosing See All Results
  
• Often a lockup would start with one app, and then spread to the rest -- I've seen this with things like filemon on multiple Vista machines and figured that was a cause, but at work I've seen Outlook and OneNote hold each other open and then get all the other apps to join their freeze-up party
  
• I had more than one lockup when changing "Use this folder type as a template" and checking "Also apply this template to all subfolders" (as an aside, I wish I could default this across the board to "All items" -- what can I say, I'm just used to sorting by date)
  
• Maybe it was a bad hard drive -- I began to notice Event ID 129 warning messages from nvstor32 in the event viewer stating "Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort0, was issued." Often these preceded the lock-up.
  
• I also saw ACPI Event ID 6 messages stating "IRQARB: ACPI BIOS does not contain an IRQ for the device in PCI slot 2, function 0." Besides slot 2, this also happened with slot 5, slot 4, slot 19, and slot 24.
  
• Switching in and out of full-screen mode in Unreal Tournament 2004 could lock up the machine
  

This latter led me on a quest that I think was a dead end but I'm not entirely sure. When I first bought the PC and ran it for a number of days straight I had the occasional lock-up. This seemed to go away, maybe with successful nVidia (graphics) driver updates, but after applying the Performance and Reliability patch (I think) it caused the lockups again, and so I started looking at video card temperature as a possible reason. I downloaded MonitorView and nTune and found that my nVidia 8600 GTS did in fact seem to be running pretty hot (124°F from a cold start in 2D mode), and also noticed that the fan was at its lowest setting. Using nTune, I could set the fan to the maximum and achieve a temperature of 115°F in 2D, though it would increase to 130°F or so during games. Turning the fan up and decreasing the GTS's temperature seemed to reduce lockups, though I would still have a few a day. And nTune was annoying, because it couldn't automatically set the temperature, so I put it in Startup and manually set it every time. What a pain in the ass to set this four or whatever times a day, and still have lockups.

After some searching on the nvstor32 129 errors, I found this MS Forums post and follow-on searches turned up this blog entry, which pointed me in the right direction. I turned off Native Command Queuing in the "nVidia nForce Serial ATA Controller" for my hard drive to see if that helped, and so far I have had my computer on for almost 30 hours without a freeze and reboot, whereas it hadn't lasted two hours for the last few weeks. I assume that by posting this I tempt fate and perhaps my computer will "hear" me and begin to freeze again, but hopefully others who have this problem will see my blog post and have similar success.

Now to figure out what exactly is Native Command Queuing, and find out why it would cause such a problem and why it only became such a problem recently. Did a Performance and Reliability patch turn it on? Did some nVidia driver update do it? Why was I plagued with this? Would Dell have known if I had just called them? So many questions, so little time in the day to answer them…

--sbreck

technorati: Vista Dell XPS 710 NVIDIA

I recognize the shocking amount of time that has passed since I last blogged. Cut me some slack, we have a 2-month-old baby named Oscar now. Anyway, here are some little short rants to get out of the blogging standstill:

Palm sucks:

• Why does my dad's Verizon phone that he got for free have a pretty cool and useful GPS function using the built-in locator, but we Treo owners have to spend hundreds for external GPS? He paid nothing, and I (actually, my company) paid $585 for my phone (upgrade from 650 to 700p out of contract), so why am I the one who has no GPS function? Palm deserves a beating.
  
• I installed the 1.10 update so that my Treo wouldn't freeze up searching for a signal when I was on the subway. And now it's even worse. Palm, you suck. I'm switching to Blackberry as soon as I possibly can. Your platform is dead.
  
• Speaking of Palm sucking, that Foleo thing is the most useless thing that they could possibly have done. Apple has an new convergence device coming out with a radical new user interface? How can we compete? Oh, I know, a little toy laptop thing that has to be connected to a Treo to work. Guess what? I have a $2200 laptop that has to go with me when I leave the office, so I can use Microsoft Outlook and Office, Interwoven document management, DTE time entry, and a browser. I can also take notes on it because it's a TabletPC. I don't need another slightly smaller and lighter laptop that runs half-assed versions of those apps on Linux.
  

Computers suck:

• I am still plagued with OneNote sync problems with SharePoint ("This section contains changes that cannot be synced because access to the section file is denied. Correct the file permissions or save your copy of this section elsewhere."). Apparently this is a known issue, and you can only find out about it by reading the microsoft.public.onenote newsgroup.
  
• McAfee SecurityCenter came bundled with my Dell and it is really annoying. Most annoying is when it downloads an update requiring a restart, which causes a loud bell sound and popup what seems like every 20 minutes. Can't they take a cue from Windows Updates, which pops up a balloon with a gentle "pop" sound? This throws me out of all-important Unreal Tournament 2004 games and makes me wonder why I have the program in the first place. I've already turned off the firewall (it didn't usually ask what to block, it just blocked, and the rules are too deeply hidden in the shitty user interface). And, yeah, I turned off the firewall of my own free will, so stop giving me grief about it every time I start my computer. Also, the virus scan finds the same two virii from some 8-year-old backups that it can't clean, plus a dozen cookies, so how much protection do I need and can this thing even give it to me? Verdict: McAfee SecurityCenter sucks.
  
• I grow weary of Vista on my ThinkPad X60 Tablet. The laptop is awesomely fast and 1400x1050 on a crystal-clear 12" screen is the best thing ever, but at least once a week I have to hard-power it off because it crapped out while hibernating, or refuses to come out of sleep mode. Also, could the stupid bastard remember for once that I like to extend my desktop to the left, onto the other display? When docked, additional display on left; when not docked, normal screen. There. Was that so hard? Then why do I have a little screen adventure every time I put the laptop in the dock? Perhaps both of these issues are related to Lenovo drivers and not Vista. Regardless, it annoys me as a person that docks and undocks the laptop and takes it places. Did XP Tablet suck that badly? Why do I use Vista, anyway? These are things I shouldn't be thinking as someone Microsoft thinks will be driving Vista and Office 2007 upgrades in my vertical market.
  

I cannot promise I will blog again soon, but I will try.

--sbreck

technorati: Palm, Treo 700p, Foleo, OneNote 2007, SharePoint, McAfee SecurityCenter, Vista, TabletPC, ThinkPad X60

Sorry, semi-faithful readers, for being such a bad blogger. I keep writing these long things and then polishing them continually and then the next thing I know it's been another month without me posting anything. Also, this was a pretty busy month work-wise. Anyway, here's what I've been thinking about:

• New X60 Tablet: I got a new tablet, a Lenovo X60. It's totally sweet. This is the blog entry I've been writing in little bits for a few weeks. I will be blogging about it next because it seems people found my X41 Vista install entry helpful. Also, people who subscribed to this blog because they liked Tablet PCs are probably wondering if I still use a tablet, or else they unsubscribed. I wouldn't know. Anyway, the tablet features of Vista are very good and I look forward to writing about them.
  
• OneNote/SharePoint: Still the most popular search term leading people to this blog. I kept having my sections suddenly get "access denied" and turn read-only on me and it was driving me nuts. Weirdly, this never happened on my home machine. Then, trying to fix something else, I reset my settings in IE and all of a sudden I was being prompted for a SharePoint password instead of being booted out of my section. It was a refreshing change. Please see the comments of this entry on Jeff Borlik's blog for details. This entry helped me understand what might be happening in a way I never would have. Unfortunately, today in a meeting the problem returned, and I had some trouble fixing it. I have learned that I can usually exit OneNote, log out of SharePoint and close the browser, reopen the browser to my SharePoint page, open the section from SharePoint, and then the OneNote section will often resync properly. I just learned tonight that I have to close Outlook as well, because it too is integrated with SharePoint, and when you switch from office (connecting to SharePoint locally, or via NTLM authentication) to home (over the internet using basic authentication), the SharePoint authentication gets messed up. Anyway, I think SharePoint authentication is super picky and making it so that you have to reauthenticate frequently is annoying but prevents lockouts on your sections.
  
• Vista Media Center on the hp z552: My Media Center PC is spiraling off into unreliability, and my wife is starting to lose her patience. I have it set to the shittiest non-interleaved picture possible, shut down every process that could be shut down, turned off Aero and anything that actually looks nice in the non-10' user interface, and still I have jerky video if the Media Center decides it's sort of busy (like, if you are watching a time-shifted program while something else is recording, or even watching a program while I am copying some files from my computer to the Media Center PC). It's annoying as hell. Now, we're sometimes seeing problems where it turns on, but is unresponsive to the wireless keyboard or remote or even a USB mouse that we've started to keep handy to try and reestablish control. Another neat feature is that sometimes it will make a bunch of those "doo-DEE, dee-DOO" sounds that mean it is finding and then losing devices, over and over again. I guess I will have to blow away the box and install real Vista. (I have RC2 now, which I upgraded from the factory XP MCE 2005 load.) However, I keep reading that HP has some drivers that are only on the factory-loaded machine's C: drive, and last time I was unsuccessful in Ghosting the machine, so I'm worried that my keyboard and remote will not work if I install from scratch. Also, I'm cheap, so I'm only buying the Home Premium Upgrade, so I have to do some complicated shit to install from scratch. Plus, stupid HP only has XP drives for the thing. Come on, the parts are probably similar to a bunch of new machines that run Vista, why have they frozen their old z552 page in time? (Aside: I went to the Dell site to look for Vista drivers for my over-3-year-old XPS Gen 2 prove a point that HP abandoned their old hardware while Dell did not, but the only Dell Vista drivers on the downloads page were like BIOS, diagnostics, and two monitor drivers. So Dell does the same thing, although maybe not with machines newer than three years old.) I hope the clean reload fixes my problems (this blog entry gives me hope), otherwise I think I am going to reload the factory image of XP MCE 2005 and see how that works for the basic stuff we need the Media Center to do. I had thought of buying a cool half-height ATI X1600 with an HDMI connector to future-proof the box, but I worry that it will overwhelm the power supply and cause the loud-ass annoying fans to run constantly instead of just half the time. Another option is to get an XBox360 to use as an extender so that the Media Center PC can come back in my room to keep things quieter in the living room, but I've heard that the XBox360 is pretty loud, also (though maybe that was just the DVD -- and I don't think we've watched one in three years). And of course there is always the option of giving up completely and going with a DVR from the cable company. At least then we'd get HD :/
• Daylight Saving Time changes: I feel like this is the coming apocalypse and I couldn't be more annoyed at Microsoft. How long have people known about the March 11th time zone change? Far longer than when the first patches arrived a few weeks ago. Those were just in time to royally screw up everyone's calendars, and leave you in a situation where some people were unpatched and were sending you appointments that showed up at a different time for you than for them. When you have a software company saying things like "Please print out your calendars" and "Make sure you include the time of the appointment in the subject line when sending to others" and "Verbally confirm all appointments", that is basically like them saying, "sorry, we are complete idiots and could not have fucked this up any more than we did." Seriously, how can we be printing out calendars and verbally confirming appointments in the year 2007? If all these patches went out a year ago, which would be six months after the Energy Policy Act passed, or even six months ago (a year after the Act), pretty much people would be patched right now, at least to the degree that TWO FUCKING COMPUTERS WOULD AGREE ON WHETHER AN APPOINTMENT IS AT 1PM, NOON, OR 2PM. That this is not the case with 10 days left to go is evidence that Microsoft should be beaten for not addressing this. In my last blog entry, I ranted about the document management vendors being poorly prepared for Office 2007. This is even more inexcusable because like hundreds of millions more people use Outlook calendars on Exchange servers than use law firm specific DMSes. Thanks, Microsoft, for three weeks no one will be on time to any meetings, or court appearances, or deadlines that they set for themselves, or what have you. You have failed. (As an aside, it sort of amuses me to think of the possibility that for these three weeks no one will go to meetings, a sort of "National Quit Screwing Around in Meetings and Just Do Your Work Month", and American productivity will leap to new heights. Only complainers like me, who will pathetically try to go to our silly little meetings only to get annoyed when no one is there for our "weekly status meeting" or "bi-weekly project task list review", will not gain from this problem. And, the economy could start roaring ahead from all the cool inventions and innovations people come up with when they don't spend half their days in meetings. On the other hand, email servers could collapse under the strain of all the extra emails people will send because they are not in meetings. Anyway, you never know what will happen. Maybe I will eat my words, including all those bad curse words I put above. Ask me on April 8th(?), if I have not dug myself into an underground bunker by then.)
  

  
  

--sbreck

My wife pointed out that I was rapidly approaching the extremely low bar of one post per month I had set for myself, so I thought I'd jump the gun and blog about what I've been working on for the last few weeks. As I have blogged about ad infinitum, I have been running the full Office 2007 on my home PC since May, and Outlook and OneNote 2007 on my work tablet since early August. Since about November, I have seen my colleagues bite the bullet and load Vista on their primary work machines and complain about it. Then when we got RTM code back in mid-December the complaints started to turn to admiration, and people I worked with a lot started pressuring me.

"But I've got a shitty 4200RPM hard drive in my tablet," I said to myself. "Only 1GB of RAM is not enough for Vista." "My company is working on a standard Vista deployment, and then I will be able to take advantage of it and not have to set up my own laptop and lose a week's billable time." "Those bumbling idiots at Interwoven still haven't written any usable integration between Office 2007 and DeskSite."

(Can I take a moment to complain about this last one? How the hell can Interwoven not have any integration with Word and Excel 2007 two months after the RTM came out? What, exactly, have they been working on for the last 12 months? It's not just Interwoven -- Open Text (Hummingbird) and World Software (Worldox) won't have any integration for months, either. AND THIS IS THE MAJOR SOFTWARE THAT THEIR PRODUCTS SHOULD INTEGRATE WITH. The primary function of document management software is to, when you press File\Open in Microsoft Word or Excel, pop open a window that allows you to search the DMS repository and shows you recent documents you've opened from said repository. That this function does not work and is not expected to work for months, in any software from any law firm document management vendor, is a complete joke given the outlandish per seat and yearly maintenance that law firms pay. You know, a lot of law firms are considering throwing out their DMS vendor and just going with SharePoint due to their annoyance with substandard DMS products. That Office is going to be in retail stores on Tuesday, but DMS integration isn't going to be around until the 2nd quarter at least, just gives more credence that these vendors deserve to be thrown out on their asses.) (Caveat: Interwoven OffSite is a brilliant product and in general, DeskSite, Hummingbird DM, and Worldox have far more advanced functionality than SharePoint 2007 as a document management system. This, I suppose, is why we keep putting up with these delays from them.)

OK, totally out-of-the-blue rant over. After all that, why did I go Vista? Simple -- my hard drive died the morning after a flight back from Chicago. Using all the various safe modes all still refused to load the HKLM\Software hive from the registry. IBM Disk Diagnostics showed that I had a bunch of bad sectors. Faced with setting up everything all over again only to still be on XP Tablet Edition 2005 was just too depressing. So I loaded Vista. Here are some of my notes from the load in case you decide to do the same.

First off, Lenovo has added a ton of Vista drivers in the last week that weren't there when I set the laptop up. Go to the site if you are missing something. Almost all of it is there now. You can also try the Vista beta driver page for those things that aren't there yet. In some cases, XP drivers do work. (I warn you -- none of them change the fact that the X41 Tablet has a super-shitty 1.0 Vista Experience rating ;)

Now, in no particular order, are some challenges I faced in the install and my fixes. I hope it helps you if you are doing the same thing.

• I had an error "No sound device installed" but installed the Audio Driver for W2K/XP. This install threw its own error ("This operating system is not supported by this software"), so I tried to "reinstall using recommended settings" which applied XP compatibility and made it work. On login, I got an error "No ADI codec driver is installed" but audio is working. I went into Device Manager, opened up the SoundMax Integrated Audio device and let Windows search for an updated driver online; it installed something and suggested I reboot. On restart, the error was gone.
  
• I had one Unknown Device listed, but extensive Googling showed that it was the "ThinkPad PM Device". Installing the Modem driver (Conexant AC97) got rid of the Unknown Device.
  
• Only recently did I get screen rotation working properly. It had always worked through the Windows Mobility Manager (right-click the battery icon) but you will want to check out the Tablet Shortcut Menu, and click Settings to get it to change orientation automatically. I originally thought that "Active Rotate" was kind of cool but eventually got rid of it because it took a long time to rotate the screen and sometimes did so unnecessarily.
  
• I read somewhere that having the round Vista start button peeking out over a single-height taskbar caused some sort of moderately expensive graphics operation to occur when different windows came up and when orientation was switched. That sort of sounded like bullshit but I did give up a precious few dozen pixels at the bottom of my screen to try it out and I have to say, things seem slightly faster with the taskbar at double-height. (And, I have room for all 12 Quick Launch icons.)
  
• I am using ReadyBoost with a 1GB Kingston DataTraveler U3. I can't really tell what all I get out of it but I do think Vista in general, with the USB stick, is faster than XP Tablet was on this PC. My coworkers swear that ReadyBoost works really well for them.
  
• Fingerprint reader:
  
  • I installed Trusted Platform Module, it didn't require a restart required, but I wasn't sure what that got me -- I still had a "Biometric Coprocessor" showing as an unknown device.
    
  • Still no login with fingerprints, so I gave Fingerprint Driver and Software a try -- no love.
    
  • Then, I found a link to the beta ThinkVantage Fingerprint Software 5.6… it works like a dream, and is much better than the previous version. It's just more reliable to see your finger swipes, and also always passes through the fingerprint from BIOS to login screen, whereas the older software I used was pretty hap-hazard about it.
    
  • The real test will come in a few days when my password expires. In the old software, that would mean I'd have to delete all my fingerprints and recreate them because it didn't handle the password change well.
    
• Hotkeys (mute, volume, etc.)
  
  • Found the beta page and downloaded the Hotkey Features Driver, it didn't seem to do anything
    
  • Strange, they do work, but are not integrated with the Vista volume. So when I unmuted in Vista, it didn't work, but when I pressed the hardware volume key above the keyboard, it did work. So it's working, I guess.
    
  • Update: one of the latest batch of installs (Vista System Interface Driver and the Tablet buttons) seems to have restored the on screen display and tied the buttons to the Vista speaker systray icon. So everything is cool now.
    
• Wireless
  
  • Originally I grabbed the Intel driver for 2000/XP and downloaded; had to install in compatibility mode
    
  • Later, an updated driver was released on 1/24, so I downloaded and installed it.
    
• Power Manager
  
  • The 1/22 update is Vista-aware now, and it's pretty cool -- all the settings are in the Power Plan now. I tried to dial some stuff back when on battery and jack everything up when on AC. Originally I was on High Performance with some tweaks to conserve battery, and I have to say that my battery life was not very good -- well under 3 hours whereas I could get close to 5 with XP Tablet. Now that there's a new ThinkPad Power Management Driver and some sort of new Vista System Interface thing, I will see how it goes.
    
• You can install the Active Protection Center if you like. I did. The Vista version works fine. The XP version worked OK also except the system tray icon would not appear.
  
• Getting the tablet buttons (rotate, Ctrl-Alt-Del, etc.) to work was a bit of a struggle:
  
  • Tablet Shortcut Menu wasn't a Vista program but I installed it anyway, it doesn't work for the buttons
    
  • I installed the X60 Tablet version; no luck either
    
  • A new Shortcut Menu was put up for the X60 and X41, so I tried that -- didn't add button functionality either
    
  • Finally, a 1/22 Tablet Button Driver worked like a charm.
    
• I installed the BIOS Update but can so far report no differences, good or bad
  
• I had a problem with my VPN disconnecting as soon as I attempted to send data over it; I unchecked "use remote gateway" and things started working again. This is OK for us since we are a small shop and devote 20 or so IPs from the server IP block to VPN clients, but I suppose you would have to troubleshoot further if you were more properly set up subnet-wise.
  

So what's left and what doesn't work?

• Presentation Director is not Vista-compatible and doesn't run. Right now, the Fn-F7 key combination is not doing what I want it to and I would very much like to get this resolved. (It switches from LCD-only to VGA-only to LCD-in-800x600-and-VGA and then back to LCD-only. All of those options are shit. I want LCD-in-1024x768-and-VGA-in-the-same like I always had before.)
  
• I can't get the hard drive firmware update to work -- it fails logged in as me, and it froze the whole machine when I was logged in as my local admin user
  
• I would like to load the IBM stuff on the 5GB partition, but there appears to be no way to do this. Partly this is my fault because I greedily ripped open the replacement hard drive and started loading Vista (after creating a 5GB partition) before my recovery CDs showed up. But I had hoped that an option existed to load just the partition, and that's not the case. I'll have to Ghost the partition from one of my colleagues with an X41.
  
• I don't see a version of PDAnet for Vista and the Treo 700p out yet. I will try it but I suspect it will not be easy. This is a bit of a bummer as I've got a long business trip to Chicago coming up at the end of this week.
  
• I would like to get Vista to show underlined letters for keyboard shortcuts. It is inconsistent in doing so.
  
• I would like to have pressing the power button prompt me what I would like to do, instead of immediately doing one of sleep, hibernate, or shut down. This was an option in XP which I miss. Between meetings, I will stand by; when I leave the office or client site, I hibernate; and when I install things or have problems, I restart or shut down. All initiated by pressing the power button and choosing S, H, R, etc. No more.
  
• For all my complaints, I do have limited Interwoven DeskSite (and OffSite) integration working. I still cannot get File\Open to work, but if I launch all documents from DeskSite, they will open in the appropriate application and are saved and checked back in when closed. New versions have to be instantiated from DeskSite. I am told that FileSite does not work with Outlook 2007 but I am not fond of FileSite -- as a traveler who uses Outlook with RPC over HTTPS, I find FileSite is too stupid to understand that I can be online and switch to offline, or that I can be online but it cannot contact its DMS server. I sort of miss FileSite (its primary advantages were that the integrated apps launched super fast because it told them whether they were online or offline, and also you could insert documents or document links from within a message you were replying to) but its confusion when you hibernate online and then resume offline made it too difficult to use. And now it doesn't work, anyway.
  
• I can't get Juniper Network Connect to work, and Juniper's site does not easily let me find updated versions if there are any. (In the transition from Neoteris to Netscreen to Juniper, my partner registration got lost.) Secure Application Manager does work (so I can use DeskSite and DTE) but Network Connect is good to use to sync up my offline files (and some OneNote files) at the client before heading to the airport. Since our PPTP VPN doesn't work through most client firewalls, Network Connect is important, particularly now that I've had a hard drive crash and almost lost notes from a meeting (fortunately you can copy over a .onecache file from one machine to another and it will sync up cached changes perfectly, even if you've already been using another cache file). I will always sync everything before moving my laptop from one building to another from now on.
  
• Outlook is flaky in switching orientation -- sometimes it knows to move the reading pane from right to bottom, sometimes not.
  

Other than that, I'm actually pretty happy with Vista. It seems faster to log in and run, and the tablet features seem to be a bit more stable (e.g. TIP popping up and staying up, handwriting recognition), I already prefer the new start menu search function, the look is slicker (even without Aero which I am too underpowered to run), and I am of course liking full Office. It took a long time for all the drivers to come out but now that they are, most of the machine-specific features are working for me now. I will update this post or post links to an updated post if I can get some of the outstanding issues working. Please feel free to comment if you have questions, and I will try and help you if I can. If you have suggestions, I would really appreciate them as I've not exhaustively searched these (except the PDAnet and Juniper Network Connect issues).

Hope this helps you,

--sbreck

technorati: Vista, Tablet PC, ThinkPad X41, Interwoven, Office 2007