Category: Computer

So during this Paypal/Newegg promotion, I decided to pick up some hardware. I’ve been meaning to build a new file server for some time, but didn’t really have the resource (money and time) to do it. I did have 3 Seagate 500GB 7200.10 Hard Drives sitting around just collecting dust. With the $20 off $100 discount, I saw it as a prime opportunity to pick some stuff out. Newegg not having tax for us Washingtonians was an added bonus.

I ended getting another Seagate 500GB 7200.10 for $80, making it the 4th. That means in my RAID5 array, I’ll have a total of 1.5TB.

I also picked up a mobo+cpu. The main criteria for my new motherboard was that it needed to have 6 SATA ports since I plan on adding additional hdds as I need more. But the 6 SATA ports conflicted with the fact that none of those motherboards came with on-board video, forcing me to now look for a cheap PCI-E video card. I wouldn’t have mind on-board video since a file server doesn’t really need that great of a graphics card. The motherboard I ended picking up was BIOSTAR TForce TF570SLI with a cheap AMD Sempron 64 3000+ Manila 1.6GHz. After the $15 motherboard rebate, this combo would have cost me $85.

I also picked up a stick of HP 1GB PC5300 DDR2 RAM from TechOnWeb for $20AR.

The final thing I need is a cheap PCI-E video card and Ungsunghero’s made a good suggestion of pickup one up from FS/T (for sale/trade) forums. Since I don’t need something need or great, getting a used and cheap PCI-E video card would be the best option.

I just installed my Samsung ML-2010 yesterday, which I purchased about 1.5 years ago. My trusty Minolta PagePro 1250W has been running low on toner for the past month and shaking the toner cartridge no longer worked. I guess it’s about time. I mean I have been using it for about 4 years already, since junior year of college, and that was just the starter toner (no refills, no new toner cartridge).

After college, I realized I don’t print much anymore. With PDF printers, I hardly ever need hard copies of anything. I think the majority of things my printer has printed over the last 2 years has been stuff related to rebates.

The Samsung ML-2010 is actually rather nice. It has a 1200 x 600 dpi resolution and can print up to 22ppm (page per minute). It was extremely easy to setup. Just plugged in the existing USB and power cables (didn’t even have to open the new power cable) and my file server detected a new printer. Unfortunately, it didn’t have the drivers available, so I had to download them off Samsung’s site. But after that, sharing it, test print, and printing over network all worked flawlessly.

Speaking of USB cable, it didn’t actually come with one, which I always find very stupid, considering the cost of a USB cable is probably less than $1. Ungsunghero says that retail stores probably pressure the manufacturers into not including the cable or else they won’t sell it or recommend it to potential buyers, since they probably sell USB cables at a 500% markup, maybe even more. But that makes you wonder how DVD players or speaker systems are allowed to come with cables. I mean they don’t come with the best cable available (*cough* PS3 *cough* HDMI *cough*), but they do come with a cable that can at least prove it works. When I buy a printer and take it home, there’s nothing I can do to even test it if I don’t have the cable to connect it to my computer. I mean, if I bought an OEM printer, I can understand it’s just the printer itself and no cables will be provided, but this is a RETAIL printer… Sigh…

Back to the printer. Ungsunghero claims that it’s also very easy to refill toner cartridge. However, I do remember him telling a story about how he was coughing out black smoke.

I would include a picture, but I’m too lazy tonight. That was referring to a picture the printer and not Ungsunghero coughing black smoke. But if you do have a picture of Ungsunghero coughing out black smoke, do send it this way.

I’ve decided to list my old laser printer for sale:
Windows Live Expo
Craigslist

and see if anyone bites.

While chatting with Ungsunghero, he brought up the news about how laser printers are a health risk due the fact they pollute the air. There was a recent report published in Environmental Science & Technology: Particle Emission Characteristics of Office Printers. This story was covered by both Ars Technica and BBC NEWS.

A group was comparing indoor air quality (offices) vs outdoor air quality of urban areas by comparing the amount of tiny particles in the air that can lodge into your lung and cause damage. They noticed there were fewer particles during non-business hours in the office, however once business resumed, the number of particles rapidly increased up to 5x the amount of outdoor particles. Through a process of elimination, they were able to pinpoint the origin of the particles to the laser printer.

Of course not all laser printers are equal and after a thorough test of 60 laser printers, they’ve broken them down into 4 categories: non-emitter, low level emitter, middle level emitter, high level emitter

They’ve deterimined that the particles that the laser printer shoots out are actually tiny particles of toner or toner related material. The study also found out new toner cartridges tend to emit more particles and the amount of printed on the page also made a difference. Printing an image which covered more area of the paper released more particles into the air.

Anyway, why did I bring this story up? I took the following image when I got my tower fan, but I thought I’d recycle it here.

My laser printer is situated right next to my air filter, out of pure coincidence. It was probably due to the fact it was the only place where there was a spot big enough for it. I wonder if the HEPA filter is good enough to capture the particles…

My laser printer is generally off since I don’t print that much and even on idle, laser printer pulls in quite a bit of electricity.

So after a recent crash of Windows Media Center, I noticed all the sound effects disappeared, the startup sound, the clicks when you navigate, and the beep when you tell it to start playing. At first I thought maybe the cable was lose, but sound still worked. Playing a video had audio and Winamp was able to stream music off the internet.

I tried restarting my Windows Vista box hoping that would fix it, but upon launching Windows Media Center, I noticed the startup sound still didn’t play. Launching videos from inside Windows Media Center did in fact have audio. I went into settings to see if I might’ve accidentally unchecked the sound effects box. But nope, it was still checked. I tried unchecking it, saving the settings, and then re-checking it, but that didn’t work either.

So I started searching online for solutions, but there really wasn’t much to work with.

Solution:
Interestingly enough, I was playing with the volume control and mixer and noticed this unlabeled volume control. I wasn’t mute or anything, but was set to pretty much the bottom. Since I’m using digital audio output, the only 2 volume controls I have are main and digital out. I had no idea where this 3rd control is and it didn’t appear to have an icon or name associated. Anyway, I dragged it to the 80% mark like the others and suddenly my Windows Media Center sound effects started working again. I noticed when Windows Media Center is open, my volume control gets an extra column with the green Media Center icon.

I never knew I was so addicted to those beeps. I guess Tivo people have the same problem with the fast forward and rewind beeps, where switching to your local cable provider’s DVR just doesn’t cut it.

Glad it’s fixed now and hopefully if someone out there is hitting this problem where the sound effects are gone, they’ll be able to find this page and quickly fix the problem.

So a ton of new toys arrived yesterday:

• Onkyo HT-SR800 7.1 Channel Home Theater
• Nexus Wide TV Stand
• Lenmar Spare Battery for my Canon SD1000

I was even contemplating of working from home on Friday, but I had some work that needed to be completed.

Anyway, my entire body (arm, thighs, back, etc) was really sore today. Almost didn’t want to get up. These boxes were heavy. One thing I found out about living alone is that it sucks to have no one immediately around to help you carry heavy things. I even ended up taking apart the Onkyo box and and bringing it into the house piece by piece.

It was a good thing I purchased the TV stand last week. It’s no longer available at Costco. The cheapest I can find it now is $250 at Target and Stacks and Stacks, and I picked it up at Costco for $190 + tax shipped with lifetime warranty.

First thing I had to do was build the TV stand:

I actually had trouble moving the TV over onto the new stand. It was really heavy. I even removed the speakers (which I won’t be using anymore) to make it lighter. At first I was thinking of just putting it onto the floor and then hoisting it back up onto the new stand. After trying to lift it up myself, I decided it was a no go. I then parked the 2 TV stands side by side and slowly edged the LCD TV and then in one quick motion, moved the TV onto the new stand because it was shorter in height.

I carried the old stand down to the storage room and there it’ll stay until I find a nice family that’ll take it. It’s actually a sturdy little beast, but unfortunately won’t be able to hold both my Media PC and my receiver. I then pushed the new TV stand to where it’ll probably end up to check out how it’ll look.

Next came the interesting part, setting up the Onkyo HT-SR800. There was a giant subwoofer, 3 mid-size front speakers and 4 smaller rear and side speakers. This was a 7.1 setup, one of the features I was looking for. Another feature I needed HDMI. However, do note, I believe this receiver only supports upto HDMI 1.2, which means it doesn’t process audio signals via HDMI (HDMI 1.3). That means if you want audio with HDMI, you have to associate it to either digital optical, digital coaxial, or analog composite.

Hooking up the wires was fun, though I found out later that the included “speaker terminal tool” was really a tool to help me twist the speaker screws. Oh well, it wasn’t too bad with just the finders. The included speaker cables were 10-11ft for the front ones, and 30ft for the side and rear ones. Since I didn’t want speaker wires crawling across the floor, I had to wrap it around my sofa. Here’s the current layout:

The layout is actually drawn to scale where 2 pixels = 1″. The little black dots represent speakers. I didn’t include the center speaker, but it’s located immediately underneath the TV. 30ft of speaker was barely enough to reach the side right speaker and has to run across the bottom of my fireplace. Also, the side and rear speakers are on the floor and the couch blocks a lot of the sound coming out.

That’s why I decided to pick up some speaker stands, speaker cable, and some other stuff (optical toslink cable and component cables) to complete the setup. Of course whenever cables are concerned, MonoPrice is my preferred store. I can’t believe how inexpensive their speaker stands are. $12 for a pair: Speaker Stand – Silver (SS-01) – Set of 2. There aren’t that many reviews on the silver one, but you can check out the reviews on the black version.

I only had 1 optical toslink cable which I had used before to connect my Xbox 360 to my computer. However, since my LCD TV didn’t have optical in, I haven’t bother setting it up. Now that my receiver has 2 optical toslink inputs, I can connect both my computer and Xbox 360 to the optical toslink port. As you can see, the 1st thing I tested was my Media PC:

Unfortunately I ran into problems. First of all, I hadn’t figure out how to configure the which audio input to use at this point. After reading the manual a bit, I figured out how to set up that association. I had a video playing in the background in the meantime. However, there was still no audio. I thought maybe I needed to enable digital output as in XP, but I was unfamiliar with Vista’s new audio setup and it took me awhile to find it. Well, I actually found the option in the Realtek HD Audio Manager software that came with my motherboard. However, even after setting the digital output as the default audio device, the movie that was still playing still didn’t output sound.

I then tried connecting the Xbox 360 to the optical port and sound immediately came out, so that ruled out any potential problems with the receiver or the cable. I looked at the optical out on the PC and there was red light coming out and if I connected the optical cable to it, you could see the other end light up.

I’m not exactly sure what popped into my head, but I thought about restarting the video and suddenly it worked and sound was coming out! It must’ve been because the video player started playing when the it was still associated to the analog output and set that as the device to output audio to. The application needed to be restarted to switch to the new audio output device.

The rest of the setup was just putting all the equipment onto the TV stand, putting the TV into the perfect angle for viewing, and making the cables look nice.

Cleaning up was mostly moving the big pieces of boxes down to storage or throwing them away. All the little styrofoam bits was picked up by my Roomba after I told it to start vacuuming.

This setup even included a mic which helps calibrate the receiver. That part was cool and it actually looks like it’s doing some heavy calculation as this setup portion takes about 5-10 minutes to complete. It would make beeping sounds from all the speakers one at a time and you have to repeat this process from 3 different locations. I’ll have to recalculate it when my speaker stands arrive, but it’ll do for now. It’s nice to be in sound heaven.

So with Microsoft’s fiscal year ending, I decided to check out the Microsoft Wireless Entertainment Desktop 7000. It was a $100 investment (not a cheap keyboard/mouse combo), but I thought worse case scenario, I’ll just give this to my parents back home, since their media center wireless mouse and keyboard are rather short ranged.

The regular wireless mouse and keyboards (using wifi/radio frequencies) have about a 6ft range. Infrared (the media center remote and keyboard) has a longer ranger, but are less sensitive and requires a direct line of sight. So I decided to that my next media center keyboard would have to be a bluetooth device.

Derek and I’ve been checking out different keyboards. The ones that we’ve been looking at include:

• Logitech diNovo Edge
• Wireless Entertainment Desktop 7000
• Wireless Entertainment Desktop 8000

The diNovo Edge was sort of pricey, but the others weren’t cheap themselves. However, being a Microsoft employee, we get discounts on most hardware. Since the 8000 hasn’t been released yet, I decided to get the 7000 and check it out.

I’m going to be focusing mostly on the keyboard since for the media center, I don’t really find the mouse that useful. Plus the fact that the keyboard comes with a navigational pad (think touch pad), it makes the mouse even more useless in my case.

Although the keyboard isn’t split for ergonomics, the curved keyboard isn’t that bad. I still position my hands as if it was a split keyboard. The keyboard is super light and easy to carry around. Unfortunately, the keyboard itself isn’t rechargeable. It uses 4 AA batteries (included) and I don’t really have any idea how long it’ll last. There’s an on off switch on the back of the keyboard and I usually turn it off when I’m not using it, so I’m guessing the batteries would last for years, since I don’t really use the media center PC as my main computer.

The mouse itself uses 1 AA battery. A rechargeable NiMH battery is included. The mouse charge is a bulky, but I’m hiding it behind the TV.

On the bottom of both the keyboard and the mouse, there’s a bluetooth sync button and getting the devices to sync with the included bluetooth adapter was pretty simple.

Distance wise, I sit about 9ft from the bluetooth adapter behind my PC which is enclosed inside the TV stand. I get perfect reception on my comfy couch. At about 20ft, the farthest distance I can stand while still being able to see my TV, the reception started waning off. There were some dropped keys and so on. However, as I said, the bluetooth adapter is sitting on the back of my PC and is really blocked by wood on all sides, with the exception of the computer side which is aluminum. I think if I stuck the bluetooth adapter to the front USB ports or get an USB extension cord, reception should definitely be better.

On the upper right hand side, there’s this navigational pad, which is similar to a touch pad. It actually works fairly well. I would’ve preferred it to be in between my 2 thumbs, making mouse control easier, but the location up there isn’t too bad. However the surface area is a bit tiny and takes about 3 left to right scans to get across the entire screen. I guess having my resolution at 1920×1080 doesn’t help.

The F1-F12 keys are actually not regular keys, but touch sensitive keys, which are a bit funny to use at first, but nothing too bad about them.

There is no numpad, but not really something I care about on a media center PC. Not having the arrow keys island and the insert/delete island is a bummer though. I never really used the media keys and if I could redesign the keyboard, I would replace those with the islands.

The worse thing about this keyboard and I truly mean the worse is the Windows key. I’m not sure how often you use the Windows key (the key stuck between Alt and Ctrl), but I use it all the time. To bring up explorer (Win+E), to bring up the run prompt (Win+R), to lock my computer (Win+L), to show my desktop (Win+D), etc. They’ve moved the Windows key to underneath the space bar and it’s one of those hard to press keys (which actually requires a little muscle), like they don’t want you to hit it by accident. This got REALLY ANNOYING REALLY FAST.

The Wireless Entertainment Desktop 8000 hasn’t been released yet. According to the website, it looks like the release date is in September 2007. I hadn’t know about this release date before I got the 7000. The 8000 does have some better features over the 7000 including a rechargeable keyboard, backlit keys, and USB ports. The USB ports are actually part of the charging station. At first I thought it’d be neat and be like wireless USB if the ports were on the keyboard. A bit too early for that dream I suppose. However, it looks like they still have the same stupid Windows key problem.

It’s been almost 2 weeks since my last post. I was planning to spend last night playing catch up on my backlog of interesting links I’ve collected for the past 2 weeks, but my internet went out at around 10pm. I was in the middle of working on my “secret” site, when time stopped moving.

While still brushing up on my php, I found myself switching back to Firefox a lot and searching for php functions, only realizing afterwards that I still don’t have internet. I’ve always known I was very dependent on the internet, but not to this extent. I would constantly hit F5 (refresh) on my router status page waiting for it to get an IP. Once in awhile, I would get a valid IP, but no site would load. I was actually able to ping google.com with the valid IP, but wasn’t able to load their webpage.

I’ve tried rebooting my router and my modem. All the green lights would come on, but I wouldn’t get a real IP (only my cable modem IP). I decided to wait it out, but when I started to lay down in my fetal position and sucking my thumb, I knew something was horribly wrong.

For the first time in months, I started watching cable TV. Watched some MadTV, some SNL, and then some Dirty Jobs (Discovery Channel – in case you were thinking of something else). During every commercial break, I would walk back to my computer, checking to see if my connection was back.

I finally gave in and called Comcast. Good thing I remembered their tech support number (1-888-COMCAST), and they confirmed there was an outage in my area and said since it was this late already (2am), it probably won’t be fixed till Sunday morning. At this point, my internet withdrawal was going to make me ask when it was going to be restored, but he had already answered it. I thanked him and hung up.

I finally decided there really wasn’t much I could do, so I went ahead and did my daily exercise and ended up watching 2 movies in my queue.

Finally, at 7am, my internet has been restored!