Category: Computer

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Google Gears + WordPress

WordPress 2.6 first introduced the Turbo button I believe which allowed it to work with Google Gears. I never really thought much about it, but recently I had to modify a bunch of posts on my HD-Trailers.net blog and lets just say things weren’t as snappy as I’d like them to be. Updates took about 10-20 seconds. However I finally decide to try out the Turbo button and see where I could go from there.

Apparently what it does is that it downloads a bunch of static pages, so it doesn’t have to fetch them every time I load any of the editor/admin pages. And I do have to say things are now much snappier. It’s not lightning fast, but lets just say that post updates take less than 5 seconds. One would usually attribute these type of slowness to the webhost involved, but I’m seeing similar slowness on both Dreamhost and 1&1. However, after installing Google Gears and enabling it for both my blogs, things have been very smooth and I’m a much happier camper.

I also hate using my mouse to navigate the WordPress UI and wish they would implement some more keyboard shortcuts/hot keys. I did learn a new one. Apparently alt+shift+p publishes or updates a published post. For more WordPress keyboard shortcuts, take a look at The Ultimate List of WordPress Keyboard Shortcuts.

A few shortcuts I would really like are:

  • Save Draft
  • Preview
  • Jump to a specific section (i.e. Editor, Title, Tags, Categories, etc.)

Finally, I searched around to see what other stuff I use supported Google Gears. I couldn’t find anything officially posted by Google, but Wikipedia had this list:

There are a number of web applications that use Gears. These applications come from a variety of companies, including Google (Gmail, YouTube, Docs, Reader, Picasa for mobile, Calendar), MySpace (Mail Search), Zoho (Writer, Mail), Remember The Milk, and Buxfer. WordPress 2.6 added support for Gears, to speed up the administrative interface and reduce server hits.

The only things I use on that list other than WordPress are Google Reader and YouTube. Gears allows Reader to work offline, which is neat I guess, but half the stuff in my RSS feeds requires me to visit the site. For YouTube, I believe Gears support was only added to the uploader and <sarcasm>you know how big a video uploader I am on YouTube</sarcasm>.

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Windows 7 on Lenovo Thinkpad X61 Tablet

It’s only been a few days since I’ve installed Windows 7 on my Lenovo Thinkpad X61 Tablet, but so far it’s been GREAT! The version I had installed was the beta (build 7000).

I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about Windows 7, and it’s not like I didn’t want to install Windows 7, but things had been working fine for now, and I saw no reason to chance destabilizing any of my critical machines. However, I had Vista SP1 running on my Thinkpad and generally it does okay, but once in awhile, after I haven’t rebooted the laptop for a few days, I get into a state where the laptop just becomes unresponsive and slow and has problems connecting to the wireless network.

Jan Lyk had shown me Windows 7 running on his Dell mini laptop and I decided I’d give it a shot. It was pretty much an impulse decision. The same day after I saw Jan Lyk’s laptop, I grabbed the beta, and installed it that night. I decided to do an upgrade instead of fresh install since I didn’t want to bother reinstalling all the applications and backing up the data.

The upgrade actually went pretty well. It did take longer than I expected. In fact, there were certain points in time during the upgrade which I thought it was stuck, especially when it was migrating files, settings, and programs.

The “fun” part came when it prompted me to log in. I swiped my finger and it logged me in.

I started typing on the keyboard. No response. I started moving the mouse. No response. Thinking to myself, I’m !@#$%^. I could use the fingerprint scanner to login, but I needed some other way to actually install drivers if they’re missing. Suddenly I remembered I still had a tablet pen to try out. Amazing, the tablet pen WORKED! Typing using the tablet pen wasn’t that fun though, but I managed to get to the device manager and noticed that the keyboard and trackpoint devices had the little yellow alert sign. I opened both of them and told it to automatically update the driver and amazingly, it found the driver and I was able to use the keyboard. The trackpoint/mouse actually needed a reboot before it started working.

The only other issue was I also needed to update the GEM smartcard reader driver (which was also done automatically). Things were starting to look good.

Moving on, it complained that my antivirus software was not turned on. I use AVG 8.0 and it was turned on from what I could tell. Someone on the AVG forums mentioned that if you disable resident shield and re-enabled it, Windows 7 would stop warning you about it. I tried that, but didn’t seem to work. I thought I’d try reinstalling, but in the end, decided to just switch back to eTrust, since AVG doesn’t officially support Windows 7 yet. This thing also warned me that Windows Defender was turned off, but I think that’s because it was set to delayed start, and the warning would disappear after awhile.

I love the fact that the tablet feature and fingerprint scanner just worked out of the box. It definitely boots up a lot faster than Windows Vista and definitely more responsive. I haven’t had much time to tinker or play around with it much, but it looks like most of the Lenovo applications also work out of the box.

The pinned programs on the task bar is like a merge of quick launch + task bar, which is pretty neat. Usually I have a vertical task bar, because when horizontally, the names of the tasks just take up too much space. Now that they’ve gotten rid of the name and only show an icon, I no longer really need to have a vertical task bar. However, I still dislike the fact that they group same tasks together. There’s probably a way to disable it, or make it more responsive so the moment I hover over the icon, the windows thumbnails would appear immediately instead of waiting a few seconds.

Another cool thing I noticed is that they have a dim screen feature. Usually you have 2 options for your screen: On or Off. I usually set mine to turn off after 5 minutes of idleness, but now there’s an intermediate step where it dims it after 2 minutes of idleness and turns it off after 5 minutes.

I’m going to enjoy playing with Windows 7 on my laptop.

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Seagate FreeAgent Freezes on BIOS screen

So in the past, I’ve always had to tell my parents to start deleting stuff on the fileshare, since free space is quickly depleted mainly due to the fact it was only a 160GB drive. Most of my computers at home are ancient. I mean I can’t even watch 720p HD trailers on my desktop here.

Anyway, I thought it was time to upgrade the drive, however given that this machine is probably over 6 years old, it didn’t have SATA connectors. I figured I could probably pick up an external drive for about the same cost as a SATA PCI card + hard drive. The external drive would also be much easier to move to a different machine if mine died again.

I picked up a Seagate FreeAgent Desk 1.0TB External USB2.0 that was on sale at Staples. The drive’s actually quite neat. The Seagate Manager software that comes with the drive has a bunch of cool options such as telling the drive to automatically go into power-saving mode after a certain amount of inactivity. There’s also some security/encryption setting which I have yet to play with.

Anyway, everything was going fine until I needed to reboot. It just froze on the BIOS/POST screen after detecting all my hard drives. At first I couldn’t figure out what the problem was, but when it rebooted fine after I unplugged the USB drive, I started troubleshooting down that path. It was pretty ridiculous that every time I wanted to reboot, I had to unplug the drive, reboot, and replug in the drive. The boot process wouldn’t even continue if I unplug the drive and keyboard did not have any response, nor was I able to get into the BIOS setup.

After some quick searching, I found this thread: Free Agent freezes computer on restart? Turns out that it’s quite a common problem with certain motherboards that try to boot off USB drives. I don’t know what’s different about this drive since I have another external drive (using a generic external enclosure) and it’s never had problems at boot.

Anyway, I thought maybe it was due to the power-saving mode of inactivity so I disabled that, but that still didn’t help. According to the forums, there were a few things to try:

  • In BIOS, try to disable booting from USB
  • Connect drive to USB PCI card instead of motherboard’s USB ports

I search throughout my BIOS and there was no option to disable booting from USB. I even ended up disabling all USB support and my keyboard/mouse stopped working (it did boot without freezing though). This PC Chips M848A motherboard is pretty crappy and options are pretty limited. I ended up resetting the CMOS.

I was already contemplating if I should get a new CPU/motherboard combo at Fry’s or just pick up a cheap USB PCI card. I mean I’ve brought back a good PCI-E graphics card and DDR2 ram in preparation of the worse case scenario when my mom told me the scent of burning came from my computer and it stopped working (turns out the fan on my graphics card broke off and it just burnt out the GPU).

While looking at the internals, I noticed I already had a USB PCI card, which was not being utilized due to the fact a couple of the ports were dead. I guess that’s what you get from a $5 USB PCI card. I hooked up the Seagate external drive and reboot is working just fine now. No more hangs or freezes.

Update: I actually forgot to mention several things. I had tried to see if I could update my BIOS firmware, but it turns out I already had the latest (July ’04).

I didn’t actually see the mention of USB PCI card until later, and before that I was contemplating on ways to delay the start of my external drive or the USB hub that my drive was connected to.

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CDBurnerXP – Best Burning Software Ever

So Liam was over and wanted me to burn him some “videos” that I had. Should be easy, or so I thought. It turns out I didn’t actually have any data burning software installed on my computer. What is going on I thought… It’s been at least over a year since I last formatted this computer. Windows shows a creation date of April 10th, 2007 for my user folder. Has it really been that long since I’ve burnt any data. I guess that’s what happens when you have a 2.5TB file server available (currently down to only 600GB+ free).

I tried using Windows Explorer as I believed I should’ve been able to drag and drop files onto my burner and burn it via that method. Unfortunately it didn’t recognize my DVD+R as a blank writable disc.

I recall someone telling me an alternative to Nero, but I couldn’t recall what it was called. So I went and “located” my copy of Nero. The version of Nero I found was 7. That darn thing was almost 200MB, while versions 8 and 9 reach almost 1GB. I’m thinking why the heck did Nero’s burning software suite get so huge?!?! After installing Nero, for some reason, it did not recognize my DVD burner. It found my Lite-On CD burner, but I needed to burn a DVD+R. Now I’m pissed for wasting my time on Nero.

Anyway, I typed in nero won’t see dvd burner into Live Search and the first result pointed me to alternatives such as CDBurnerXP. Something clicked and I’m pretty sure that was the alternative someone had suggested to me sometime ago. Anyway, it’s freeware and it’s only a 3MB download! That alone made me much happier. All I wanted was an explorer like interface (similar to old Nero) where I can drag and drop files and then click burn.

And that’s what CDBurnerXP turned out to be. Very simple, very small, very fast. I was browsing through its options and it even has the capability of making bootable discs, something I’ve always wanted from a burning software. Now I can truly get rid of my floppy drive, which I only kept around for flashing the bios on my motherboard.

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HDHomeRun Faulty Power Adapter

For quite some time, I’ve been hearing about people having faulty power adapters on their HDHomeRun on the Microsoft distribution alias. Turns out when I wanted to show VonLobster, I got the dreaded “Unable to locate tuners” error message.

I looked at my HDHR and notice all the LEDs were off. A closer look revealed the power LED was actually blinking green, but very dim. I looked at the power adapter and it was blinking red.

Later that night, I went to SiliconDust, hoping to contact customer support in regards to this issue. From what I’ve heard, it’s pretty simple to get them to replace it for you free of charge. Turns out if you go to their Submit a trouble ticket page, this issue is so big, that they actually streamlined it:

SiliconDust is offering replacements for the SW20-S050-15 power adapter shown.

A failing power adapter may result in one or more of the following symptoms:

  • Flashing power light on the HDHomeRun or failure to power on.
  • Flashing red light on power adapter.
  • Zero signal-to-noise quality (snq) on all channels.

If your HDHomeRun included this power adapter please see this page for a replacement power adapter.

If you go to their Power Adapter Replacement page, all you need to do is enter your HDHR device id (located on the bottom/back of your HDHR unit). They then verify if your HDHR unit actually came with a faulty power adapter and if it did, it prompts you for your name and address.

After submitting that info, I should be getting my power adapter in 3-5 days. I guess it’s good timing since new seasons for TV shows are just around the corner.

Update: Got my replacement power adapter today and once again, QAM HDTV on Vista Media Center works again 🙂

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2008 Olympics

So I wasn’t planning to blog about the 2008 Olympics, mostly because I’m not much of a sports fans, but over the past few days, I’ve accumulated a few things regarding the 2008 Olympics I wanted to share.

First, Artemyst blogged about the 2008 Beijing Olympics song/music video: 北京歡迎你 (Beijing Welcomes You). Update: It appears YouTube has taken down the video. Here’s a mirror.

At first I found the accent a bit off, but after awhile, I realized many of the cast were Hong Kong actors singing in Mandarin. The lyrics were borrowed from Artemyst’s blog, but the English translations were rather bad in the YouTube video description. I’ve gone ahead and did my best at translating it:

北京歡迎你/群星
Beijing Welcomes You/Various Artists

作曲：小柯
Composer: Xiao Ke

填詞：林夕
Lyrics: Leo Ku

主唱：群星
Artist: Celebrities

【陳天佳】 迎接另一個晨曦　帶來全新空氣
[Chen Tian Jia] We welcome the next morning, bringing in fresh air

【劉歡】 氣息改變情味不變　茶香飄滿情誼
[Liu Huan] Weather may change but friendship will not, the tea’s fragrance is filled with friendship

【那英】 我家大門常打開　開放懷抱等你
[Na Ying] Our door is always open, waiting for you with open arms

【孫燕姿】 擁抱過就有了默契　你會愛上這裡
[Stefanie Sun] After hugging and developing a bond, you will fall in love with here

【孫悅】 不管遠近都是客人　請不用客氣
[Sun Yue] Everyone is a guest no matter how far away, please feel at home

【王力宏】 相約好了再一起　我們歡迎你
[Wang Lee Hom] Agreed to get together, we welcome you

【韓紅】 我家種著萬年青　開放每段傳奇
[Han Hong] We’ve planted evergreens, displaying every spectacle

【周華健】 為傳統的土壤播種　為你留下回憶
[Wakin Chau] Sowing seeds into the soil, leaving you with good memories

【梁詠琪】 陌生熟悉都是客人　請不用拘禮
[Gigi Leung] Strangers and friends are all guests, no need to be formal

【羽泉】 第幾次來沒關係　有太多話題
[Yu Quan] No matter how many times you come, there are much to talk about

【成龍】 北京歡迎你　為你開天辟地
[Jackie Chan] Beijing welcomes you, opening your eyes to a new world

【任賢齊】 流動中的魅力充滿著朝氣
[Richie Ren] The flowing charm is full of life

【蔡依林】 北京歡迎你　在太陽下分享呼吸
[Jolin Tsai] Beijing welcomes you, sharing the joy of breathing under the sun

【孫楠】 在黃土地刷新成績
[Sun Nan] Making new records on our yellow soil

【周筆暢】 我家大門常打開　開懷容納天地
[Bibi Zhou] Our door is always open, welcoming the world with open arms

【韋唯】 歲月綻放青春笑容　迎接這個日期
[Wei Wei] The old ages is smiling like youth, welcoming this day

【黃曉明】 天大地大都是朋友　請不用客氣
[Huang Xiao Ming] Everyone is friends, please feel at home

【韓庚】 畫意詩情帶笑意　只為等待你
[Han Geng] The arts bring smiles, only waiting for you

【汪峰】 北京歡迎你　像音樂感動你
[Wang Feng] Beijing welcomes you, like how the music moves you

【莫文蔚】 讓我們都加油去超越自己
[Karen Mok] Let’s work hard together to go beyond ourselves

【譚晶】 北京歡迎你　有夢想誰都了不起
[Tan Jing] Beijing welcomes you, with dreams everyone can be great

【陳奕迅】 有勇氣就會有奇跡
[Eason Chan] Having courage will bring miracles

【閻維文】 北京歡迎你　為你開天辟地
[Yan Weiwen] Beijing welcomes you, opening your eyes to a new world

【戴玉強】 流動中的魅力充滿著朝氣
[Dai Yu Qiang] The flowing charm is full of life

【王霞．李雙松】 北京歡迎你　在太陽下分享呼吸
[Wang Xia, Li Shuang Song] Beijing welcomes you, sharing the joy of breathing under the sun

【廖昌永】 在黃土地刷新成績
[Liao Chang Yong] Making new records on our yellow soil

【林依輪】 北京歡迎你　像音樂感動你
[Lin Yi Lun] Beijing welcomes you, may the music move you

【張娜拉】 讓我們都加油去超越自己
[Jang Nara] Let’s work hard together to go beyond ourselves

【林俊傑】 北京歡迎你　有夢想誰都了不起
[JJ Lin] Beijing welcomes you, with dreams everyone can be great

【阿杜】 有勇氣就會有奇跡
[A-Do] Having courage will bring miracles

【京劇】 北京歡迎你呀
[Beijing Opera] Beijing weclomes you

【容祖兒】 我家大門常打開　開懷容納天地
[Joey Yung] Our door is always open, welcoming the world with open arms

【李宇春】 擁抱過就有了默契　你會愛上這裡
[Chris Li] After hugging and developing a bond, you will fall in love with here

【黃大煒】 不管遠近都是客人　請不用客氣
[David Wong] Everyone is a guest no matter how far away, please feel at home

【陳坤】 相約好了再一起　我們歡迎你
[Chen Kun] Agreed to get together, we welcome you

【謝霆鋒】 北京歡迎你　為你開天辟地
[Nicholas Tse] Beijing welcomes you, opening your eyes to a new world

【韓磊】 流動中的魅力充滿著朝氣
[Han Lei] The flowing charm is full of life

【徐若瑄】 北京歡迎你　在太陽下分享呼吸
[Vivian Hsu] Beijing welcomes you, sharing the joy of breathing under the sun

【費翔】 在黃土地刷新成績
[Kris Phillips] Making new records on our yellow soil

【湯燦】 我家大門常打開　開懷容納天地
[Tang Can] Our door is always open, welcoming the world with open arms

【林志玲　張梓琳】 歲月綻放青春笑容　迎接這個日期
[Lin Chi-ling, Zhang Zilin] The old ages is smiling like youth, welcoming this day

【張靚穎】 天大地大都是朋友　請不用客氣
[Jane Zhang] Everyone is friends, please feel at home

【許茹芸　伍思凱】 畫意詩情帶笑意　只為等待你
[Valen Hsu, Sky Wu] The arts bring smiles, only waiting for you

【楊坤．範瑋琪】 北京歡迎你　像音樂感動你
[Yang Kun, Christine Fan] Beijing welcomes you, like how the music moves you

【游鴻明．周曉歐】 讓我們都加油去超越自己
[Yu Hungming, Zhou Xiao’ou] Let’s work hard together to go beyond ourselves

【沙寶亮．滿文軍】 北京歡迎你　有夢想誰都了不起
[Sha Baoliang, Man Wenjun] Beijing welcomes you, with dreams everyone can be great

【金海心．何潤東】 有勇氣就會有奇跡
[Jin Haixin, Peter Ho] Having courage will bring miracles

【飛兒．龐龍】 北京歡迎你　為你開天辟地
[F.I.R., Pang Long] Beijing welcomes you, opening your eyes to a new world

【吳克群．齊峰】 流動中的魅力充滿著朝氣
[Kenji Wu, Qi Feng] The flowing charm is full of life

【5566．胡彥斌】 北京歡迎你　在太陽下分享呼吸
[5566, Anson Hu] Beijing welcomes you, sharing the joy of breathing under the sun

【鄭希怡．刀郎】 在黃土地刷新成績
[Yumiko Cheng, Dao Lang] Making new records on our yellow soil

【紀敏加．屠洪剛．吳彤】 北京歡迎你　像音樂感動你
[Ji Minjia, Tu Honggang, Denis Ng] Beijing welcomes you, like how the music moves you

【郭容．劉耕宏．騰格爾】 讓我們都加油去超越自己
[Guo Rong, Will Liu, Tengger] Let’s work hard together to go beyond ourselves

【金莎．蘇醒．韋嘉】 北京歡迎你　有夢想誰都了不起
[Kym Jin Sha, Allen Su, Wei Jia] Beijing welcomes you, with dreams everyone can be great

【付麗珊．黃征．房祖】 有勇氣就會有奇跡
[Fu Lishan, Shawn Huang, Jaycee Chan] Having courage will bring miracles

【全體】 北京歡迎你　有夢想誰都了不起
[All] Beijing welcomes you, with dreams everyone can be great

【全體】 有勇氣就會有奇跡
[All] Having courage will bring miracles

【全體】 北京歡迎你　有夢想誰都了不起
[All] Beijing welcomes you, with dreams everyone can be great

【全體】 有勇氣就會有奇跡
[All] Having courage will bring miracles

If you notice any translation problems above, please do tell. I notice most places label this song as Welcome to Beijing, which I guess is technically correct or Englishfied, but to me there’s a difference between Welcome to Beijing and Beijing welcomes you. May be I’m being nitpicking.

Later I saw these awesome photos: 2008 Olympics Opening Ceremony. These images are just magnificent and as someone mentioned in the Digg comments, many of these images reminded me of Magic Eye. Did I mention how beautiful these photos are?

Finally, Windows Media Center, TVTonic, and NBC teamed together to bring you easy access to the Olympics: NBC Olympics On The Go. The whole company got an email late this past week stating about the project. When VonLobster was over here earlier today, he brought that up and we decided to check it out.

The process was much more complicated than I had expected. After clicking “Launch” from the MCE menu, it prompted that it’ll be opening a browser and I’ll have to run the setup after it finishes downloading. I don’t see why it couldn’t have streamlined the process. It even specifically stated I wouldn’t be able to use the remote to continue with the setup.

After installing and launching TVTonic within MCE, I would have to say the navigation was rather poorly designed. It took us quite awhile to figure out what to do. We were just trying to figure out how to watch a video, and that took a good 5-10 minutes.

After we figured out how to subscribe to channels, things went pretty smoothly from there. Videos would automatically start downloading and if we wanted to watch a particular one, priority would be given to that one and it would pretty much start streaming immediately. We checked out a few swimming ones and the opening ceremony.

The Lenovo ads did get a bit annoying after awhile. Between every clip, it would play. I understand it’s sponsored by Lenovo, but maybe if there were just more than 2 Lenovo ads, that’ll be okay, but I’ve seen the laser vaporizing and the fruit basket one at least 8x today. It also didn’t help that the audio volume was much lower in the actual clips than the ad, so immediately after the clip, the Lenovo ad would be SUPER LOUD.

I was hoping to share some of these videos with my parents, but unfortunately they’re drmed and requires a TVTonic license to view. I know it’s free, but I doubt I can teach my parents how to install TVTonic.

It also took me awhile to figure out where they were caching these. On Windows Vista, it’s located in:
C:\Users\All Users\Wavexpress\TVTonic\Cache\Services

Update #2: Ohfuee had asked me for the names of the artists, but unfortunately I only had the list of them in their Chinese names. I then found this video/description which lists all of them: Various Artists – Beijing Welcomes You w / Translation. They even have a download link to the mp3.

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Motorola SURFboard SB5101 Cable Modem

So I finally picked up a Motorola Surfboard SB5101 Cable Modem. Amazon.com finally had a deal for $43.99 – $20 rebate, making it only $23.99 shipped. Well, I had to pay sales tax too, but that’s because I’m in Washington.

There has been discussion on threads if the rebate is valid for Amazon.com given that the rebate form is hosted on Frys.com and that Amazon.com doesn’t actually list the rebate. However on the rebate form, it does state that Amazon.com is a valid retailer to purchase from. Then there was doubt about the UPC matching given that apparently there are 3 UPCs for this particular modem and something about the color of the box.

I got the modem today and the UPC do indeed match (6-12572-14827-3) and mine came in a blue/black box if that matters.

Previously, I had posted my results from Speedtest.net using my D-Link DCM-202 flashed with a special Comcast firmware yielding these results:

speed test with d-link dcm-202

A couple days later, TekMan showed me his results:

TekMan's Motorola SB5101 speed test

I was shocked how much of a jump there is just based on the cable modem alone! At this point I was determined to find a deal and get my own Motorola cable modem.

A week or 2 ago, there was a Circuit City deal for $20 after rebate, but required price matching to Office Depot and the fact that I had to actually visit a store discouraged me from attempting. When I saw this Amazon.com deal on SlickDeals, I knew I had to get it.

I ordered it last week for $44.99 + tax shipped and then it dropped a dollar further to $43.99. I did get my dollar back through Amazon.com’s 30 day price guarantee. Anyway, the modem arrived today and I called Comcast to update the MAC address so I can associate the new cable modem to my account. After giving him the information, he tells me the registration server was down and told me to try back at 3am. I had called around 11pm and the thought of me going internet-less for 4 hours was a scary thought.

So I sat around filing my rebate and did a couple other things while the clock ticked away. When the clock hit 1am, I knew I had to check to see if I can register my modem yet. I called and indeed the server was back up. Registration only took a few minutes and my internet was up and running in no time. Whoopee!

Of course, the first thing I do is another speed test:

My Motorola SB5101 speed test

This purchase was definitely worth it. I did 3 tests with my D-Link DCM-202 and they average to around 18000Kbps down and 1500Kbps up. I did 2 tests with my Motorola SB5101 and they average to 23000Kbps down and 3100Kbps up. Quite a performance increase for just $25! Of course, this could just be the initial burst speed, but I’m still excited about the speed increase.

Now I have a spare cable modem or if I sell it, it’ll probably pay for my Motorola cable modem completely!

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Dead Seagate

So awhile back (probably around 3 months ago), my first RAID5 file server (4x160GB) had a hiccup, where it wouldn’t detect 1 of the 4 drives and the Promise RAID controller would enter this “critical state”. I powered off the computer and checked to make sure all the cables were fine and made sure they were snug and tight. I rebooted, it started working again. Of course it needed to rebuild the drive (which takes ~2 hours) and after the rebuild was successful, I thought nothing much about it.

A few weeks ago, I noticed it was once again in critical state. To clarify, I hardly log onto this machine as it only serves as a file server, so I have no idea how long it’s been in critical state, but I can only assume it’s been for quite some time. I rebooted the machine several times and it finally detected the drive and started to rebuild. This time, after rebuilding, using Promise’s PAM (Promise Array Management) software, I told it to synchronize to make sure everything was working fine. When I came back to check on it, I noticed it kicked that drive off the array again.

I decided to move all the data onto my second file server (yes, I know that I promised to blog about that and yes, it’s still coming. ETA: undetermined) as a prevention measure. The 2nd file server is a 2.5TB and had over 50% free so it can easily accommodated a 480GB file server, which was nowhere near full.

I finally got around to testing that file server. First I tried changing SATA cables, but it pretty much failed immediately after rebuilding. I wanted to avoid running diagnostics on the drive since this was a hardware raid controller, the individual drives weren’t expose to the controller, which meant it required me to take the drive out and plug it into a different machine (since this motherboard doesn’t have on-board SATA ports). I finally caved and took the drive out and plugged it into my main box.

I installed Seagate’s SeaTools for Windows and pretty much 5 seconds into the short test, results show FAILED. Sigh… Looks like I’m going to need to RMA the drive. Interestingly enough, I was still able to format the drive. This is my first RMA in years. The last one was probably back in college?

I’m not saying Seagates are bad. In fact, 90% of the hard drives in my computers are Seagates and the other 3 drives on my Promise RAID controller are the exact same drive, so I’m guessing this was just a bad one in the batch.

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Comcast Blast Speed Tier

So Tekman IMs me today about this new Comcast Blast Tier (16Mbps down / 2Mbps up) and says that the D-Link DCM-202 cable modem (which I recommended) wasn’t compatible with it and it maxed out at ~8Mbps.

So I started digging around the internet for this and apparently many users were having problems getting the higher speeds from Comcast with this D-Link cable modem. Some people claimed that Comcast uses some proprietary “Burst” technology which wasn’t compatible with all cable modems. According to their FAQ, if you’re renting a modem from them, you can always ask for an upgrade to a newer model which is compatible. Others were saying that even though the Burst technology required DOCSIS 1.1 and the D-Link cable modem was DOCSIS 2.0 compatible, there was some header configuration screw up, where Comcast would only detect the cable modem as DOCSIS 1.0, which capped the transfer speeds to 8Mbps/768Kbps. Apparently if you call in and keep on escalating to a knowledgeable tech support, they would be able to manually set your DOCSIS to 1.1 and you’ll be able to get the higher speeds.

So first thing I go check is what tier I am on. Apparently I’m on the 8Mbps/768Kbps tier and Tekman said he was able to get the 16/2 Burst Tier for $42/mo. A bit bummed, I decided I could live with 8/768 for $30/mo.

However when I got home today, I received a letter from Comcast stating:

RE: 16 Mbps download and 2 Mbps upload High-Speed Internet for no additional charge
…

I didn’t even bother reading the rest of the letter till later and went ahead decided to try flashing my modem. Apparently there’s a Comcast specific firmware you’re suppose to use. You can find the firmware on D-Link’s website: Product Support Resources for DCM-202. I thought it was a bit weird that the Comcast firmware was 2004 while the newest one was 2007, but I decided to go with the 2.0.1 Comcast firmware anyway.

The included PDF documentation was pretty straight forward, though they only included instructions for Windows XP. There was one missing instruction and that was the fact you should connect your computer directly to the cable modem’s ethernet port. When I was first trying to connect over the switch, it wouldn’t see the cable modem. Once I was able to ping it, the flashing was pretty painless. They did screw up the login information. The web login information remains dlink/dlink and not admin/hitron.

My newly flashed cable modem shows:

  • Class ID: 2
  • Max Downstream Rate (bps): 17600000
  • Max Upstream Rate (bps): 2200000
  • Upstream Channel Priority: 1
  • Guaranteed Min Upstream Data Rate (bps): 0
  • Max Upstream Transmit Burst (bytes): 0
  • Privacy Enable: 1

Unfortunately, I don’t have what it showed beforehand as I was too excited to get the newer speeds.

So I went and did a speed test and the results are:
comcast burst tier speed test

Sweet! 16/2 Burst Speed Tier for $30/month! I guess that might be ending soon, since it was only a 6 month promo. At 16/2, this matches Verizon FiOS’ $52.99 plan. Did I mention how sweet this is?!

UPDATE: Apparently it wasn’t the fact that Tekman wasn’t getting the higher speeds with the D-Link DCM-202 cable modem, but they weren’t as high as when he had tested the connection with a Motorola cable modem. He was getting 12000-16000Kbps down / 1000-1500Kbps up with the D-Link DCM-202, while with the Motorola cable modem, he was consistently getting 18000-20000Kbps down / 2000Kbps up. I did notice my upload speed was a bit on the weak side for 2Mbps. Looks like the cheapest Motorola cable modem on Amazon is ~$55.

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32-bit Vista SP1 Enables 4GB of RAM?

So I recently found out that my Windows Vista MCE box is now showing all 4.00GB of RAM in System Properties. If you recalled, I had posted about Vista showing only 2,943 MB of RAM, even though BIOS detected all 4GB.

I hadn’t updated any motherboard firmware recently and the only driver updates I installed was my ATI Radeon X1600Pro.

Windows Update did install SP1 about 2 weeks back and that’s the only explanation I can come up that has enabled all 4GB of RAM.

Maybe when they release Windows XP SP3, all 4GB of RAM on my XP box will be enabled. 🙂