Hardware: January 2007 Archives

Another of those infamous random freezes killed my computer this morning.  This was after I'd spent all night running Memtest86+ to make sure I wasn't dealing with a rogue bad-memory issue; I got through eight passes with the program (with cache both on and off) and found no problems.

Whenever I've dealt with a problem like this in the past, my usual way of debugging it has been to first remove everything that does not absolutely have to be there, and then cycle out the components that can be changed.  Since I no longer have any expansion cards left in the system, I decided to cycle out the video card (an ATI Radeon 9550) and replace it with an older one that had originally shipped with the PC (an NVIDIA Quadro FX 500).  That meant losing Aero for the time being, but I'm patient and losing Aero for a bit is not going to break me.

I'm now tentatively wondering if the Radeon a) had some kind of "sleeper" issue that was only exposed when Vista started really stressing it a bit, or b) it was already starting to malfunction and it did so coincidentally with my move to Vista.  It's a bit of a parallel with the folks who moved to Vista and then discovered one of the DIMMs in the PC in question was bad -- and that this only surfaced with Vista because of the ASLR (address space layout randomization) system in use.  Likewise, maybe there was a defect with the card that only surfaced in the rarest circumstances before, but is now surfacing more regularly with Vista due to differences in the way the card's being handled.  It's tempting to blame Vista, but off-base; it doesn't solve anything.

If I go for three days without a crash using this older card, I'll swap the other one back in and try it without Aero to see if that makes any difference.  Either way, I think I may be looking at a new video card.

One last possibility is that I might be looking at some weird side effect of DEP.  If I continue having problems, I might try turning DEP off (or put the old card back in and try it with DEP off to see if that affects anything).  A shot in the dark, but a shot worth taking.

Remember those random Vista freezes?  One of them struck last night in the middle of work -- in fact, it trashed a document that I was in the middle of working on (thank you, Word Auto-Save), and I had to take a picture of the screen to recover the part of the document that I had been most immediately typing.

So far I'm going with one of a few theories:

1. A driver issue.  I've upgraded all of the drivers I can in this system to their most recent editions.  The one thing that I tried most recently after this last freeze was updating the video driver to ATI's Catalyst-edition drivers (as opposed to the bare drivers I get from Windows Update).  I've heard that the Catalyst software is a little more thorough about spec-ing video card settings that might cause instability, so I'll try it.
2. A memory issue.  All four 512MB DIMMs in this machine are registered ECC, though, and I have memory error correction turned on in BIOS; so I'm not sure how likely this is.
3. An interaction with another component.  The freezes didn't stop when I pulled out the one other expansion card I have in the system -- a fairly generic Belkin PCI USB 2.0 card -- so if it's something else that's in the system it might take a lot more hunt-and-peck to find it.

Also, I managed to trigger Product Activation during this experimenting -- probably when I yanked out one, then the other set of DIMMs to see if that fixed the instability (it didn't).  But I put everything back to the way it was and re-activated.  I wonder if there's a way to back up and restore Product Activation in Vista as there was in XP.

Now that CES has more or less wrapped, and I've sifted through a good deal of the reporting therein, I thought I'd share some of the things that have jumped out at me.

1. News about the iPhone is impossible not to come by, and after Apple's stock leaped (full disclosure: I own some myself), people started to question the logic of the device: Why Cingular?  Why no third-party software on the phone?  Why such a high pricetag for a device that is essentially being sold into a commodity market?  Even asking for 1% of a market that is saturated with cheap hardware -- and one where, in a way, the hardware isn't even really the issue anymore; it's the quality of the networks and the service offered across it -- seems like they're asking too much.  But I suspect this is simply a loss-leader, foot-in-the-door measure by a company that wants to break into a new space -- the way Microsoft lost money upfront with the first iteration of the XBOX but are now very solid players in a space where they were initially seen as being wholly unwelcome and unwanted.  Now if they can just resolve the nasty lawsuit over the name....
2. The HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc camps are getting all the more entrenched:
   
   a) Warner Brothers' hybrid HD/BR disc.  Apparently many of their HD titles will be in this format only, as a way of consolidating SKUs and saving on manufacturing costs.  I'm still a touch leery of the idea if only because of the way Sony tried similar tactics with HDCD (blech), but the two situations really aren't as analogous as it might seem.
   
   b) Triple-layer HD-DVD and beyond.  Toshiba claims they can push the capacity of an existing HD-DVD to 50GB+, which would kind of negate any immediate advantages afforded by Blu-ray.  What's not clear is how feasible this is with the players that have already been put onto the market -- would they be able to accomodate such discs with nothing more than a firmware upgrade?
   
   c) The porn factor.  In my opinion the idea that the porn industry could decide which format is the victor is so myopic it isn't even funny; it's just wishful thinking based on a loose analogy about Beta vs. VHS.  One joke I heard before sums this aspect up nicely: In what format do people want their porn? Any dang way they can get it.
3. Microsoft's "home server", which sounds a bit like Windows Media Center Plus.  One of the things I have always been annoyed about is Microsoft's lack of a server product that was intended for home or even home office environments, and that didn't cost a ton of money.  Among the ideas being tossed around for what this thing is for: network-wide automated incremental backup, central data repository, media streaming, and most likely firewall/network filtering too.  It's also clear that it won't be a standalone software product (unless you're a system builder), but a bunch of hardware boxes offered by different manufacturers loaded with a custom version of Windows Server 2003.  RTM for the software is scheduled for June 22, so I'm guessing we'll see the hardware itself in the fall.  Hewlett-Packard is going to be one of the first manufacturers to offer such a device.  But, again, at what price?  (The fact that the system is supposed to ship without and run without a display or a keyboard -- it's a "headless / lights-out" configuration, in other words -- will cut some dollars off by default.  My guess is that it won't appear for less than $500, which is a lot more than what you could pay for a simple desktop machine with no display ... but then you'd have to configure it all yourself.  And that's presumably what people are shelling out for -- the luxury of not having to do that.)

If nothing else, the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2007 has proven that there's no end in sight to the Clash of the HD-DVD / Blu-ray Disc Titans.  Here's just a few of the goodies that were unveiled at the show:

• Toshiba's 51GB triple-layer HD-DVD disc.  It's yet to be approved by the DVD Forum, but they're confident it'll be a standard-issue item.  I suspect existing players will need a firmware upgrade before they can recognize this thing, though.
• But the Blu-ray Disc people aren't about to be one-upped: they unveiled a quad-layer, 100GB Blu-ray disc as well, and claim that they can cram as much as 200 GB on a single disc (possibly by double-siding two 100GB discs).
• There's Toshiba's TWIN Format Disc, with HD-DVD on one side and regular DVD on the other -- although these "combi" format discs have never really sold all that well no matter what the format.
• And then there's LG's combination HD-DVD / Blu-ray Disc player, which will eventually also be released as a PC standalone drive.  If nothing else, I might as well start saving my pennies for that baby -- it sounds like the only logical way out of this mess.

(Oh yeah, and there was this company called Banana or something like that, they released this phone...)

One of the little white lies about Windows is that it's "self-updating" -- whenever there are new drivers or systtem components available, Windows will download and install them automatically from Microsoft Update.  That's only provided the manufacturer has ever bothered to make them available through Microsoft Update in the first place.

It's some kind of bizarre irony that several of the most critical drivers for my computer happen to be not available through Microsoft Update.

A little background: I'm running an Alienware dual-processor AMD Opteron system, with a Tyan motherboard.  As it turns out, AMD provides a set of drivers for the chipset used by the motherboard that are not the stock drivers you'd get in a Windows installation.  Windows will install and run without them, but not well, so it's somewhat in your best interest to stay up to date with such things ... provided you remember to do so.  These drivers aren't offered through Microsoft Update and have to be added or updated manually.  How I came to be reminded of all this is half the adventure.

After working with Office 2007 for a month or two (I love it), I noticed something odd: whenever I scrolled through a document in Word with my mousewheel, I'd get a weird visual artifact where the top or bottom few lines of the document onscreen would be repainted ad infinitum up and down the length of the window.  I poked around a bit and found that it was probably a video driver problem, and since I hadn't thought to try and update my video driver in months, I went ahead and did that.

The video driver (which was for an ATI Radeon 9550) came with a set of utilities to configure the video card as well.  Out of curiosity I opened them up and started checking the settings, only to find that the card's diagnostic tool was reporting that I had a "0X Speed" AGP bus.  Whaaaa?  Another round of poking around online revealed that this often happened if your AGP controller driver was out of date.

The date on the AMD AGP controller driver was 4/1/2002. Several of the other AMD-specific drivers were also hopelessly out of date.  They had never been updated since the last time the system image was prepared.

I went "argh" and "aieee" and snagged the appropriate driver packs from AMD's site.  One -- ahem, two reboots later, the system was not only free of Word weirdness but was running much faster overall.  (To top it off, I also snagged an updated driver for the disk controller, which was also a year behind the curve.)

Moral of the story: Updated does not always mean updated.

I guess this also means I need to update the system image I built....