A clever way to get multiple monitors

Matrox has just announced an interesting hardware idea called DualHead2Go . According to the press release, it’s:

… a palm-sized box that connects to the existing single monitor output (i.e. external VGA output) of a computer and appears to the system as a single ultra-widescreen monitor with native support for resolutions up to 2560 x 1024, which are twice as wide as standard resolutions.

Clever idea, and Matrox claims it will work with notebooks and desktops alike. Instead of adding a second video card (with the attendant hassles of getting multiple video drivers to play nice with each other), you just plug your current video output into this box and let its embedded graphics hardware do the work.

In my experience, adding a second monitor is one of the best ways to increase your productivity. This seems like a pretty hassle-free way to do it.

I’ll see if I can get a review unit and try it out.

The Definitive BIOS Optimization Guide

I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this resource, but it sure does look comprehensive. Definitely a good starting point if you’re stumped by what one of those obscure BIOS options really means.

Consider this and similar sites as reference tools, not as a bible. For what it’s worth, I don’t recommend spending a lot of time and energy tweaking BIOS settings for better performance. The odds that you’ll screw something up and hose your system are much greater than any minuscule performance gain you’re likely to see. But sometimes you can fix a conflict or provide a better configuration for a specific piece of hardware than the default settings.

Tip of the day: Troubleshoot mysterious crashes

What does it mean when your system restarts for no apparent reason, or when you experience frequent program crashes and file corruption? The problem might not be with Windows at all. These baffling symptoms can be the result of a bad memory chip.

If you suspect you might have a failing memory module, Microsoft has a free downloadable memory test program that you can use:

The Windows Memory Diagnostic tests the Random Access Memory (RAM) on your computer for errors. The diagnostic includes a comprehensive set of memory tests. If you are experiencing problems while running Windows, you can use the diagnostic to determine whether the problems are caused by failing hardware, such as RAM or the memory system of your motherboard. Windows Memory Diagnostic is designed to be easy and fast. On most configurations, you can download the diagnostic, read the documentation, run the test and complete the first test pass in less than 30 minutes.

To run Windows Memory Diagnostic, you must reboot your computer with the disk or CD-ROM on which you installed Windows Memory Diagnostic in the drive. After the reboot, Windows Memory Diagnostic will load and its interface will appear. After loading, the first test pass will begin, using the default standard test suite, and continue until complete, unless Windows Memory Diagnostic is either paused or exited. Once the first test pass is complete, Windows Memory Diagnostic will begin a second test pass using the same settings as before. Windows Memory Diagnostic will continue to run test passes until you exit.

If you find a problem, try pulling the suspected memory chip and running with reduced memory for a short time. If the problems vanish, replace the memory.

The woes of external USB hard disks

Alex Scoble writes about a friend who is using an array of external drives to manage a large media collection. It sounds like he’s having some of the same problems Thomas Hawk has reported:

Additionally, iTunes would stop playing after a while for no apparent reason. Only fix for the problem that I could find was to go into Device Manager and disallow XP from turning off the USB hub subsystems, which it does to save power. So far it sounds like that has worked.

Personally, I think the decision to use SATA drives and then connect them via a USB connection was ill-advised. External USB drives are acceptable for some applications, but I’ve seen and heard of enough problems in demanding digital media applications that I recommend strongly against using them. External SATA is the only way to go.

Alex also throws in an aside:

Trust me when I say that his system definitely requires the use of high quality MP3 or lossless audio files. The crappy 128kbit MP3s you get off of Napster or the Apple iTunes store definitely won’t cut it.

Amen.

Shuttle’s new HTPC – wait till next year

The new Shuttle M1000 is about as good looking as it gets.

Shuttle M1000

Here’s how Shuttle sells it:

The Shuttle XPC Media Center’s built-in analog TV tuners, FM radio tuner, dual format DVD writer, and 8-in-1 card reader, make it easy to enjoy TV, video, music and photographs with your friends and family.

Based on Shuttle’s all new ‘M’ chassis, the Shuttle XPC Media Center sits stylishly within any home audio/visual entertainment center. But don’t be fooled by its simple exterior. Inside the attractive case you will find; analog TV tuners supporting HDTV, time shifting, and real time or scheduled recording, high definition 7.1 channel audio, FM radio with pause and replay capabilities, and 3D graphics processing power from NVIDIA.

What’s the catch? How about the $1899 price tag? That’s a lot of money for a PC that’s going to sit in your living room and not be used for anything else. (And if you’re thinking about buying this box to use in your office, well, you can spend half the money and get just as much computer.)

The good news is this base configuration has everything you need (sans speakers and monitor, of course) – no missing pieces, no hidden upgrades. The only quibble I have with the configuration is the onboard B/G wireless networking, which really should offer 802.11A support as well.

AnandTech has a typically comprehensive review that nails the real problem with this box:

The problem is, someone looking for an expensive but capable HTPC probably has some other wants as well. HDTV compatibility is a major flaw in the design. Sure, you can watch DVDs without trouble, and you can even download movies from the Internet and watch them on your HTPC. The NVIDIA output either through component or DVI to an HDTV works great. The inability to record or view HDTV broadcasts on its own makes this, at best, a secondary A/V component for many people.

[…]

In the end, there are several things holding back the HTPC market, and none of them are Shuttle’s fault. The DMCA and similar legislation are definitely not helping the home user get the most out of their electronics. Content providers share the largest portion of the blame, as standards like cablecard were promised years ago and yet content providers are still “nervous”.

[…]

What we want in a fully featured HTPC is the ability to record SD and HD content, and even better would be compatibility with cable and satellite subscriptions. You can get all that for $10 a month from many providers, though other compromises are made in those systems. HDD size is never as large as we would like, and networking support is generally omitted as well – likely to keep the content secured on the device. Shuttle has the right idea with the M1000 design, but unfortunately it won’t meet the demands of many Home Theater enthusiasts.

If there’s anyone to fault for the problems with HTPCs, it’s Hollywood, the MPAA, the RIAA, and the cable and satellite providers, because while the ability to create our dream HTPC exists in theory, it can only be achieved with more cooperation among all of these parties. The hardware manufacturers would love to be able to sell new hardware that supports the necessary features, but those features are as yet undefined.

Can I recommend this computer today? No way. As gorgeous as it is, I can’t justify its high price tag until it does HD. And without a guarantee that this box will be upgradeable when CableCARD hardware and software upgrades appear next year, it’s too risky.

[Cross-posted at Ed Bott’s Media Central]

The two lamest words in the English language

“After rebate.”

I’ve written about this before, but over the past week I was reviewing some receipts for technology purchases over the past year and realized that I no longer make any purchase decisions based on “after rebate” prices. Even if you follow all the rules, you could still wind up getting screwed out of a rebate you deserve. It’s happened to me more than once, and I’ve read countless horror stories about other people who were denied a promised rebate or whose check simply never arrived.

The hassle of filling in rebate forms and then tracking their progress isn’t worth it to me, so I don’t bother anymore.

So these days, when I’m in the market for just about anything, I ignore any deal that contains the words “after rebate.” Life’s too short.

Windows Explorer, Media Player, and big libraries

Thomas Hawk ranted about Media Center the other day. Charlie Owen and Matt Goyer of Microsoft’s Media Center team responded (Matt on his own blog and in comments on Thomas’s blog), and the upshot is that Thomas’s complaints are being taken very seriously.

I’ll have more to say about the MCE part of this post over on Ed Bott’s Media Central, although probably not till next week. But I want to address one of Thomas’s specific complaints here, because it’s more related to Windows in general.

Some background: Thomas has a very, very large digital music library. Last December, when he and I first exchanged details of this problem, Thomas’s library contained 141,000 files. I’m sure it’s larger now.

Thomas says he encounters disk errors when he tries to copy or back up those files:

Windows Explorer sucks. With a large digital library I simply cannot effectively copy files or back files up without having disc errors. Large batch copy jobs are super difficult as one little error aborts the whole job.

Let’s break this down. As Charlie Owen noted in his response, and I can attest, this is not normal behavior. I have 19 hard disks, internal and external, distributed among seven computers in my office. Collectively they represent well over 3 terabytes of storage. I move large numbers of files between computers constantly. I routinely copy the 16,000 files in my music library over network connections between external hard disks, and I don’t get disk errors. Now, if I try to copy a group of files, one of which is in use and locked by a running process, then Windows Explorer will stop. That is a weakness in Windows Explorer that is (1) being fixed in Windows Vista and (2) easily avoided by using third-party file-management tools. (It’s also what I was referring to when I said Thomas had a “legitimate complaint.”) But aside from that known issue, I’ve never encountered the problems Thomas describes. Nor should any properly configured Windows system, Media Center or otherwise.

So why is this happening to Thomas? I’ve read his complaints on this issue and we’ve exchanged some e-mail messages on this topic in the past. Thomas has told me that MP3 files are being randomly corrupted at frequent intervals. This is not normal behavior. It is not caused by Windows or Windows Media Player. There is no reason why any Windows user should get even a single corrupted file. If this happens, it indicates either a hardware problem (such as a buggy USB controller), a bad configuration (like cached writes being lost during copies), or data being damaged by software.

If I were Thomas, I would do the following things:

First, I would run a thorough diagnostic tool (like Ontrack’s Data Advisor) on all of the hard drives that were giving me problems.

Second, I would convince one of my buddies at Microsoft to put me in touch with an engineer who could verify that all drivers in my storage subsystem were working properly. If necessary, I would have that engineer hook up a remote debugger and then start the copy process until it fails, so that the exact error could be captured.

Third, I would find an MP3 diagnostic utility and check all of my MP3 files to see if any of them have damaged tags. The MP3 file format is flaky, especially in files that use the older ID3v1 format. If the file format is damaged, it could be causing problems during copies. I suspect that the WMP option to save star ratings to music files might be at least partially to blame for this problem. (In fact, I would recommend that Thomas use a batch MP3-editing program to translate all ID3v1 tags to ID3v2 and then rewrite all tags. This would be time-consuming but would have long-term benefits.)

Fourth, I would temporarily disable all features in WMP 10 that update or change music file metadata, especially those that affect star ratings. (This would not have any impact on currently stored ratings.) I would also disable folder monitoring temporarily.

Somewhere in that process, I’m sure the real cause of this problem would become apparent. Is this a lot of work? Well, yes, but this is also an absolutely certain way to fix the problem once and for all.

Reducing PC noise

Fans are the single greatest cause of noise from the average PC. For at least part of the problem, The PC Doctor has found a solution:

I decided that this was a good time to try out one of those fan noise reduction kits that I’d seen in PC World a few weeks earlier.

These kits are both simplistic and quite cheap. Basically it’s a silicone rubber frame that fits around the fan and this forms a cushion between the fan and the PC case. In the kit I bought there were also some silicone washers and new screws.

This is worth trying if the fan itself is quiet and the connection to the case is the problem, and in this example it worked. I’ve seen lots of PC fans, including those on power supplies, where the basic design of the fan is just plain loud. In that case, the only real solution is to replace the fan with a better one – that’s a case where reading reviews can pay off.

Another source of noise, even with a well-designed fan, is when a process gets stuck and starts demanding excessive resources of the system. Firefox does this on me occasionally. I notice that a PC is suddenly very noisy and discover upon checking Task Manager that the Firefox process is cranked up to 50% or more and won’t go down. Usually, killing the offending process takes care of the problem.

Tip of the day: Customize Windows power settings

Opening the Power Options dialog box in Control Panel lets you adjust some settings that can make Windows XP easier to use. Here are the adjustments I typically make for a desktop computer.

On the Power Schemes tab, I choose the Home/Office Desk entry from the Power Schemes list and configure the Turn off hard disks and System standby settings to Never.
On the Advanced tab, I select Shut down as the default option for When I press the power button on my computer.
On the Hibernate tab, I make sure there’s no check mark in the Enable hibernation box.

With these settings in place, my computer is running at full speed all the time. I never have an annoying lag when it resumes from standby, and I’m not wasting 2GB or more of disk space (equal to the amount of RAM in my system) on a hibernation file.

Because my portable PC has a battery that needs management, its Power Options dialog box has a completely different group of settings. On this PC I’ve enabled hibernation. I’ve configured the power button so that Windows shuts down when this button is pressed. I’ve told Windows to go into standby when I close the lid on the computer and to hibernate if the computer remains on standby for more than 30 minutes. If I press the Sleep button, I get a dialog box where I can choose whether I want the notebook to go into standby or hibernate.

Power Options

What sort of power management do you need? Every computer and every individual is different; if you spend a few minutes adjusting these options, you’ll be sure they match the way you work.

Can you transfer your Windows license to a new PC?

A commenter on another thread asks:

can i upgrade my mobo to a totally different socket type and still use my oem xp license or will some bloke in india tell me “please buy another copy sir”

The short answer is, “It depends.” If you purchased your OEM copy from a reseller and built your own PC, or if you bought a PC from a white box builder who is a member of Microsoft’s OEM System Builder program, then yes, you can upgrade your motherboard and reinstall your copy of Windows. You may have to activate the new installation over the phone, but you should be able to use your existing CD key.

However, if you purchased your copy of Windows preinstalled on a PC from a so-called “royalty OEM” – i.e., one of the largest 20 PC makers – then it is system-locked, and your CD and license key will only reinstall on the same computer (or one with an identical motherboard and BIOS).

More details here and here.

Yet another reason why I recommend smaller system makers and DIY projects over the big names.