Vista and Me

A couple of days ago, I turned the PC on (I thought it was off but it was only sleeping) and the alarm started and didn’t stop. It’s an annoying pinging noise, not terribly loud but irritating. Figuring it was a thermal problem, I opened the case (it has a quick-release handle but you have to take out two thumbscrews first) and looked at the CPU fan. It was stopped. I gave it a flick but it didn’t start (and there was nothing getting in its way). So I rebooted.

Then the alarm kept sounding on and off through the day. The fan kept stopping and starting but it really didn’t seem to matter. So, I started playing with the Gigabyte EasyTune5 application. This is the only fan speed and CPU temperature monitor I can find so far (Believe me, I’m looking for a better one. EasyTune5 is a “triumph of form over function” and it’s really ugly.).

What I found was the CPU temperature runs about 24-26 deg C under the low load of sitting here watching the temperature. When the temperature drops to 24, the fan stops and the alarm goes off, but the CPU still takes a while to get back up to 25. So I played a DVD to increase the load, it hardly made a difference. DVD’s put a 5-10% load on each core. The temperature drifted up to 27 and back down to 25. Playing Second Life brings the temperature up to 37, so that’s one solution.

I used EasyTune5 to increase the minimum fan “effort” from 28% to 50% (at 20 deg C). I’ve heard hardly a peep since then. It appears the fan is “undervolted” at low temperatures and stalls. However, it’s a 4 pin fan and I thought they ran on PCM instead of variable voltage. I’ll study more on this subject, later.

BTW, the system temperature was running about 43 deg C and the nVidia GPU was 59 deg C (it has no fan, just a big convection heatsink). Ambient was about 21-22.

One of the reasons I chose Intel over AMD was the 65W TDP (compared to 125W for Athlon 6000) but I never expected it to run this cool. Pat Gelsing made a famous quote a couple of years ago about Pentium 4’s being “hotter than the sun” by 2010. I’m really impressed by the Core 2 Duo.

Update 13 Oct 2007

A couple of reboots ago I changed the fan settings in the BIOS from “Auto” to “Intel something” and “PWM” (Pulse Width Modulation, I assume). The fan alarm now pings for a fraction of a second on power up and wake up. CPU Temp now runs in the high 20’s, with the fan in the 800’s, under low load. A much more satisfactory arrangement.

Update 6 Jan 2008

Based on the comment I received here, I should provide a little more explanation. Normal DC fans can be speed controlled by varying the voltage. Most people would have had experience with model trains and slot cars; the controller is just a variable resistor, changing the voltage available for the motor by creating a voltage drop across the controller. However, the speed response of the motor to the change in voltage is only linear over a small range. Again, model trains and slot cars display really poor slow speed running; they just stall. So do PC fans. The solution is to switch the current on and off (at a high enough frequency so the stop-start characteristic is not observed) while maintaining the voltage. This is Pulse Width Modulation and it provides very fine and accurate speed control.

Two problems have occurred from the start. Firstly, the Gigabyte motherboard utility (the GUI-MFC portion) requires UAC permission after every restart. It also needs UAC permission when logging in as a different Vista user (I use a separate Vista account for Second Life) even though it’s already running under the admin login. I assume this is needed because it is the visual portion of the tune-up application. Also, the GUI-MFC has, on a few occasions, gone 100% on a single core and needs to be terminated. Then, it sometimes takes two or three attempts at starting the tune-up app (with UAC on each attempt) before it is able to be accessed from the system tray. Very unstable for the first couple of days but seems to be settling down.

Secondly, I’ve had a couple of video driver resets while using Second Life. The application doesn’t crash but the screen is black so I have to exit anyway. More recently, I’m seeing occasional freezes that have the same feeling as when the video driver resets, but SL recovers after 2-10 seconds. This was a major problems this morning when I had two instances of SL running. Memory, CPU and network load were all low but the screen kept freezing. I think it’s the video driver. However, AVG Free was doing a scan at the time.

Oh, Bill, while I have your attention. There’s a bug in Notepad (where I’m preparing this blog entry). I’ve used Notepad as my preferred text editor for 17 years and now you’ve broken it. If you turn Word Wrap (yes, I know, Notepad didn’t have word wrap back then) on and go back and edit some earlier text, the soft line breaks get screwed up. Cycling Word Wrap fixes them so I believe it counts as a bug. Also, when I paste the contents from here into WordPress, I have to turn Word Wrap off otherwise it copies the soft line breaks as hard line breaks.

Now the playtime is handled, I need to configure this machine with the boring stuff: mail and office software. Firefox is my default browser, mainly because I believe in supporting alternatives, but also because it reduces my attractiveness to malware.

The old machine had an OEM licence for MS Office XP Pro, but I never used Access or any of the other whizbang bits and bobs. Just Word, Excel and Outlook for mail. The Office 2007 Home and Student should suit me but the OEM licence is only for one PC and the full price product gives you three licences for only a little more. And the Home and Student package doesn’t include Outlook, they expect you to use Windows Mail. Out of this this complexity came a decision to try OpenOffice (again).

For those who don’t know, Windows Mail is Outlook Express rebadged. It offers a single mail identity and something called “Microsoft Communities”, which is really newsgroups. I didn’t realise Microsoft had bought Usenet.

Let me be blunt: Microsoft have completely missed the boat. One identity? At work, I have one mail account. Some people are also members of shared accounts for support purposes. A few executives have secretariesPA’s who send mail in their names, but everyone else has one account. Home is different. My partner and I have 5 POP3 accounts between us (including a spamtrap account), the cat has her own account (for moderating her blog comments) and I have another 3 webmail accounts. One identity? I am not creating 9 Vista accounts just to collect email.

So I set Windows Mail up to collect the spamtrap mail. Works well, I get daily mails from F-Secure (whose product refused to install). Then I tried to import the outlook.pst file copied over from the old PC. Windows Mail complained that MAPI wasn’t running. A quick bit of googling reveals that many weary travellers have trudged this path before me. The recommended solution is to install the trial version of Office 2007 with Outlook just to get a free MAPI service. Hmmm, time to look more closely at Thunderbird.

Outlook XP supports multiple accounts and is quite flexible in selecting which account you send mails from, but it only has a single tree. I discovered this when I set up my second personal mail account, A single tree has its advantages but it makes it difficult to determine where your mails are coming from. So, I used Thunderbird for all the other POP3 accounts. It provides excellent flexibilty in deciding which tree to store the mail messages in. However, the Mozilla Foundation have announced that Thunderbird will not be developed any further. It’s not clear whether that includes bug fixes or the occasional vulnerability that’s encountered.

So, Thunderbird is my main mail client. It offers import for Outlook but it falls over 5 minutes into my 113 Mb pst file. My partner and I have decided to boldly leave our mail history behind us.

OpenOffice 2.3 is my office application. It works well enough, my only real concern is interoperability with MS Office. In particular, I have a few spreadsheets with VBA macros that I also need to be able to run at work. I don’t mind if they don’t work under OO, as long as they’re not deleted.

As I said before, Second Life is really important to me. Its severe hardware requirements are a big portion of the specification of this computer, in particular, getting enough RAM was part of the reason I wanted a 64 bit OS. Machines with 32 bit OSes max out at about 3.5 Gb and I need at least 2 Gb for a comfortable SL experience plus whatever Vista feels like consuming for itself.

Anyway, I downloaded the latest SL build and installed it. Cranked it up and it fell over straightaway. Started it again and I was at least able to login before it crashed. Then I started to wonder about the video drivers. The standard advice on the SL forums is to use the absolute latest drivers.

Hiding deep inside the nVidia Control Panel was the information that my ForceWare version was 158.xxx but no indication of whether this was out of date or, indeed, how to update it. So, it was off to the nVidia website. Not too hard to locate and download ForceWare 163.xxx. Yeah, I was a tad out of date.

Latest drivers installed, SL starts up and stays up. And it’s fun. I’m getting 48 fps standing still whereas I never got 20 on the old machine. If I fly around, I can pull the fps down to 25 (a lot better than the 6-7 I usually get). Then I notice Vista’s memory usage is only 600 Mb. So, I realise I need to configure my SL preferences a bit. I turned on almost all the graphic options except anisotropic filtering and increased my visual range to 128 m. I can go anywhere I want now, frame rates rarely drop below 30, movements are smooth and it feels the way it’s supposed to be. RAM usage is above 1 Gb all the time but not too much. CPU usage is about 60-70% on each core.

I hadn’t connected the network or any funny hardware so the install went quite quickly. I think the first 10 minutes was spent formatting the hard disk, although it didn’t say so. The whole process was only about 30 minutes and only two reboots. Then I had to install the motherboard drivers and the video card drivers. These gave me my first taste of UAC. It really is a pain and doesn’t seem to add anything because you have no choice but to accept. Maybe one day it will save me from something.

The next piece of software you need is a virus scanner. I’ve been using AVG Free for a few years but I had a look at the choices recommended by Microsoft and chose F-Secure. I downloaded the evaluation version and tried to install it. The installer said it wasn’t compatible with my OS. So, I gave it the flick and got AVG Free again. I really don’t see the point of paying Microsoft to get to advertise your product if it doesn’t actually work.

Then I hooked up a network cable and it worked straightaway. The only gotcha was it named the local workgroup differently to the default XP Home name of Mshome but that was easily fixed. A friend at work had already told me that I had to install the Link-layer Topology Discovery protocol on my XP machines, so I was ahead of the game on that problem. Two hours later, I had 60 Gb copied across from the old box.

Next, I found that the Windows Experience setting on my brand new computer was 1.0. That’s right, even though the video card was there from the beginning, the drivers weren’t. A quick refresh of the Windows Experience and I got 5.5.

I’m really not comfortable with SATA. I got the HTPC going with its sole SATA drive after only a couple of BIOS changes but I really didn’t understand what was going on.

This machine is incomprehensible. There is a single IDE header, four yellow SATA sockets and two purple ones. The yellow sockets are for the ICH9 Southbridge controller and the purple ones are the Gigabyte ones that are able to operate as a RAID pair. All of the instructions are for setting up a RAID set – which is really hard when you only have one drive. But I used the purple socket anyway because mirroring is something I’d like to do soon.

When you get to the BIOS, it’s no help at all. It shows 6 pairs of Master/Slave drives – really stupid when SATA only supports a single drive. Go back and count the connectors – I see one Master/Slave pair and six single drives. You also have to battle with the concept of AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface). All sorts of caveats on its use but it sounds like the way forward, so I selected it.

It just didn’t work. I loaded the Vista installer 3 times before I took the hint that it really couldn’t find a hard disk. Vista prompts for you to load a driver (there is one on the Gigabyte DVD) but then it can’t use it. So, I set to work permuting the settings for the disk drives in the BIOS before giving up and deciding to pull the hard disk out and look at at it.

I put the machine back up on the assembly bench and pulled the drive out (on the really nice slide-out guides). The power connector fell off, it had never been plugged in properly. I’ve read that SATA power connectors can break off so I hadn’t applied enough force. This time I got it right and you probably could easily break the board with the force needed to get the connector on.

I put the drive back in and it worked straightaway. I felt appropriately stupid.

Fairly straightforward. The cardboard box with the case screws was wedged firmly behind the drive trays and had to be destroyed to get it out. Then I realised the trays slide out. LOL

The Antec case was really nice. There are slide-out guides for the 5.25″ front-mounted drives and the internal 3.5″ drives. The internal drives also have silicone vibration isolation mounts. The case for the HTPC is a Themaltake Tenor and it was really fiddly installing the drives in it. All sorts of screws and cover plates. And it was only case in 20 years of experience where I’ve had to file the floppy disk opening to get the drive in. So the Antec was pleasant in comparison.

I had a little trouble getting the motherboard in. On the first attempt, one set of port springs (little pieces of bent metal from the IO plate that press against the outside of the ports) had stuck down and were trying to short out the serial port. Then I found a problem with the CPU installation. The instructions said to install the CPU before putting the motherboard in the case and install the HSF (Heatsink/Fan) after. Then they said to check the underside of the motherboard after fitting the HSF to closely check the inner pins had pushed through fully. The case didn’t have a removable “bottom” panel so there was no choice but to remove the motherboard to check. Life would have been easier if the other side of the case was removable.

Fitting the front panel connectors was the usual hassle (I missed installing the Reset switch). The motherboard has the single IDE socket right down the bottom which means the supplied cable is barely long enough to reach the DVD drive and is not long enough to allow the drive to be pulled out on the slide-out guides. There’s quite a lot of excess cabling but it doesn’t interfere with the CPU fan.

I bought the components from TX Computers. Of the various computer shops in Sydney, I find them the best. Not always the cheapest, they are convenient, competent and reliable.
The specs of the machine are as follows:

I also got a basic DVD-ROM drive and simple keyboard and mouse. I already have enough of these and I just need something to use while I move the data and applications off the old PC. I also have a nice Samsung 19″ LCD.

Overall, the machine is at the top of consumer grade PCs. I could have bought a high-end Dell, but this way I know exactly what I’ve got and I get the fun of building it (yes, I could have paid TX to build it for me).

I have a couple of XP machines (one regular PC and one HTPC) and I’ve been watching the Vista rollout for the last year. Microsoft have endured enormous bad press over Vista. But my machines are getting old and I really need to know whether the problems are real.

I have to admit that I have a few strange requirements but mostly I run pretty ordinary software. My single biggest problem is Second Life. This “game” sucks the life energy from your PC and spits out the dry husks. But I’m addicted. I’ve added more RAM and a new (7600GS) video card but the performance still sucks.

Recently, a couple of sudden reboots in one day put getting a new PC at the top of my list. So, let’s find out if Vista works!