So, I thought I’d have a look around at the state of play. So I did a quick search on the ISP that I use from home:

Hmm, my ISP hasn’t heard of IPv6. Could be interesting when they find they can’t sell any more accounts.

So, next I thought I’d look at my (home) router manufacturer to see how it’s going to cope with the change:

Hmm, ok, a pattern is beginning to emerge.

Now I know Vista supports IPv6 out of the box, although my router’s never heard of it and my ISP doesn’t want to know. Here’s my settings:

Well, it looks as if IPv6 a complete waste of disk space, memory, CPU and electricity on my PC.

My understanding is that most IPv6 traffic is tunnelled inside IPv4 packets at present. This does need to change so that IPv4 is tunnelled inside IPv6 instead. However, there could be up to a billion pieces of networking kit that are made obsolete by IPv6. I have no idea what will resolve this. My ISP gives me a lease on an IPv4 address. This address is assigned out of the subset of global IPv4 address that iiNet have been allocated. But it doesn’t have to be. iiNet can just assign out of 10.xxx.xxx.xxx and build a massive NAT router of their own. And this could translate to IPv6.

But why would you bother? It should be much easier to implement IPv6, get the routers upgraded and let Vista (plus Linux and OS X) just talk IPv6.

The above picture is unbelievably bad but it’s the only shot I was able to get of the opening screen. I don’t know what causes the blurriness but I suspect something causes the display to move. The real purpose of this shot is to show the BIOS version is F4.

Next we get the RAID BIOS screen. It shows a configured array.

The above shot shows the main BIOS screen. Not much use but you can see my flash drive is attached.

The above shot is the Basic setup screen. Not much to see here.

The Advanced options screen is also horrible but there’s nothing that matters here.

The above shot is the most important so far. It shows that I have disabled the ICH9 SATA ports (the top two entries) and configured the Gigabyte ports (the purple ones) to RAID/IDE. This agrees with what is shown in the manual.

The above shot is the PC Health screen. It shows the CPU runs incredibly cool but the North and South bridge chips are quite warm.

The above shot shows the RAID config screen. Seems pretty straightforward to me. It’s also the single best shot I was able to get of a character-mode screen.

The above shot (and all the following shots) come from the installation program. I selected Repair because I was hoping it would find my existing install and repair it. I have also gone through the following steps on the Clean Install option but the result is the same.

The above shot shows Vista prompting for media. The manual said to create a floppy and I wasted 3 hours attempting to do this – the floppy setup software will not run under Vista. However, the manual was wrong – Vista is able to load drivers from a variety of sources.

I downloaded the drivers from Gigabyte’s website and copied them onto my flash drive.

There’s only one inf file so I selected it.

Vista finds lots of hardware being described. I also tried the 32-bit path but it said there were no drivers for the hardware. More likely, there were no drivers Vista could make use of.

Vista then spends quite a few seconds attempting to load these drivers…

and fails. I’ve tried this with a variety of BIOS settings and I’ve also tried the drivers on the GSATA\Application\jmide path. None of them work and Vista gives no reason why.

Firstly, I’ve had several power resets over the last 3 months. Three of them while I was actually using the computer. After the first couple, I went to TX Computers and talked to the guy about it. He said that “high quality” power supplies, like Antec, are actually more sensitive to supply variations that cheap power supplies. Let’s play a quick game of Hangman: “BULL___T”. Guess a letter.

I have the following products which all provide USB connectivity, and which all work with XP 32-bit:

• Canon LBP1120 monochrome laser printer. Canon claim to have Vista drivers but don’t specify 64-bit. The installation fails so I assume they’re pretending there’s no such thing as x64.
• Canon LBP2410 colour laser printer (see above).
• LG 8330 mobile phone. Good luck if you can find anything about Vista on their site.
• Samsung VP-D453i camcorder. This does work as a removable drive (for stills) but there’s no way to use it as webcam or to play the MP4’s it creates.
• Ricoh Caplio GX8 digital camera. Their website claims it works as a USB drive on Vista 32-bit but the software simply refuses to install on Vista 64-bit.

I admit that none of the above the products are the latest in the marketplace but they’re not that old. In fact, I only bought the Ricoh today – it was the last one in the shop. However, that’s 4 manufacturers that are making no effort to provide 64-bit drivers.

It looks as though 64-bit is an idea before its time even though almost every computer built in the last two years would have a 64-bit CPU.

In case you’re wondering how I deal with this problem: I still have the old XP PC. I just switch it on, haul out the old keyboard and mouse and press the Source button on the monitor.

I was trying to install Shockwave 10.2 from, firstly, the usual web-type link and then by running Shockwave_Installer_Slim.exe. The install fails with: “Could not load the DLL library…\Shockwave10\gi.dll. The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the application event log for more detail.”

So I cranked up Vista’s Event Viewer for the first time. What a nightmare of complexity! I eventually found something under “Applications and Services Logs\Microsoft\Windows\UAC”. It occurred about 10 minutes before I found it so I assume it was caused by the web-link install attempt. There are no entries for the several manual installations I tried. I can’t find anything for them at all.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.