Johns Blog

I finally got win 7 for my new beast and it runs it great. That said, I also subscribed to Microsoft Technet. With all the computers I test/play with, it makes sense. I can now use all of Microsoft’s OS’s to test, evaluate, and keep current on, for one fee. Well worth it. I even put windows 7 Pro on an old Pentium 4 2gig machine just for fun and it works surprisingly well.

I re purposed my old Dell XPS400 as a windows home server and installed a 160gig drive, a 500 gig drive and TWO terrabyte drives. This thing is awesome and mind numbingly easy to set up . It automatically backs up all of my computers every night. Not just file backups, but image based, so if a hard drive dies on one of my machines, I can boot from a restore disk and put the exact image on the new hard drive and loose nothing. Equally as cool and useful is the fact that I have all my photo’s, videos, Movies, documents and others shared to all of my computers on this thing. Better than that is they are duplicated on two drives sort of like raid. This means if a drive in my server dies, I just replace it with a new one, and it rebuilds it and I lose nothing. I also shared my printers from it and aside from manually installing the 64bit drivers for sharing, It was plug and play. Good stuff. Its built off of Server 2003 and runs rock solid. With a few add ins, I can now remote into it from any machine on the home network and do anything I need. Another neat feature is it monitors all the PC’s on my network and lets me know if one of them is missing backups, or has out of date antivirus or other potential problems. If you have more than say 3 PC’s to keep up with, this is handy stuff. I currently have 6 not including the server itself. The system has a max of 10 that it can backup, more than enough for most people……hopefully me.

I have also built an HTPC for the living room. It is a zotac IONITX system and is very small. It uses the Intel Atom 1.6 processor combined with the Nvidia ION and has 2 gigs of ram. It has built in HDMI out and digital optical audio out, Gigabit Network, 8 USB ports, and everything else you would need. I put it in an Apex HTPC case and used a 500 gig drive I had laying around. Plenty big given the server I now stream everything from. I put a MCE remote on it for ease of use. Best of all I have a total of 220 bucks invested in this HTPC since I used some parts I already had.

This new HTPC thing had me wanting to upgrade my network, so I ended up with a Linksys Wireless N router with a built in Gigabit switch. This also required me to string 50 feet of Cat5 through the walls, and up in the attic and back through the walls to the switch. Gigabit network is SUPER fast and well worth an upgrade. I love being able to stream my movies in HD from any room in the house.

And just because I can, I bought a Dell Zino HD for Johns room. Neat machine. I dont have it yet, but hoping its worth the bargain price they are selling for (less than 300 bucks!)

To offset the geekiness, I have a 93 maxima to pull the trans out of, and tomorrow I will be changing wheel bearings in a 2000 Honda Foreman 4×4 due to too much mud inhalation. Well thats it for now.

Warning, geek mode enabled:

Well since im a tech junkie, I decided to take the plunge and build a computer worthy of Vista, and be ready for Windows 7. So I did. I used an Asus M3N72-D motherboard with an AMD Phenom II 940 black edition quad core CPU, and 8 gigs of Corsair XMS ram and a Terra byte hard drive running dual 8500GT graphics cards, one is onboard (a bit dated, but I dont do gaming much) running in Hybrid SLI mode all stuffed in an Antec Sonata III case with an earthwatts 500watt PSU (small, but runs it for now). I transplanted my lightscribe DVD burner and multi card reader into the box also. A screamin machine no doubt.

This all worked out because I was able to order an OEM copy of Vista Home Premium 64 bit and it came with a free windows 7 upgrade coupon. I have already ordered my windows 7 and it will ship on November 3 according to Microsoft.

In the meantime, I downloaded the windows 7 ultimate 64 bit release candidate and am testing it on my dual core dell machine. So far everything works with it except my “legacy” graphics card, a Radeon X300SE that came in it in 2006. Doesnt feel like it should be relegated to legacy status yet, but oh well. I can see all the resolutions fine and it looks OK, even with aero, but I cant get a windows experience index score as it refuses to run it. This wont be a problem with me on my new machine, I hope.

I do have one gripe, I can not use classic start button mode in Windows 7. I am a fan of it and enable it on all my Vista machines as it looks less cluttered to me. Guess I will get used to it. Other than that 7 runs very smooth and looks promising. I like the explorer Icon in the taskbar, and everything you would do under “my computer” is accessible from it. You can also “pin” icons to the taskbar sort of like the quick launch icons of vista, only looking more like an apple or Linux OS.

In other tech news at the house, me and Jennifer both got miniature laptops, or netbooks, or whatever you call these. She got an Acer Aspire One with 11.6″ HD screen, 250 gig HD, 2 gigs of ram running Vista, and I got Gateways version built by Acer with an AMD processor and same specs otherwise. I also picked up an external DVD burner since these dont have onboard drives. Once I got rid of all the bloatware, garbage antivirus programs and streamlined the running services, I find them to be great sub 400 dollar machines for the average laptop user. /geek mode

Its summer time again. I have been absent from this blog for far too long. Between TDY’s to Las Vegas, and Biloxi MS. and Life in general, my time is short.

I took on a job putting an engine in a 2006 Mazda MPV minivan, that took a good 2 weeks start to finish, but I made 1000 bucks and got some new tools I didnt have before. Then I bought a 1990 Pontiac Firebird for 200 bucks, and sold it a few weeks later for 400 bucks and didnt do much to it in between. All of this money is going towards our vacation. Probably just another road trip to Illinois, Georgia and back, stopping at a theme park or two. I am hunting for a nice travel trailer camper to buy or trade my four wheeler for. That would change our vacation plans just a little. Other than that its just life as normal. Hope this finds you well.

Well its tax time again, and as usual we have a plan for every dime of it. Starting with paying a few bills. Then we bought a new TV, or rather ordered a new TV. Got it from Amazon.com. A 42 inch LCD Sharp Aquos 1080P 120hz. I did lots of shopping and it was the best TV for the money and nobody could beat Amazon. I even got to build a new entertainment center to put it on. Fun. The rest will buy some home renovations. We are tearing out a wall and putting in a breakfast bar with more cabinets and some lighting. It will look nice and open up the house some. Then its going out to eat with the family and fixing some maint items on the truck.
I also get a 6 week trip to Biloxi Mississippi starting this month. I get to go to the NCO Academy. Its just a class full of people my rank giving speaches and writing papers, yucky stuff, but easy enough. Its a vacation compared to what I normally do at work.
The kids are well and growing up fast. The wife is well also. Hope you all are well.

Well its already come and almost gone… Time flies when you get older. We had a great Christmas. Relaxed and did just what we wanted to do. Now we are visiting with Jennifers family and hanging out at the house. Monday I am taking the kids to Illinois to visit and Jennifer will go back to work. I have a ton of pics im going to put up on the website, as soon as they are shrank. Well gotta get back to it….

SyncToy. Why am I just now finding this thing? If you have many computers, or even just one that you back up to an external hard drive, this thing is great. I have 3 different computers that have the potential to have some of the same, and some new photos on them. It is quite a task to try to back those up to an external drive without making many copies of the same photo. Mess around and rename a photo on one without renaming it on the other, and you get two copies of it.
SyncToy can see that the photo is the same and will not make another copy of it, it will however change the name of the generic photo to the custom name you created, if you want it too. You can choose how it Syncs one of three ways. You can have two folders match exactly, swapping files and changes both ways. Or, you can have the folders match files, but file changes only go one way. Or you can just have a file, memory stick or card “contribute” to your master sync folder. This is mostly the way i will use it. Sending my computers pics over the network to one folder. Then use it again to back that up on an external drive. I believe in no less than two drives with the files you care about.

Best part about SyncToy… ITS FREE!!

Its Grandma Naas’s birthday today! She wouldn’t want me to tell you how old though.. But Happy Birthday!

At least its new to my home computer. I’m certainly not new to it, ive been using it on my 1.6ghz Celeron M Toshiba laptop for 1 year now. It runs Vista slower than XP, but not slow enough to matter. I can accept that I use it for surfing the web, email, photo stuff, web site editing, and watching movies more than anything else and it does that every bit as fast as XP, and looks pretty to boot. It still does everything else, and as of late, everything ive done on it is fully compatible, unlike when it was first released. I did upgrade the laptop to 1.5 gigs of ram due to the way Vista ate it alive.
While in Vegas, I let a buddy show me how to speed up Vista by disabling the services I don’t need or use and turning off some of the eye candy. I have a policy to make someone explain what it is they are doing if they are messing around with settings. A few of the things turned off really were never going to be used, like tablet PC functions. A few of them I didn’t even know what they were, like Readyboost. (I later re-enabled Readyboost, and it really does speed up what I do with the laptop using a 2 gig thumb drive!) After cleaning up the services and turning off some things like graphic boot screens, the laptop runs much better. So much better that I formatted a hard drive to use to test Vista with my home computer.
I choose that method so I can unplug my XP drive and not mess up anything. I simply don’t want to mess with a dual boot right now. Switching between the two is as simple as shutting down the computer, pulling one small plug from one SATA drive and putting it on the other. The Case on my XPS 400 is simple to open and this solution is foolproof for my testing.
Currently this computer has a Pentium D 3.0ghz dual core processor, 1 gig of PC 4200 ram, 160gig sata drive (two of them, one for XP and one for Vista), and a lowly ATI Radeon X300SE which I learned through Vista really only has 32 megs of ram and steals the rest. Vista scores everything 4.5 or higher in the experience index except the graphics scores. The lowest is a 2.0 and I can see why. My 19 widescreen LCD hooked to the DVI port at max resolution looks outstanding in Vista. Truly an HD experience. In XP the Icons, Pictures and everything just look grainy and not as crisp. Vista makes it look very nice but at the expense of your graphics power. When doing something intense, it slows down visibly, and watching movies produces a choppy output sometimes in Vista. So to combat this I ordered an Nvidia Geforce 8500GT that I found for the lowball price of 36 bucks shipped. It has 256 megs of ram and officially supports DirectX 10 so it should speed up the visuals noticeably. I also like the fact that it will run without the need for a larger power supply. I also ordered 2 gigs of PC5300 ram. The increase in ram and the higher frequency it will run at should help Vista run noticeably faster. On a side note, I ordered the ram from BZboyz on Ebay and they sent me some cheap generic ram that wouldn’t boot. Their add stated major brand ram, but they made it right in the end and are sending me Super Talent ram and paying for me to send the old stuff back.
Vista is not new by any means, but it has been a very long process of convincing tech savy people and “power users” that it is worth switching to. Benchmarks after all score higher in XP, so that means its better right? Only real world usage can tell me if using it day to day is worth the trade offs. Maybe its the fact that all new computers come with it now, or maybe SP1 answered some questions, but I think its now time to embrace the future and give the Vista a fair shake. With the right hardware and a few tweaks to the basic install, it should come out on top

Well someone had to go again to Vegas for 2.5 weeks. Might as well be me. I am in a two bedroom suite off base (65 bucks per day for food), then I move on base (12 bucks per day) I still cant afford to go throw down 10 large on black, but just walking around the strip and hanging out with everyone here is still fun. It does get old after the first few nights of it, or maybe im the one that’s old. Either way, im here. There is an Air Show this weekend at Nellis, and it should be a really good one. Its the last one of the year for the Thunderbirds and this is the home of the fighter pilot, so they should put on a good show. I will get some pictures uploaded as long as my next hotel has internet, im only in this one for two days. Gotta love logistics of a military trip.

Well, im back online. I must have clicked on the right thing in the config file for once because ever since July, this blog has been offline. I tried to upgrade it to the latest version of wordpress, never a good idea…. Upgrading for the sake of upgrading is bad. Not even the hosting providers could tell me what went wrong. It was supposed to be a one button easy update, but it went horribly wrong. Now that I have had some time, I was able to go deep into the internet and find the problem. Im sure you are all relieved.