Aaron's space: Computer and Internet

Broke Down on Twitter

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 12:48:43 GMT

Alright I finally broke down and signed up for twitter. You can see me here - http://twitter.com/Vendoran. I'm syncing facebook and found an app that will also synch my IM status called Twessenger. I don't know if I really want to update my IM status with it, but I'll try it it. I'm also using a vista sidebar gadget called Twadget.

New Hardware

Tue, 09 Oct 2007 20:47:39 GMT

Well I broke down and purchased some new hardware for my home machine. Last month I had posted my configuration and some of the problems I've had. Well this summer we experienced many power outages and since I had gone cheap and didn't have the computer plugged into a UPS, my motherboard started having issues and so did one my hard drives :(. So I've order some new hardware:

Hopefully after I get these this week, I'll be back up and running by the weekend and the issues I was experiencing go away.

Great Job!

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 15:47:35 GMT

Aaron Erickson (a fellow Magenicon) has become a Microsoft MVP in C#. Great Job Aaron!

No dice

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 14:42:30 GMT

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So I got home and immediately installed the Vista Update. The first update that I tried KB938979 actually hung and the Vista dialog came up stating the application error and do I want to close or look online for solutions...this gave me a really good feeling. Anyway that wasn't the one I was really excited about anyway. I quickly made sure I had the most up to date drivers from nVidia and then installed KB938194. It called for a reboot, which I did. I then went into my favorite game and gave it a try. To my utter disappointment, I still had the same problem. To be fair, the problem wasn't as bad. Instead of blacking out the screen and disabling playing time for 30 seconds it only stopped play time for about 5 seconds and the screen would just flicker. It also didn't happen as often as it used to. Used to be every 2-3 minutes like clockwork, now I was going a good 10 minutes in between time, although when it happened, it would occur 3-4 times straight. So hopefully as newer drivers are available and SP1 comes out this will work itself out....

If anyone has any other ideas of what to try, I'm open to suggestions...here's the hardware I'm running:

Case - COOLER MASTER Centurion RC-534-SKR5 Silver Aluminum & Mesh bezel, SECC chassis ATX Mid Tower Computer Case 430W Power Supply
Motherboard - ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe Socket AM2 NVIDIA nForce 570 SLI MCP ATX AMD Motherboard
CPU - AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Windsor 2.0GHz Socket AM2 Processor
Hard Drive - Western Digital Raptor WD740ADFD 74GB 10,000 RPM Serial ATA150 Hard Drive x2
Memory - CORSAIR XMS2 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) x2
Video Card - EVGA 256-P2-N554-AX GeForce 7600GT 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card
Sound Card - Creative 70SB046A00000 7.1 Channels PCI Interface Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatal1ty Professional Series
DVD - LITE-ON 16X DVD±R DVD Burner With LightScribe and 5X DVD-RAM Write Black
Monitor - Acer AL1916WAbd Black 19" 5ms DVI Widescreen LCD Monitor

I purchased the parts and built this as a Christmas gift last year for our family. Since then Scott Hanselman has been blogging about his experience purchasing and Jeff Atwood's experience building a computer. I'm an avid reader of Scott's blog and listener to his podcast. While he provides good content, I also relate since due to his experiences with black hair and type I diabetes. While I do not have diabetes, I've dealt with the effects all my life as both my father and late grandmother have type I, and my mother has type II (if you don't know the difference, you can read at his blog here and here). As far as my experience with black hair, you can see my family pictures :)

Video on Vista

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 21:28:40 GMT

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So awhile back I wrote about moving from vista 64. Since then I have gone to Vista x32 and XP x64, all to no avail. The best experience I've had has still been Vista x64. So I have reloaded it on my computer and am quite happy with it....Many utilities like AntiVirus are more readily available now. However I still have problems with the video 'Driver stopped responding' issue. Well today Microsoft released a patch http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/938194 that the second bullet states:

The computer stops responding, and you receive a "Display driver stopped responding and has recovered" error message. You can restart the computer only by pressing the computer's power button.

I plan on trying this out tonight, and hopefully it solves my problem. If it does I should even get some playing time tonight as my wife will be out helping clean the church.

64-bit Vista and Windows Easy Transfer (File and Settings Transfer Wizard)

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 17:33:02 GMT

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I had built a new computer last December (thanks http://www.newegg.com/). I received all the hardware and loaded up Vista x64 and have been loving the Vista experience since. However I have not enjoyed the x64 experience.

Things I discovered while on x64:

MP3 players that can't sync with Media Player don't and have no intention of supporting x64 (I returned the iPod I bought my wife, in exchange for an Insignia - Best Buy's brand)
Anti-Virus were very slow to support x64 (also free AV programs charge for their x64 version)
Driver support for Vista was slow, more so for x64

Also I had constant video driver issues. For those that aren't aware, Vista has a new feature where the drivers can crash and be recovered. The OS basically restarts the driver, however the hardware the driver interfaces with is unavailable during the restart. In my case it was the video driver. I would be working and all of a sudden my monitor would go dark and come back in a couple seconds with a notification that the video driver had stopped. I had specifically spec'd the computer for Vista (video card - eVGA 7600GT) and have tried the newest drivers with no avail. Not to mention during game play (WOW), I had screen tearing and color problems constantly.

So I finally decided to "downgrade" to x32. I started out by using the Windows Easy Transfer to backup the files and settings for 4 users (was about 1 GB). Loaded up the x32 and started to restore from Window Easy Transfer.

Now a little background, in Windows XP there was the File and Setting Transfer Wizard, which I've never had a great experience with. I've used it going from XP to XP machines. I backed up the settings and reloaded the computer doing all the updates and went to restore the settings only to find out it didn't work. This was due to the version, evidently there is a hot fix that essentially "upgrades" the Transfer Wizard in XP, and of course it comes through window update. The newer version states the image file can't be used, no explanation why or what can be done. So to restore, I had to uninstall this Hotfix. You'd think the newer version should be able to read backups from the old version, but hey who doesn't love spending a half hour getting to know Google.

The last time I used it was when I moved to Vista. I moved from x32 XP to x64 Vista. However when doing this the Settings couldn't be transferred and the files couldn't be put in the proper place, due to Vista being so different. All it could do was restore the files to a generic location and I had to put them in the appropriate user profiles. While not ideal, I understood and it didn't take that long.

So back to Saturday, I loaded up x32 Vista and started the restore. And to my surprise I got a single message stating that x64 backups can't be restored on x32. No option for just restoring the files to a generic location, No option to do anything. The only option I had was to close the application. Nowhere was this information disclosed prior to the restore attempt, which of course is the last place you want to see there's a problem. I'm not sure what is so different about a desktop and screen saver settings between x32 and x64, but why couldn't I at least get the files themselves?

So guess what I got to do? I got to load x64 back on the machine, restore through the wizard (which actually was pretty cool when it let me do it, the wizard was even able to create the user accounts). Then copy the individual files and reload the computer back to x32 bit and recopy the files.

As you can imagine my Saturday afternoon project, turned into a weekend project which I finished Sunday evening. Hopefully this solves my screen tearing issues, I'd hate to have to go back to XP on it, just to play games. :)