http://serenitycomputing.com/ All new articles, alerts, updates and stories. Serenity provides computer support and training, computer programming and web design expertise. Here you will find comment on the industry including develoments with the Internet, Microsoft, and the Linux operating system en-us Copyright 2006 Serenity Computing. Phil Stephens admin@serenitycomputing.com http://www.serenitycomputing.com/welland-lanshare-network-drive-review.html One problem facing the small business and home office is the need for reliable access to shared data and printers. In Windows 200/ XP / Vista based networks, the answer is to use one computer, usually the one that is running most of the time, and share files from it. This creates problems when someone wishes to access files from another machine when the “server” PC is shut down. I have written about the D-Link DI-624S Wireless Router /storage device. It is convenient but performance of the shared drive was always poor. I have installed a Welland LanShare network storage device to replace the DI-624 external drive. Please check out the full Welland Lanshare Network Drive review. http://www.serenitycomputing.com/asus-ee-pc-review.html I have been using an Asus Eee PC for a month or so and decided to report on my Findings. The Model I have is the Eee PC 4G in pearl white colour. This is not intended to be a review in the traditional sense, but more of a evaluation of it's usability. But first a quick review. The Eee's name refers to its slogan “Easy to learn, easy to work and easy to play”, or Eee. It is also quite cheap for a fully functional PC. I paid $479, making it one of the cheapest notebooks you'll get your hands on. It is one of the first notebooks that uses a solid state drive, even if it only has a 4GB capacity. Solid state memory is fast, safe and rugged. With no moving parts there little risk of causing damage to your drive with a knock or drop. It is the first laptop I have owned that I an happy to carry around with me while it is running. http://www.serenitycomputing.com/blog200805.html#May_20_2008 * This story seems to be getting air time only in the depths of the technical press, but Windows XP Service Pack 3 is continuing to create problems. Among issues reported are the following: * Installation hangs at 60% and requires rebooting * It prevents any other windows updates from installing. * It reverts or loses drivers an corrupts component installation. * USB memory devices (memory cards, external drives, etc ) disappear, and USB wireless adapters dissapear or stop working. * Network adapters disappearing. * AMD machines are going into reboot loops. http://www.serenitycomputing.com/xpsp3.html Microsoft began using the Windows automatic update service to install Windows XP Service pack Three on May 6th 2008. Please note that there are three issues associated with this update. 1) It is VERY large, 315Mb. This will take 30 to 90minutes to download if you have a broadband connection, and is simply not practical for a dial-up user, requiring about 14 hours on a fast dialup line. 2) Many Bigpond / Telstra users have a monthly download limit of as little as 200 – 300Mb. If you are on a 200Mb plan, the XP service pack alone will generate an additional charge of $17.25 excluding any other internet usage for the month. 3) Many users are reporting significant problems with their computers after installing SP3. Some cannot get the computer to work at all, some are suffering other problems. See Information Week for details. Service packs are in important part of maintaining the security of Microsoft Windows based computers, and need to be installed as soon as practical. I recommend, however that users consider postponing the installation of XP SP3 until Microsoft fix some of the current rash of problems. I would expect they will issue a fixed service pack within the next couple of weeks. ... http://www.serenitycomputing.com/blog0804#Windows_Vista Windows Vista is Slower Than The Mac OS X Leopard. More bad news for Microsoft in benchmarks run by Popular Mechanics magazine. The ZDNet story is here The good news is If you run Vista ON the Mac (using Bootcamp) it runs faster than on the PC hardware... http://www.serenitycomputing.com/blog0804#April_19 Web site goes live today The new site is up, I will spend the next week adding some of the material that I cut during the process back to the site. It will be much more search driven. The Google search bar in the banner will search the site only, or the Internet. http://www.serenitycomputing.com/blog0907.html#Blocking_Spam_with_HOSTS A glance at Techmeme has lead me to a blog post by Nicholas Carr at Rough Type in which he asks: “Adblock Plus: What would Jesus do?” For those of you who do not use the Firefox web browser (using Internet Explorer is like smoking, if you don't do it, don't start, if you do, STOP NOW, get Firefox!) Adblock Plus is a free plugin that blocks all those annoying advertisements from the web. For a discussion of using Adblock Plus or not, I cannot improve on this Blog post, and its comments. Please go and have a look as soon as you finish reading this. I would like to talk about a low(ish) tech option that can do more than Adblock plus. It is called a hosts file. It is literally a text file called hosts. The purpose of the hosts file is to tell your computer where to look on the network or internet for computers. It has no extension, and it has a format like this: http://www.serenitycomputing.com/blog0907.html#Sabayon_Update Well, It's time for an update on my Sabayon Linux experience. Let me say at the outset I am not a Linux fanboy, or a Microsoft hater. I am a computer lover, and a computer user. I will always look for the best option to keep me working. Sabayon caused problems installing simply because of the time it took to add applications, and the apparent inability to install binary applications. On PCLinuxOS I was able to install applications using Synaptic or RPM. I resorted to RPM to install VMWare and several other applications. As a result I was disappointed with the mini version of Sabayon I first installed, and I went back to PCLinux briefly. When the 3.4e full install arrived, I attempted another installation. I chose to omit the 3d games, but otherwise did a full install. It has an overwhelming array of software, but still missed several applications that I rely on. I used a mixture of Emerge from the command line and Portato, the graphical front end to install Audacity, Thunderbird, Kompozer and other applications. Once again it took time. I started the installs before going to bed and let them run all night. I Need to run a VM, as part of my income is derived developing Windows software. I could not get VMWare to install. I installed Virtualbox, but it does not allow a VM to split its image into 2Gb sections. This means I cannot backup a VM to my backup drive which is a FAT32 formatted 200Gb USB Drive attached to my D-Link wireless storage router. As a result I re-installed (again) this time with a dual boot XP / Sabayon setup. 22Gb for XP, 11Gb shared and 22Gb for Sabayon. This installation is now running fine... http://www.serenitycomputing.com/blog0707.html#PCLinuxOS_2007 I have swung back and forth between a variety of Linux installs and Windows 2000 or Windows XP for some time. My feelings and opinions have been documented on my web site. My motivation is not hatred of Microsoft, or a crusade to introduce open source software. It is to enjoy a reliable and easy user experience. I support home and business computer users, and develop software. There is no escaping the fact that Microsof and Windows will be dominant for some years to come. However the landscape is changing. Microsoft has focused much of the development of Windows Vista on DRM (Digital Rights Management) to protect the movie and music industry from piracy. The result is a version of Windows that offers very little to the user, but costs a lot. The Vista Experience (second hand) I am not running Vista, and will not be for several years, if at all. This is based on research by other intelligent investigators and commentators. Vista is slower, more expensive and less featured than Windows XP. the DRM features cripple video and audio whenever 'Premium Content' (High definition or HD) media is present. Your video and audio will drop to a quality similar to that of a Pentium 200 PC with VGA. This will happen without warning. Games will not perform well, HD movies will not play, high quality audio will not play, or will be throttled back to the quality you got from a Compact Cassette. Welcome to the world of Vista and DRM! If ther is any hint that a Video card or piece of software has been compromised by pirates and Microsoft will remotely disable that device. If your video card driver has been hacked in China, Microsoft can switch of every one of those cards (including yours) next time you connect to the internet. And all these parts will cost more due to the required additional security that must be built in. There is a saying in Australian pubs: “You don't buy beer, you just rent it”. Well welcome to the future. You don't buy Windows Vista PCs now, you just rent them. and the landlord will lock you out the first time the guy next door forgets to pay the rent. This is not a problem if you are willing to break the law. The security measures have already been bypassed by a user who could not play a legitimately purchased HD Video on a legitimately purchased PC with a legitimately purchased copy of Windows Vista. It took him a week to bypass billions of dollars worth of software and hardware development. The results are now on the web. Goodbye Vista DRM security! My concern is the attitude. Microsoft and the movie industry have tried and convicted all the people like you and me who buy a movie and the want to watch it on the PC because the better half wants to watch “neighbors” instead. To quote the famous line from Star Wars: “The more you tighten your grip, the more [users] will slip through your fingers”. It is time to plan the escape. Enter Linux; Enter frustration; Enter PCLinuxOS 2007; The answer! I do not generally gush over Linux. I see it as the best alternative to Windows, but I have been firmly of the opinion that it is NOT ready for the average non-geek desktop. I think PCLinuxOS 2007 will change that. There are some bumps, but this finally, is the operating system that CAN replace Windows. To prove the point I am typing this on a Toshiba laptop running ONLY PCLinuxOS 2007 test 3. This is a Beta release, but it just works! I have finished the last three paragraphs with exclamation points. The reason follows. Disclaimer: This is not a blow by blow review with installation screenshots and comparisons of performance with other Linux distros. It is an explanation of why I have chosen PCLinuxOS 2007 (PCLOS). The install is from a live CD, so you can run the CD and check that it all works, then begin the install. The installation is no harder that a Windows XP installation and does not require a whole bunch of driver disks for every device. they are all included on the install disk. Run the installation and everything else (for all the applications) is downloaded from the PCLOS repositories easily using the installer. Upgrading the libraries and installing new tools takes a few hours over my slow 256Kbp link, but they happen smoothly in the background while the computer was used for other things. What is included Web browsers, e-mail, office applications, development tools, media applications including video, audio, etc. Linux comes with pretty much everything. What does not work immediately The default video viewer (Kaffene) does not play copy protected media, which includes pretty much all DVDs. I installed the libdvdcss modules from the repository. No joy. After installing VLC (a free video player) the Kaffene player then was able to play all DVDs. The Firefox web browser had problems with java applets. Installing libstdc++5 from Synaptic fixed the problem. Note: These problems where fixed on the PCLinux OS Final CD, and are no longer a problem :- ) I use a Windows based research tool extensively. I was able to find detailed instructions on getting it to work on Linux using Wine on the web. Fifteen minutes and it was working. I use Borland Delphi for Windows software development. I am also doing a TAFE course the requires Microsoft Office. There are reports that suggest both these applications can be installed on Linux, but I decide to use a Vmware emulator. After downloading the Vmware rpm it was installed using standard commands and asked a few cryptic questions, but the default values worked OK, time taken 10 Minutes. Once the emulator was installed I copied a virtual machine (VM) from a Windows computer and loaded it in. Installing the Vmware tools took a few minutes. Starting from scratch requires a full install including adding patches and tools. This takes a few hours due to the endless parade of patches and updates that have to be downloaded and requiring a reboot each time. One of the nice things about Linux is – NO reboots unless a new kernel is installed. http://www.serenitycomputing.com/blog0707.html#Disk_Drive_Failure I sat and read a book in my office last night. I have a comfortable chair in one corner, and as I read I had a view of the two desktop PCs running in the room. I noticed one was continuously accessing the hard drive, and the other was not. After a while I got up and investigated. One was running Windows XP because my son had been playing a game. The other is my PCLinuxOS workstation. The Linux machine accesses the drives every few minutes, probably because I had a browser and e-mail client open. Windows however was running an anti-virus scan. That machine, like most, has a lot of software and a lot of files on it. I use backup software to backup data nightly to an external drive, but folders containing my ripped CD collection and my large installs directory containing all manner of installs from Windows patches to Linux .ISO files only needs backing up occasionally. These I copy to unused space on a client PC every week or so, and to DVDs every couple of months. This means I have many Gigabytes of data on clients. The result is that if it is a Windows PC, anti-virus scans take hours. What is the damage to the hard disk drives of a virus scan? The heads are in constant use, something commodity drives are just not designed for. If you have paid a premium for a server with high end drives, the difference is probably knowledgeable, but most computers run disk drives designed to give performance for a price. Modern disk drives are extraordinarily resilient and reliable, but there is a limit to what they can take. Constant virus scanning is shortening their life. To make matters worse, the average computer is running with a cheap power supply with a small rear facing fan, and is struggling to keep a modern computer cool. The result is that a disk drive being accessed constanly during a virus scan will get hot. How hot depends on air temperature and fan efficency. I have seen an almost new PC with the drive running at 55 degrees celsius. A typical disk drive draws 7 Watts at idle 10 or 12 under load, but the heat quickly builds up in the spinning metal. Most hard drive manufacturers rate their drives to 55Deg. But research shows that every drop of 1 Deg in temperature increases disk drive life by 10% or, increasing the temperature by 5 Deg has the same efect as shifting the drive from a 10% load to a 100% load. A virus scan increases the temperature and also increases the load from 1-10% to 100%. The result... Be afraid, be very afraid for your disk drives, anti-virus scans on home computers significantly decrease the life of the drive. Anti-virus software is a fact of life for Windows users. BACK UP NOW. Or switch to Linux and add years to that disk drive. The disk drive is the heart of the system. A faulty video card, power supply or any other peripheral can be replaced, and life goes on. If the drive fails, it is all over, red rover. A total re-install, and goodbye data. If all your data disappeared right now, how long would it take you to get your home or business system up and going again? I suggest you look at this reliability study at Digit-life.com: There are a number of free HHD temperature monitoring programs available, search for 'hdd temperature' for some suggestions. http://www.serenitycomputing.com/blog0707.html#D-Link_DI-624S Updated 16/04/2008 - Continuing problems with Disk access... For the larger office or business, document and resource management is simple, install a server and a decent network and make sure you back it up. A system administrator will ensure that everything is secure, and that printers and files are available to everyone the should be. Many small or home offices have a problem with this approach for file and printer sharing. It is expensive and difficult to set up. My office and home office has always tended to have a file server. I am a bit of a pack rat when it comes to keeping old computers. As a result my server is usually and old machine pensioned off because it is too slow and not worth the expense of upgrading. I install a decent disk drive and a copy of an older, but stable operating system and share everything. This has its drawbacks however. The cost of running a PC is small, especially an older PC, but it adds up to around $130 to $180 per year. This is a lot for a home office. Additionally the noise and heat generated can be quite noticeable. Running two desktop PC's pushes the temperature in my office about five degrees higher than the rest of the house, and in Summer, that means all computers begin to push disk drives to dangerously high temperatures. I had to add an extra fan to one PC because high room temperature pushed the disk drive over 50 Degrees Celsius. When the time came recently to upgrade my wireless router I decided to try the D-Link DI-624 Wireless storage router. There were some bad user reviews on the web, but I decided to have a go... http://www.serenitycomputing.com/blog0707.html#Installing_Windows_XP I have just had to re-install Windows XP, after a period of Linux installs. I had forgotten how tedious and time consuming it is to install Windows from scratch. The installer asks questions about disk partitions, and copies files and reboots the system. Of course Windows, being proprietary, there is the need to enter the product license key, a long and annoying string of arbitrary letters and numbers. You hope you get it right, and eventually you are past that stage. The install takes about an hour on my PC, and at the end of that, you have a basic Windows XP install in a screen resolution of 800x600, with 256 colors. Windows never seems to have the right drivers for anything, so the next step is the motherboard CD. That has drivers for audio, network and the bits and pieces specific to your motherboard. Things like ACPI, PCI, USB and all that acronym soup that makes a PC run well. You can skip this step if you wish, but performance will suffer, and things like USB and audio can be problematic. Next comes the Video driver CD. Then you probably can get the network running. After that there are patches. I have Windows XP service pack 1 and 2 on my server, after that there are an avalanch of patches to be applied. This involves downloads, reboots and accepting license agreements. Everything has to be patched and added to... http://www.serenitycomputing.com/blog0707.html#The_Rise_of_the_Small_Computer_Store When you go to buy a computer you have little choice. It comes with Windows, or Windows. With Vista, you can pick from a number of versions, but they are all Windows Vista. Vista has serious problems, including very few working drivers and issues with multimedia content. I will talk about these another time (I already have, elsewhere) Vista is slow, Many watchers describe it as a $400 XP service pack. Most of the money spent on it was used making DRM (digital Rights Management) an integral part of the OS. So much so that games running with DRM on Vista are 18-20% slower that the same game on XP. The upshot is, many people don't want Vista on their new computers. Unfortunately, when you front up at the computer store, there is an array of computers to look at. Usually big name brands, HP, Toshiba, Acer, Compaq to name a few. And they all come with Vista ONLY. What to do? Enter the small family owned computer stores. Most make their living providing service and support, but computer sales have been thin on the ground the last few years as the big chain stores have taken over. I think for the next year the small computer stores will come back into their own. XP OEM is still available, and most small computer stores build to order from components. If you DONT want Vista yet, find a reliable local computer store, and get them to build one to order. The advantage of this is you have control over components, so ask for a good, quiet power supply, a name brand DVD player and so on. Get the machine set up with Windows XP. It will run faster, It will cost less, and will NOT come loaded with gigabytes of trial software that you do not want. And I find the personal touch of the reputable small computer store has a lot to recommend it over the big chain stores. This option is being picked up increasingly by new computer buyers who are being warned off Vista by friends and family who are keeping up with the news coming from IT industry watchers. I helped a friend migrate data from her old Windows ME computer to a new Windows XP home based PC built by a local computer store last week. She is happy with a familiar interface, and as a widow, money is important. Small businesses face the same cost pressures. Vista is expensive, it requires the best hardware, and on any hardware it is 20% slower that XP. Why not save the money and enjoy the performance. By the time you are ready to upgrade from Windows XP, Linux will be ready for the desktop and will run on your hardware. then you can save again by installing a more efficient, Free/Open operating system. http://www.serenitycomputing.com/blog0807.html#iRiver_T30 I recently bought two iRiver T30 medial players. I was attracted by the spec. which includes the ability to record from a line-in jack. I have used an older Creative MuVo to record from the FM signal in a number of lecture halls, but have been unable to use an induction pickup to record from the induction loop provided for hard of hearing or directly from the magnetic flux of a speaker or speaker cable in some lecture venues, or from a line input. I have been forced to use a cassette recorder and the to dub from tape to MP3. The T30 also has a microphone, and I have used it to record lectures by placing the recorder close to a ceiling speaker in a quiet area,. The signal strength is quite good, and noise is low. As a result I can use software such as Audacity to boost the signal, and get a clean audio file. Compared to either tape recorder (motor noise) or the MuVo (extremely low signal, and hiss when amplified) the quality is exceptional. I bought the player from an eBay vendor here in Australia, and expected FM recording capability, and the ability to connect to both Windows and Linux PCs. Unfortunately the supplier sent me a US version. This version uses Windows medial Player ONLY to move files on and off the player. This means it would not work on Linux, and requires WMP with is DRM (Digital Restrictions Rights Management) to handle music. I would call this a deal breaker, but the goods where paid for, and getting refunds from eBay sellers is a painful exercise. So I looked for a solution. The US iRiver use MTP, Microsoft's Media Transfer Protocol to ensure you do not move copy protected music onto the player. The European and Australian players are UMS (USB Mass Storage) devices that can be written to and from like any USB storage device. It is possible to upgrade the firmware to allow the US UMS devices to be accessed by Linux and Windows without WMP... http://www.serenitycomputing.com/blog0807.html#Thunderbird One of the common problems associated with using multiple PC's or multiple operating systems is the problem of managing email clients. An e-mail sent from one client not visible when booting into another operating system. Downloading an e-mail in one client makes it disappear from the next application. On a Windows only basis this can be gotten around by using a USB drive carrying a portable application like like portableApps Thunderbird. http://portableapps.com/ One day someone will present an option of a group of Java applets/applications that can do this, and we will have true cross platform office tools. at the moment this option is Windows only. I am currently handling this by using Thunderbird with a configuration that looks to a common storage area. In my case I use a server for file storage. I made this work in this way... http://www.serenitycomputing.com/blog0807.html#Sabayon_Linux Yesterday I listened to the Linux Action Show podcast, and the boys where raving about Sabayon Linux, and how well it detected Wifi devices, and other drivers. I am a confirmed PCLinuxOS lover. Since finding an 0.92a disk on a magazine and discovering that it would find the WiFi card on my Toshiba Tecra A4 Laptop. I have moved with PCLinux and was disappointed when the 2007 final release would not find the WiFi card. I compromised and bought a Belkin USB 'Stick' WiFi card, and this works fine in PCLinuxOS 2007. Unfortunately PCLinux will not handle the ACPI power management functions at all well, and the ACPI is what inteferes with both the inbuilt network cards. To use the ethernet card I have to boot with ACPI off, resulting in the laptop running at full CPU speed and generating a lot of heat. The fan runs almost continuously, and power consumption skyrockets. So I downloaded the 'Mini' version of Sabayon Linux 3.4e (700Mb) and booted the laptop with it. to my astonishment, not only did it detect the WiFi and Ethernet cards, it also has full power management facilities. CPU throttling, Sleep and hibernate and power monitoring work fine. The CPU runs at an all time low temperature, and I think I will find battery life is good. As a result I have installed Sabayon Mini on the Toshiba. I have the full DVD version downloading (a 2 day operation at the bandwidth I have available) and I have ordered the 3.4e (desktop) and 1.0 Business (server) edition CD's for the U.S. They are due in 10 days, just in case the download fails. I cannot do a 4.2Gb download twice in one month on my broadband plan. It will throttle me down to 64Kb, and then it will take a week to download! Sabayon is based on the Gentoo distro, and Gentoo is considered 'beginner unfriendly' however I have found Sabayon quite easy to install, and a very nice looking and quite fast distro. It is now at home on my laptop and the pain has begun. The 700Mb install excludes OpenOffice, Gimp, Kaffene and a lot of other applications I am used to, so I have attempted to install them using the Kuroo GUI package manager. I failed to get it working initially, and most of the responses to requests for help with Kuroo are along the lines of 'it is garbage, use the command line'. I used the command line to install OpenOffice and it took 5 hours to install. It appeared to compile the whole suite from source code. I went back to Kuroo after realising it had not asked for administrator access. Instead of booting from the desktop icon I ran it as root from a terminal. Everything works now, and installations are happening. More on this development over the next few weeks.