Tech Headaches

Borland to Bring Back Turbo

2006-08-08T14:15:00.000-07:00

From Slashdot:

"Borland Software's Developer Tools Group just announced the return of the Turbo line of products. With free and cheap versions, it's aimed at students, hobbyist developers, occupational developers and individual programming professionals. More information is available at the the Turbo Explorer website, including a video of the Adventures of TurboMan."

Check out the official site here: http://www.turboexplorer.com/

My Playstation 3 forum: Win Cash for Posting!

2006-08-07T15:21:00.000-07:00

I am a big Playstation fan, so it was only natural for me to make a forum dedicated to the Playstation 3. You can check the boards out at http://www.playstation3board.com

In order to spur interest in the forum, I am announcing the following contest:

One random poster with 50 posts or more, on or before November 1st, 2006 will have their choice of
- $50 US Gift Certificate from Amazon.com or BestBuy
- $50 US Cash via Paypal or a
- PS2 Games of your choice valued at $50 US or less

Qualifications:
- Must have at least 50 posts on this board
- Need to have a valid email address listed in your profile

POST AWAY!

Firefox 1.5.0.6 Released

2006-08-03T13:23:00.000-07:00

Quicknews: Following just days after the release of Firefox 1.5.0.5 is version 1.5.0.6, which addresses some problems that Firefox had in regards to handle media embedded in websites.

From the Official Firefox site:

Firefox 1.5.0.6 is a stability update that is part of our ongoing program to provide a safe Internet experience for our customers. We recommend that all users upgrade to this latest version.

* Fixed an issue with playing Windows Media content

Release Date: August 2, 2006

AMD Acquires ATI.

2006-07-24T09:10:00.000-07:00

AMD released an official press statement declaring it's intentions to purchase ATI, a deal worth over $5.4 billion dollars. The deal still must be approved by the U.S. government regulators, although it is expected to pass without a hitch. The deal has some AMD fans worried that nVidia will discontinue or neglect to produce their popular nForce chipsets for the Athlon 64s CPU line. While this may or may not be the case, there are also several benefits that will come from the purchase.

The first thing to come to mind is that with AMD and ATI combined, AMD can finally produce a complete OEM package, including a CPU, motherboard + chipset, integrated graphics, sound, and ethernet. Until now, AMD has only made a limited number of chipsets, relying on ATI, nVidia, and VIA to produce the majority of the chipsets for their processors. With the ability to package a complete set of components, AMD should be able to provide competition to Intel in that area for the first time.

It's no secret that ATI has recently been on the losing side of the graphics processing war. nVidia has consistently produced superior performing products over the last few years. On the otherhand, AMD has been winning the CPU war for quite awhile, until Intel recently slashed prices and introduced the Core 2 Duo. This purchase may prove to be the key to AMD's survival, since it not only gives them the motherboard/chipset capability, but it also allows them to improve ATI's video card development using AMD's advanced fabrication processes along with their partnership with IBM in fabrication research.

One thing that may be lost in the mix is the current level of competition we're used to. The sides seem to be dividing to an Intel + nVidia partnership vs an AMD + ATI purchase. While this may actually help competition, it also has the ability to stifle innovation. If nVidia stops producing chipsets for AMD, and ATI stops producing chipsets for Intel, the only motivation for either company to produce better chipsets than the other will be tied directly to the CPU's performance. VIA will most likely suffer from this, as ATI will undoubtedly be the standard chipsets for AMD. Not that VIA will not be able to develop chipsets in the future, it's just that if ATI chipsets become the stock, default chipsets, it makes it that much more difficult to offer a low end VIA chipset to anyone else but budget PC builders.

With Intel pulling ahead of AMD, it's no surprise that AMD is trying to position itself in order to step up the competition. Only time will tell if this deal will be a success and increase innovation in both the CPU and GPU market, or turn into industry stifling mistake the solidifies Intel's growing lead. Until then we'll have some interesting things see.

Official AMD Press Release.

UPDATE: From nVidia: "Today’s news about the acquisition of ATI by AMD is a positive development for NVIDIA. We are now the only graphics processor and core logic company that supports both Intel and AMD processors. We will continue to execute on our strategy, which is to develop industry-changing GPU and platform technologies, extend the use of the GPU into new applications, and expand its reach into all computing devices - from PCs to servers to phones."

Daily Dose of Funny Links - 7/22/06

2006-07-22T16:33:00.000-07:00

ARTICLE: Some dumbass gets pulled over for speeding and pretends to be a cop! What a jackass

VIDEO: A paternity test that is obvious as hell. This dude is an idiot.

There's been a crap load of Apple jokes lately. Here are a few of the funniest ones from YouTube:

VIDEO: This is what really happens when you put an Intel CPU inside a Mac.

TrueNuff takes on the new series of Mac:

What the hell is up with all these spoof Macintosh commercials:

Click here for the Daily Dose of Funny Links for 7/21/06

Computer Monitoring: How to Record Everything Your Employees Do

2006-07-22T10:43:00.000-07:00

These days it's hard to trust employees left alone on their workstations to actually stay focused on work. The reason why I say this is because I've actually watched a few co-workers install P2P applications, play online games, and even view pornography at work! That not only loses company time, but it also exposes them to potentially damaging lawsuits. Not to mention the fact that all three of the above examples are high risk areas for ad-ware and viruses.

To address these threats, a few companies have developed computer monitoring software. Spectorsoft's computer monitoring software is considered by many to be the leader in the industry. Their products span from home and small business based, to enterprise level solutions designed to monitor large corporate intranets. I've had experience with a couple other vendors, but some of them reduced the computers performance significantly, while others were easy to disable or circumvent. Spectorsoft's line of products suffer from neither of these inadequacies and are scalable depending on your specific need.

For the parent, or a concerned spouse, home based monitoring can help protect their children from predators, or catch an act of infidelity. With the rise of websites such as myspace.com, and it's capability of endangering children, using monitoring software will help protect them from such threats. This also includes the ability to see who they're chatting with, what websites they're visiting, and providing you with periodic snapshots that record their computer usage.

On the corporate level, this software becomes almost critical when it comes to accountability. Simply installing this on your intranet, and then informing your employees about it, is enough to keep most people focused on their work. Those that continue to do non-work related tasks on their computer will be caught, and can be punished accordingly. Who knows how much money each year is lost due to employees wasting time on the internet, surfing sites that are definitely not work-related.

In fact, the reason I write this is because those very same employees I watched downloading P2P programs, playing games online, and viewing pornography at work got fired shortly after our IT director installed computer monitoring software on their machines. So, if you're concerned about employee compliance, inappropriate web surfing, or want to protect your children from online predators, you should definitely consider getting computer monitoring software to address those concerns.

Daily Dose of Funny Links - 7/21/06

2006-07-21T11:00:00.000-07:00

VIDEO: Myspace has gotten so big that people are even making crappy songs about it?

ARTICLE: The Masturbate-A-Thon in the UK. Seriously, wtf? The Official Site (work safe.)

ARTICLE: The iPod stuff has gone out of control. iPod Accessories Gone Wild

ARTICLE: American's get even lazier: Techdirt: Walking Is For Suckers

PICTURE: CollegeHumor Picture: Ten bucks says this comes from a van with curtains over the windows.

BLOG: Joe Mathlete Explains Today's Marmaduke cartoon. His comments are pretty damn funny.

VIDEO: A new supersoaker that seems a bit... inappropriate

Click here for the Daily Dose of Funny Links for 7/22/06.

Someone Asked Me What Computer They Should Buy

2006-07-19T18:38:00.000-07:00

To sum up and paraphrase the question:

I want a top of the line computer with a graphics card that won't be outdated soon. What should I get for under $1,500? Additionally, what is the difference between the GF7900GX2 and the GF7950GX2

Here's my answer. Feel free to post a comment to correct any technical errors I might have made:

Just a disclaimer about putting together a system for gaming right now. There are no DirectX 10 cards available today, and by the end of 2007 you can expect all new computer games to be programmed for DirectX 10. That dosen't mean that certain companies won't spend the time to port their games down to Direct X 9 (hell, Valve made Half Life 2 support even as low as Direct X 7, although it looks like hell)

The GeForce 7900 GX2 is to bundled with new systems only, while the GeForce 7950 GX2 is available as a retail card. Companies individually selling the GeForce 7900 GX2 may be violating their OEM licensing by doing so. I don't know if there's a difference between the two in regards to hardware. If there is, I imagine it is minimal.

Btw, you should look into getting an Intel Core Duo 2. They are the top of the line CPU's right now, getting better performance than AMD's best CPU's (The Athlon 64 X2 using socket AM2) and they cost less. Normally I recommend AMD all the way, but Intel's finally getting their stuff together.

The Core Duo 2 launches on July 27. The Pentium D series is alright, but all Athlon 64 X2's will kick it's ass for games.

The order of performance as far as I understand it is:
Core Duo 2 > AMD Athlon 64 X2 (AM2 Socket) > AMD Athlon FX-62 > AMD Athlon 64 X2 (Socket 939) > Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition (Socket 775) > Pentium D Series

That's a pretty rough sketch, but rest assured that if you're looking for gaming performance and a CPU that will not be outdated yesterday, you should grab either a Core Duo 2 or an Athlon 64 X2 on the AM2 socket. If you're willing to wait until late fall, earlier winter, AMD is releasing a setup that takes two Athlon 64 X2's, for a total of 4 CPU cores. This is expected to give the new Core Duo 2 a run for it's money.

Boot.ini file in Windows 2000, XP, & Server 2003

2006-07-19T16:54:00.000-07:00

I made a mistake in my boot.ini on a Dell XPS computer (of course it applies to anyone with a PC no matter what vendor) and was greeted with this error message:

Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem.

Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware.

Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information.

The easiest solution to this problem was to:
1) Insert your Windows disk and when you are prompted, press R to enter the Windows Recovery Console.
2) You'll then need to select one of your Windows installation and enter the Administrator's password.
3) When you reach the command prompt, type bootcfg /rebuild and hit Enter.

If you need more help, I recommend this Microsoft Knowledge base:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=314477

While going through that problem I learned quite a bit about the boot.ini file and ended up writing this brief guide.

The boot.ini file format is a standard ini file that determines which Windows operating system to load at boot, and also determines which Windows installations are available from the menu at boot up. From Microsoft: "Windows (specifically Ntldr) uses the Boot.ini file to determine the operating system options to display during the startup (boot) process"

Here's a sample boot.ini file from a Dell computer with XP Home and Professional installed:

[boot loader]
timeout=3
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
multi(0)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

The first line, [boot loader] contains two variables, the first one, timeout, corresponds to the amount of seconds to display the boot menu. The second value, default, specifies the Windows installation that will boot if no other installation is chosen. In this case, the Dell computer defaults to loading the Windows XP Home installation, on the first hard drive.

Multi refers to the type of hard disk interface. In this case it is multi, which means that it is either an IDE, EIDE, ESDI drive, or a SCSI adapter with no built in BIOS. In other words, the only time you'd replace multi, is if you had a SCSI interface with a built in BIOS. disk(0) refers to the 1st physical hard drive. disk(1) would refer to the second hard drive on that channel. rdisk(0) is specific to SCSI drives, and is usually fine at 0. partition(1) means the actual 1st partition on the drive, so in the above example, the Windows XP Home installation is on the first hard disk on the first partition. Windows XP Professional is on the second hard disk, and on the second partition on that hard drive. \WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" says that the Windows folder is located at \WINDOWS and the "Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" tells the NTLDR boot screen to literally display "Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" as the selection. The final boot options we'll discuss are /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn which are flags that pass parameters to Windows when loading. The following list is from Wikipedia:

/3gb - Allocate 3 GB of virtual address space to programs and 1 GB to the kernel; used for some programs that require more than the standard 2gb allocation for user programs.
/basevideo - The computer starts up using the standard VGA video driver.
/baudrate=nnn - Sets the baud rate of the debug port that is used for kernel debugging.
/bootlog - Write a log file when Windows boots
/burnmemory - Amount of memory Windows is not allowed to use
/channel - Use with /debug and /debugport to have kernel debugging messages sent over an IEEE 1394 (firewire) port
/crashdebug -
/debug -
/debugport=comx -
/fastdetect - Turn off mouse detection
/HAL=filename - Define Hardware Abstraction Layer to use
/kernel=filename - Use an alternate kernel on boot
/maxmem=nn - Set maximum memory Windows can use (use /burnmemory recommended instead).
/nodebug - Turn off debugging; can cause Stop Error if a program uses debugging.
/noexecute=optin (DEP)
/noguiboot - Don't use the bitmap progress bar when starting up.
/nopae - Do Not Support Physical Address Extension.
/noserialmice:comx -
/numproc - Set number of processors Windows is allowed to use; useful if some processors are failing or defective.
/onecpu -
/pae - Support Physical Address Extension.
/pcilock - Let the BIOS assign device addresses instead of Windows.
/redirect - Turn on Emergency Management Services on certain versions of Windows.
/safeboot - Enter Safe Mode.
/usepmtimer -
/userva - Specify additional memory rules in combination with /3gb switch.
/sos - Display driver names while loading.
/w95 -
/w95dos -
/year -

A complete list can be found here.

Blogger Edit Posts Menu is Displaying Weird In Firefox

2006-07-18T13:11:00.000-07:00

Probably about 20% of the time I go to my "Edit Posts" tab on Blogger Firefox 1.5.0.4 on Windows XP Pro) it displays the edit button way too long, length wise. Here's a screen shot:

It should be noted that I have been able to repeat the problem on another computer running Windows XP Home SP2 and Firefox 1.5.0.4. I have been unable to recreate the bug in Internet Explorer 6.x, 7 Beta 3, or Opera 9.

Fortunately a simple refresh of the page usually fixes the problem, but I definitely thought it was worth noting. I reported the issue to the Blogger staff so they could check it out.

Windows Genuine Advantage Error: Validation Incomplete Unable to Perform Validation

2006-07-16T19:40:00.000-07:00

About a month ago my computer got damaged by a lightening storm (full details here.) The result was a wiped out Windows XP Home installation. Well I finally got back around to installing XP Home, and had to go through the hours of updates. Before I could even start the update process I was required to run the Windows Genuine Advantage, which was fine with me. That is up until WGA gave me this error message:

Validation Incomplete: Unable to Perform Validation
You have encountered an unknown error. Please contact your local support team for further assistance with the issue.

Fortunately the solution to this is pretty simple. Here's the solution posted from Microsoft's official WGA forums:

Due to the recent influx and very successful use of the forum, I'd like to have a few steps for all users to follow before making a new post, in order to help alleviate issues regarding validation issues. First, as always, please run the MGA (Microsoft genuine advantage) diagnostics tool BEFORE posting ANYTHING. The tool is conveniently located here (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=52012).

If you are not able to pass validation, but the MGA Diagnostics tool says "Genuine" in the Validation Status field, then please check for the "WGA Version"!

If the WGA Version says: "Failed to retrieve file version. - 0x80070006", then the easiest fix is to simply download the latest WGA Notifications update and revalidate. The download is located at (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=69498) The other option, if you do not wish to download WGA Notifications, is to head to www.microsoft.com/genuine and click Validate. That will update your system with the latest WGA Validation DLL.

If the WGA Signature Type says "Unknown", then the easiest, and best solution is to install the Notifications software to easily remedy the signature issue. The Notifications software, again, is located at (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=69498) If there are any other issues, please run the MGA Diagnostics tool and provide its output in a reply below so we can better figure out what is happening.

That fixed the problem for me.

I love how the program says Microsoft Confidential. Do not distribute and then they post it on their forums for the whole world to download.

A Guide to Computer Pranks - How to Freak Your Friends Out

2006-07-15T15:20:00.000-07:00

Sometimes friends and room mates deserve a little scare, and what better way to accomplish that than by pranking their computers. Computers are frustrating enough as it is, so imagine how much more frustrating it will be to them when you've intentionally sabotaged their computer.

The following pranks are pretty harmless, but I must caution you that the following is provided for informational purposes only. Do not perform these pranks on computers you don't own, and especially not on any computer used for business purposes.

Anyway, there's two types of pranks I'll cover, pranks that you download and pranks that you perform directly.

Downloadable Pranks

There are plenty of programs out there to prank your friends, and a few I've written myself. I've made two, one that emulates the blue screen of death, which I've lamely entitled the Blue Screen of Jeff, and another program which makes a transparent window always on top of the whole screen (transparent.exe) Both of the programs are easy to kill from Task Manager, but a computer novice will be lost. The programs come with an installer (2.05MB) and can be downloaded here: [1][2][3][4] [5] (Note: You'll need to visit the page in order to download the file, since I'm using file uploading services. If anyone would care to host the file just let me know.) There is no spyware/viruses in the file, and the Delphi 7 source code is available upon request.

To use either the Blue Screen of Jeff or transparent.exe simply place them in the Startup folder on your start menu. Another good prank is to copy one of these programs into another applications directory. As an example, lets say Photoshop. Now rename Photoshop.exe to Photoshop2.exe and then rename the Blue Screen of Jeff or transparent.exe to Photoshop.exe. Next time your friend tries to start Photoshop, they'll be greeted with a surprise. You can apply that trick with many of the programs I'll cover in this article.

Next up are some awesome prankware from Lizard Works. My favorite is Drifting Windows which makes your open windows move a pixel or two every 5 seconds. It is definitely noticeable, but still a good prank. Mean Swapper is another good one. It causes your left and right mouse buttons to switch roles. The warning on their website stated that upon closing the program the buttons may still be switched around, which can be remedied by going to the Control Panel > Mouse, and unchecking the Switch Primary and Secondary buttons checkbox. I personally experienced that problem when I closed the program myself, so be prepared to fix whatever computer you install that on.

Browse the rest of Lizard Work's pranks on their website at http://www.lizardworks.com/pranks.html

One of my favorite pranks is to change my friends boot screen to something weird, using Stardock's free Bootskin program. Below are a few of my favorite prank bootskins:

[Download it here]

[Download it here]

[Download it here]

Of course Bootskin is made mainly for customizing your own computer, but I've personally done this to a few friends and it freaked them out, so what they hell. Speaking of Stardock products, another great customization program that can be used as a prank is Stardock's WindowBlinds which can be download here. The program is shareware, but the limited version should be enough to install a skin that will leave your friend wondering wtf happened to his computer. Installing a skin like this horrible one:
is sure to make them cringe. I've wanted to make a WindowBlinds skin out of tubgirl and gay pr0n, but I just can't justify spending money on SkinStudio just to do that.

Speaking of changing Window's theme, there's an easy way to prank them using control panel, which leads us into our discussion of

Pranks You Perform Directly

One of the easiest pranks to perform is to right click on the desktop and select "Properties", then click on the "Appearance" tab. Click on the drop down box labeled "Windows and Buttons" and click on "Windows Classic" and click "Apply". Click directly below on the "Color Scheme" drop down box. There are several horrible color schemes to choose from, with High Contrast Black being one of the worst. It looks like this:

If that's not bad enough for you, click on the "Advanced" button. From there you can turn almost everything to the same color. Good luck fixing that though. While you're there you can also make the text huge, the icons tiny, and general tweak the system to unusable.

One of my favorites that I've been using for years is to modify the legal notice that can display when Windows starts up. To do this click on the Start menu, click on "Run" and type "regedit" to load the registry editor. From there, migrate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\ Double click on legalnoticecaption and enter in the name you want for the window, then hit OK and double click on legalnoticetext to enter in what you want the body of the window to say. Here's an example:

Well, that's about all I've got to say on the subject for now. If you'd like some more pranks check out the following links:
http://www.rotteneggs.com/r3/show/se/177236.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_pranks

UPDATE: Due to popular demand I am writing a sequal to this article with even more pranks and techniques. Stay tuned for it within the next few weeks.

Ubuntu 6.06 on Virtual PC 2004 SP1 and VMWare Server Beta 1

2006-07-15T12:20:00.000-07:00

Categories: VirtualPC, VMWare, Ubuntu

The ability to play with multiple operating systems while still running your primary OS is probably one of the biggest benefits of virtualization today. To that end, I tried installing the latest version of Ubuntu 6.06 on my computer, which completely failed (You can read about that here.) However, I still had an interest in checking out the latest offering from Ubuntu, so I tried installing it on Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 SP1, which got as far as the first boot screen, before giving me these wonderful errors:

Uncompressing Linux... Ok, booting the kernel.
[ 46.776306] isapnp: checksum for device 1 is not valid (0x89)
[ 46.783751] isapnp: checksum for device 2 is not valid (0xbe)

I tried several things, including boot flags, and messing with the Virtual PC BIOS (not much there really.) Finally I just said screw it, and loaded up VMWare Virtual Server Beta 1. Lo and behold, Ubuntu installed perfectly. In fact, I used that virtual machine to write this article and acquire the screenshots for it.

Basically, with both Microsoft and VMWare offering their products for free, there's no reason not to have both. I like the fact that Virtual PC has drag and drop support between the host and guest OS, and support for changing the resolution simply by changing the window size, but their lack of compatibility and inability to run several OS's make them a bit outdated. VMWare on the otherhand, has an excellent number of compatible operating systems and superior networking, at the sacrifice of extra drivers and services that stay resident on the host, even when VMWare Server is not running.

RELATED ARTICLES

A Guide to Overclocking Your CPU

2006-07-13T10:26:00.000-07:00

Categories: Tutorials, Overclocking

Introduction to Overclocking

I remember the first time I had decided to overclock my computer. Although I am tech savvy, overclocking was an area I was concerned about since it could potentially damage or destroy my computer. For this reason I read as much information on the subject as possible to make sure I had a firm grasp on overclocking. An issue I ran into initially was that most of the articles I read made assumptions, either that I had a certain type of CPU, or that I knew the difference between Front Side Bus overclocking and overclocking through the CPU Clock Multiplier. I make none of these assumptions in this tutorial. If you already know these technical details, simply skip over the sections you're familiar with. The aim of this guide is to walk you through overclocking any CPU or video card, no matter how old or new, or which vendor produced the product.

Use Caution

At a very basic level overclocking refers to running a processor or component at a faster rate than it was designed for. This can yield better performance, but comes with the risk of overheating and potentially destroying the component. It is advisable to monitor the temperature of the component that you're overclocking to make sure that it is within acceptable temperatures. To minimize the risk of burning the chip out, special heatsinks, fans, and even water cooling systems are sometimes used as replacement for the stock heatsinks. Another pitfall that comes with overclocking is that the lifespan of the product may decrease, since it is processing quicker than it is was designed to operate. This can also void the warranty for your processor, and even your RAM and other system components.

There are a few points I'd like you to consider while reading this article and tweaking your system. The first point is that overclocking can damage your system, so don't overclock if you're not prepared for the possibility of your system getting fried. This brings me to the second point; do everything in moderation. If you want to avoid frying your system, take things nice and slow, and don't try to push the envelope. If you really want to became an extreme overclocker, I still recommend making baby steps until you've got a bit of experience under your belt. When you overclock you should keep an eye on your temperatures. A good program for doing that is Motherboard Monitor, available for free.

Each CPU family has a different range of maximum temperatures, here is a large table of CPU's and their maximum temperatures. I must warn you that I've seen 2 different AMD Athlon XP's reboot over and over again when reaching temperatures as low as 60c. This is far lower than what's recommend on that page. When in doubt, again play it safe. You should verify the official heat rating for your CPU at either Intel's site or on AMD's site. Most CPU's can achieve a decent overclock with their stock heatsink, but acquiring after market heatsinks specifically designed for overclocking can keep your system nice and cool while achieving some amazing overclocks.

The Basic Methods of Overclocking

Overclocking through the CPU Clock Multiplier is perhaps one of the easiest methods. The CPU Clock Multiplier is the number of cycles your CPU does during one tick of the front side bus. For example, my frontside bus runs at a speed of 166MHz, and my CPU Clock Multiplier is 11.5, meaning that each time my front side bus completes a cycle at 166MHz, my CPU has completed 11.5 cycles during that time. That gives me an effective speed of 1909Mhz (166 * 11.5 = 1909.) Now if I were to raise the CPU clock multiplier I would overclock the CPU. For example, changing my multiplier to 12.5 would overclock me to 2075MHz (166 * 12.5 = 2075.) Unfortunately, some CPUs ship with the CPU multiplier locked, however there are some work arounds for specific processor families. Here's a good guide to unlocking the Athlon XP Thoroughbred and Barton CPUs. Here's another method for unlocking Athlon XPs that also covers Palomino chips.

The other main method for overclocking a CPU is to increase the Frontside Bus Speed. For example, if I were to increase my FSB from 166 to 200, my CPU would run at 2300MHz (200 * 11.5 = 2300.) Now adjusting the frontside bus doesn't just overclock your CPU, but also everything else that uses the bus, including your RAM. This is both a good and a bad thing. You can get better performance out of your whole system, but you might bottleneck your ability to overclock the CPU due to the performance limitations of your RAM and other components. Using my system as an example again, my frontside bus runs at 166MHz which is 333MHz DDR. Now the type of RAM that is rated 333MHz is PC2700, so what I did was purchase the next step up, PC3200, which is rated for DDR speeds of upto 400MHz. By doing that, I insured that my RAM would be able to handle bus speeds as high as 400MHz, giving me 66MHz of headroom to overclock.

Another thing to consider is that when overclocking the frontside bus on some systems, you will automatically overclock the PCI and AGP bus as well. This is actually a bad thing because it can cause system instability. I recommend using either an ATI or nVidia nForce based chipset on your motherboard. If you're using a VIA based chipset than carefully test your system each overclock to make sure that the PCI and AGP bus can handle it.

The level of success you have with overclocking will depend entirely upon the specific hardware that you have. Unfortunately some motherboards do not allow you to adjust the front side bus speed, and some CPUs and motherboards do not allow you to increase the CPU Multiplier. Hopefully you either purchased your motherboard/CPU combination specifically because you could overclock it, or you lucked out and your BIOS has those settings. If not, there's still hope. Wolfram Podien, a German programmer, created a program which allows you to change the front side bus speed using a different technique using the System Management Bus. The program, unfortunately is shareware, and cost $13 to register. The shareware version can be downloaded here. If you find that your motherboard doesn't support overclocking, check out this article I wrote which explains how to use CPUFSB.

Well, now that you know the basics of how overclocking works, the actual act of overclocking is pretty simple. If your motherboard's BIOS supports overclocking through the front side bus, it's just a matter of changing the bus speed to your desired level. Or if you're overclocking the cpu multiplier, just remember that FSB times your CPU Clock Multiplier equals you effective speed. Once again you should do this cautiously, gradually increasing the speed of your CPU, rebooting, and then testing the stability of Windows as you progress. There are some programs designed specifically (or just happen to great) for stressing your system to make sure that it is stable. One such program is Prime95 which I recommend you download and use the "Torture Test" after each overclock. If running Prime95 makes your system crash, than your overclock is not stable enough for daily computing activities.

Links of interest:
http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Guides/OCguide/
http://wiki.extremeoverclocking.com/wiki/Main_Page

Pulling My Hair Out at Delphi 7: rtl70.bpl Was Not Found

2006-07-12T17:43:00.000-07:00

Categories: Programming, Borland, Delphi

What the hell is the point of checking whether or not to build with runtime modules? It dosen't matter if I check the box or not, Delphi still dosen't include the runtime libraries in the executable.

Am I missing the point? Surely there has to be a way to bundle these files inside of the exectuable. Instead, I'm forced to individual package and include 3.18MB of Borland runtime libraries, even for a simple 500k executable. WTF? If I try running the programs I create on Virtual PC, without the Borland Delphi libaries, it bitches at me until I put rtl70.bpl, vcl70.bpl, vclactnband70.bpl, vclsmp70.bpl, vclx70.bpl, and designide70.bpl in the same folder as the program, or in c:\windows\system32

What I want to know is how the hell am I using the VCL Action Band on a blank form? I've tried uninstalling all the components I don't use. I even remove the VCL Sample component and my build's still require the vclsmp70.bpl file.

Still, for how much of a pain in the ass Delphi can be sometimes, I still can't find an IDE that could match the speed in which it takes to write an application. I wrote two simple applications that I am planning to post on this blog in just a few hours this mourning. If it wasn't for that, I would've taken one look at

"rtl70.bpl was not found, Re-installing the application may fix this problem"

and I switched to C# (wait, isn't that in latter versions of Delphi anyway?)

RELATED ARTICLES

What the Hell is LinkieWinkie.com?

2006-07-11T14:49:00.000-07:00

Categories: Offtopic

http://www.linkiewinkie.com/ apparently serves some function. I'm guessing linking to them might result in them sending traffic your way (oops, was I not supposed to say that?) Or maybe I'm totally wrong, but anyway it's at least worth a gander.

Tyler Banfield's personal blog is what clued me onto Linkie Winkie. I'm gonna Google around and see what I can learn about this site.

UPDATE: So I've been reading some more about Linkie Winkie and apparently they have a crawler/spider. Hmm. I must say I like the idea, very interesting.

http://www.linkiewinkie.com/
Linkie Winkie
wink wink

Underclocking Your CPU?

2006-07-11T10:40:00.000-07:00

Categories: Tutorials, Overclocking

A person I know online asked me this (rather poorly written) question:

srsly jeff, my athlon 3000+ xp is running as a 1300, how can I change it back? plzy? thx

I actually thought he was toying with me, but it turns out it was a serious question. The answer is simple, pretty much just the reverse of overclocking. Here was my response:

If you're seriously having that problem though, it sounds like you're underclocking your front side bus. There are two Athlon XP 3000+, one runs on a 333MHz (166 * 2) front side bus, and the other runs on a 400MHz (200 * 2) front side bus. You just need to go in your BIOS and bump up your bus speed [to the proper level depending on what version of the Athlon XP 3000+ you have.] If your BIOS doesn't let you then there should be a jumper on your motherboard that you can use to select the proper front side bus speed, which may trump your BIOS settings anyway.

Which of course seems to have solved his problem. Another way to achieve a similiar underclock is to lower your CPU multiplier. In his case, with a Barton Athlon XP, the clock multiplier is locked, which eliminated that possibility.

The funny thing is that the first time this happened to me, I had just baught the new, almost top of the line Athlon XP 2200+ and plugged it into my motherboard for the first time. I can't remember what it identified the CPU, but I know it freaked me out. It took me about 5 minutes to remember that the front side bus speed played a large role in determining the speed of the CPU, but for those 5 minutes all sorts of things went through my mind... did Tiger Direct rip me off, is my motherboard not compatible, did I break something? I was pretty freaked out.

A Massive Gallery of Pwnd Images

2006-07-10T18:27:00.000-07:00

Categories: Humor, Offtopic

Dude, You're Getting Owned!

Anyone who frequents forums has seen someone totally get the crap pwnd out of them, followed by a picture of someone getting owned in real life. I like saving them for future use, so why not share them with everyone else out there pwning people.

Keep this page bookmarked because as I find more pwnd images, I'll continue to update this post. Feel free to post more in the comments at the bottom!

Hosting a Website for Nothing: Free Webhosting Without Ads

2006-07-10T14:31:00.000-07:00

Categories: Reviews, General, Offtopic

I like to keep a list of free webhosting companies on my computer so that when inspiration hits me I am able to build the site and get it hosted without worrying about shelling out any cash. I figured I might as well post it here so I can access it anywhere and also share the addresses of some of the better free hosts that don't force you to display any advertising.

50Webs has free webhosting with 60 MB disk space with unlimited domains, unlimited bandwidth, and no ads. The only catch is that your filesize can't be greater than 300kb. This is my #1 choice simply because it is very straight forward and comes with FTP access. I was easily able to set up my site & domain http://www.jquindlen.com with no effort.

Afmu.com has free webhosting with 100 MB disk storage and 1 GB bandwidth each month. The perks of afmu.com is that they support PHP, CGI, and MySQL on their free accounts, meaning you set up a forum, or other content management systems there.

FriHost.com is one of those free hosting companies that requires you to be at least minimally active on their forums in order to acquire their free hosting. However their package is pretty nice, featuring 250 MB of disk space, 10 GB of traffic each month, PHP, Perl, and an unlimited amount of MySQL database and POP3 accounts, plus FTP access.

000Angels.com comes with 111 MB of disk space and unlimited bandwidth. 499Angels.net comes with 100MB of space, and looks like it is run by the same company.

122MB.com has free webhosting with 1GB of bandwidth and 200MB of disk space. There is a 4MB filesize limit, and PHP, Perl, and MySQL support.

Gratis-Server.de gives you 1 GB of storage, with 5GB bandwidth each month. The only draw backs are a 1024 kilobyte maximum file size, and no support for your own domain name.

If the above servers don't meet your needs, I recommend checking out http://www.freewebspace.net/ which has an exhaustive database of free hosting companies, with and without forced advertising.

How To Properly Punch Your Computer

2006-07-09T11:24:00.000-07:00

Categories: Humor, Offtopic

Everyone knows that the best way to fix a computer problem is to punch your computer. Either that, or clicking on a pop up window that says "FREE SPYWARE REMOVAL!" and clicking yes to everything that's displayed on the screen. However, not all people are smart enough to properly punch their systems. To that end I have developed this exhaustive guide that will step you through this intricate process.

What should I punch?

After conducting a butt load of tests, we here at Tech Headaches have decided that punching your monitor would be hilarious. Not my monitor, but yours. It's best if it's an LCD monitor, like this:

What Happens if I Screw Stuff Up More?

Some people find that punching their monitor dosen't help. These people are idiots. Sometimes these people are so stupid that the monitor punches them back:

What About This Guy?

If punching your system dosen't work, I recommend punching him repeatedly. Make sure to put back on any rings or brass knuckles you may have taken off when hitting your monitor.

I Followed Your Directions & Now My Computers Broken!!!

YOU STUPID ASS! YOU OBVIOUSLY DID NOT PUNCH YOUR SYSTEM HARD ENOUGH. KEEP PUNCHING IT, IT WILL FIX IT OVER TIME! Decades of research have proven without a doubt that punching your computer, kicking your car, and punching the wall will fix just about anything. Just look at ninjas!

Is There Ever a Time I Should Punch My Computer Case?

Yes. I recommend hitting your computer chasis every couple of secends. If you've got one of them there fancy ass plexi glass covers, punching through it may yield extensive performance gains!!!

For those of you with a laptop, just smash it on the ground. Trust me, you'll be much happier afterwords.

Insert abrupt ending here.

A User Friendly Guide to Installing Ubuntu Linux 6.06

2006-07-08T17:52:00.000-07:00

Categories: Linux, Ubuntu, Tutorials

If you're reading this I'm going to guess that this is your first Linux installation. Congratulations on trying out one of the best operating systems out there, and I'm sure once you've given this brief article a read, you will realize that installing Ubuntu is as easy (or even easier) than installing Windows.

The first step of installing Ubuntu is to download a CD-ROM image and burn it onto a blank CD-R. If you haven't done that already you can go to the official Ubuntu site and download it here. Once you have downloaded it, you simply need to open up your favorite CD burning application and tell it to burn your ISO file. For example, I use Nero 6. I simply opened Nero Express, clicked on Disc Image or Saved Project which opened up this dialog window:

I then selected my Ubuntu ISO file and clicked open, and burned the CD like I would burn any other CD. One important note is that it is often better for you to burn at a slower rate to minimize the chance of errors. After the CD is done being burnt, the next step is to reboot with the CD in the drive. You'll also need to make sure that your BIOS is set to boot off the CD-ROM drive before your disk. This setting can be found in almost every BIOS made in the last 6 years. It will be in a different spot depending on who makes your BIOS. For me, it looks something like this:

Once you have that all taken care of, you should be good to boot off the CD. Just restart the computer and you should be greeted with this screen:

Just go ahead and select Start or Install Ubuntu and hit enter. If during the installation process the graphics appear garbled or warped, simply reboot the computer and at this screen select Start Ubuntu in Safe Graphics Mode. After hitting enter, Ubuntu will start loading the operating system.

The great thing about the Ubuntu installation CD is that it is a live CD as well. This means that you can Ubuntu and test it out, without ever installing anything to your computer. In fact, that's exactly what you're doing at this stage in the installation. Once Ubuntu is done loading your free to explore it, and a sample of the programs available for it.

Once you've decided to install Ubuntu on your hard drive, simply double click the install icon on the desktop. It will then ask you a series of straight forward questions, such as your language, location, and keyboard layout.

The installer will then ask you for your name, and your a user name for logging in. Definitely pick a username that you will remember, because you will need to enter this when you login. You will also need to enter a password. Try to pick a password that has both upper and lower case letter, as well as numbers and symbols, for example, Lt44y&29X would be a very secure password to use. You should make one that is long and secure, yet is something that you will remember. Ubuntu will generate a name for your computer so you can identify it over the network. You can leave this the way it is, or edit it so that it's more descriptive.

This next step is to create a partition for Linux to use. If you're going to be dual-booting both Windows and Ubuntu, you'll need to make room for your Linux partition, unless you have some unformatted space on your hard disks. Be careful to not erase a partition that contains data that you want to keep. You'll need to allocate at least 3GB of space for your Ubuntu installation, but a more realistic minimum of 10GB should be allotted so that you have room to install additional applications.

If you're using an unformatted hard drive like I am, you can simply click new and use the full amount of space available.

Once you're done with partitioning the hard drive, you'll be presented with a confirmation screen that will recap the installation procedure. If you're ready to commit to installing with these settings, click the install button.

Ubuntu will now format the disks, and install itself. The process took about 15 minutes for me.

After the installation is done, Ubuntu prompts you to reboot or to continue using the live CD. When you are ready to use your new Ubuntu installation, simply reboot and remove the CD from the drive.

Now that you've restarted, after Ubuntu reloads you'll be presented with a login, simply enter the username you've chosen and hit enter. Next you'll enter your password.

Ubuntu is now installed, ready to use and abuse. If Ubuntu didn't have any trouble setting up your internet connection, it will check for any available updates. If there are any updates, a notification will popup informing you. Simply click on the icon and it will bring up the updates that are available.

Unless you're low on disk space I recommend installing all the updates.

Well, that's pretty much all there is to it. Pretty straight forward, huh? If you encounter any problems installing Ubuntu, I recommend you check out the official Ubuntu forums.

How To Overclock an HP Pavilion 8566C

2006-07-07T13:20:00.000-07:00

Categories: Overclocking, Tutorials

The HP Pavilion 8566C is a dinosaur. Maybe it's not from the Triassic era, but as one of the first Pentium III CPUs (Katmai core), I think you could easily date it to the Cretaceous period. Clocking in at a woping 500MHz, this beast of a machine was once a top of the line PC, complete with a CD burner and DVD drive, 128MB of PC133 RAM, and the nVidia Riva TNT 8 MB AGP x2 video card. Needless to say, this system kicked some serious ass back in 1999. Fast forward to today however, and this system is laughable, although that dosen't mean that it's completely useless. To that end, I decided to try and overclock one of these babies to see if I could suck a little more life out of it before it hit the junk yard.

The first, and most obvious problem with overclocking the HP Pavilion 8566C was the fact that the motherboard had no frontside bus jumpers or anywhere in the BIOS to change that or the CPU multiplier. Normally the only solution to that is to buy a motherboard that does support overclocking, but with such an old PC you would really be throwing your money away.

Luckily, Wolfram Podien, a German programmer, created a program which allows you to change the front side bus speed using a different technique using the System Management Bus. The program, unfortunately is shareware, and cost $13 to register, which is a bit high, yet still affordable (it should be freeware in my opinion.) The shareware version can be downloaded here.

Now, the hard part of this program is that it requires you to know the PLL vendor and number on your motherboard. Directions for finding the PLL vendor and number are found here on Podien's site. For me, with the Pavilion 8566C, acquiring those numbers meant disassembling the whole case, and spending about 20 minutes trying to decipher the tiny numbers on the chip. The vendor was easy to identify as ICS, but after years of dust and wear the numbers were almost impossible to read, especially since the case prevented me from getting my head close to the motherboard. Finally I made them out as 9248-39.

I then started CPUFSB and entered the mainboard manufacturer as Abit, the PLL manufacturer as ICS, and the PLL type as 9248-39 and I was good to go. I stepped the frontside bus speed from 100MHz up slowly. The max I made it to was 124MHz for the frontside bus, which stepped my Katmai P3 from 500MHz upto 620MHz, a 24% increase in speed. Here's the CPUz validation.

So there you have it, a quick and inexpensive way to get some additional speed for your old computer. CPUFSB works on a bunch of different computers. I would definitely make sure your PLL is supported before you purchase the software. Throw another 256MB of ram in this old Pavilion 8566C and you've got yourself a decent web browsing machine or family computer.

Delphi is Dying. Who Wants to Buy It?

2006-07-05T18:23:00.000-07:00

Categories: Programming, Borland, Delphi

Borland announced a few months ago that it was no longer going to be the producer of new versions of Delphi, C++ Builder, and their other IDE products. The plan is for them to sell the product line, as Borland moves it's company focus towards Application Lifecycle Management software. The full story can be read here.

Now I am a steadfast Delphi fan and supporter. I love the seamless cross development available between Kylix and Delphi, and I like the new integration of C# into the Delphi package. I also must expound upon just how easy it is to quickly develop and deploy an application in it. It combines the ease of Visual Basic with the power of C++. However, what I can't stand about the product was Borland's almost complete lack of support. Not that they did't provide "support" for the product, but that they seemed to have abandoned marketing and building a strong community for the product. Granted, combining Delphi with C# was a good move in that direction, but I never saw a single Borland advertisement anywhere. Never.

Whoever ends up with the rights to the Borland suite of IDE's must learn from Borland's mistakes. They need to strongly advertise their products, such as Delphi, or the community is going to gradually erode until even the most hardcore Delphi fans are forced to find a better supported product, with a strong and growing community.

Prehaps selling their IDE suite is a good move. Obviously Borland has fumbled the last several years with it, while competitors such as Microsoft have borrowed some of the best innovations from Borland for their Visual Studio suite, and gained good market share (just look at Visual C++ 6 compared to Visual C++ 2003.)

In the interim, while Borland searches for the right company to acquire it's IDE suite, the Borland Developer Tools Group have released a roadmap for the continued development of their IDE tools. Notable is .NET 2.0 support in the Delphi Highlander release, slated for early 2007, followed by Delphi for Vista, which will aim to support .NET 3.0 (formerlly WinFX), and a 64-bit Delphi/C++ compiler in 2008.

While it's great that Borland is continuing to develop these products (which is necessary if they wish to sell the division for a decent amount) I still feel that effect advertising is the only way Delphi and the rest of the Boralnd IDE product line has any chance of success. Without it, the community will dwindle, the support will atrophy, and the products will be discontinued.

UPDATE: If you don't already have a version of Delphi you can download Borland Delphi 7 Personal Edition here(65mb) from Borland's Polish site. While that's downloading you'll need to head over to this page or this page and get your free product key from Borland. I like Delphi 7 because it loads quickly, and has a very straight forward user interface, unlike later versions of Delphi.

Blogger Flagged My Blog as a Spam Blog

2006-07-04T16:53:00.000-07:00

Categories: Blogger, Spam

It's no secret that spam blogs are running rampant. In fact, the Search Engine Journal estimates that 60% of Google’s Blogger Blogs are spam blogs, so I can understand why they're cracking down on them.

So today, the fourth of July, I decided to add a blog post that will act as a link page. The page was created with the intention of linking to a small number of related blogs and sites that I feel are pertinent, and to be the only blog post dedicated to that.

Upon posting that blog entry I was asked for Word Verification. Clicking the help question mark displayed this explaination:

Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What's a spam blog?) Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive.

and they gave me the opportunity to have a staff member of Blogger come and review the content of my blog to turn off the spam filtering.

Now even though the word verification is a pain in the ass, I applaud Blogger for doing this. I'm personally so sick of browsing through blogs that are full of meaningless keyword spams and affiliate links without content. If that means losing a few posts due to mistyping the word verification than I can live with that. What I'd like to see is more people clicking the Flag as Objectional button on the Blogger toolbar, whenever they come across spam blogs. Blogger is a community, and as such, it is not only the Blogger staff that is responsible for removing spam blogs, but also the community itself if it wants to continue to grow and thrive. If you're interested in preventing spam blogs, check out the Spam Chongqing blog. It has a lot of good information.

I will update this post with the length of time it takes Blogger to unlist me as a potential spam blog. Until then, happy 4th of July!

UPDATE: It only took them until July 7th to unflag my blog. No harm, no foul.

Overclocking an AMD Athlon XP 2600+ Barton Core

2006-07-04T13:47:00.000-07:00

Categories: Overclocking, Tutorials

By default, the AMD Athlon XP 2600+ comes clocked around 1.9Ghz, and runs on a 333Mhz frontside bus. Now the Barton chips have the mutliplier locked, so the easiest way to overclock is to simply raise the frontside bus speed. Of course you'll need a motherboard that supports higher frontside bus speeds than 333Mhz. For that purpose I baught an Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe, which uses the nVidia nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset. This is an ideal motherboard for overclocking, as it lets you adjust not just the frontside bus speed, but also the multiplier, and the AGP bus speed as well (which you should keep set at 66Mhz.) I made sure to buy PC3200 ram that is designed to run at 400Mhz, even though my CPU runs at 333Mhz. This gave me enough headroom to overclock my CPU without worrying that the RAM would bottle neck it. Just for the sake of comparison, I tested some PC2700 memory in the system as well. I also baught the Aero Cool Hightower heatsink, which works excellently, and I used 3dMark 2005's CPU test for a basic benchmark.

So here's my system specs:

AMD Athlon XP 2600+ Barton
ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe
1GB PC3200 + 512MB PC3200 set to aggressive memory timings
AeroCool Hightower CPU Heatsink

The Athlon XP 2600+ seems to overclock very nicely, and I slowly stepped it up from 166 up to 180 FSB. Windows booted fine so I continued, this time to 189. Once again Windows booted perfectly, so I decided to stress my CPU out a bit and play Half Life 2 for awhile. Still no problems. Next I tried increasing the FSB up to 196 This time Windows wouldn't boot, so I went into the bios and barely increased the voltage to the CPU by 0.25 (you always want to be careful when messing with the voltage; last thing you want is a fried CPU!) This got me back into Windows, but Half Life 2 triggered a reboot. I tried lowering it back down to 193, while keeping the extra voltage I had adjusted in the BIOS. This time Windows booted fine, and Half Life 2 ran great.

http://valid.x86-secret.com/show_oc.php?id=34486

So in the end, I did manage to get it to the AMD Athlon 2600+ barton overclocked to about 2.3Ghz, but it just wasn't stable enough for me. Even at 2.2Ghz 3dMark 2005 wasn't stable enough for me. I've settled on a median of about 2.2Ghz for now. It's the perfect way to squeeze a little more performance out of my aging computer, with only a small risk of damaging the processor.

UPDATE: I was cruising the internet and I found this excellent beginners guide to overclocking, if anyone's interested.

Links: These are sites I recommend

2006-07-04T13:38:00.000-07:00

Slashdot

AMD Zone (AMD News Site)

Tom's Hardware (The King of Ads)

Nothing To Do With Arbroath

Jeremy Clark - A Tech Blog

#1 Free Link Exchange Directory On The Web - Link Market
Have you ever tried to exchange links, swap links, or trade links? Was it hard? Use link market instead; - it is easy to use, free and very smart. It will save you hours of work.

Freeshare.us
Free image upload hosting solution.

Waynebusters.com
Computer tutorials don't just live to geekit; geekit to live. Waynebusters. Com is a site committed to offering free computer help, always free

Gift Ideas
Home 'n gifts is a one-stop shop for all your household and gift giving needs. They carry a large selection of housewares, giftwares, home furnishings, home decor, collectibles, garden, jewelry, toys and tools.

Treece-birch Consultancy
Web design, accountancy and bookkeeping, and it consultancy. In business to help small businesses and individuals. Based in derby. Friendly, trustworthy company.

A Look at Memory Usage In Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 1.5.0.4, and Opera 9: Part 1

2006-07-03T15:10:00.000-07:00

Categories: Firefox, Reviews

Introduction

Internet Explorer has had the dominant position in the browsers wars for years. During this time they did virtual no improvement to their browser, expect patch security holes. Then Firefox came out, integrating the best features of both Internet Explorer, and the then shareware browser Opera, finally bringing back some competition to Microsoft.

In response to this, Microsoft created Internet Explorer 7. It includes most of the features of Firefox and Opera, including RSS feeds and tabbed browsing. So how does the new Internet Explorer stack up compared to the competition? Well, there are plenty of reviews that tackle all the issues. My biggest concern was memory usage, so I decided to run some basic memory tests on each browser. In part 2 I will cover more specific scenarios of memory usage.

The Memory Test

To conduct the memory test I opened the Task Manager and kept it open throughout. I set each browsers home page to about:blank and loaded them seperately, noting the memory usage with no page loaded, then one page, then two, then finally 10 tabs. Once I had run all the test on one browser, I closed it and started the tests on the next browser. My test machine is an AMD Athlon XP 2600+ overclocked from 1.9Ghz to 2.1Ghz. I have 1.5GB of ram (1GB PC3200, 512MB PC3200) running Windows XP Pro SP1.

1. Internet Explorer 6.0.2600
2. Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3
3. Firefox 1.5.0.4 (x86/Win32)
4. Opera 9.0 Build 8502 (x86/Win32)

Opera seemed to be the most efficent memory wise. For example, when I minimize Opera it jumped from using 26MB of memory all the way down to 4 MB with 10 tabs opened.

Firefox finished in the middle in each test. It should be noted that I have no themes or extensions installed in Firefox, so that it would not effect the test.

Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3 lost every test to both Opera and Firefox and just barely beat Internet Explorer 6 with 0 and 1 page loaded. It likes Internet Explorer still hogs the most memory.

Turning Windows Server 2003 into a Windows XP style Workstation: DirectX, Themes, and More

2006-06-30T13:24:00.000-07:00

Categories: Win2k3, Tutorials

____________________________________________

Introduction to Windows Server 2003

Windows Server 2003 is also known as Windows NT 5.2, and as such is the successor to Windows XP (Windows NT 5.1) and Windows 2000 (Windows NT 5.0.) Some students are lucky enough to recieve a free CD of Windows Server 2003, but not all students want to run it strictly as a server. For those people who want to run Doom 3, Half Life 2, Fear, Oblivion, or other cutting edge games on Windows Server 2003, tweaking their system to perform and act more like Windows XP can allow them to do this.

By default Windows Server 2003 comes stripped down, with things such as the Windows XP theme disabled, Internet Explorer locked down, audio disabled, and Direct X disabled as well. This is ideal in a server situation where those services are not neccessary. However, it takes very little time to tweak Windows Server 2003 into a fully functional workstation.

____________________________________________

Tweaking Windows Server 2003 in 6 Easy Steps

1. Disabling the Manage Your Server page.
The very first thing you'll want to do is disable the Manage Your Server window. At the bottom left corner of the screen you'll see a checkbox that says "Don't display this page at login." Simply check that box and exit the window.

___________________
2. Disabling the Shutdown Event Tracker.
The next step is to disable the Shutdown Event Tracker. This annoying feature requires you to manually type in the reason you're shutting down Windows Server 2003 each time. To disable this, and use the classic shutdown window, simply goto:

Start > Run > and enter gpedit.msc

Now click on Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System and on the right double click on Display Shutdown Event Tracker. This will load the Display Shutdown Event Tracker Properties window. Simply click on the Disabled radio button and click OK. You will no longer have to enter in a reason why you want to shut down Windows Server 2003 (Thank god!)

___________________
3. Enabling Windows XP Themes and Sound.
Windows Server 2003 actually ships with the Luna (Windows XP style) theme, but it is disabled by default. To enable it:

Start > Run and then type services.msc

Scroll down to Themes and double click on it. These will bring up the Themes Properties window. Click the Start button to start the service. Once the service is loaded, click on the Startup type drop down box and select Automatic. Finally hit OK and the Themes service will start each time Windows Server 2003 loads.

To enable sound, scroll down to Windows Audio in the services pane. Double click on that and then follow the same steps that you followed to enable the themes service (Start > Startup type drop down box and select Automatic > OK)

___________________
4. Enabling DirectX and Hardware Acceleration.
Of course, anyone who wants play games on their Windows PC needs DirectX and hardware acceleration enabled. To do that, simply right click on your desktop and select Properties. Click on the Settings tab, then Advanced and then Troubleshooting. Move the slider all the way to the right to Full, and click OK.

Now, to enable DirectX goto Start Menu > Run > and type in dxdiag and hit enter. It should ask if you want dxdiag to check for valid WHQL certificates, to which you should respond Yes. Next click on the Display tab and click the Enable buttons for DirectDraw, Direct 3D, and AGP Texture Acceleration.

After that, you should test to make sure that DirectX is working for you by clicking the Test DirectDraw and Test Direct3D buttons.

We'll also want to enable sound acceleration while we're here. Click on the Sound tab and move the Hardware Sound Acceleration Level slider all the way to right to Full.

Also, you may want to upgrade to the latest version of DirectX that is available for Windows Server 2003. Click here to download the latest DirectX for Windows Server 2003 directly from Microsoft. Now you should be ready to play the latest games (if you've got a decent graphics card.)

___________________
5. Getting Windows Server 2003 to Recognize Your Scanners, Digital Cameras, and WebCams.
Simply go back to the Start menu > click on Run and then type in services.msc again. This time we'll be looking for the Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) service. Once you find it, double click on it to load the Windows Image Acquisition Properties window. Once again, simply click the Start button to start the service. Once the service is loaded, click on the Startup type drop down box and select Automatic. Finally hit OK and the Windows Image Acquisition service will start each time Windows Server 2003 loads.

___________________
6. Making Windows Server 2003 run like a Workstation.
The last main tweak to get Windows Server 2003 to run like a workstation, is to change the way it handles programs and memory usage. By default it gives priority to background services, which is how a server should work. However, this generates poor performace for those not running their system as a server. To change this, simply right-click on my computers, and click on Properties. Next click on Advanced > Performance Settings > and the Advanced tab. Adjust both options for best performance of Programs, then hit OK.

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Running Windows Server 2003 as a Workstation Longterm

While Windows Server 2003 is not meant to be a gaming OS, or really a personal end-user OS, some people have their reasons for using it in that manner anyway. There are several issues that you'll encounter if you run Windows Server 2003 for any long period of time. One of which is that some programs refuse to install, even though they would actually run fine on Win2k3. One of those programs is Doom 3. The msi installer detects which version of Windows you're running, and for some reason they excluded Windows 2003 from the installer. Luckily, since it is an MSI file, you can edit it to allow you to install the file. Click here for instructions on how to install Doom 3 on Windows Server 2003, thanks to flexbeta.net. The instructions on that site apply to almost any MSI installer that refuses to install because of your OS. I've even used Orca to get Microsoft Virtual Server to install on Windows XP Home, although it required way more editing and global find and replacing than the simple Doom 3 example in that link (and note, Virtual Server requires IIS which is a pain to get installed on Windows XP Home.)

Other issues I've seen from people running Windows Server 2003 for long periods of time as a workstation, is that they had issues with the OS not detecting USB devices correctly. That may have been user errors though.

Anyway, hope this helps someone out there.

Microsoft Office 2007 Delayed Again

2006-06-29T16:23:00.000-07:00

Categories: News, Reviews

I've been beta testing Office 2007 for awhile now, and I haven't been pleased. I'm sure most of you have seen how they've changed the whole user interface. It's not a bad idea, and we could definitely use some innovation from Microsoft, but if it's not broke, don't fix it.

So not surprisingly, Microsoft announced that Office 2007 will be delayed until... 2007 (who would've guessed?) They cited feedback from Beta 2 as one of the main reasons for the delay. Gee, I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that all that fancy eye candy slows down the computer? Isn't Office supposed to be geared towards businesses? If so, they should take a clue from the department that built Windows Server 2003. At least they had the good sense to disable the XP theme to cater towards a server/business environment. Instead we are treated to a bloated interface that tries too hard, and performs like crap. Should I go buy two nVidia GeForce 7800GTX's in SLI mode just to run office? Of course not. Microsoft needs to realize that most corporate machines out there are using crappy integrated graphics adapters, and that functionality is much more important than style, especially when it comes to productivity in the business world.

It's not just the performance of my computer that took a hit. I also had no clue where half of the stuff is. I've spent all these years learning where each function was located, just to have Microsoft rearrange it all and hide it behind an overdone UI. The ability to switch to the "classic" menus should be available, as they've done in the Vista betas.

Blah. I might be sticking with Office 2003 or switching to OpenOffice for good. That is, unless Microsoft's finished product cuts out all the bloat that's present in this beta.

Kylix 3 Open Edition on a Linux 2.6 Kernel (Debian 3.1)

2006-06-29T09:14:00.000-07:00

Categories: Programming, Borland, Delphi

Just a quick note, I tried installing Borland Kylix 3 Open Edition on Debian Linux 3.1 running the 2.6.11 kernel, and it installed fine. After the Kylix installation, typing in startdelphi in the command prompt would return an error message. After searching the net I found the solution to loading Kylix was to edit the startdelphi file and insert this on the very first line of the file:

export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1

After typing that in and saving the file, I now have Borland Kylix 3 Open Edition running great on my Linux box.

UPDATE:For those of you looking to download Borland Kylix Open Edition, the download can be found here: Kylix Download Page. Please post a comment if the URL becomes broken.

Whoops. Windows Server 2003 and dual booting

2006-06-23T17:39:00.000-07:00

Categories: Win2k3, Tutorials

I have two hard drives, one is a 160GB hard drive and the other 120GB. On the 160GB I original had Windows XP installed on it. On the other I installed an evaluation of Windows Server 2003. The first hard drive was the main drive, and thus had to retain a Windows NT master boot record in order for the other drive to boot. Unfortunately when I decided to install FreeBSD I kind of spaced out on that fact and made the 160GB a dedicated FreeBSD drive. This meant that my Windows Server 2003 OS was inaccessible, however I had a lot of crap on that drive, and I wanted to continue my evaluation.

What I did was unplug the FreeBSD hard drive and plugged the Windows Server 2003 hard drive into the primary master IDE channel. I then tried to fix the master boot record in the recovery console with the command fixmbr However upon reboot it still didn't recognize the OS. I also tried fixboot and a few other commands, but it became obvious to me that it wasn't working. Next I tried to do the repair installation, but again I was greeted with the NO OS FOUND, PLEASE INSERT BOOT DISK. Finally I said screw it and opted for a clean install. Of course it detected my previous installation, and asked if I wanted to overwrite it and install to the WINDOWS folder. I opted to install the new version in a folder called WIN2K3, just so I didn't accidentally lose any files. As luck would have it, after it got done copying the files to the installation folder, it rebooted and showed both installations on the boot selection screen. From that point all I had to do was select my old Windows Server 2003 installation and I was good to go. Since I had previously tried doing the recovery installation I had to go through that process, but now I am happily running it again with all my programs and files just as I remember them.

It is kind of lame having to switch IDE cables every time I want to switch operating systems, but I guess that's the price I have to pay for wiping out Windows on my main disk. If anyone has a better solution to this I would love to hear it, but for now this will suffice.

UPDATE: Just a quick note. I've recently decided to simply disable whatever hard drive I don't want to boot into through the BIOS and it works perfectly.

Installing Jack Audio Connection Kit on Debian Linux 3.1

2006-06-22T16:47:00.000-07:00

Categories: Linux, Debian, Tutorials

I had a bit of trouble getting Jack (sometimes called jackd) up and running on my computer, so I thought I'd post a quick tutorial that will walk you through the setup process on Debian Linux 3.1 running KDE.

1) Install qjackctl from the packages collection. apt-get or use your favorite package manager.
2) Run qjackctl and click on the setup button
3) Uncheck "realtime"
4) Click "save" and "OK"
5) Click "start"
6) Open up "Control Center" and click on the "Hardware" tab
7) Where it says "Select the audio device" click the drop down box & select "Jack Audio Connection Kit"
8) On the "General" tab click the "Test Sound" button to make sure your sound still works
9) Load up your favorite audio app (in my case Ardour) and have fun running Jack on Debian!

Ubuntu 6.06 Won't Install: CD-ROM Couldn't Be Mounted?

2006-06-20T11:07:00.000-07:00

I've been a big Ubuntu fan. Everytime someone asks me what Linux distro to go with, I always recommend it. However Ubuntu will not install for me. At all. When I boot off the installation disk it boots just fine. I got up to the point where it's suppossed to detect and mount the cdrom drive, and it freaks out. It says "Your installation cd-rom couldn't be mounted. This probably means that the cd-rom was not in the drive." The first thing I thought was that perhaps the ISO I downloaded was corrupt, so I immediately downloaded another one and burned it a low rate. Same problem. Next I looked on the net and found that a lot of people have had the same issue with Ubuntu. Some of them found this boot option worked for them: Linux ide=nodma but this had no effect for me.

The next logical step was to try using a different CD-ROM drive, so I pulled out an old drive I had laying around and had the exact same problem. At this point it was obviously an issue with my motherboard/IDE setup, so I went into the BIOS to see if I could find any settings relating to that. Unfortunately I could not. This is pretty much where I said forget it, and downloaded Debian and installed it without an issue. I guess I could of downloaded Ubuntu onto my other computer and installed through it through the network, but at that point Debian sounded much better than an OS that couldn't even use my DVD-RW/CD-R drive to install itself. I guess I'm done recommended Ubuntu.

FreeBSD and Music Production

2006-06-19T12:54:00.000-07:00

Categories: FreeBSD, Reviews

FreeBSD was never designed to be an audio production OS, and the kernel is definitely not optimized for it. Those in the open source world have found Linux to be better suited for music production than FreeBSD simply because there's more music programs for it. In the ports collection of FreeBSD, about the best thing we have is Audacity. However, even with OSS I cannot elimate the latency when I record more than one track. This makes it useless for actual studio work. Unfortunately, I also cannot get two of the best programs for recording to compile on FreeBSD (Ardour and Rosegarden.) To that end, I am going to switch to Debian Linux for my day to day computing tasks and use FreeBSD to run my next webserver. FreeBSD is definitely my favorite OS in terms of stability, however Linux has many more programs available for it, including a variety of music production applications.

For those looking for good open source sequencers, I recommend you get the following:
http://www.ardour.org/
http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/

Firefox Memory Leaks

2006-06-17T14:45:00.000-07:00

Categories: Firefox, Reviews

Seriously, I have a kind spot in my heart for Firefox. It has taken market share away from Internet Explorer which is good. No one can deny that IE 6 was outdated and full of security holes. Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 (which can be downloaded for Windows XP SP2 here, copies most of Firefox's features such as tabbed browsing and RSS feeds. What it dosen't copy is Firefox's poor use of memory. Firefox has been plagued by memory leaks (memory leaks are when a program reserves memory and then never gives it back, causing the whole system to slow down) since it's inception and continues to bogged down by it to this day. Of course, the main cuplrits are user written extensions to Firefox. However, Firefox alone, with no extensions installed, still contains memory leaks. On FreeBSD, Firefox 1.5.0.1 slowly eats up all 1.5GB of RAM I have installed. It takes a few hours for it to eat it all away, but the problem is so bad that I switched to a beta version of Opera. It has no such problems.

The Mozilla team is well aware of Firefox's memory problems, and are working to eliminate them with each release. The folks at mozillazine.org have put together a great guide to help reduce the memory problems, it can be found here: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Memory_Leak

There have also been some memory leak tools developed to help people find and fix the problems. Here's one written in Javascript and HTML: http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/tools/footprint/leak-gauge.html and one written in Perl: http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/tools/footprint/leak-gauge.pl?raw=1

UPDATE 6/30/06
Well, upon upgrading to Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.4 I am glad to say that my memory leaking problem has vanished (thank god.) Firefox definitely is superior to Internet Explorer, but an issue like memory leaks can easily steal Firefox's thunder.

Struck by Lightening: The Importance of Backups and UPS

2006-06-16T14:27:00.000-07:00

Categories: General, Offtopic

Well, Spokane's been having some thunder storms lately, and last week while I was gone my computer got zapped. I have my computer running on a fancy looking, old surge protector made by Newpoint. It's got a great green LED that tells you whether the power strip is "protected" or not. Well, apparently their version of protection is not akin to mine. Long story short the computer got a serious shock, wiped out my music recording NTSF partition, including all the songs I hadn't backed up, and currupted several Windows XP system files on my main hard disk. I ran the MS Memory Checker to make sure my ram was alright, and then ran chkdsk to see if there were any physical problems with the disk. Luckily there were no problems, however after trying multiple file recovery tools I was resigned to wipe the disk. The lesson here: invest in a decent UPS.

I was browsing Tiger Direct and this seems to be a decent UPS that's not to spendy. I think I'll end up getting this.
ULTRA 1000VA UPS. (And yes, that is an affiliate link, just to warn you. I figure I'm going to buy it anyway, might as well try to get a few dollars off the price.)

Windows Vista Beta 2 Impressions and Downloads

2006-06-16T13:59:00.000-07:00

Categories: Reviews, Vista

Vista Beta finally went public. That means that anyone can download Microsoft's crappy beta version of Windows Vista. It is available only on a DVD or DVD ISO download, which goes along with the information that CD-ROM distributions are done for. You can download the program, and get your serial number here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/default.mspx

If after you have your serial number the download link is reported as busy, you can download the ISO files directly:

Windows Vista Beta 2 x86 version
Windows Vista Beta 2 x64 version

The beta expires June 1st, 2007.

My impression is that Vista Beta 2 is just OK. The one thing I love is that with Aero enabled, the graphics card is actually doing all the calculations to render your desktop instead of your CPU wasting clock cycles doing it (they should've been doing that for years.) The interface is great in terms of eye candy, almost seems like they're finally on par with Mac (almost.)

On the flip side, the User Accounts Access feature is implemented horribly. Basically it's Window's version of prompting for a root password (or in this case the Administrator's.) However, they've executed it so poorly that it takes seven or eight prompts just to delete certain files. The interface also responds a bit sluggishly. Of course a lot of programs that worked fine under Windows XP crash in Vista, and Microsoft has gone and conviently moved the location of almost every familiar feature or configuration that we've been used to. Say goodbye to File menus (at least until you figure to how to restore the "Classic" file menus.) Vista also has a bad habit of trying to force me to save files in the god damn "Documents" or "Pictures" folder, even after I've saved a million of them in a row, each time I got to save another one... it wants me to save it in "Documents." It needs to seriously shove off.

I don't know. It's still just a Beta, not even the first Release Canidate yet, so helpfully they'll fix the deficits and polish up the whole thing before it's actually released... or they'll just continue to put out crap like usually. That's just my two cents.

Barry 0.7 in KDE 3.5.1 on FreeBSD 6.1

2006-06-16T13:14:00.000-07:00

Categories: FreeBSD, KDE

Some people have problems getting Barry to work after installing it from the ports collection of FreeBSD. The error message that Barry produces says:

The directory /usr/ports seems to be invalid, failed to locate the port database.

Please make sure that you installed the 'ports' distribution and that the directory /usr/ports was mounted properly, if necessary.

Also, make sure that the file /usr/ports/INDEX.db exists; if it doesn't, run portsdb -u as root to generate it.

That is because by default, FreeBSD stores it as /usr/ports/INDEX-6.db even when you run portsdb -u
If you do not have an INDEX-6.db than make sure you login as su and run portsdb -u

Finally, doing a simple: cp /usr/ports/INDEX-6.db /usr/ports/INDEX.db as root, will fix the problem and get Barry 0.7 up and running for you.

Ubuntu Linux 5.10 on Virtual PC 2004 Screen Resolution Problems

2005-11-08T13:04:00.000-08:00

Categories: Linux, Ubuntu, VirtualPC

I've made the mistake of installing Linux distro's just to see if I like them, before having tried them out before hand. This generally becomes a pain dealing with the boot loader, and occasionally fixing Windows XP through the Recovery Console. A few people on the net had recommended that I try out Ubuntu Linux. This time around I decided to try it on Microsoft Virtual PC 2004.

Installation took about 2 hours on my PC and everything seemed fine until after the installation was complete. On my first boot up Ubuntu resolution was messed up. My screen was unreadable. Upon doing some troubleshooting on the net I read that Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 doesn't support 24bit screen resolutions. The solution then was to change the color depth of Ubuntu's screen resolution. This was accomplished by rebooting the virtual machine, hitting escape to access GRUB and then choosing the Recovery Mode. This booted me into Linux to the command prompt as root. From there I typed:

cd /etc/X11

and hit return, and then I typed:

pico xorg.conf

I then changed the 24 under screen resolution to 16. Then I saved and rebooted, and Ubuntu worked just fine. I must say though, I am beginning to like Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 less and less and time, as the problems go on and on.

Windows Vista Beta 2 and Virtual PC 2004: Installation Cannot Be Completed

2005-11-06T18:33:00.000-08:00

Categories: Vista, VirtualPC

I've messed around with some Longhorn betas and was not impressed, and so when Windows Vista Beta 2 Build 5231 came my way, I wasn't about to go through the hassle of dual booting another beta OS that I wasn't going to keep. However I was still interested in trying it out so I started installing it in Microsoft Virtual PC 2004. I used Daemon Tools to mount the Vista DVD image and then made the new virtual machine.

The first problem I had was that the installer didn't like my virtual hard drive. Apparently the solution to that is to format the drive using the installer and then reset the virtual machine. The next time through the installer will accept the formatted virtual disk. Now, although I gave it 512MB of RAM the install process took forever. After a few hours I thought the installation process was winding down when Windows reported that the "installation is taking longer than expected, but should be finishing soon" 5 hours later I was still at that screen, so I reset the virtual machine. This however put me back near the beginning of the installation. I have read that others who have successfully installed Windows Vista Beta 2 using Virtual PC 2004 Service Pack 1, which I had not yet installed.

After downloading and installing Virtual PC 2004 SP1, half way through the Windows Vista installation process I am greeted with a nice helpful error box that simply says "Installation cannot be completed. Please start over and attempt to install again." I click OK and am greeted with an apology screen from Microsoft, and the option to connect to the internet to see if there is a solution to my problem. This seems kind of funny to me, so I agree to let Vista connect to the internet to troubleshoot my problem. Instead the virtual machine just rebooted. Ha! That's some great troubling shooting Microsoft. Upon subsequent attempts at installing I am presented with the same error.

Well, at this point I said screw it, and opted to actually install Vista on my computer. The installation was pretty quick, about 20 or 30 minutes. I must say, this is much better than early Longhorn betas, but I'm still not that impressed. It seems like they're dumbing down Windows at the expense of customization. However this is still just a beta, and if Whistler is any indication, we can expect Windows Vista to turn out much differently than this incarnation... hopefully.

UPDATE 07/11/06: I definitely recommend using VMWare Server for running Windows Vista. Not only does it run Vista excellently, but the Virtual Machine drivers and additions work perfectly on it. The best part is that VMWare Server is absolutely free! You can download it from VMWare here. Here is a screenshot of Windows Vista Beta running in a VMWare Server virtual machine: