Alex Hopmann’s Blog

About a week ago I switched the Media Center from the old machine running the XP version to a new Vista machine. As I’ve mentioned before this is a new machine I built in a nice Zalman HTPC case, a quad-core 2.4ghz process (Q6600), the Gigabyte Silentpipe 8600GTS video card and an AverMedia dual-tuner card. The parts all follow my usual theory when building my own PCs- stick with the top quality name brand stuff.

I’ve been running the machine for a couple of months now as a workstation and its been running great. So I reinstalled Vista, installed the minimum of stuff I needed for its new role as a TV, unplugged the old media PC and plugged it in. The old Media PC is not getting touched until its clear that the new one is really working 100%. Part of what is so tough about penetrating this market is that you really rely on your TV. It sucks to reboot a PC ever, but rebooting your TV in the middle of a program sucks even more. And having your TV fail recording the football game right before the big ending is even worse.

So far the results are so-so. Overall the new user interface is nice, with two big flaws. The new 3-row UI for finding programs is a disappointment. I remember seeing this a long time ago when it was in development and thinking about how cool it looked. In particular it should be a much better use of the screen on wide-screen displays (like I have). It does look cool, but I find it fairly clumsy for finding things. Its even worse when for my video collections it shows the thumbnails for everything so finding an item with a given name is really hard. I think we figured out how to switch to a “list” interface, but its only somewhat better.

The other big issue is the video libraries. It now integrates with the Windows Media Player notion of libraries and scans directories for videos, pictures and music. The old one just let you browse directories to find the videos you wanted. Now, the new approach should be better but so far its not working very well so I go to my video directories and see nothing.

As for reliability, so far no general system crashes. But it has mysteriously failed to record a few programs in the middle of the night. Since I’ve got the cable plugged directly into the tuner there are now cable boxes to screw things up now, so something is clearly failing in the box. So far its been old Star Trek episodes so no big deal, but it would be really annoying if we started missing the new episode of something (once there are new episodes of something back on TV at all).

But I’ve had three incidents now that were even worse. In the middle of recording a program it has screwed something up in the file that causes playback to freak out skipping in a crazy way playing sounds like nails on chalkboard. It actually can corrupt it so badly that it caused the whole machine to lockup at 100% CPU for like an hour. It is not just the Media Center playback, playing the recorded file on another machine in Media Player does the same thing. I’ve never seen something so screwed up.

I do wonder if the bug is in the drivers for the video tuner card (since in theory lots of the encoding happens in hardware) or in Vista itself. I am tempted to try my older Hauppauge tuner to see if it makes a difference, although of course I don’t have a consistent repro case.

I’m getting this error message a bunch when copying fairly large (~1gb) media files over the network in between two Vista computers. When it gets in this state it says there until I reboot the machine where I was doing the copy. After the reboot it works for awhile.

Any idea what is causing it? Is it going to get fixed? What resources are running out?

I had this “bright” idea to use RAID1 for my boot disk on my new workstation. In theory its all handled by the Intel chipset, should be high performance. As RAID1 writes aren’t any faster, but reads should be twice as fast, so running Windows, my page file, and other key stuff on there should help give me great performance. Plus I figured my time is very valuable, and not having to worry about rebuilding my whole machine if I have a drive failure sounds like a great idea, right?

It was a TERRIBLE IDEA. It was terrible. A complete mistake.

The catch is that for your boot drive, RAID1 makes it way less reliable. Partly because its controlled by all these BIOS settings, and I’ve had times when it reset and then the machine started up with the drives not in RAID mode. Which was fine until I tried to put it back into RAID mode. Then it wouldn’t boot and I couldn’t get the Windows repair utilities to touch it. Faced with the possibility of having to reinstall Windows I switched RAID mode off and now I just have a normal system disk.

The other thing I didn’t realize is that as a RAID disk, if anything happens to the system like a crash or whatnot, it is going to have to rebuild it. Of course rebuilding the disk when you are trying to boot from it is a bad thing, and as far as I can tell the controller can’t really do a rebuild until the system is done rebooting.

Plus it needs special drivers that aren’t built into Vista (or most other operating systems) so anytime you are trying to install/do system maintenance you are back to installing these extra drivers, which is just a mess.

So the RAID is gone. I’ll probably just use the 2nd disk for my page file and maybe move my VM data over there…

More and more I’ve been watching TV much later than its official release. I wonder if using DVR starts you down that slope? First you are just time-shifting shows to later that night, then you watch them a different day of the week when you have more time. Pretty soon you are catching up on weeks of episodes. 24 season 5 and the first season of Prison Break were the first big cases where we saved up the whole season- it can be fun to watch them all in a row in just a few weeks.

Amazon Unbox has made this much easier since I don’t have to record and save up from the TV broadcasts. I just caught up on the new Battlestar Galactic series and I’ve got to say I’m impressed by both how good the show was as well as how good the experience can be watching this stuff in high quality on Amazon. I’ve been hoping to catch up on Lost also but unfortunately Unbox does not have it (despite having many other CBS programs). I really don’t get why some of the networks are being so tight with this stuff- they just passed up around $20 dollars of easy, no cost to them revenue…

I’ve been using VMWare workstation to run some virtual machines lately. Its very helpful to be able to have a WinXP IE6 box, WinXP IE7, Vista, Linux, etc, all at once, not to mention other nice uses of VMWare.

So yesterday I’m doing some big file copies and noticing that my network transfer performance on my gigabit Ethernet is running a solid 6%. Not a blip over or under, as if something were hard-limiting it. I also notice there are these two extra network adapters that VMWare has installed which each think they are 100mbps connections.

So I try disabling them (since with a little poking around I find out they are only necessary if you are doing on-machine NAT or internal networks) and like magic my network transfers hop up to 9.5%. These get installed by default but for most people you will never need them, so get rid of them.

Now to figure out what the next bottleneck is. The machines involved have plenty of CPU, I was testing on multiple disks so disk IO should not have been limiting, and I’m pretty sure everything is hooked up with nice high quality cables on my gigabit switch.

For some reason when I install Windows components on my new workstation there is an app called TrustedInstaller.exe that runs incredibly slow. It takes 30+ minutes of (one core) CPU time per component to install- language packs, the .NET Framework 3.5, etc.

This seems like its an obvious bug and I haven’t seen it on any of my other Vista machines. I wonder if its some interaction with some Penryn feature where Windows is trying to do some wacko-fancy “trusted” thing that doesn’t actually gain anything real.

I’ve got my new workstation built and am writing on it at the moment. The hardware part is all done I think so its time to start some observations while I get all my software installed and setup.

Before I go onto details of the build and some comments on the parts, I’ll mention that I did manage to overclock it to 4.0ghz (quad core), which I think is pretty cool. I suspect I’ll bring it back to 3.66ghz or so in a bit to run a little cooler since that extra little bit doesn’t actually matter, but as a milestone it was pretty fun ti hit. If I think about it, I had my first 3ghz machine probably 4 or 5 years ago and I think I got a 3.6ghz machine 3 years ago just about this time of year. Of course that was the old slower P4 architecture and only single-core (although HyperThreaded), so this machine is probably well over 4x the performance of those machines.

The Antec P182 Case

Overall I’m very disappointed with the Antec P182 case that I got. Before I get into the details lets say that this is a big case. It has 6+ 3.5″ drive bays, 4 5.25″ drive bays, and is supposed to have plenty of room for everything. Overall the situation for PC cases is just pitiful. Compared to the Mac Pro they all are pretty bad. You get the gamer-cases that are all dressed up with wacky windows and plastic demon skulls. And you get other cases that various people tried to design but pretty much none of them are done with any skill or taste.

This case is for my new main workstation. This is going to be a high performance computer and I’m starting with 4 hard-drives although only a couple of PCI cards (video and sound). The case needs to provide for clean cabling, good cooling, not be super-loud (but my office already has enough fans that it doesn’t need to be silent or anything) and I’d like it to look decent.

So to recap, I’m looking for-

• Plenty of space
• Easy expandability
• Looks decent
• Good cooling
• Not loud


Empty Antec P182 case before install


The parts for the computer came in a few at a time, so I started putting things together before everything arrived. The power-supply goes in the bottom of the P182. Pretty quickly I’m hitting trouble as its a real pain to jam the thing in there. Even worse, there is a nice fan in the bottom in between the bottom drive-bay and the power-supply, but its getting in the way of the cables coming out of the power supply. Later on I end up having to take this fan out because the situation is even worse on the drive side, with the drive cables (power and SATA) are impossible to get out of jamming the fan. The picture to the left is before I removed the fan and you can see how tight it is.

Again, let me point out that this is a very big case. Not the biggest, but its the biggest I have. In a SFF system you can excuse a certain amount of jamming things in. In a large tower case the designers are supposed to have figured this stuff out so that things can be put together without creating a problem.

This may be a situation where the case designers have not caught up yet with modern parts. I suspect it might work with old IDE style drives but the SATA connectors stick straight out more and need more room behind the drive bay. To be clear, with the Antec P182 its hard to not bend your SATA power connectors to the point where they break. This picture shows the drive bay with out the fan- the metal bar at the top of the picture is where the fan would be and you can see how much the power cables would be bent if it were still there.

Another issue (which points to a similar blind spot) is that all the fans have old-IDE style power connectors rather than headers which attach to the motherboard. These are bigger and mean that your motherboard can’t monitor and control the fan speed. The case has some nice external switches that let you adjust fan speed, but the ideal situation is to have the motherboard automatically adjust it based on the internal temperatures so it can crank up when you are gaming and run quiet the rest of the time.

The fit for the motherboard itself is also fairly tight, again given the size of the overall case. There are some baffles that let you separate out the bottom power-supply/drive section from the main section, but they get in the way of the bottom of the motherboard (where Asus puts the USB/Firewire and front-panel connectors).


Finally, if you get this motherboard you need to make sure that your power-supply has a long enough 12V cable. Normal cases put the power-supply at the top of the case which will end up being close to where the 12V connector is on the motherboard, so the power-supplies tend to not make this cable long enough. The P182 does make a nice provision to run the main power-connectors behind the motherboard to keep them out of the way of the expansion cards, cooling, but my 12V cable was at least 4″ too short and so I couldn’t actually get things working inside the case until I bought an extension. You can see the extension cable in the bottom right of the picture. This part from Amazon is exactly what you need to fix this situation-


The last thing that was a trouble during install was that I couldn’t figure out how to mount my DVD drive in the external bays. I was probably just being stupid but the manual is (as usual) horrible at providing any useful information on this stuff. It was not clear whether you insert the drive from the inside or the outside, other than that the inside is blocked by the motherboard. My first attempt to insert it from the outside got stuck because I put the mounting rails on backwards- it turns out that the clips go towards the outside of the case which (to me) is non-obvious.


Finally, some observations on the case now that it is all put together. Overall once it is put together it seems very nice. The big thing I’d look for differently is that it is a pain having the DVD drive inside a fold-out door. To insert/remove disks you need to open the door and put it in. I’d much rather just have external access to the drive so the front-door thing ends up being a pain overall.