Windows 7 and external Sata drives

So tonight i finished the install of essential apps on Windows 7 and disconnected the old xp machine. Since all the work files are on the external western digital 1 terabyte external i thought it would be simple to unplug from xp and plug into windows7. All the other computers (mac/linux) have external e-sata drives (so much faster than slow USB), so what could go wrong.

Fire up windows 7 and it doesn't mount the external drive. Go into Administrative Tools, Drive Management and it still can't even find the drive. Weird. After wasting a lot of time poking around windows and looking on the internet it looks like lots of people have similar problems. This boggles the mind. Just to make sure i haul out a second e-sata hard drive, a LaCie this time. Same problem - not mounted. I booted windows with both drives just to be sure.

I goto western digital's site and they have a firmware update and some wd drive management software. Yikes, if i install the firmware what if it bricks the drive? Especially since the backup drives got cleaned and moved to the living room to connect to the Oppo BDP-93 (which btw had no problem mounting the drive, Steve Ballmer). Best to back up the course files.

So i plug the drive into the USB port (all my externals are 4 interface drives, usb/e-sata/fw400/fw800) and windows recognizes it and starts seaching it for music and other files. I put a stop to that right away. Now we start up the copy operation and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait...i said USB was slow, right?

Might as well go and see if the HDCD burning problem with Brasero is fixed....i suspect optical drive has gone bad...i see i/o errors in the log...

To Be Continued

Ok firmware update worked ok but drive still not recognized when plugged into e-sata
Next we install the WD drive manager setup software - installs but no menu item??? and it is not a control panel...

We decide on a low tech solution, grab and old firewire pci card from the box 'o parts and put that it.....OK windows recognizes the card. Let's shut down the external and plug in into there..ok it immediately installs the 'device driver software' and the stupid auto search for content comes up. Gee, in the days of mega terabyte externals maybe the default should be NO auto....

And the drive is there. So let's see - a modern e-sata interface that should be plug and play does not work in Windows 7 but an ancient technology going back to early macs works automatically. Lesson - don't discard your old firewire stuff yet...

PS

Multi-tasking in windows still sucks badly. Doing any kind of large scale file operations ties up the computer completely until the task is done. I am so not used to this. Linux and OSX are so much better at multi-tasking. People focus on whether the OS is 'faster' and forget about all the time you spend waiting for windows. The more time i spend in Windows 7 the less i like it. Sure it is prettier than XP and is not as absolutely annoying as Vista but in reality it is no big improvement.

Media Center IV

The quest for the perfect media center setup continues...

So far we have been fairly happy with the combination of TVersity media center server and Xbox client. The only problems have been the poor support of Windows for such essential codecs as flac and mkv among others. However it does work ok, playlists seem broken and tagging is a pain but livable.

Today we hooked up the Oppo BDP-93, a player with usb/e-sata, wired and wireless network and a built-in upnp media client. First we downloaded and updated the firmware, a very easy process using a USB stick.

Next we access the Home menu which displays all the options.

Note the built-in Netflix client which works and the Blockbuster client which is banned by the Canadian Gov't (courtesy of the CTRC apparatchiks). These are useful services that are a lot cheaper than Robber's Cable but since your internet comes from Robber's Cable (ya gotta love monopolies) you end up paying through the nose anyway.

With an attached hard drive (USB or eSata!) the movies and music functions read files directly from the drive. This could be handy but then i've have to copy files to that device. I'm more interested in playing streaming audio/video from a media server in the basement. The My Network option lists any media centers on the local network.

One neat thing about TVersity is that you can add YouTube channels and then stream those videos to your TV. We decide to play Dire Straights, "Money for Nothing" because it has also been banned by the Canadian Gov't because 1 person complained. This file is in flac format but it is listed as WAV by the media player.

The audio files work well and sound great. Really cant hear a difference between Oppo and Xbox, which is as it should as the source files are just strings of bits. I didn't try some of the more esoteric files such as DTS and BD (blue-ray rips) yet.

Where there was clearly a problem is in streaming video. Some quicktime (MOV) and MKV and MPEG4 files would not play. When the software has problems with a file it keeps on trying to play it, the streaming does not stop. With one file it even managed to lock up the player, forcing a hard reboot with the power button. In fairness to Oppo it notes this is an experimental feature, albeit one i was very interested in and which partly influenced my purchasing decision. On the plus side, since this is software, updates may come along to fix problems, add codecs and features. I'll have to test all the MKV video files as the Oppo FAQ on the wiki indicates it does support mkv.

Conclusion

A nice upgrade to the old Oppo 980HD (i had two, going to keep one) but the streaming is still a bit rough. The blu-ray video and audio quality was excellent! Much better than it's predecessor, a consumer-grade $250 Toshiba that was really disappointing and turned me off blu-ray.

Postscript - while the streaming is a bit rough and doesn't support all formats, plugging in an external hard drive (i used e-sata) works wonderfully. The oppo plays just about everything including ape, dts, mkv, flac etc - it does all the things you want (which windows media center will not) and the sound quality is excellent - much better than the same track streamed from the media server. I couldn't believe it but they sound so much better non-streamed. Compression perhaps? Anyway, i think the search for the media center is over. So i shutdown the windows 7 media server, the mac pro connect 360 media server and the windows xp Tversity media server. They all worked, some better than others but none were universal. The oppo comes closest so i'm going to use the external hard disk option. This presents a few problems - how do you get the new stuff onto the external disk? The current solution is very low tech - new stuff goes to a folder and once a week unplug the external from upstairs and bring it downstairs and copy over the new stuff. Buy an Oppo-93, the almost universal machine.

Windows 7 and Essential Apps

The migration continues...

Firefox up and running - back up using the FEBE extension and restore to FF on win7 so your online life follows you.

GIMP installed. Love the latest version. It hung when first run and i let windows diagnose and 'fix' the problem. Ran perfectly the second time.

Audacity installed but the beta version. Nervous about beta but we shall see. Ran fine. The lame and ffmpeg add ons installed fine.

VLC installed and runs ok. We searched and found a windows 7 codec pack which looks like it could solve the media problem. Will test it out later.

Lightscreen - installed ok but took a bit of diddling to get the screen region set by default and keys that worked. Finally settled on CTRL aLT PgUp. Also have to create the Screenshots folder in My Documents. Which exposed one annoyance. When i click on the folder icon on the dock or taskbar it shows a finder-like arrangement with useful links to network, downloads etc, everything except your HOME. Must be a way to add it to the view...Another annoying problem is that while the Network bit shows the other machines which have shares, i can only copy files from the Ubuntu box, not the windows xp box. That's right, windows 7 works out of the box with Linux but not with Windows. All the machine are on the same workgroup and the win7 user name and password has share privileges. It is probably related to that new home group stuff, but wouldn't a better approach would be to respect what is working and then offer to migrate it to the new home group setup? So now if i want to network with xp i have to figure it out. Don't waste the time of the user!

WAMP - downloaded and installed and the wamp control panel works fine, it is under the little UP arrow on the far right tho, took me a few minutes to figure that one out.

Greenstone installed and ran fine. I'm running it out of the user folder to see how that goes.

7zip and clamwin installed no problem.

The scanners are a problem. The USB canon does not work but we expected that as it did not work with Vista. However, it works perfectly with Ubuntu so maybe it changes desks. The big HP scanner is more problematic as it is SCSI and there is no room in the case for a scsi card unless i take out the 64bit network card. Shame as this is a quality built scanner (I have two) and the HP software has worked flawlessly since i bought it 12+ years ago. It even acts as a copier.

Installed a new DVD burner but haven't tested it out yet. I used Roxio on windows xp because there is no port of Brasero. But it may not be a problem as most burning takes place on the Ubuntu desktop anyway because that is where Brasero lives.

And we need to install a lan scanner, i run one once a month just to check up on all the network devices and to make sure nothing is wrong...

Last to do is to install the network postscript laser, which i did for the test install, not intuitive but i think i noted the process here so that's ok. Of more concern is the not almost as ancient epson stylus photo 2200 printer, a real beast (one of the few firewire printers in existence) but a workhorse. I don't think the RIP software for xp will work on win 7. We shall see...

Summary

All my must need apps (which are all open source) installed ok which is a relief, if they do not work with Win 7 then there is no need for Win7 and i've have to downgrade. Since they do there are no shop stoppers so all in all, i should be ready to switch off the old xp machine next weekend...

Windows 7 Media Center

Since i built a Windows 7 pc over xmas i decided to take another look at the windows media center. Last year when looking for media server we had installed and tested windows media center xp edition and found it sorely lacking. We ended up going with TVersity and Connect 360 as servers and an xbox 360 as the client.

Windows 7 ultimate has a UpNp media server included and it shows up on the list of servers on the xbox so we decided to give it a whirl. The shop stopper for the xp media server had been it's poor codec support. What's the sense of having a media server that won't play your media?

From windows 7 you can run the media server software and it asks for the 9 digit code that is displayed on the media client. Not sure why it does this, it requires a trip upstairs to run the xbox to get the number.

This is the first problem, while the xbox lists a windows 7 media server we cannot seem to connect to it. Even running the Test diagnostic fails to find a win 7 machine. The wizard suggests some options, one if which is the windows firewall settings.

This requires a trip downstairs to check out the firewall, which by default is not allowing media center connections. Why? We have to change the firewall settings to allow media extenders which is the microsoft name for media center clients.

Back up stairs and we still cannot get a connection. We run the network diagnostics, which is a pretty screen.

The wizard suggests creating a new connection. We do this an viola! - it has now found the Windows 7 media center and it gives us a 9 digit number. So now we go back downstairs and put in the number and the extender drivers are downloaded and the media center indexes whatever content is in the shared public folders. So now it is back upstairs again to check it out.

The GUI is ok but nothing special, no competition for XBMC here. Photos and music play fine and FLAC files now work. Adding media libraries is similar to other media servers but the GUI navigation is a bit annoying. As to movies, it played the AVI and MP4 but not the MKV, which is a show stopper. You need that codec support to play extracted blue-ray movies in high def.

What we need to do is to figure out how to turn off the media server service on Win 7 and replace it with TVersity media server which we purchased and that is currently running on windows xp.

Windows 7 on the macbook pro

Today we try windows 7 ultimate on a macbook pro. I used to run xp some years ago on the original macbook but forgot to shut windows down one day and it did not go to sleep because of a buggy boot camp driver and ended up burning out the airport wireless. Let's see how we fare now.

There is no reason to run window 7 on this as it is running xp inside of osx (via virtualbox) anyway, but this gives me a laptop for just about anything.

The target machine is a 15" macbook pro with 4 gig ram, 250gig hard drive, intel core 2 duo running at 2.4 ghz and nvidia 8600m GT dedicated graphics. To make it run full speed we decide to go the boot camp route.

Boot camp no longer requires a cd/dvd, you run the book camp app in the utilities folder and decide how much hard disk space to allot to windows. I choose 50 gig. It then asks you to insert the windows install media and runs the windows 7 installation program. You choose advanced or optional setup and select a partition. Windows will complain it cannot install there as it is not the right format. We select drive 0 partition 3 boot camp and click on the windows disk utility and format the partition as NTFS.

Windows then formats the partition, copies over it's numerous files and starts the install. This takes quite a bit of time so we start a quick game of civ2...

finally we get to the setup and create an account and get to the home network. Odd how the win7 gui reminds me of an earlier version of osx.

Ok it starts up but the isight is not working. Network is ok. I'll have to find the drivers for the macbook for win 7 tomorrow...ah, if you run windows update it gets the driver for the video and some other things.

Once installed it boots automatically into windows. In the old boot camp there was a control panel in windows to set the boot back to osx, i don't see it anymore so how to return to osx? I found it in the control panel, system and security.

Ah, here is a good guide:

http://www.simplehelp.net/2009/01/15/using-boot-camp-to-install-windows-7-on-your-mac-the-complete-walkthrough/ which says to do this:

Insert your OS X Leopard (or Snow Leopard) DVD. When prompted, select Run setup.exe. Note: If you’re using Snow Leopard and a message pops up saying “Remote Install Mac OS X”, close that window and eject the CD. Put the CD in again and this time select “Open folder to view files”, navigate to the Bootcampfolder, and run setup.exe.

Looks like this is needed in able to get back to osx - as windows probably toasts the existing boot loader (why you need to install windows 1st before linux on a dual boot machine). So we haul out the 10.6 retail box and insert the dvd.

Works as advertised. Remember to remove the snow leopard cd before rebooting.

When your Mac boots, hold down the Option key to select which Operating System you want to boot into.

There will be 2 hard drive icons shown, your apple one and a hard drive called windows. Select the windows drive. Next we install the apple bootcamp update by running Apple Software update in windows. This loads ver 3.1 which updates some of the drivers.

The macbook gets a little hot during all this updating, i have a fan control applet in osx that cranks up the fans - need to find something similar for winddoze.

Summary

Windows 7 ultimate on a macbook pro looks nice and is fast. I must say the Aero window manager is very nice looking.

How useful windows 7 is remains to be seen, but because work is a windows-centric IT place i have to use it sometimes, although there is no longer any compelling reason to do so. Many years ago a windows upgrade would have been exciting, today it is ho hum as everything i need can be done is Ubuntu or OSX and in fact there are things i do there that i can't do easily in windows without purchasing a lot of software or fiddling around in windows innards. During the years windows tried to take over the world with phones, zune's, xboxes and such it lost sight of updating it's os and many people left for better options. Wonder if it will get them back? Probably not - would you return to IE after many years on Firefox and Safari?

PS

Ran the windows experience index and got a score of: 5.1 which is caused by the slower hard drive, the other scores were all 5.9

Reading Books on the iTouch

Earlier we had hacked liam's nintendo DS so we could read ebooks on it. And it works but i don't carry around a DS so i wanted to turn the iTouch into a ebook reader.

When i got the device i immediately jailbroke it so the first step was to restore it to default and install the latest version 3 of the os. Next i downloaded the Stanza ebook app along with the apple ebook reader, the kindle and kobo ebook apps and the dropbox app. I wanted to explore various methods of using the device. The kindle and kobo approach is to tie your mobile device to an online store (like the itunes store) and i don't like that approach. I want to be able to put any ebook on it and to download from multiple sources or transfer directly from my computer.

First off we tested the stanza ebook app. This works well and has a section for free online book sources such as Gutenbery and Feedbooks as well as a link to my fav publisher, O'Reilly and some vanity presses. It is not obvious how to add additional sources, for example - can i add a local source such as a web server on my home network as a source of books?

We also downloaded the stanza desktop app for the mac, this allows you to read books on a desktop which is ok, but more usefully it lets you convert books between different formats.

Unfortunately, the instructions on the stanza web site on copying books to the itouch from itunes are obsolete (or written for the pc version of itunes). It's odd that i was able to import a bunch of pdf ebooks into itunes to the books library and that there is a books library on the itouch, but there does not seem to be a way to sync the books from the desktop itunes to the itouch. Perhaps they have to be in a different format? The apple web site notes that you need ios 4 or better which means 2nd gen itouch and mine is 1st gen so there is no books tab in the itouch window when the device is selected.

We decide to try to download some books from our web server on the home network. For the mac desktop this is http://localhost which corresponds to library\WebServer\Documents and it has a default web page of index.html which we delete. Next we copy a folder of ebooks in various formats to this folder. We discover that file permissions must be set so that everyone can read them.

We fire up Safari on the itouch and goto http://192.168.1.105 and browse the ebooks folder and select sharpe's skirmish in epub format. But because it is in epub format the web browser cannot open it and there is no way to download. Same for other formats. I was able to open and read html, txt, and pdf because they are supported by safari.

The other option is to use a website that is supported by stanza. So we head off to: http://bookworm.oreilly.com and create an account. It turns out i already created one last year and had uploaded a few books. The idea was to test out reading in bed using a netbook. This was not a success as i found the netbook screen just too small and the device uncomfortable to hold for long periods and so went back to printed books for bedtime reading. So now we decide to upload a Richard Dawkins book in epub format.

This works fine and next we turn to the itouch and run Safari and goto http://m.bookworm.oreilly.com and sign in to our account. All out books are listed. We click on the arrow next to the Dawkins book that says Read in Stanza and the stanza app is automatically loaded and the book is downloaded to the itouch. It works but it got the title wrong.

This works but we would have to convert books from the common chm and pdf formats to epub. And what about all our comics in cbr ad cbz format? A batch process would be useful here, the workflow (automator?) would be to pick up all new books in a file folder and convert to epub format and store in an uploads folder to moving to the bookworm web site. How secure is bookworm and how much storage do you get? I would prefer a local solution - how do you make a web-site stanza ready? It would be a very useful plug-in for Joomla or Drupal or Wordpress. Perhaps the workflow script could be modified to:

- convert ebook files to epub
- upload files to web server
- parse author/title info and enter in the mysql database
- create an xml file with the data for use by stanza
- build html code based on xml file and display as part of a catalog of books

I see people have come up with some solutions to the problem such as this post by cornfed

- use the program CalibreDBxtractor
- see http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=62332

CalibreDBxtractor also builds web pages that you can turn on or off at the time of build, the function of downloading the ebooks or just showing the discription of the ebook. The program is now called calibre2opds and is hosted at https://launchpad.net/calibre2opds and requires java and calibre. The progam basically uses the Calibre ebook reader to produce an OPDS compatible xml catalog complete with cross-references and links to web pages. OPDS is the open publication distribution system. From the google code web site:

The Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS) Catalog is a syndication format for electronic publications based on Atom RFC4287 and HTTP RFC2616. Catalogs enable the aggregation, distribution, discovery, and acquisition of electronic publications. OPDS Catalogs use existing or emergent open standards and conventions, with a priority on simplicity. This work is part of the BookServer project: http://www.archive.org/bookserver

This looks good. Hey, since the output is html i could use my public folder on dropbox as a testbed.

My Dinner with Windows 7

Installing Windows 7

After a previous disaster (my evening with Vista), that ended up with a lot of cursing, hurt feelings and a windows divorce, I was loath to try Windows 7. But half the computer lab is now 7, and the new students will arrive bearing laptops with 7 and the attendant problems. So i have to learn it so i can be of some help.

This all started when passing the usual dumpster spot i noticed a familiar looking computer. It was a dell precision 450, the little brother of my main desktop (dell precision 470, 2 x 3.4Ghz xeon's, 1.5tb, 6gig ddr2). Students had taken the optical drives, video card and ram but the innards (esp the dual cpu's) looked good so i had to bring him home.



Digging through the parts box resulted in 2 gig of ddr ram, ati radeon 128mb video card, a combo dvd/cdrw and a 250 gig hard drive. Put it together and fire it up and viola, a dual xeon (2.4Ghz) box with HT. Then it stuck me, this would be a good machine to try out windows 7 and i could connect it to the new 32" toshiba lcd with vga, dvi and hdmi (xmas present).

The windows 7 install went smoothly, unlike Vista which for some reason couldn't connect to microsoft's server and i had to telephone an autobot to get a validation number to enter. When it was all done i ran the 'windows experience score' and found most things scored 4.5 - 5, except as expected the ancient ati radeon 128mb video card (a score of 1). This had a max resolution of 1024 x 768 and the included windows driver was not accelerated. Tried to download and install a ATI driver without success.
Here is the windows 7 desktop showing the 4 cores in action. Note the Vista desktop background, the only thing i liked about vista! (I even use it on my ubuntu desktop...). The windows update did not fix the video problem but installed the correct driver for the analog devices ad1918b integrated sound chip, which was good as i wanted to try out the media functions microsoft advertising so heavily. I had tested the media center xp edition as a possible living room media center but it was very lacking and thus discarded.

Anyway, with the sound now hooked up to the Spherex sound system (grab one of these if you can find it) and the video sort of working (480p only) we plugged in our windows media center remote and after a few minutes telling it where the media files are located (on a server) and removing the default local options we had a media center.

The audio part works well and goes off to the internet to display the cover art. The look and operation of the 7 media center is very familiar to users of XBMC. I just played mp3's to start from one machine, the main media server has only FLAC files, although the mac pro runs connect 360 and so serves audio files from iTunes. Yet to test if the media center can pick up the connect 360 and TVersity upnp media servers.

We next test out the image function and it works fine. I like it better than the media center client update on the XBOX 360. The last update has slowed the image viewing down and made it more clunky to use.
The big test is movies, it is a media center after all - music and pictures are nice but it HAS to play movies well. And here it all comes crashing down. It took forever to pick up the 976 movies from the server and each time you click the movies option it seems to have to do it again instead of being instantaneous. And the display - butt ugly, where are the movie covers? I watch (and buy) a lot of movies, so i expect and need a good interface. I also like the MKV format (see MakeMKV for mac) but like FLAC for audio, windows lags behind the times. Not only could i not play my MKV video but also the MOV (quicktime) and a bunch of AVI's. A media player MUST play all formats and not just the ones the company decides it has deals with - so now we have to spend a lot of time hacking windows media player yet again to get it to play common file formats.

Summary

Overall, i give windows 7 a B+, it is not totally useless like Vista and did not get in my way much for common tasks. It does the job competently. The GUI is nice (and will be a lot nicer and faster once i add an ATI 4670) and it ran surprising well on just 2 gig of ram (soon to be 4 gig).

The major failing for a consumer OS is the lack of robust digital audio and video support for common formats. Business won't care about that (maybe it is a feature for enterprises!). Basically microsoft doesn't get the digital world anyway....proof - Zune - the 'ipod killer', windows smart phones - 'the ipod/android killer' and their new tablet - 'the ipad killer'...

Ya right..

PS

So i go to add a printer. It's a network printer at 192.168.1.2 but windows fails to discover it on the network. So i Add Printer manually and put in the IP address. It then presents a list of manufactures, and surprise Apple is no longer listed. My laser printers are Apple postscript so i search for a generic postscript driver but that is no longer there and Adobe doesn't provide one anymore. The solution was to choose a postscript level 2 printer like the Lexmark Optra Ep PS and install that. It worked (which is should, that's the idea behind postscript...) and the test page printed perfectly on my ancient Apple Laserwriter...

-------------------
Dell Precision 450, dual xeon cpu's @ 2.4 Ghz, 2 gig DDR ram, 250 gig hard drive, ati radeon 9200

UPDATE

Replaced the existing processors with two 3.2 Ghz 1mb cache hyperthreaded cpu's. Interesting in that when windows starts it updates a driver and requires you to reboot. The cpu score went from 4.5 to 5.0, a moderate improvement. I also upgraded the ram from 2 gig to 4 gig which raised that score to 5.0, all we need now is to install the 1 gig video card which should arrive tomorrow. The end result is a usable windows 7 box for about $240 in upgrades to a freebie..

Update 2

The ATI HD 4600 card arrived and is installed. Take 2 slots. Odd is that it is listed as having 1275 mb of total graphics memory but that only 1000 mb is actually on the video card and 251 mb is shared system memory. I don't want memory shared, that is the whole point of a dedicated graphic card vs onboard graphics! However, i can find no setting to change this. We rerun the performance index and the graphics score has gone from 1.0 to 6.7 so now the slowest component is the ram at 5.0! I check the bios but no setting on shared memory but i did change the agp aperture setting from 256 to 32mb.

Update:

Appalling! I just started up a small 1 gig copy operation of 13,000 files and basically it totally ties up the file manager window. I've never run across this in OSX or Ubuntu. Other windows can be operated and you can run a second copy of the windows explorer file manager to perform file tasks while the copy operation is going on but the original file manager window did not respond until the copying was complete.

Horrible! Windows 7 managed to scramble the file system on my USB stick while copying a file! It now cannot read the stick and wants to reformat it as there is 'no recognizable file system'. The stick will not mount on osx or ubuntu so it has to be reformatted. This never happened in XP, the primary rule is 'do no harm', how can a file copy corrupt and entire file system?