KaiSchaller.com

I suppose I have one more hardware post in me before moving on to greener pastures. Previously on KaiSchaller.com:

Since the last post the 8600 GT card from Best Buy had developed a horrible grinding noise that was being caused by its fan. Since the fan wasn’t performing the card was running at 92 degrees Celsius while idling (that’s about twice as hot as it should be), and it was quite impossible to do anything graphically intensive as the card would shoot up to about 120 degrees Celsius at which point the computer would lock up and require a hard reboot. Putting it down to bad luck and poor manufacturing, I decided that it wasn’t so bad considering my new video card from NewEgg was arriving the next day.

Fast-forward to after work today, where a lovely box is waiting on my desk. After popping the old, seemingly defunct video card out of my tower I noticed that the decal that had been glued to the top of the GPU fan (no idea what purpose that serves…) had slid off to one side and was grinding against the side of the heatsink. No wonder the fan was acting crazy! I re-mounted the sticker (if I weren’t returning the card I would have removed it) and plugged the card back in to do a quick test. Lo and behold everything worked swimmingly again. At that point I noticed another piece of plastic that had evidently peeled off of the top of the heatsink (the kind you find on new electronics that protect them from fingerprints). Again, no idea who’s idea it was to stick plastic and adhesive all over the cooling elements of a video card. To be fair, I should have noticed, but the thought didn’t even occur to me.

Anyway, I plugged the new beast of a card into the motherboard and ran a few benchmarking tests. For about $20 more this card has more than twice the performance of the other. Needless to say, I’m very pleased — it’s great when hardware cooperates.

I’ll be returning the other card to Best Buy sometime this week.

It looks like my video card was going bad. I definitely prefer that outcome to my motherboard needing to be replaced. Aside from cost it’s a pain in the arse to remove CPU fans.

I swung by Best Buy after work and picked up a dinky little PNY nVidia 8600 GT to test things. Plugged it in and the monitor sprung to life… current plan is to return this card to Best Buy and get a much better one from NewEgg for about the same price.

In other news, my dad may be sending some money my way in the way of a Christmas advance for a Mac mini! Now I just have to play the waiting game and hope Apple rolls out an updated line in September…

Sadly I am once again experiencing problems with the PC’s video signal. Every now and then it will just refuse to output anything to the monitor when it is turned on, which puts the LCD into a power save mode as a result. When this started happening a couple of months ago it seemed to be enough to just switch DVI ports (the video card has 2) or reboot the system, but it’s become a bit trickier since then. When I ran out of easy options about a month ago I carried the thing outside and gave it a good air-dusting. After blowing out a fair amount of dust — mostly from the processor’s heat sink — and reseating the video card in the PCI-E slot, everything was running well again. The problems returned this evening, though, and I’m not sure what is causing this strange behavior.

In other hardware-related news, I’m currently very interested in acquiring a Mac mini for use as a HTPC. There is a plethora of great-looking software out there that I’m itching to use, but I have to get the hardware first. I’m waiting (and hoping) to see Apple release an update to their mini product line, which is rumored to happen sometime in September. 802.11n wouldn’t be too shabby at all. Waiting isn’t so bad considering I don’t have the money to go out and buy one right now anyway!

For the first time in my years of Apple coveting I find myself being displeased with how one of their products is functioning. I recently upgraded to the 2.0 software for my iPod touch and the number of problems I’ve had with the device since then has increased from none to many.

Last night I was suddenly unable to transfer podcasts to the iPod. Music would go over just fine, so this was baffling. I couldn’t get it to work on the PC either. After not being able to find anyone with a similar story on the ‘net I bit the bullet and initiated a restore, confident that I could restore my settings, etc. from the handy backup iTunes offered to make for me.

After the restore was finished, I was told the backup was either corrupt or not compatible with the iPod I was trying to restore. I would also be unable to restore my applications (some of which I’ve purchased). Luckily the App Store recognized that I had already purchased certain applications and let me re-download for free.

These kinds of usability issues are unacceptable in any product, even more so an Apple product because they’ve set such a high standard for themselves. Compounding the problem is that there never seems to be a real solution to any particular issue except “Backup and restore the iPod.” Hey, I’d love to , but that doesn’t seem to work reliably either.

One other small thing that’s been bugging me lately. I know that some of the problems that people experience with iPods are due to copyright-protection technologies that limit what users are able to do with their devices and media. Just another reason to scrap the whole mess and get on with it — DRM and similar technologies do nothing but hurt the end-user.

I’m officially writing my first post of WordPress 2.5. Happy Cog definitely helped tighten the admin interface, and gave it that “clean” look. I haven’t noticed much difference in functionality, but then again, I don’t usually go past the usual simple write-and-post process.

The reason for writing this post is that I wanted to share with you something incredible that happened over the weekend. Don’t get too excited; it’s not that great, but made my jaw drop nonetheless.

I went home to St. Joseph to give my mom her birthday present — a new MacBook. She’s been putting up with a clumsy Gateway laptop for a while now, and the problems were starting to mount. After continually singing the praises of OS X, my dad and I both chipped in to buy her a Mac to alleviate these problems.

One recurring theme was that her printer would just stop working for her with the Gateway. Lo and behold, we plug it into the MacBook and it’s ready to go in 3 seconds flat; printed a test page and it worked great.

Since she still needed to use the Gateway for her office, it was time to figure out what was going wrong. After some basic troubleshooting I uninstalled the printer software and drivers in order to start from scratch. We plugged the printer in to the USB port and the New Hardware Wizard appeared, as expected. Also expected was the “No drivers were found” message that appeared on the next screen as well as the “Would you like to search online for drivers?” prompt.

Now get ready…

For the first time in my many, many years of using Windows XP, the internet search for drivers actually worked. Printed a test page and all was well.

Mind blown. The end.

My dad is planning on buying me a new 24″ iMac as a graduation present in December and I’m beginning to get very excited about it. A lot of this probably has to do with the release of Leopard, since I know it’ll look and function even better on a newer system than on my dated PowerBook G4.

I can definitely see myself making the iMac my new primary computer. I’ve always been a PC guy when it came to getting actual work done, but that is looking to change. What I will still need my PC for is the occasional game of Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2, or whatever else the fellas happen to be playing at the time. However, now that EA has signed on with Apple (and the fact that AAPL is gaining market share) it probably won’t be long before game developers start releasing Mac-compatible versions of their games.

In other news, my capstone project is trucking along, and I shouldn’t have a problem getting it finished in time for the November 26th presentation. In the end it will be functional, and time will determine how feature-rich it becomes.

One of the frustrating incompatibilities that still exist between operating systems is which file system you use to format your hard drives. I have a few external hard drives that I use for storing my media, keeping backups, etc. As far as I know FAT32 can be used by both Macs and PCs to read/write, but using it limits your file sizes to less than 4 GB. NTFS and MacOS Extended do the trick for their respective operating systems, but I learned the hard way that OS X couldn’t write to NTFS. I haven’t tested how Windows responds to the MacOS Extended file system, but I would imagine it’s the same if not worse.

Let’s standardize, people! Sadly, this probably won’t happen.