Bring It On

I used to be a hard-core hardware enthusiast. I was reading hardware oriented sites daily and always on the edge of technology, updating my home machine all the time. It is worth mentioning that I was still a PC gamer then and that a lot of the upgrades were triggered by the advances in the graphics cards technology.

But then I tried console gaming and got myself an Xbox. Finally realized that the PC gaming is nice, but expensive and that if I did not need to play games, my machine could survive several years before the next upgrade cycle.

Still, 5 years is a lot of time for a computer, so this winter I decided to build a new desktop/server/multimedia machine. Timing was good as the choice of the processor and the chipset became trivial (IMHO). Here’s what I picked:

• ASUS P5B-E, because it overclocks well, but almost any Intel P965 chipset based mobo should work good enough
• Scythe Ninja (rev.B) cooler to help with the temperature because of the overclocking, this is a big and quiet cooler that can even be run in a fan-less mode
• Intel Core 2 Duo 6300 (1.86GHz), deliberately picked the slowest and the cheapest model because they overclock like crazy
• G.Skill DDR2–800 (or PC-6400) memory, got this brand because they were the cheapest one having a decent (4–4–4–12) performance, at first I got 2GB, but then prices dropped so now I have 4GB (should be useful when running several virtual machines)
• NVidia 7600GS based graphics card with 256MB of memory, this is more or less recommended minimal configuration for running Windows Vista (128MB of memory and older cards will work as long as they support shader model 2.0)
• Western Digital Raptor 36GB 10K rpm as a primary (OS) drive and Western Digital 320GB (KS model) as a secondary drive; 10K rpm vs more common 7200 rpm is visible, but the price is such that for the data drive you’re better off with something cheaper with a lot of capacity
• Quiet case (with noise dumping material) with a quiet power supply – I chose Antec Solo because it looks good and is not too big, has only one 12cm ventilator with a very slow rotational speed (and noise) and Antec NeoHE 430 because of its high efficiency, very low noise and modular cabling – you only use the cables you need reducing the clutter in the case
• Samsung 205BW monitor to replace my CRT – yes, I had CRT monitor up until recently – this Samsung is probably the best wide screen LCD with a 1600x1050 resolution that you can buy for under 300€

Everything worked from the first try. I was able to overclock the machine to 2.8GHz (!) via a single FSB increase to 400MHz which made the bus synchronous with the memory speed. It is plenty fast, looks good and is very quiet.

Scott Hanselman has recently discussed the ways that an application can auto-update itself.

He’s only discussing the nice side of the auto-update, assuming that the app will behave correctly and predictably. Here’s my take: if you can’t implement this functionality right, don’t even try, you’ll only annoy your users.

Examples of auto-update done right:

• Reflector, besides from being an all-around cool tool, updates seamlessly and with the lest fuss
• Eclipse, even though it consists of a million plug-ins and sub-platforms and whatnot
• Paint.net, including auto-update to and from a beta version
• Windows Live Messenger, notifies you, downloads and installs, simple and effective
• Firefox, downloads the update in the background, just restart and that’s it

Examples of auto-update done bad:

• Samsung PC Studio, where the update consists of the individual downloads of each and every DLL and EXE (I kid you not), judging by the look of the progress bar uncompressed; takes a lot of time on my 15Mb connection, but at least it works
• Nero 7 Premium, confusing UI, mindless questions, does not work and it’s not obvious why; looking from the Process Explorer it does establish the HTTP connection(s) to the French mirrors (OK, at least it got right that I live in France) but then nothing happens and it declares “download problems” – “very” informative

If it takes more trouble and nerves to use the auto-update, please don’t bother. Just link to the Web page with the info on the latest version and I’ll download it myself, thank you very much.

I haven’t updated my desktop machine for about 5 years (!). Yeah, I’m cheap that way. It just wasn’t obvious that any of the advances would stabilize for the foreseeable future – processor sockets would change all the time, 64bit was slowly becoming mainstream, memory speeds were advancing once or twice a year, so I just waited.

Finally when my wife started developing software with Visual Studio 2005 it was obvious that a 5 year old computer is not really up to a task. Fortunately, this coincided with Intel taking the performance/price crown and the choice of the components was more or less trivial.  So I built up a new machine (details in the next post).

This in turn coincided with the launch of Windows Vista. Contrary to many nay-sayers I am actually excited about the launch of the new Windows and was eager to install it. I used beta 2 and RC1 before and knew what to expect.

But I forgot the most obvious thing: we only need the OS so that the applications we use can run. In and of itself, the OS is almost useless. I don’t use anything esoteric, just a few Web servers, Source Code Management and the SQL Server 2005 Express plus some multimedia viewers and such.

Installation of Vista was extremely smooth and fast. But then it hit me – I did not check if the apps I am about to install are going to work or not.

I had no idea if Subversion would work, but assumed it will. The same with SourceGear Vault, which is a .NET (1.1) app/web service. I definitely expected Microsoft products to work, including Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server Express 2005.

Needless to say, I was disappointed to find that Vault (server) does not work at all (no workaround), that SQL Server 2005 Express probably works (but is not supported until Service Pack 2) and that there is a beta update(!) of the Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005 that still does not resolve all the issues!

At that point I stopped and did not even check if the Apache 2.0.x works or if the Subversion works – if Microsoft was unable to patch its own products in time for the release of Windows Vista, what are the chances of the Open Source developers providing a free product for no fee (thus, generally having no pressure with release schedules)?

I ended up installing Windows XP. Believe it or not, it took longer installing and patching it than installing Vista, mainly because of the 64 updates from the Internet(this was applied to the Service Pack 2).

I am really annoyed by this and have been looking for an alternative. The obvious one is to move the existing  machine into a VM, then install Vista and then run the XP as a VM. But for that to work, the VM app has to be Vista compatible. I use VMWare and am very happy with it, but the quick check shows that the only Vista compatible version is 6.0, which is currently in beta. I’m (temporarily) stuck.

Really, really, irritating.