Hardware

So far USB 3.0 leaves a lot to be desired

Kevin Shyr — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 14:49:05 GMT

I now have a few docking station for my SATA drives that's hooked on to USB 3.0 PCI Express cards. I also have a laptop with 2 USB 3.0 ports. The straight up transfer speed is good, 86 mbps versus 20 mbps, my virtual PC now runs very well with USB drives. However, using those devices for file storage has not been a very good experience so far. With the old USB 2.0 drives, I could create multiple "move" instances between drives. The speed slows down, but I could initial some moves and leave the computer for a while. With USB 3.0, if I initial a second file move between the drive that are currently being moved, the drive drops off and corrupts the files. I thought it was the drivers, but my 2 desktops and my laptop all are doing the same thing.

For now, I am moving back to USB 2.0 when I need to move files, and only use USB 3.0 when I need something fast straight up. I'm definitely looking forward to new computers with USB 3.0 built in natively and will try other docking stations other than Vantec. However, my HP portable USB 3.0 drive is doing the same thing, so I'm not sure anything would help at this point.

I guess the first thing to do is to look through all the support page on Vantec, HP, Dell, and Gateway.

Thanks to my wife for a dream machine

Kevin Shyr — Thu, 05 May 2011 13:39:17 GMT

2 months ago I learned that there is going to be a Windows Azure Boot Camp, free, 2-day, code-intensive. The only catch at the time for me was that I didn't have a laptop, a requirement for this camp.

Thanks for my beautiful and tolerant wife, we provisioned and I got my dream machine. Waited and shopped for a long time to get a reasonable price, but I got the following spec:

8GB ram
Necessary for me to run my virtual environments
i-5 4-Core CPU
Want 4-core for virtual environments, but not a fan of hyper-threading, so no i-7
2 USB 3.0 ports
Hook up to my USB 3.0 portable external drive, it's like having a SATA drive. My virtual machines are flying.
dedicated video card
Free up system resources.

Now I am enjoying this Boot Camp and I got my DEV environments all set up and portable. I'm one happy man!

A network card did not show up in the Virtual PC networking adapter settings...

Kevin Shyr — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 01:43:37 GMT

This post saved my life: http://blogs.technet.com/b/windows_vpc/archive/2009/12/07/networking-in-windows-virtual-pc.aspx

Installing XP with Visiontek Radeon HD 2400 Pro 512MB AGP

LifeLongTechie — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 17:10:47 GMT

I bought this video card to work with Windows 7. It works perfectly; couldn't be happier.

The problem starts when I had to install XP for some legacy application. I tried installing different versions of XP (home, professional, media center), and each one hangs at the XP startup screen.

Workaround: I installed XP with the onboard video card first, change the screen resolution, then switch in the new video card, and voila.

Proof of concept project - Home infrastructure

LifeLongTechie — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:26:15 GMT

Some of you have been seeing some pictures of me putting heat sinks into 2 old computers to

reduce noise
provide adequate cooling for the system to run 24/7

I want to blog this for several reasons:

To keep track of what I've been doing
To perhaps get some suggestions of any better way of doing it.

The 3 computers I'm working with have the following specs:

P-4 1.6 GHz, 1.5 GB PC-133 SDRAM, 120 GB IDE
P-4 2.6 GHz, 2 GB PC-2700 DDR, 320 GB IDE, 800 GB RAID-0 SATA
P-4 2.8 GHz, 2 GB PC-3200 DDR, 400 GB RAID-1 SATA

These are the physical box. For proof of concept purpose, all necessary servers will be installed as virtual PC/Servers.

[Update 2009-10-13]

First up:
Domain controller running 2008. In my concept, this will be on the in-house network and will only connect to the internet for updates. I don't plan on having a server to push out updates because I'd like the end users to have the options to update as fast as possible, but I'm also looking into the possibility of having my web server be the windows update server.

Just can't wait for USB 3.0 to be available

LifeLongTechie — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:38:53 GMT

Kind of make me regret setting up a ExpressCard/eSATA virtual environment, but this is really cool!

http://www.everythingusb.com/superspeed-usb.html