Chaucery Blog

As noted in a previous entry, I recently bought my first LCD monitor, a Philips 190B6CB 19". It is connected to my stoic old Gigabyte Radeon 9200 via a 2m DVI cable.

I found that I got lots of sparkles on the desktop, which worsened to huge flickering lines when I watched digital tv via my PCI tv card. A sparkle is a single pixel that flashes somewhat randomly between two colours. The sparkle is colour, rather than location, dependent. If it occurs within a picture on a web page, then scrolling down that page will cause the sparkle to move down too.

Sparkles are relatively common in home-theatre installations where the DVI cable lengths are extremely long. They indicate that the signal is not strong enough to propagate the length of the cable. This can be cured by installing an active DVI repeater. In my case, the 2m cable was far too short for this to be of relevance.

As I mentioned in the previous entry, after some investigation I worked out that I had to untick 'alternate DVI operational mode' in the Catalyst digital panel settings. However, I also found that fullscreen 3D programs only worked when this option was ticked. Otherwise, the screen would go blank after flickering wildly on startup.

My thoughts were that if this was caused by hardware, ie. cable, video card or monitor, then it wouldn't be fixable by a Catalyst driver setting. An answer to this would be found if I could determine what that driver setting actually does, but I was unable to discover this.

As a test, I replaced my 1.5 year old $100 Gigabyte Radeon 9200 with my brother's 1 year old $300 Asus Radeon 9600XT, and found that this completely eliminated the visual errors. My current theories are that the latter card provided a stronger signal, or that its signal was more compliant with standards.

Update (14 Oct 2005): Setting the display size closer to the LCD's native screen resolution also improved matters somewhat. It's hardly a great solution, but might be a useful temporary fix.

Update (18 Oct 2005): After having major flickering DVI display problems when I upgraded my Linux partition from Mandrake LE 2005 to Mandriva 2006 I found a plausible explanation from a disgruntled user. Related bug entries in the X.org database are 1129 and 1829.

Posted by James at 12:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After ten years of loyal service my ADI Microscan 5V+ 17" CRT monitor was getting a bit dim, so I looked around for a replacement. I eventually settled on the Philips 190B6CB 19" LCD monitor for the a variety of reasons.

CRT vs LCD

As an aside, the DVI cable was not included with my monitor, and I found it difficult to find a reasonably-priced one in the shops. There are three varients of DVI: DVI-A is analogue, DVI-D is digital, and DVI-I is the combination of both. If you look at the cables ends, you can see that you can convert a DVI-I cable into a DVI-D cable by breaking off the analogue pins. However, there is some odd pricing in shops, because DVI-D is aimed at people buying expensive home-cinema systems who wouldn't bat an eyelid at outragous cable prices, so DVI-D prices range from double to ten times that of DVI-I cables, despite being simpler.

When I first connected my DVI-D cable, after using the included VGA cable for a day, I found that it produced awful flickering when watching tv using my DVB-T PCI card. To fix this I had to change the ATI display driver advanced settings, to get rid of default ticks next to "Reduce DVI frequency on high-resolution displays" and "alternate DVI operational mode".

Philips LCD vs other LCD

I was rather disappointed with the lack of a printed manual. As well, the electronic manual was poor, in that it doesn't explain fully the monitor's features, such as why to use the DVI interface, what the USB port is useful for, how to plug in the USB and audio cables, and what "stand-alone audio for efficient net conferencing", as mentioned on the box, actually means.

Black Philips LCD vs other colours

The display frame must not be too black or too white. This is to avoid contrast with the display surface. Nor may it give rise to disturbing reflections.

In summary, after only a few days of use, I already feel that this LCD monitor has proven its worth, and I can't imagine living without it.

Posted by James at 10:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In almost twenty years I have never experienced a hard disk failure. My first hard disk was a 20MB monster purchased in 1987 to go in my amber-screened 8MHz 8086-compatible. It worked until just a few years ago when I took it apart for magnets. Since then I've steadily progressed up to the 160GB SATA 7200RPM 8MB cache Hitachi Deskstar, which I bought in April 2004 for video editing.

Two mornings ago Windows XP refused to boot up, remaining at the pretty XP logo screen. When pressed, it revealed that its loading would proceed up to mup.sys, then halt. Google pointed me to a Hardware Analysis forum, which didn't offer any immediate solutions.

Given that this problem occurred overnight, it had to be a hardware fault, and the most common hardware fault when you're not fiddling with your PC's innards has got to be the forever-moving hard disk.

At this stage I started thinking about backups. I make my main backups across the network to my second PC, and vice versa. I checked the contents and viability of the backups, and found they were fine. There was just a minor amount of data that had changed since the last backup that would be useful to try to retain. This was straightforward because I had multiple OSes on multiple partitions, and the other OSes still booted.

My data was on a FAT32 partition, so I could access that from the Win98 OS, and backup that. A tiny amount of data was on an NTFS partition, which I could still reach from my Linux OS. So, I had everything I could possibly need off the disk. Time to check about the disk warranty.

Hitachi have a nice little Disk Fitness Test program, which I downloaded and ran. It informed me that my disk was defective, as it was suffering from excessive shock. Assured that I couldn't fix it, I took it back to its place of purchase, and I'm now awaiting a replacement.

Although this whole event is a slight annoyance, it does give me the opportunity to install from scratch all my OSes, which I have been meaning to do for a while. It also takes me back to 2004, because the temporary disk I am now using is my previous hard disk (a 20GB Quantum Fireball) which has not been formatted since I removed it. Windows 2000 sure seems clunky.

Posted by James at 2:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I never had a problem with printing to the LaserJet 5L attached to my Win98 box from a Win 2000 PC over the network. However, after switching from 2000 to XP it was another matter entirely.

When installing the printer driver on XP, I received a message along the lines of "print server doesn't have proper drivers installed". Continuing on I tried installing the 5L driver that came with XP, but after selecting this the dialog would hang, amid a flurry of activity on the network. At this point the Win98 box would reach 100% CPU utilisation, where it would remain until the print spool service on XP was restarted. The same happened with the latest 5L driver from HP.

Surprisingly, Google was quite silent on this issue. I eventually found some hints on the HP support forums leading me to believe that this was a driver issue. I found an old Win 2000 driver lying around on the system (I had upgraded rather than reinstalled from 2000 to XP) and found that it worked perfectly.

Looking on the HP website, this miracle driver can be found in the Windows 2000 section, as version 4.3.2.200.

Posted by James at 2:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

There's always been something strange about the price of DVD-RAM blanks. Perhaps it's because of its use in high-end DVD recorders, where users expect to pay high prices for media. However, when I see a single-sided DVD-RAM disc on the Panasonic web site with a recommended retail price of $5.95, and find it being sold online for $59, I wonder if I've missed something. Is it in packs of 10 (no), is it double-sided (no, that's $75), is it in a cartridge (no).

I regularly buy Fujifilm DVD-RAM (4.7GB) blanks locally for $8, so I know what they're worth, but online prices seem to average $25. It's no wonder people prefer the less-durable DVD+RW.

Posted by James at 3:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While you're considering the purchase of the latest piece of technology, and pondering whether it's worth every dollar being asked for, you might like to reflect on how far technology prices have fallen in only a few years. Using the magic of the Wayback Machine, you can view the websites of technology vendors from many years ago.

For example, the online shop I usually use, Simline Solutions, has been around for four years. We can see that in May 2000 they were selling a rather hideous Acer 15" LCD monitor for $2000. Nowadays they're $350 - in four years they'be been reduced to 17% of their original price.

Posted by James at 1:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After experiencing some problems with the K8V SE motherboard in the system I built recently, I decided to try out a different motherboard for a second project.

Commonly, Gigabyte is regarded as a slightly lower quality manufacturer to the top tier of Asus and a few others. However, not long ago I punted on a really cheap Gigabyte graphics card, and found that it performed well. So, I thought it'd be worth the risk to go with a Gigabyte motherboard, and I was happy to find a suitable one, the K8VT800 Pro at a price 20% lower than the Asus K8V SE Deluxe. One thing I did notice, as with when I was choosing my video card, was the huge variety of Gigabyte products, all with just tiny variations in some technical aspect. This makes choosing just that much more fun.

The problem with the K8V SE was that the hard disk light does not work for disks plugged into the VIA SATA port, and this is a general bug with all K8V SE motherboards. If not for this, I'd have been happy to buy it again. On the other hand, I have found Asus technical support to be efficient and responsive, which goes a long way to assuaging any fears of problems.

For this new motherboard I got an AMD Sempron 3100+, as opposed to the Athlon 64 3000+ last time. It's a bit slower, but a lot cheaper, and my favourite feature this month, Cool'n'Quiet, is included in both. The Sempron won't run 64bit software, but for its intended recipient that won't be a problem.

You can read the products web pages to compare their techical details, but for my needs they were identical. The Gigabyte board was noticably smaller, such that it screwed into the case backplate using 3x2 screws instead of 3x3. Plus the Gigabyte's hard disk LED worked perfectly.

The BIOS setup for the Asus was far better laid out than the Gigabyte. In fact, the Asus BIOS setup was by far the most logical that I've ever used, whereas the Gigabyte's was a little odd, though still usable.

Cool'n'Quiet, the underclocking of the CPU when it's not heavily loaded, requires more steps to turn on in the Asus, but paradoxically is easier because it's actually documented in an easy to find place on their web site (though not in the manual). For the Gigabyte I had to email support (a few days for a response, which is pretty fast) to be directed to a page on their web site that described the process.

So my conclusion is that you do get a slightly more polished, better featured product from Asus for a slightly higher price, and that Gigabyte provides a perfectly functional product. In addition, you will find many more people have purchased the K8V SE than the K8VT800, which might assist if you need user-to-user support. However, the overriding result from this head to head showdown is that the Asus board has a hideous bug and that if it's going to affect you then the Gigabyte board is a perfectly suitable substitute.

Posted by James at 8:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In building a new Athlon64-based PC the following points of interest were found:

• The highly-praised Asus K8V SE Deluxe motherboard is good, but has a rather large unresolved bug. Described in an Asus FAQ, it means that if you plug an SATA hard disk into one of the two main SATA ports then the hard disk light does not ever get activated. With hard disks getting quieter, I'm finding it more useful than ever to watch the HDD activity light to see if the PC is actually doing anything. As such, this is a monumental bug, and one that Asus have known about for at least 4 months, but not fixed. The two mitigating factors with this are that Asus has great technical support. If you contact them via their web site, then a human actually responds in half a day or so. Secondly, this motherboard has a second SATA controller built in. It's not as integral as the first, but it works fine, and the light goes on with it.


• This is the first Antec case (an Antec Performance II SX635BII) that I've played with, and it's great compared to my five-year old Aopen one. The design is spiffy and finger-friendly. Even so, one complaint is that the wires connected to the front firewire and USB ports are identical, and unlabelled. So when it comes to plugging them into the motherboard, you have to either dismantle the front of the case to trace which is which, or note that though the cables have the same ends, they have different pins unconnected.
  
  Update (1-Oct-2004) After building another PC using the same model of case, and finding that the firewire and USB plugs are labelled, I shall adjust this complaint to one of quality control, unless this labelling is a new innovation, in which case I say well done.


• The motherboard came with a sticker of the motherboard layout to affix to the (inside of the) case. Very useful.


• The Benq (FP767-Ver2) 17" LCD monitor was described as purple, and I was expecting purple, with perhaps a little bit of black. If I'd studied the picture on the web site closely before purchasing, I'd have seen that a better description would be white, with a dash of purple. Still, I'm, impressed by the huge viewable area compared with my old ADI Microscan 5V+ (16" viewable) CRT


• The heatsink for the Athlon64 is of a greatly improved design compared to the Athlon XP (and previous CPUs). It's pretty foolproof now, and doesn't even require the dangerous high pressure screwdriver manoeuvre to install.

Posted by James at 2:42 PM | Permalink

I bought a digital television tuner card for my PC a couple of days ago, just to see what all the fuss was about. It's a Dvico Fusion HDTV DVB-T, and it has a forum, and Windows and (unofficial) Linux drivers. There's a full review of its US-oriented sister product, the Fusion III QAM, at AMDPower.

So, what is there to watch on digital television? All of the free-to-air networks (ABC, Seven, Nine, Ten and SBS) have a digital version of their analogue offerings. They also have extra channels, which can be varied by the channels for special events. For example, Seven will have a digital channel exclusively for the Olympics.

There's a program guide showing what's on widescreen and high-definition (HD) for each day. In summary, a lot of the popular stuff, such as news, sport and high-rating UK and USA serials are shown in wide-screen. A few regular programs, and a few films are in HD, but that includes nothing that I normally watch. They don't broadcast in HD in the UK, so programs from there are never HD.

There is very little extra programming content on digital television. The ABC has one digital radio station, SBS has a world news channel (continuous unsubtitled foreign news bulletins) and a weather and news summary channel, consisting of maps and text with classical music. The ABC had two additional televison channels until 2003, when their (overall) funding was cut by the federal government.

I am not in a position to comment on the quality of HD broadcasts, because my monitor has a resolution of 1024x768, which is far below the (interlaced) HD resolution of 1920x1080. However, I am able to comment on the reception. Using my gimcrack antenna I can get all channels clearly (with 70-80% signal strength), whereas with my analogue VCR sitting next to my PC with the same antenna I can only receive 3 of the 5 channels with clarity.

Watching widescreen programming on a normal old (4:3) television (via tv-out from my PC) is not a pleasant experience. I find that I need to use pan and scan to fill up the whole screen, whilst losing the sides of the picture.

So, I can see that digital television is the future, but that there is so little content at the moment that it's not worth expending any money on it yet. I certainly would not consider getting a standard definition set-top box for my main television. If I could pay $50 extra to have a digital decoder built-in to the tv then I'd go for that.

If the government wants to encourage people to go digital so that they can release analogue radio spectrum for other uses, then they'll have to encourage better content for the digital channels.

SUMMARY

If you're buying or already have a wide screen tv, go digital.

Everyone else should ignore it until there's better content.

Posted by James at 1:43 PM | Permalink

The price of hard disk storage is rapidly declining to the $AU1 per gigabyte level, leading to some odd comparisons between the value of items. For example, instead of buying a Big Mac for lunch, I could get an extra 3GB of storage space for ever (assuming that you buy hard disk space in 1GB chunks). Until yesterday I only had a 20GB hard disk, and its value to me is so much more than the $20 of apparent value.

Speaking of which, I have just taken delivery of a 160GB SATA Hitachi Deskstar hard disk. It seemed to be a choice between it and the Western Digital JD series. The WD had the size I wanted, 200GB (I have no idea why Hitachi does not provide 200GB SATA disks when they have PATA disks of that size). However, the WD is apparently is little slower (which I doubt I would have noticed), a little hotter (which I definitely would not have noticed), and a bit noiser (which I suspect I would have noticed).

The funky SATA cable is a joy to use compared to the old wide ugly flat grey IDE cables. The sooner all drive cables are SATA the better.

Windows 2000 and Windows 98 had no problems seeing the new hard disk, though the Windows 2000 setup needed a driver floppy disk. So, video editing, here I come.

Posted by James at 12:36 PM | Permalink

Well, that didn't take long. My desire for an optical drive with a SATA interface will be answered in April.

Posted by James at 11:18 PM | Permalink

There were a few memory upgrades along the way too. Most of the changes brought about noticable increases in performance, but the latest upgrade, from Athlon 650 to Athlon XP 2500, has made no real difference. Most of the time in Windows 2000 the CPU sits idle, so a speed increase had nothing to help with. Nevertheless, the upgrade, forced on me by needing a new motherboard, has its benefits. The system is more stable, as the AGP implementation is much better than previously, and all the fans are now temperature dependent, making for a much quieter system.

Posted by James at 4:21 PM | Permalink

Having sorted out my power supply I got around to purchasing a new videocard to replace my misbehaving Geforce 256. After much consideration I decided upon a Gigabyte Radeon 9200 for $AU105. I wanted something that was at least twice the speed of my 4 year old card, but for about $100. This was the only option available locally. For 30% more I could have got an Nvidia 5200, but the model I wanted was not being sold by anyone I'd heard of.

Although Gigabyte claimed the bus was AGP 8x/4x, I knew from my research that it would work just fine at AGP 1x. And so it was. The only problem is that it crashes when I do certain 3dMark01 tests. I tried it in a spare Celery 300 at AGP 1x, and it worked fine in that, so I guess it's my motherboard. I'll try fiddling, but I don't think it's a big deal. The games I have tested so far work fine.

Posted by James at 2:26 PM | Permalink

As mentioned previously, I have been looking at getting a new budget video card to replace a dead Asus Geforce 256 V6600 Deluxe. I was looking at getting a used card because the information I originally found indicated that modern cards wouldn't work in an old 3.3V AGP v1 motherboard. Further research showed that most, if not all, Geforce cards will work on my motherboard, and many Radeon
variants would too.

After watching eBay auctions for a fortnight I have come to the conclusion that it is not worth buying a used card. It looks like the market has decided that cards are priced according to performance, and that used cards are worth 80% or more of the value of new cards of the same speed. That 20% is certainly worth spending if you don't want the concern of whether the card you buy has been overclocked to death.

There's also the problem of auction overexcitement. I spent an interesting few days watching an Asus 4200 (basic model, without video-in) creep up from $50 to its final price of $167. This was a particularly well-described auction, with accurate pictures, description, and included details of where the item was purchased originally and for how much. This would have added a noticable amount to the final price. Anyway, the interesting thing is that new Asus 4800SE cards, with video-in, are selling for $200. The 4800SE is a few percent faster than the 4200, but otherwise a very comparible product (same Nvidia family).

So, I moved on to looking at budget new cards. The cheapest cards were Nvidia MX440, but lots of people have been saying how bad their performance is. This is strange, because actual reviews of it are positive. The problem is that there are so many variants of the MX440. To start with, there's the MX440, the MX440SE, and the MX440-8. Just looking at the MX440-8, you can have 64MB or 128MB versions, with 64bit or 128b memory interfaces. The performance of a 128bit 128MB MX440-8 is almost twice that of an MX440SE. I think it's mainly the memory interface rather than the amount of memory that matters.

The difficulty here is that many online retailers don't give full technical details of their products, and sometimes the manufacturers' web sites don't either. In years gone by, you'd be sure that a Geforce 3 was faster than a Geforce 2 which was faster than a Geforce, but nowadays product naming is not indicative of speed at all. I think the MX440 takes the cake as having the worst naming scheme, leading to lots of people making blanket generalisations about the whole MX440 range. A rough guide is that the cheapest MX440s are 64bit versions, which you should avoid.

Posted by James at 3:25 PM | Permalink

Since my old Geforce started behaving strangely I've been looking into getting a new video gard. My PC was bought in 2000, so it has an AGP 2.0 slot, which can do 1x or 2x speed. Meanwhile, technology has progressed to AGP 3. The only new video cards that are available now are AGP 3. Although cards can be backwardly compatible, they are not necessarily so. Unfortunately, it seems exceedingly difficult to determine this.

The only useful resources in the whole of the Internet on this topic that I have found are a pdf from video card manufacturer XFX, and an AGP Compatibilty page from a helpful person.

Summary for the hyperlink-phobic:
- an AGP 8x card with 2 keys (gaps between the pins), will work on all AGP motherboards
- if the card fits (ie. the keys line up) it won't break, but it might not work

Update
I have found an article with even more information about AGP v3 over at X-bit Labs.

Posted by James at 12:50 PM | Permalink

Computer blew up. Boo hoo.

When I turned on the power something in the power supply unit exploded, and set off the house's electrical safety switch. 'Twas a lovely loud bang, and a quite nasty smell. I took apart the PSU, but couldn't find the damaged element, which I'd guess was a capacitor that has now gone to meet its maker. Hmm, time for a new PSU.

I've moved down to an Intel Celery 300 in the meantime.

Posted by James at 12:41 PM | Permalink

After my Geforce 256 started playing up, I decided to have a look at possible replacement cards. I would normally only ever buy new electronics gear, but cards that work in my ancient (circa 2000) motherboard seem not to be sold any more. So, off to eBay I went. Hmm, so many cards, how do I know what they're worth?

This whopping great list of card benchmarks certainly helped. For cards that looked interesting, I took the Unreal II at 1024x768 benchmarks, and combined them with the prices of completed auctions on eBay, and the prices at various computer shops for new items. I hereby state the rules that I have found:

Results are given in Australian dollars per frame per second, where lower is better value.

New cards
best: ATI Radeon 9600XT (4.3 $/FPS)
worst: ATI Radeon 9600SE (8.3 $/FPS)

Second-hand cards
best: ATI Radeon 8500 (2.6 $/FPS)
worst: ATI Radeon 9600 (5.2 $/FPS)

I looked at 30 or so Radeons and Geforce cards, right back to the original Geforce 256. I'm not sure why Radeons occupied all the extremes. Anyway, it's a useful guide to expected prices on eBay: check the benchmark list for the FPS rating of the card of interest, then work out the $/FPS rating for your bids, and keep an eye on the extremes I mentioned.

Posted by James at 7:04 PM | Permalink

When playing with extremely strong magnets, such as those found in batteryless torches, it is wise to not get too near a monitor that you still wish to use. It's true that it makes wonderful rainbow effects, but it's also true that the rainbow stays when the magnet has been removed. This is because the monitor's shadow mask has been permanently magnetised, causing flying electrons to be deflected from where they ought to be hitting.

No problem, I hear you say, just hit the degauss button. Alas, this particular monitor was a dodgy brand that didn't provide such a seemingly obligatory feature. Googling for answers, it seemed the only option was to get hold of a manual degaussing wand, the type that television repairers use.

Obviously, that sounded like too much trouble for me to go to, so in a brainwave I thought of where I could find a "manual" degausser mere metres from the monitor - another, more advanced, monitor. I placed the monitors face-to-face, the rainbow one unplugged, and pressed the manual degauss button. Hey presto, a fixed monitor!

Posted by James at 10:20 PM | Permalink

After building PCs for three years, I thought that the cable select option for connecting IDE drives was an old useless feature. Not any more, as this comprehensive page on PCGuide explains.

... the traditional way of doing cable select was a total mess, which was why it was never widely adopted. The key reason for this mess was--once again--lack of standardization. I rather expected cable select to eventually wither away. However, when the 80-conductor Ultra DMA cable was introduced, the cable select feature was much improved, changing the potential of this feature.

However, given the current move to SATA the rebirth of cable select may be shortlived.

Posted by James at 10:44 AM | Permalink