Category Archives: Home IT

Whew, finally done installing 7

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All of the PC’s in the Juchems Blaine household are now on Windows 7.  Most of the ones in Plainfield are as well, only one left there!  Windows 7 is great operating system that really takes away many of the reasons to be a rebel and stick with XP or be lazy and stay on Vista.  If not having the most secure and feature rich Windows operating system out there so far isn’t enough to get your rear in gear, here are a few more reasons to move.

First off, if you have Vista, upgrading to 7 is a complete cinch.  Get the same version of 7 that you have of Vista (ie, Ultimate to Ultimate) put in the disk and away it goes.  I have done this several times with no ill effects.  Be prepared to free up some space on your C: drive and reinstall your video drivers.  It might take a bit, but it is so easy its almost criminal.  You don’t have to pay someone to do it 🙂

With XP, you need to be prepared to wipe it out and start fresh.  Also, if your PC is older than Vista (late 2006) you should be prepared that things like wireless cards and printers may not work.   Look for drivers before you go for the upgrade.  Beyond that, make sure you have your media and keys for things like Office are at hand, back up your important data to a couple different places, put the DVD in and enjoy!  It will preserve anything in your “my documents” folder if you choose to not nuke your XP partition when installing but you shouldn’t rely on that.  In my experience, installing 7 plus running windows update once after the install will catch an incredible amount of diverse hardware.

Lastly, avoid buying a retail copy of 7.  NewEgg OEM is the way to go. Buy the 64 bit if you can, only buy the 32 bit version if you have to.  If you buy it now, you can expect to have a solid five year lifespan on that Operating System. Might as well jump in early!

–Nat

Cheap Toner & Ink

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I’ve always appreciated Monoprice for their cheap cables and they are widely known around the internet as the place to go for decent quality cables at low prices.  What I didn’t realize is that they have such a great selection of toner and ink for printers at approprately low prices as well.  Many of the toners I looked at received good reviews, so I won’t hesitate to order from them the next time I need ink.  Check it out!

https://www.monoprice.com/

–Nat

Microsoft DNS

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I am willing to bet that most implementations of Microsoft DNS are those that are integrated with Active Directory.  When setting up DNS with AD, setting up multiple DNS servers is fairly trivial because AD takes care of the zone transfers, etc.  I am resisting putting the Blaine-Juchems household into a domain because I really don’t want to have to fight the same fight at home as I do at work.  Frankly, the DNS is more work than it should be, but the fact we are hosting websites that I would like to actually visit inside of our network dictates the need for DNS.  A quick and dirty definition of DNS (Domain Name System) is what turns a site address/name (like www.google.com) into a piece of data that gets you where you want to go on the internet.  In my case specifically, www.teamjuchems.com was not a valid name inside of my network and so I couldn’t access my own blog inside of my own house.  Lame.   If you don’t care about DNS, I would suggest you come back when I have a friendlier post.

Installing and configuring DNS is pretty easy.  Depending on what version of Windows Server you are running, you either add DNS as a network service or as a new role.  From there, you setup a forward zone, which is were you catch local DNS traffic and turn names into IP addresses, and a reverse zone, which turns IP address into names.  I won’t go into extreme details here as it gets kind of messy, I am sure that Google will get you much better walkthroughs than what I feel like providing right now.

What will cause you some grief is that if you aren’t running a Active Directory Domain along side of your DNS implementation is that your hosts won’t have a fully qualified domain name, which will really come into play when you want to setup zone transfers and DHCP with a default DNS suffix.  I was at a loss at how to do this as the trick of configuring the network adapter to have a specific suffix wasn’t working for the DNS services even though ipconfig was showing the correct FQDN.  Well, there is a button for that!

These are the magic buttons!

These are the magic buttons!

Once I had setup the actual DNS suffix in a place so close to where I have been hundreds of times before (almost the same spot where you would add the computer to a domain) the error messages went away and the StartOfAuthority issues I had been seeing went away.

Now, I also made the wise choice of  burning two valuable hours of sleeping time trying to get another zone transfer completed successfully.  Turns out that the zone files had been corrupted in the DNS share of the primary DNS server, so I exported it out to a .txt file and manually recreated the two records.  Once again I added the second DNS server as a name server for the zone and on the second server configured the secondary forwarding zone and poof, it worked.  How does a DNS record get corrupted on a clean server?  How does Microsoft have error codes that they don’t have in their resolution database (DNS error 1501, I feel pretty special…)

It works now and I am ready to enable DHCP on my Windows Home Server and flip my primary router into access point mode, effectively flattening out my network and resolving some lingering port forwarding issues.

Kristin makes comments about how overly complicated our home setup is and usually I brush them off as I am learning a lot as I go along.   Sometimes, though, I definitely agree.  Like at 1am this morning.

–Nat

Nifty Little Dell

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I am really interested in the new Dell Zino HD.   First, I’d like to point out that it starts at under $250 delivered.  It is like the Mac Mini in form factor, but features better hard drive, memory and graphics card expansion and capacity while also featuring slower processors.  With its combination of outputs, its seems to be the perfect little  box for a media center PC that is mainly used to stream media.  Given its lack of expansion slots, one would be limited to USB TV tuners which is less than optimal.  This is not a huge deal if you’re mainly playing back recorded TV as you would be well served to use your bigger main PC in this case to install your tuners and capture drives.  For Hulu, YouTube and Netflix this guy would be awesome.  A front IR port would have been nice for the use of Media Center remotes and the option for blue tooth for nice wireless accessories.

From the front.

From the front.

From the back.

From the back.

Pretty robust expansion with the eSata ports – this thing would be an *awesome* base for a home server with 65W consumption maximum and the ability to attach eSata drives or multi disk enclosures for just mind boggling expansion along with the prerequisite and surprising at this price point gigabit ethernet.   Note you could would need an HDMI to DVI adapter for most digital panels and that you would need a mini stereo to RCA converter to get the 5.1 digital sound (just like the older Audigy cards) which is a bit of a pain, but at least the options are there.

Options go up to 8GB of ram and a 4330 discrete/separate video card.  These are both luxuries as the integrated graphics are fine and you really don’t need more than 2GB of ram in most user scenarios.  Especially as the CPU choices are pretty slow – the dual core upgrade would be a great one at the current price of $65.  For me that would be the only change I would make as I have easy access to more Windows 7 licenses.  If you are looking to make this into a real media box hooked to a TV, I would go for the 7 upgrade.

Bottom line, if you are looking for a little media box or home server, this is a great option.  Even as an inexpensive desktop, the package is pretty compelling.  Maybe I’ll buy one to check it out 🙂

–Nat

SMTP & Comment Goodnes

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This blog is slowly growing up and getting more complex.  Today I have fixed the SMTP issue that meant I didn’t know when I had comments to approve and added a change that should send you an email when your comment has “cleared” moderation and then will send you an auto-reply when someone else comments on that blog post.  Two plugins and one email address was created to make this functional.

First, I installed and activated a plugin called Configure SMTP that moved the mail function out of PHP and onto the SMTP protocol that I know a bit more about.  This also allowed for much more granular mail settings, including using gmail as an SMTP relay.   In order to do this, a functional gmail account needs to be setup.  If you get an email from teamjuchems@gmail.com in the future, now you will know why 🙂

Second, the WP Comment Auto Responder plugin was downloaded and activated.  This should, theoretically, do a better job of keeping you in the loop as far as comments go and also email me when comments are posted.  Previously, I would only get emails when a comment was awaiting moderation.

Remember to add teamjuchems@gmail.com to your address book!  Getting these emails will be worth it, I promise 😀

–Nat

Wall Mounting the Dell 23″

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I finally got around to mounting the LCD in the workout area to the wall.  This meant that I could move the center channel speaker back onto the shelf where it belonged, starting the transition away from the current layout that includes the glorious old 21″ Sony Trinitron that I bought in 2003 for the princely sum of ~$562.  Free shipping, of course.  Which was important, give its packaged weight rating of 80lbs.

Anyway, this is my first attempt at a gallery like this WordPress.  I think it turned out pretty good, actually.

–Nat

I’ve been Zuned!

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With the big trip to Manila looming and the lack of a smart phone seriously reducing the level of technology I have been carrying around, I decided to take a peek at Craigslist for either the smaller flash Zunes or an even older 30GB hard drive based model.  I found an ugly yet functional brown 30GB Zune right in downtown St. Paul, I met the guy over lunch and I now have a Zune of my own.  Why a Zune?  Here is my top ten list:

1. It’s not an iPod – no iTunes required.

2. Even the oldest Zunes are feature complete – they keep getting new firmware.  Try that with your iPod.

3.  The Zune Pass.  $15 a month, you get unlimited music from the Zune store PLUS you get to *buy/keep* 10 tracks a month.  You can have this used by up to three Zunes and three PCs simultaneously.

4. Seriously cheap accessories.

5.  It is not an iPod.  I can hook it up to a bunch of different PC’s to sync music to it and evidently from it.  I’ll be testing this out more later.

6. FM + FM tune tagging.  I like listening to the 93x morning show and *if* I get the Zune pass, I like the idea of just snagging a song title on the way into work and having it automatically pull the song down when I get to work.  I’ll be taking the bus to work soon and this should work out nicely.

7.  Pretty big screen for video and a solid amount of storage.

8.  Wireless syncing for leaving it in the car yet having new music put on it.

9.  It was cheap.

10. It comes in Brown.  Best. Idea. Ever.

Do you see how well it coordinates with our fall placemats? Priceless!

Do you see how well it coordinates with our fall placemats? Priceless!

–Nat

PS:  Not an iPod.  This me showing my nonconformity.   That’s right, by choosing Microsoft.

Quiet down your PC

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This is a topic of conversation that Sean and I have been discussing lately.   What makes this so frustrating is that even if you buy really nice components, when you assemble them the PC tends to be noisy when compared to some $400 Dell or HP PC.  I’d even go so far to say that some of my cheaper builds have been quieter than my more expensive ones.  That and all the PCs I build for Jeff Lemaire seem to be whisper quiet, frustratingly so compared to the rigs I build for Kristin and myself.

To that end, I have set out to quiet the PCs in the Juchems home (thanks to Sean for bringing this up in his own quest to cut down on PC noise pollution.)  Some things to keep in mind when building your own quiet PCs:

  • Buy a video card with a three or four pin fan.  Two pin fans are not speed controlled and therefore will spin at one (typically annoyingly loud) speed.  This prevents control of fan speed via software as well.
  • Enable automated fan speed management in the BIOS, sometimes referred to as “Smart Fan.”  This will spin down your CPU fan and possibly any other fans plugged into the motherboard headers for power when system temps are cool.
  • Pay attention to the Db (decibel) rating of the fans you are buying.  Try to stick to fans that are ~28Db or lower.
  • Spin your fans slower.  This is a example of how to do this from Silent PC, a site dedicated to making your PC run as quietly as possible.  As for myself, I just modify a three pin to four pin adapter buying switching the yellow and red cables in the female end.

I recently purchased an inexpensive video card from the online forums as part of package of inexpensive computer parts.  I didn’t pay close enough attention – the fan on the little x1650 card was two pin and spun incredibly fast and loud.  As this card is likely to go into my moms computer (hey, I might want to fire up a game on it for some easy LAN action back at the farm) it needs to be much quieter – this little $20 card was filling a room with sound and that made it pretty worthless.  This card doesn’t consume much power so only a little airflow is really needed and the fan was really pushing at 12v.  So I performed the mod linked to above.

See how the yellow matches up the red and vice versa? By default, they would match up.

See how the yellow matches up with the red and vice versa? Prior to the mod, it was red to red and yellow to yellow.

The tools I used to complete this modification were a paper clip and a box cutter.  I used the paper clip to push in the “fingers” that held in the pins on the female end and then used the box cutter blade to push those fingers back out before reinserting the pins.  If you are attempting this, you’ll get what I mean by looking at it 🙂  I was able to carefully push the two pin female connector from the video card onto the three pin adapter without any other modification.

Since I performed the mod, the fan can no longer be heard.  It should be spinning with 5v rather than 12v now, meaning just under half as fast.  Now it will serve its purpose perfectly.

One word of warning – using this adapter as a pass through now will likely roast something like a hard drive.  Make sure there are only fans downstream of your connector.  You can daisy chain these four pin fan adapters to accommodate all of your case fans and you should only need to modify the first connector.

–Nat

Video and Voice communication over the ‘net

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With Kristin in the Philippines voice and video communication over the internet has become more interesting and important.  Before she left, I snagged a couple of Logitech webcams so that we would be able to see each other during the time she was away.  This would be working out much better if her hotel would actually have their internet service up…

That said, Skype seems to be the defacto software for free video calling.  Last night, Sean and I ran through different products through the ringer to determine which would offer the best voice or video quality.  The software tested was the most recent version of Skype, Steam (voice only)  and Google Voice through Google chat.

One of the most interesting discoveries of the evening was how CPU bound we were in terms of quality.  My test machine was a three year old laptop that has a single core Sempron 3400+ (2.0ghz and 128k of L2 cache), one gig of ram and Windows 7 Pro.  The video quality would immediately and very noticeably degrade if I tried to *anything* but use the communication application as the CPU was running near or at 100% when ever the camera was in use.  Any dual core setup should remedy this performance issue.

First, we tried to do voice chat over Steam.  This was a disaster.  Sean and I have extensively used Steam before to do voice chatting, but for some reason last night was not the night for it.  It was crackly and very near non-functional.    We’ll have to investigate why the performance was so horrible, maybe it had something to do with using a webcam instead of a dedicated microphone? Grade: D-

Next up was trusty Skype.  This worked easily and well, call quality was sharp along with video quality.  I was able to give Sean a tour of our freshly re-floored and painted future office.  The only issue was how big of a CPU hog it was, making using any other applications notably decrease voice and video quality.  Grade: A-

Lastly we fired up Google Voice over google chat.  The installation and configuration of this application is easier and quicker than Skype given that it is a browser plugin.  It is linked to from within the Google chat application that appears on the left sidebar when signed into gmail.  Sadly, the performance hit enabling video over Google Voice turned my video into a slideshow and so overwhelmed the poor laptop that voice dropped as well.  I know the CPU in the laptop isn’t a beast, but it is a 2ghz semi-modern CPU and skype offered decently quality with full functionality on the same processor.  Google Voice is one of those perpetual Beta apps that Google releases so a lack of polish and tuning can probably be expected.  Still, it basically didn’t work.  Grade: C-

Well, that’s it.  As Sean suggested, I’ll likely be moving a PC upstairs to take the laptops spot.  That should remedy the performance issues and I will post some follow up thoughts once that is complete.

–Nat

Good Customer Service, I guess…

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This May, Sean and I made our annual(ish) pilgrimage to Fry’s Electronics in Chicago.  If you haven’t been to one, these places are the mecca of consumer electronics.  Huge walls dedicated to motherboards, CPUs and RAM are on one side, TVs on another, console and software on the other and host of awesome goodness sandwiched in between.   I think Sean and I spent a solid eight hours there over two days – unlike Menards, there is a good reason that this place has a cafe.

That said, neither of us were really shopping for anything in particular when we went there.  I came back with some speakers, a case, and a card reader.  The case is still in the garage (I will use it soon, I promise…) and the card reader has been working really well.   Now, the speakers are what I am having an issue with.  I bought them at Fry’s because they seemed like a solid deal.  I’ve always like Altec Lansing in the sub-$100 level category for PC speakers as I believe(d) they consistently provided better sound and longevity for the money.   These be the guys in question:

Click for the big pic...

Click for the big pic...

Inexpensive, yet decent speakers for use in the office that is going to get done someday.  They should have fit the bill nicely.  Well, to be honest I should have done a little more research.  As you can see they are no longer for sale at NewEgg and there are a lot of bad reviews that mention the defect, like the one here…

Click for the big pic...

Click for the big pic...

My set, as with many of the reviewers, got *horrible* interference unless I held my hand on the control knob.  Well, come to find out they neglected to magentically shield that component and anything and everything that emitted crap would interrupt it.   This makes them unusable around computers, which is awkward given they are computer speakers.  I finally gave in and called Altec Lansing as they have no way of submitting issues online.

*Waited on hold for 15 minutes+”

Guy: “Hello, thanks for calling Altec Lansing, how may I help you?”

Me:”Hi.  My name is Nat and I have an issue with my speakers, they are model VS2421 and they”

Guy:”Yes, they are not magnetically shielded.”

Me:”Yeah, in order to use them I have to keep my hand on the control or”

Guy:”Cover it with tin foil.”

Me:”…”

Guy:”I need you to give me a little information, then we’ll send you a new upgraded set once you have shipped yours in.”

Me:”Free upgrade?”

Guy:”Yes, free.  I’ll just need some information…”

Of course this issue is so well known that the guy recognized the model number of the speakers and just decided to upgrade me to the $50 speakers in the same line that are shielded (VS2621 for the curious out there.) Yet, Fry’s still sells them.  That’s bogus – it’ll probably cost me $15 to ship the darn things because they are so heavy, which is normally a good thing in PC speakers.

I can’t decide who is at fault here, Altec Lansing or Fry’s.  One thing is for sure; unless these new speakers are *nice* I am taking a break on buying Altec Lansing products.

–Nat