David Gardiner - Windows Vista

Australian Weather Radar Gadget v1.2

2010-06-15T21:34:00.001+09:30

It's been a few years since I've been able to update the Vista Sidebar Gadget that I wrote which displays the radar images from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. It's worth noting that while the sidebar doesn't exist in Windows 7, you can still add gadgets to your desktop.

I'm now hosting the source code on Google Code, and I've released a minor update to reflect some changes to radar locations:

Added:

Sydney (Terry Hills)
Norfolk Island
Emerald (QLD)
Bairnsdale (VIC)
Perth (Serpantine)

Removed:

East Sale

I've had a few reports of a memory leak when people run the gadget for extended periods of time. I think this may be an unfortunate side-effect of the way the gadget uses HTML. Maybe re-writing the gadget using WPF or Silverlight might help with that.

The gadget can be downloaded from the Windows Live Gallery from here (currently 1.1 but hopefully 1.2 will be approved shortly), or go to the Downloads page of the Google Code site.

Media Browser for Vista Media Center

2009-08-19T20:54:00.001+09:30

I came across this useful Media Center plugin recently. As well as providing an alternate interface to browse media files it also includes an RSS reader which I've successfully configured to watch some interesting video podcasts:

dnrTV - .NET Rocks TV
10-4 – New features of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0
TED – Talks from the annual Technology, Entertainment, Design conferences
Scrap Time – A Scrapbooking video podcast for Narelle

It is free, and is being actively developed on Google Code.

Holiday to Yamba

2009-01-15T07:00:00.000+10:30

The Gardiner family started 2009 off with a week’s holiday in Yamba, NSW. Narelle has family up there and it also happens to be a very picturesque and relaxing spot too.

While you could fly to Coolangatta or Coffs Harbour and then use a bus or rent a car, we opted to drive from Adelaide so we’d have the convenience of our own car to get around once we were there.

We took this route going up, staying overnight at Hay and Gunnedah.

View Larger Map

Coming back, we followed a similar route, however we came back via Glen Innes (slightly longer, but less windy). We also stopped over at Coolah and Moulamein. Both of these towns are slightly off the main highway, but the cost of a cabin was a lot cheaper.

View Larger Map

So how does a family with 3 kids (including a 7 month old baby) who only have a medium-sized sedan survive driving these kinds of distances? Things have improved a bit since me and my sister and Mum & Dad used to head off on family holidays many years ago. A critical innovation has revolutionised long-distance car travel – the portal DVD player!

Narelle wisely suggested we purchase one for our previous interstate trip, and it really did make the difference to the younger members of the family, who aren’t quite up to the stage of curling up with good book to while away the hours.

Not wanting to take all the original discs, I made copies of a few of the kids’ DVDs. In addition Narelle borrowed a few talking book CDs from our local library (more for the benefit of those in the front seats).

Copying DVDs isn’t always straight forward. I’ve got a copy of the final version of DVD Decrypter (no longer under development) which is pretty good, but I read just before we left that SlySoft (who also produce the very useful free ISO mounting utility Virtual CloneDrive) had a special on their AnyDVD HD tool. AnyDVD works at the driver level to transparently remove protection from DVDs (including HD and Blu-Ray). I could then use ImgBurn to copy and burn the “travel” copies. For any dual-layer discs, I made use of DVD Shrink 3.2 to squash everything down to fit on my single-layer blank discs.

I also copied a few of the kids’ favourite ABC Kids programmes that had been recorded using Media Center and burned a couple of discs with those. For some weird reason I couldn’t get Vista Movie Maker to work with the DVD drive, but I found a decent (and free) alternative – DVD Flick that did.

We did survive the trip there and back (also aided by Narelle’s folks who also drove up with us in their car), and had a nice time in Yamba too, managing to be in the pool or at the beach every day!

If you’re dining out, have coffee and cake at the Marina Cafe, and try some fish and chips or hamburger from the Fish Shop on Wooli St.

Building a new Vista 64bit machine

2008-10-19T22:03:00.001+10:30

I’m in the process of upgrading my Dad’s PC. He does a bit of video editing and had noticed his machine was getting slower and slower, combined with the increased minimum requirements of the latest version of Pinnacle Studio.

The existing components that we wanted to reuse include:

WD600BB 60Gb IDE hard disk
WD800JB 80Gb IDE hard disk
LG GSA-4163B DVD writer
WD 2000JD SATA hard disk

Because his machine was a few years old, buying some extra RAM was going to be relatively expensive, so I suggested maybe he do a complete upgrade. Hoping to reuse the old case and drives, I selected the following components:

Gigabyte GA-MA770-S3 motherboard
AMD Phenom Quad-Core 9550
4Gb Kingston RAM
Noctua NH-U9B CPU cooler
1TB Western Digital drive
Vantec ION2+ 500W power supply
PCI ATA 133 Controller

One thing I realised (from previous experience) was to make sure that there was enough room for the CPU fan. The old case was one of those compact upright boxes, and from examining the old motherboard it became obvious that the location of the existing PSU would prevent anything larger than ~5cm. All was not lost, as I just happened to have another case around that was slightly taller and allowed the PSU to sit alongside rather than over the top of the motherboard.

The GA-MA770-S3 comes with lots of SATA connectors, but only one IDE connector. As we wanted to make use of two existing IDE hard disk as well as the old IDE DVD drive, I bought the extra ATA controller that plugs into the PCI slot. The only downside to this appears to be that you can’t boot off of a drive connected to the PCI card.

Newer motherboards require a 24 pin power connector, hence the new PSU. The Vantec was not my first choice (I had chosen a Cooler Master eXtreme Power 500W but MSY didn’t have that in stock), but it seems a capable unit. I particularly like how all the cords are wrapped in blue mesh to keep things tidy.

I’d decided that I’d use the 80Gb drive as the system drive (apparently it has an 8Mb buffer compared to the 60Gb’s 2Mb so it should be a bit faster).

After connecting all the bits and pieces together, I booted up the Vista 64bit DVD and got as far as installing it onto the correct drive. It then rebooted and I saw the following unhelpful message:

“The computer has restarted unexpectedly or encountered an unexpected error. Windows installation cannot proceed..”

I found a post to the Microsoft newsgroups by Richard Urban which lists some conditions which can cause this problem (and sure enough they matched my hardware).

Following his advice, I disconnected all the drives except the 80Gb drive and the DVD, which were both attached to the motherboard’s IDE slot. The Vista installation proceeded as normal.

(If the DVD drive ever gets upgraded in the future for a SATA model, this problem would be avoided)

Following the successful restart, I then reconnected all the other drives and put the DVD back on the PCI card. Everything then came up fine, however the DVD wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Vista identified the card as an Integrated Technology Express IT8212F. In the FAQ for this card, it mentions that there are two BIOSes available – a RAID BIOS which only works with hard disks, and “pure” IDE BIOS which also supports ATAPI devices (eg. CD/DVDs). There’s a BIOS upgrade application, but it only works in DOS mode, which won’t work in Vista 64bit.

I tried the BIOS upgrade (on three different machines) but with no success. I was about to give up when I figured out that I could host the two IDE drives (including the Vista system drive) on the PCI adapter as long as the system drive was configured as the first drive. This then allowed the drive to be listed in the main motherboard BIOS’s list of bootable drives.

Now everything is working well. The only outstanding issue is to check whether the Epson Perfection 2400 PHOTO scanner can work properly with Vista 64bit. There are Vista drivers but it appears the Epson Smart Panel software requires a non-free upgrade to a compatible version.

Deleting the “Program Files” directory

2008-09-10T08:00:00.000+09:30

No, don’t worry I’m not that crazy. On the HTPC, I initially installed Vista on the 1Tb disk. When the replacement system drive arrived, I then installed Vista on that drive, but didn’t reformat the original disk as I’d already recorded some programmes that I wanted to keep.

This meant that there was the old “Program Files”, “Windows” and other directories that Windows creates. The problem is that even running with UAC you can’t delete them. If I’d reformatted the drive, I would have never had this problem.

Tim Sneath went through a similar situation, and his solution worked for me too.

Looking at LCD Monitors (Home Theatre PC)

2008-06-09T23:41:00.001+09:30

I've had a couple of comments that trying to use our ancient CRT TV with the HTPC is not a great plan. So I've been doing some additional research into buying a new TV. The criteria I've been using include:

Less than $1,000
Full high definition
At least as large as the current CRT (~52cm/20")
HDMI input
Not overly power hungry
Decent colour and contrast
Audio support
Good WAF

The first big choice seems to come down to plasma or LCD. I'm leaning towards LCD at the moment, as I don't want a ridiculously large display (which the plasmas seem better suited to) and and would prefer something that doesn't suck heaps of power (and consequently $$$).

The next thing is that many manufacturers sell both LCD TVs and LCD Monitors. Now unless I'm missing something obvious, it doesn't look like there's that much difference between the two categories. Some of the "TV" models have in-built tuners, but as the HTPC will have that I'd rather buy one without and save a few dollars.

Contrast ratio is also important, and here bigger is generally better.

Response time is also apparently relevant, as that determines how well it can display fast moving images. Smaller (faster) is better.

So here's some of the models I've come across so far:

Model	Size (inches)	Contrast ratio (dynamic)	Response Time (ms)	Price (AUD)
ViewSonic VX2835wm	28	800	3	635
BenQ V2400W	24	1000 (4000)	5	629
Samsung 245B	24	1000 (3000)	5	712
LG L246WH-BN	24	2000	5	460
Samsung 2493HM	24	1000 (10,000)	5	599
Samsung 2693HM	26	1000 (3000)	5	699

I still haven't made a decision and it would be good to actually have a look at some of the candidates in person. I'm open to any other suggestions too.

Home Theatre PC (Components)

2008-05-29T15:58:00.001+09:30

For a while now, I've been thinking about building my own Home Theatre PC (HTPC). I've got an unused Vista Ultimate license that I'd like to put to good use, and using it for a Media Centre fits the bill. While you can buy a prebuilt HTPC, but I thought it would be both fun and educational to build one from scratch. There are a number of good resources when planning to build a HTPC, but I've found the most useful are:

After throwing around various combinations of parts I've come up with the following list:

| --- | --- | | CPU | AMD Athlon X2 4850e | | Case | Antec Fusion 430 Silver (includes power supply) | | Tuner | Hauppauge HVR-2200 | | Fan | Noctua NH-U9B Quad Heatpipe | | Motherboard | GA-MA78GM-S2H | | RAM | Kingston (2x1G 800) KVR800D2N5K2/2G | | Drive 1 | 3.5" HDD SATA-300 250GB 16MB Seagate | | Drive 2 | Western Digital 1TB (WD10EACS) | | Keyboard | Shintaro wireless | | Remote | Microsoft MCE Remote Control | | DVD | LG GGC-H20N/L Blu-ray/HD reader, DVD & CD writer |

I posted this list to the forum (like a lot of others do) just to check it was reasonable. The main criteria I've worked from are quiet operation (and hence 45W CPU) and provision for the future (high definition). I made use of the Static Ice price comparisons to gauge what were good prices. If I lived in Sydney I'd probably buy most of the bits from IT Estate, however once you factor in shipping, the local retailers MATS Systems and MSY are pretty competitive. I was originally planning to get the Pioneer BDC-S02, but opted for the cheaper (and in-stock) LG instead. The other curious thing is that we've got a very old TV that used to belong to my parents - an early 1980's Philips model that only has an RF (aerial) socket. Not exactly what most home theatre systems are made of, but it works, and I'd prefer not to have to replace it before it completely dies! So my plan is to use a cheap video card (a Gigabyte 8400GS 256MB GV-NX84G256HE) that unlike the onboard video has a TV-OUT socket, and use an RF Modulator to convert that to something the TV should like. If that fails, then maybe we'll just have to buy a new TV. Once I've purchased all the components, I'll post an update on the build progress.

Copy Full Path for Windows XP

2008-04-30T14:48:00.002+09:30

I'm missing the "Copy Full Path" feature from Windows Explorer in Vista now that I'm back in WinXP land. And that's where Copy Path to Clipboard comes into play.

Microsoft WebDAV Extension for IIS 7.0

2008-03-14T10:24:00.001+10:30

In late 2006, I noted that IIS7 (that shipped with Vista) didn't include WebDAV. Well the good news is for IIS7 and Windows Server 2008 at least, it's now available. The notes don't say it's compatible with Vista, so this might only be a server thing.

Windows Server 2008 released and Vista SP1 (almost)

2008-02-05T09:26:00.001+10:30

I see that Windows Server 2008 has been released, and downloads are now on the Connect site.

Vista Service Pack 1 as also been finalised, but it appears it won't be available for download until Mid-March.

Looks like we need to be a bit more patient, unless they do make it available on the Connect site prior to the regular public Microsoft Downloads site.