Category: Technology

I’ve had a tough week, technology-wise.  Over the course of the last three days I’ve had two relatively new hard drives fail, a gigabit switch started having some ports go slow and a servo that controls the throttle on an RC airplane went nuts.  I think it may be time for some time away from the keyboard.

I believe my new saying for hard disks should go something like this:

“There are no such things as good, dependable or safe disks.  There are just disks that have failed and those that will fail.”

On the recommendation of some people on the Internet, I bought and tested a Samsung F1 Spinpoint 1TB SATA drive.  It seemed great: it was big, fast, very quiet and energy efficient.  Windows seemed to like it and a couple of my other PCs with very finicky SATA controllers took a shine to it as well.  After about a month or so of using it I decided to purchase 5 more, 4 to put into my ReadyNAS storage box and one “spare” to use for shuttling data around. I also convinced a partner of mine to pony up for an additional 4 drives for his NAS.  All seemed right in the world.

About two weeks ago I started noticing my ReadyNAS box getting slower and slower when trying to copy files from it or put files on it.  It also has a web page where the admin tasks get done, and most days I was fortunate to see that page in two to three minutes after trying it.  Great, I thought, some kind of firmware mess up (the box can offer and upgrade its own firmware) has happened.  So I slapped on a new version of the firmware, rebooted the NAS, and then nothing. Truly nothing, as in no web page, no network shares, no ping returns.  A few more reboots and things appeared to be working, so I left it alone to worry about it another day.

In the meantime I reformatted my main PC to be a full time Windows 7 x64 RC1 machine, so I fed it my existing Samsung 1TB drive to run from.  That worked for about 24 hours, then Win7 just stopped responding.  Thinking that I fouled it somehow (it happens, I go nuts on new installs from time to time) I hammered the whole install and did it again.  This time around it lasted for about 6 hours before Win7 coughed up an error message that roughly translated said:

“Dude (it’s California, work with me here), this drive is busted and you should back it up. Oh, and I won’t let you write to it any more. Have a nice day.”

Flash forward to June 19, just 24 hours after the desktop drive was rejected by Windows and now the NAS just disappeared.  I checked it to verify that it still had power but beyond that it did nothing but sit there and blink.  Reboot and try again.  The NAS works, but very slowly.  I finally get the admin web page up to view what the matter might be.  To my surprise there are no alerts in its log of “very bad things” that happen on it when I’m not looking, but there is another page where I can see the raw details of each disk’s S.M.A.R.T. report.  This is where all the scary data is on errors, retries and the like.  Imagine my surprise to find that one of my disks, labeled “2” by the NAS, has gone off the deep end with over 100K of errors in less than a weeks time.  I shut the box down and pulled that drive, replacing it with that “spare” Samsung I had been using as my portable disk.  26 hours later the NAS is up and running and it seems happy again, but I’m not so sure.

Along with my panic and rage, I notice that a few of my machines are running slowly when connecting to each other on my network or talking to the Internet.  That’s odd, I say to myself, since I often have self referential conversations, my network is all Gigabit Ethernet enabled save for a few older devices.  I check the gigabit switch and find that at least two of the ports are lit at 10/100 speeds.  The PCs confirm this and I sit puzzled.  It worked last week, I thought, but now it’s gone and slowed itself down for no reason?  A quick check of the Internets using some Google-foo and I have my answer, this Netgear 8 port switch, the GS608, has a history of dying slowly and taking one port at a time down to a crawl.  It just decided to make itself known to me while I’m fighting my hard disks.

Normally, three big failures at once is plenty, but since this is my life I had to make it more exciting.  I drove off to the RC airfield to fly my “reliable” airplane and the servo that controls the throttle goes nuts. It decides there are two settings: full on and off.  Stranger still is the fact that this has never happened on any airplane I’ve had before and after tinkering with the airplane and changing nothing it “cures” itself.  Knowing the week I’ve just had I packed everything up in the truck and took my toys home.

I’m not sure what the moral of this story is supposed to be, other than when I seem to have bad luck in a portion of my world it happens in clumps.  I’ll certainly want to be extra careful the next time I get in something fast and dangerous to go somewhere… come to think of it my car was just in the shop for a safety system malfunction. Hmmm….

I have recently had the great displeasure of participating in three different levels of grief and suffering with three different technology companies.  All three were so terrible that I felt compelled to write about it and post the results here, in the unlikely hope that someone might learn from my pain.  So here it goes…

Adobe: decided that it is OK to hang up on my calls twice for support to activate a product that I had purchased, transfer me between two different call centers and different support staffs in India, force me to repeat the same trouble-shooting steps no less than 8 separate times, and to, in the end, blame me for causing a problem which could only be repaired by tweaking their own registration servers. Just to get Photoshop to run.

HP:spent the better part of three hours bouncing my call between different call centers, different divisions of the company, taking over remote control of my PC, forcibly causing the loss of installed drivers and patches and lecturing me extensively on how I knew nothing about computer hardware to troubleshoot a problem, only to claim that the “outgoing phone lines are down” so that they couldn’t call me back for three days.  In the end, I relented and used the combination of the Internets free help (from other poor, tortured HP owners souls) and a Linux boot CD to restore functions to my USB ports.

AT&T: sent me around and around in circles for more than a week, trying to explain to me that “new services are available in your area”, but then deciding that no service has been improved, but that they can save me money if only I would switch to a new plan.  This led to nearly a week without any working DSL service, a series of confused support technicians, a promise of a new DSL modem that never appeared and a considerably more expensive bill than I started with for the same level of service I had before.  Extra pain points are awarded for having the local repair truck workers tell me that in 30 days or so fiber will be available in my area that will render all of this moot.

So who is the winner of this round?

Over the past couple of weeks I have been copying large amounts of data back and forth from my desktop PCs and my ReadyNAS in order to facilitate clearing some local hard disk space and to really, honestly begin scheduled backups.  Today while copying a particularly large file (greater than 2GB if you must know) I found that the transfer rate to the ReadyNAS was a measly 10 MB/s.  I have a gigabit network setup and this represents less than 10% of the available capacity.  Obviously something is up.

I have my full-time, every-day PC running Vista with SP1 and for the most part this is a very stable and good performing platform.  I have thrown a lot of modern hardware at it, including 4GB of DDR2 RAM, two NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX graphics cards in SLI mode and an AMD Phenom 9950 quad core CPU, so Vista can really go fast.  However, to test out the theory that Vista might be taunting me I fired up one of my spare PCs running Windows XP with SP3.  Sure enough, transferring files to and from the NAS with XP works fine at over 22 MB/s.  Something must really be hosed with Vista, IMHO.

So, off to Google I go in search of answers, and low-and-behold I found this article at ZDNet explaning what I feared: Vista thinks it is smarter than me when it comes to prioritizing what needs to get done on the PC.  Whenever the media sub-system in Vista is active with either audio or video playback the network connection gets crunched down to its lowest level.  No matter what I tweak, disable or alter Vista will not transfer at a respectable speed unless all audio and video sources stop.  This includes playback inside of a browser such as IE7 or Firefox.  I take a deep breath and sigh.

So now I must sit in silence or play music on a separate PC if I want full network capability on my main work machine.  For this fine, new feature I award Windows Vista the “Poo of the Day” award.  I’m sure more of these awards will follow soon enough.  Windows 7 can’t get here soon enough.

When your computer begins to slow down and then do strange things, you really do need to pay close attention because it is trying to tell you something.  In my case Vista was attempting to communicate in a very inept way that it had been attacked by some malware and was in the process of going down the drain.

First I noticed the hard drive LED flashing rapidly all the time.  Next I found that the machine wouldn’t stay in sleep mode any longer.  Browser windows would pop open for no good reason.  It was time to make a trip to my old friend MSConfig and enable the clean-boot options.  Only after booting into Safe Mode with everything disabled (and my system all but useless) did I find the culprit files hiding and renaming themselves in the Windows/System32 directory.

What followed were many reboots, the forced termination of IE7 and Explorer.exe, a reload of some critical OS files from DVD, then a determined and lengthy process of online virus scanning.  Only when all of these processes were completed was the threat finally removed.  I must once again return to my old paranoid ways: never install anything from the internet directly onto my critical PC AND always keep some kind of security (the dreaded User Account Control) turned on to slow down an attack.

And to think I was worried about being bored this holiday week.  Shame on me.

If you have a new HDTV set and are looking to hook up some glorious Blu-ray or PS3 goodness you know that you will have to run to the store and purchase one special component not bundled with any device shipping in quantity: an HDMI cable.

Unlike the days of old when you could run into your local Radio Shack and pickup whatever cheap cables they had on hand and make the new device work, in today’s digital era you are treated the one of the greatest fleecings in modern retail sales history.  You see, Monster, the cable provider of over-priced and over-hyped speaker cables from days past has moved in and pushed just about every other provider of HDMI cables off the shelves, leaving only their own brand at the most outrageous prices.  And the problem is that retailers gladly let them do this because the margins (that’s the money retailers actually make on each good sold) can be 50%, 100%, even 200% on these cables.  Typical devices like TV’s and cameras sometimes net the retailer less than 10% margin.

I don’t begrudge Monster on pushing their cables on the unsuspecting and clueless at the store, that is their business after all.  My problem is that their retail strategy has pushed every other provider of similar products to do similarly stupid things, like raise the price for the same product.  Don’t believe me about nearly all of the cables being the same regardless of price?  Go look at this article on Gizmodo and tell me that you don’t cringe after reading how badly we’re getting ripped off.

The point to this whole story is this:  I had to have a new HDMI cable for some new hardware at home, I can’t go get the cheap cables because they simply don’t exist locally any more, and I got ripped off to the tune of $22.99 for a $5 cable.  Next time no matter how badly I need one of these things, I’m headed to Monoprice where saner heads (and prices) reign.