Category: Tech stuff

I love the speakers but we’ve had a falling out.

Basically the analogue inputs don’t work. I contacted Amazon who fell over themselves to replace the kit. This duly arrived and this set had the same problem. Troubleshooting for 2 hours led me to believe that it was never meant to be so I shipped one set back (the one which decided to display scrambled text when I chose the direct inputs rather than the one that was silent.

Optical works fine. Co-Ax works fine. Analogue works for 2 minutes then stutters and gives up. I’ve dropped a query into the Logitech forums hoping somebody can help. I only need the analogue inputs to run the Boy’s PC. This would mean that the TV volume control can be relegated to emergencies only. It also would allow loud iPod moments.

I’m disappointed but not so much that I want to send the other set back. It does 90% of what I need from it so I can’t really expect much more. dts surround sound is still better than flat stereo. Makes me want to go through my DVD collection again.

I splashed out on a new set of speakers for the living room. Of course I made the same mistake as I did last time I ordered speakers and assumed they were much smaller than they were.  So we have had to rearrange the living room to accommodate the subwoofer which is bigger than the dog.

It was very easy to set-up mainly because it has a co-ax input for the DVD player, optical for the Sky+ box and analogue for the PC. The analogue inputs seem to have a problem but the digital ones work a treat. Whilst Julie was sceptical at first, a fortunate appearance by Bon Jovi on tone of the music channels soon helped her appreciate the bass response from the sub woofer.

The sub woofer is of course a rather prominent part of the living room now. And the vast array of remote controls we now own is making a universal remote look very attractive. But to finally have a THX-certified, DTS capable Dolby 5.1 system with an awesome bass is worth the little extra thinking time required.

I would recommend this set-up for anyone not wanting a complicated home cinema receiver or wanting to avoid the compromises when going for a combined DVD player/receiver unit. I do however pity the person who buys this to run off their home PC as it is severe overkill unless they use it as a living room DVD player/media centre/games console. In which case, you don’t want to go buying anything else.

My wife kindly bought me a Nokia N95 for my birthday (along with a load of other cool stuff). The Nokia is a device with lots of potential but some support for it is still a bit lightweight – such as the maps support.

It supports all the mobile bands as well as WI-Fi. There is inbuilt GPS, music player, video player, web browser and 5 megapixel camera. As is usual for such a device, there are a few compromises but it is the best phone for the gadget geek on the market today. Makes the iPhone look like a gimmick too.

Wandering around the house using it like a micro tablet pc for web-browsing is neat but I have yet to really unravel what is possible with the uPnP support.

More updates as I get to grips with it.

Well I finally got all the bits together to build the box to run Home Server. For those that care it is:

• Asus M2n4-SLI board £40
• 1GB of 4200 DDR2 £10
• AMD Sempron 3200 £25
• 80GB IDE hard disk Free (my spare drive)
• nVidia PCI 5200 video card on loan from my good friend Martin.

And did it all go smoothly once I dropped in the DVD and rebooted ? Pretty much yes. It is rather spooky to be installing Windows Server for a home environment. I have run it in the past on the basis that it is the kind of thing only a true nerd would do but now of course, it is going mainstream.

Once you have agreed that your hard disk will be wiped, it says it’ll be about half an hour and installs itself with familiar graphic and white-text-on-blue screens. During this process it restarts twice. There is a pause in all this chaos whilst it asks for a server name, country and keyboard type followed by the request for the licence key (which you can skip and enter later if like me you had forgotten where you put the bit of paper).

Then it goes mad teasing you with one of those bulletted installation screens where you think you are at stage 4 out of 5 and it’ll be any second now… Eventually it finishes and presents you with the welcome screen.

After asking you for a password to secure the server it tells you not to do anything as you might break something as you should instead go and put the connector CD in a workstation and go play from there.

At this stage of course, I got keen to poke about.

One thing I wanted to do was to fix the LAN IP address to ensure I didn’t get in a pickle later. I also had to activate Windows to enter that validation key. Trouble is that Home Server couldn’t find the network card built onto the motherboard. I need to dig out some drivers for it then.

At least I got the majority of it working. I’m off to Centerparcs tomorrow though so it’ll have to wait for a few days. If anyone reading this has experience with this one or knows a good set of drivers for the LAN chipset on the M2N4-SLI, please add a comment.

I downloaded and burned the DVD image for the Windows Home Server RC set and fired up my cobbled together PC I had chosen as a victim for the new software. All went well until the installer said my BIOS didn’t support ACPI. But it did. So I downloaded the latest firmware for the trusty K7 Master board and flashed the BIOS. It died. So I dug the BIOS out of the spare board (everyone has one of those don’t they?) and tried again in a much slower, safer way but that one died too.  So I stripped anything useful off the machine and sold it on eBay. The boards are on their way to a WEEE-compliant equivalent of landfill.

One bright light around all this was a discovery of a cool website. I’m guessing you have no floppy drive on your PC anymore right ? So what happens if your hard drive fails or you need to zap a disk partition and you want to go ferreting around in MS-DOS ? No chance of using a bot-disk. I wonderif it is possible to build a bootable CD-ROM ? Oh hang on, my computer is broken and I don’t have any MS-DOS disks left laying around. AllBookDisks is the place to visit. Go there today and get yourself another way of getting your broken machine back to life.

I am of course now slowly building a new PC to get HomeServer running. When I do, I’ll report back on how I get on.