Plenty of Clouds

Adam Barr's latest blog post begins innocently enough, comparing types of geeks at Microsoft.  But the last paragraph is a zinger - revealing both that Microsoft is "pushing engineers to realize that they are not the customer, the customers are not geeks...", but that even the "anti-geeks", as Barr calls them, are still messing up.  Couldn't agree more.  Here's the money quote:

Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters: Geeks and Anti-Geeks

The reason this matters is because Microsoft has recently been pushing engineers to realize that they are not the customer, the customers are not geeks, and therefore engineers can't design properly for our customers. What I think happens, however, is that the anti-geeks hear this and think, "They're not talking about me; I know that those beer-swilling geeks don't understand the customer, but I'm a cultured sort, not a geek--I'm just like our customers!" And so they go out and design software for themselves...and of course they mess it up...because our customers may not spend their spare time playing Dungeons & Dragons, but neither do they spend it tramping across the Burgess Shale.

I’ve taken advantage of some dreary gray January days to rework my mish-mash of computers and devices, so now is as good a time as any to list the components.

My main machine has just undergone an eBay facelift.  I kept the Intel 6300 1.83mhz Core 2 duo, but I was maxed out at 2gb ram, so I picked up an Intel DP35DP motherboard and an nVidia 8500GT 1gb video card.  My old board was AGP, so upgrading meant a new video card, something that has held me back from upgrading in the past, as the old card worked fine for me.  I don’t play games, I just want a good fast machine to run apps.

After messing with some too good to be true memory deals on eBay, I picked up 2 sets of 2 x 2GB Crucial “Ballistix” memory from Fry’s.  I’ll only get the $35 rebate on one set, but hey 8gb of 800mhz ddr2 for $73 after rebate, that’s still pretty crazy.  My old case, 500 watt power supply, and SATA II drives (one 200 gb, one 300) were fine.

I have to say that I’m not entirely convinced that this new board doesn’t have some issues.  One of the problems of making multiple changes all at once, of course, is in troubleshooting errors.  At first I was planning on using the onboard Dolby 7.1 sound, but there was a persistant annoying high-pitched whine when I tried to use it.  I should say at this point that I have only installed Windows 7 Beta 1 on the new system, so some of my issues could well be driver/beta OS problems.  Anyway I picked up a Creative Sound Blaster Extreme X-FI sound card, and disabled onboard sound.  Now the problem is that only the front channels work in the sound card.  Since I bought the card from Fry’s, it’s entirely possible that it is defective.  None of my machines have a PCI Express slot to test it in, although my father’s machine might, now that I think of it.

I also have some curious issues with the SATA drives showing as being Generation 1 drives, and giving low Windows Experience scores.  This could either be a Win7 driver issue, or again, it could be a motherboard problem.  Everything works, however, so I’m tempted to just leave things alone and enjoy the obvious benefits of Core 2 Duo, 8gb of ram, and PCI Express video.  Quite a big step up from what I was using.

While I was waiting for the stuff to arrive from eBay, I took some time to clean up the Windows Home Server, which is a Frankenmachine with some 800 gb of storage, and a 300 gb external drive hanging off of it to back up the shared folders.  I used SyncToy to get my music folder up to date on the WHS, and now I’m just streaming music from there to the main machine, instead of keeping a local copy.  It’s working seamlessly so far, and frees up a lot of space on the local machine.  Again, not a big music collector (not since my LP rock collection days), only something like 10GB of music, and I’m trying to stay away from buying more, even at bargain prices on Amazon.

Another annoying issue came up around some DRM music that has become separated from the licenses.  No big deal really, I can live without the dozen or so songs, but whenever Windows Media Player would hit one of those songs in Shuffle All, it would stop and ask for the license.  I dug in and figured out how to create a playlist that filtered out protected music, which is much easier than trying to figure out which songs are drm and which aren’t.

I also have a laptop running Vista, and another frankenbox dual booting XP and Windows Server that I use as a test server for “web development”.  It’s all running on a home network, mostly wired, connected to Comcast Cable.