I have two PC’s in my house. One is my primary desktop which is the family PC running Windows 7 Ultimate. The other is used a Media Center Server (lets call it MCPC). After I got my iPhone, iPad and AppleTV I have moved all my digital media from Zune to iTunes (who knows when I buy Nokia Lumia 800 or a later Windows Phone, I will need to do the reverse all over again). My favourite application to convert DVDs and VCDs that I own into iTunes/Zune format is a free tool called “Handbrake” (that I had written about earlier).
My MCPC was about 4 years old, has outlived and needed an upgrade very badly. The MCPC had a AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 6000+ CPU, 4GB DDR2 RAM and a ASUS M2NBP motherboard with NVIDIA Quadro NVS210S GPU. Instead of throwing away the entire PC I decided to retain as much as I can and upgrade only the portions I needed to, which meant I can’t change the CPU or RAM, without changing all the three (Motherboard, CPU and RAM).
1. First item that I replaced was the 3 year old 1 KVA UPS from APC that I had been using to connect both the PCs. I shopped around for a 2 KVA with 2 Hours backup, but it turned out to be expensive (Rs.40,000 to 60,000 depending on features & brand) and huge in size to fit under my desk. Instead I went with 2 separate UPS each giving about 30 minutes backup time, first was a 1 KVA (APC Back-UPS RS 1000) and the second was a 1.5 KVA (APC Back-UPS RS 1500). Both costs together Rs.18,200 and it provided the convenience of using one of the PCs even when the other UPS dies out of its power. Both the UPS came with PowerChute client software which helps you to monitor the input voltage, set the input power sensitivity, set the voltage range and importantly shut-down the PC automatically when Power is about to run out – which ensures your drives are not corrupted. APC provides a RJ-45 to USB cable and software drivers to do this magic.
2. With the ever expanding size of my Digital Media (Music, Photos, Movies and TV Shows) stored in iTunes and as folders, I needed bigger hard-disks and also redundancy. So I replaced all the hard-drives and went in for 3 new HDDs – 1 x Seagate 500GB (Rs.2350), 2x 2TB (each Rs.4350). I didn’t choose Solid-State as they were expensive and anyway I thought I can buy a new PC with SSD in next few years. I configured the 500GB for the OS (Boot & System Partition for Windows 7) and the two 2TB as one single drive (Windows 7 Mirroring). I went for Software (Windows OS) Mirroring and not the BIOS which I was using earlier, as BIOS mirroring kept getting broken very often (may be due to the frequent Power shut-downs and problems with my UPS). It turns out this works great, only the first time I had to open Disk Management (Computer Management) and leave it open for the drives to Resync.
3. Then I went on to replace the graphics card (NVIDIA Quadro NVS210S GPU) which started producing washed out colours and lack of sharpness in the output. This meant purchasing a new add-on PCI Express Graphics Card. I selected an affordable one from ASUS called “HD 5450 Silent” costing Rs.2300 and featuring AMD ATI Radeon HD 5450 & 1GB DDR3 video memory.
(Output from my old GPU, taken with iPhone4)
(Output from my new GPU, taken with the same iPhone4)
4. You can’t get an improvement just by changing the GPU, you will need a matching monitor as well. So I replaced my old HP 15” TFT with a new ViewSonic VA1931WMA-LED 19” Monitor which costs Rs.5390. I wanted a monitor that is not state of art (and hence expensive) and one which had a built-in speaker (which limited the options dramatically). Remember I am using this as a Media Center PC with occasional YouTube & iTunes watching, so there was no need for a real speaker or a higher resolution display. I tried to have built-in USB Hub, but I couldn’t find one.
5. Now it is time to to focus on USB ports. The built-in USB ports tended to be slow and flaky (may be due to MagicJack or many other USB devices that I connected over the years). Getting new USB ports was the easiest and cheapest, it costs about Rs.250 to buy a 4 Port USB 2.0 add-on card. To get the USB ports in the front (instead of bending and reaching in the back of the PC) I purchased a Belkin 4 Port 2.0 Powered Hub for about Rs.800.
6. The next item was to look at the Network equipment (Ethernet Switch). I was using a 100Mbps Switch to connect my Wireless Router, Desktop, MCPC and other Ethernet ports in the house (like the one going to Apple TV or Daisy Chain). I upgraded this with a faster switch – a Netgear GS608 8Port Gigabit Switch which costs Rs.2475, this gives a smoother playing from iTunes Home sharing.
7. The last item was a WD 1 TB USB External HDD which costs about Rs.5000. This is to carry select media that I will be interested to have during my travel trips.
Overall the PC now manages to get about 4.0 (from 3.0 or so earlier) in Windows performance rating:
Final steps was to setup Windows to auto-login, launch iTunes automatically. I did the first using “User Accounts” (instructions here and here) and the second was done using Task Scheduler with a Trigger “When I log on”.
In my main PC at work where I store most of my documents and data, I have been using Hardware RAID for mirroring between two 500GB Seagate Hard drives for last 3 years. This provides me with automatic redundancy and minor performance benefit while reading large video files. All was well till last week, when on boot BIOS warned that the Mirror is broken. Having seen this happen few times before I quickly updated my backup to external drive and then rebuild the mirror. Yesterday I got into the same problem, I decided and moved to Windows (Software) mirroring. Today afternoon Windows 7 showed me the below dialog and warned me that S.M.A.R.T. data is indicating an impending failure/error in one of the drives. The warning was just about useless beyond that – no indication on which Physical drive is having the problem.
On searching for this issue in Bing!, I found this free utility called DiskCheckup which can read the S.M.A.R.T data and provide more information, which it did. I found one of the drives was having high “reallocated sector count” which was told me by few hardware blogs to be bad. But since both my physical drives were the same model their class names displayed were same, which didn’t help me in isolating the failed one. So I went to computer management and broke the mirror. Reran Diskcheckup few times (disabling one drive after another in Device Management) and identified the failed one. Since I didn’t have a spare 500GB to replace, I fixed a 1TB drive in place of the failed one. Fortunately Windows 7 didn’t mind setting up mirroring between two drives of unequal size. I managed to select the 500GB, Add Mirror to a portion (which Windows created automatically) of 1TB and setup everything, the balance space I could create another simple volume. Windows is currently Resyncing the mirror between the drives.
Just like the other 4999 attendees of Build Windows Conference, I am too happy to have got a test Samsung Tablet running “Developer Preview” of Windows. Having got a touch netbook previously in PDC 2009 towards launch of Windows 7, I should say I was expecting something like this.
The tablet looks great, feels a little heavy compared to iPad but has a USB port, plays all media formats that Windows Media recognizes (and for those it doesn’t you can always run VLC Player) and starts up in less than 2 seconds (awesome).
The machine specifications were impressive too and ships with SDK & Visual Studio to develop Metro style Apps.
And I was surprised to see some “Humour” in Microsoft EULA for the tablet. When was the last time you read anything in a Microsoft material that you can understand?
As I have written earlier I love everything about my new iPad2, but I do look forward to a great Windows8 tablet sometime in future (?). Normally I connect my iPhone & iPad2 to my PC so that they can sync with iTunes for all latest Podcasts and Apps. After few days with my iPad2 I realized it is not charging while connected to my Desktop Workstation (of course I have upgraded a new PC few months back) due to lack of power wattage from PC’s standard USB Ports. Connecting to a powered external USB Hub from Belkin (FSU304) didn’t help either. It was inconvenient for me to connect the iPad everyday separately to a Power outlet for charging.
Doing some searching I found the solution in this Apple Support forum page. The answer is to download a free utility from Asus called AiCharger that works in Windows, this free app configures your Motherboard and USB Hubs to increase the power output that is required by iPad2 to charge. It works fine for me in an Intel Motherboard, but please check whether your PC has a big SMPS power supply to take the extra load.
I have been a iPhone user for last two years. I love my iPhone4 and the ease with which you can buy Apps, Movie & Music in iTunes (though I hate the Photos management in iTunes). For many months now except for presentations I don’t use my laptop much – when in office it is Office Desktop and at house it is Home PC and in between I do my emails with iPhone. Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync keeps my email synced between the Office PC, Home PC, Laptop & iPhone. Windows Live Mesh syncs the files between the PCs & Laptop effortlessly. Whenever I am reading a book or a magazine I keep my iPhone next to me to refer in Wikipedia or browse the web about the topic I am reading. Even while watching TV having iPhone and turning to it for some information has become a habit – whether it is to find a song in YouTube I just remembered or to IMDB to refer on how old is an actor or buy a book from Amazon/FlipKart that you just read about in the Newspaper today. As you can imagine I am a heavy user of my iPhone, I have an Amazon KindleDX as well, so I was sceptical whether I need a iPad2. My friend who has been having an iPad for last one year kept telling it is a lifestyle device and I couldn’t see how.
Now after having been using an iPad2 for last few days, I can understand why the world loves this device. I bought a iPad2 64GB Wi-Fi model through my US Office in Washington. Apart from the device I bought a VGA Cable, the SmartCover (Light Blue), Apple CarePack giving one year additional warranty and adding WA State Tax it came to $927. The form factor, weight, display & audio are ideal for consuming content, it is not much of a Productivity Tool or Content Creation tool. There is a vast difference between what I read & visualized about the device, it feels whole lot better to actually have the device in your hand and use it. Playing Videos in YouTube, Photo viewing, Web browsing, reading FaceBook/Twitter/Blogs with FlipBoard is addictive.
Following are the 3rd Party Apps I am currently using in iPad, most of them are the same I use in iPhone4, but few of them only work in iPad.
Photo & Video: VLC Player (to play WMV and other formats), iMovie (paid app works in both iPhone4 & iPad), WiFi Photo Transfer (to share photos without a cable)
When I was a small boy Cassette tapes had become mainstream, but in our house we still had many Gramophone Discs and a player to play it. So I have had hours of entertainment listening to Illayaraja’s Tamil hit songs and BoneyM songs from the LP records. But in the 1990s the player broke down, the discs scratched and lost, leaving me only with the memory of them. I felt LP records carried in their music a bit of magic, it was fun to pick up the needle and place it gently on the record with care not to hurt it-just like a bee drinking honey from the flower we needed to take the music from the record.
All this came back to my mind when I read the article on Gramophone in one of March issues of Mint newspaper titled “The house of vinyl” by Shamik Bag. The article talked about how Gramophone is coming back to life as a nostalgic gadget and A.R.Rahman’s upcoming album will be the first LP in 13 years for India’s premier music house (Saregama). Reading this I decided to buy a Gramophone player for myself. Since I wanted to listen to LP records with ease, I went with a modern version of the Turntable (Model TT-29) brought from Europe to India by Saregama against antique versions. I ordered the player online from their website for about Rs.8000 and it got delivered in few days.
Getting the player and installing was easy, but I couldn’t play it as I had no discs to go with it. I couldn’t find a single Vinyl record from Saregama’s online store, tried in local music stores, Chennai’s Electronic Bazaar (Ritchie Street), Moore Market – no luck. Saw some Vinyl in the new Odyssey store in Express Avenue, but it turned out each of the few records costed Rs.2000 or so (One-Fourth of my player cost). Giving up I called my Uncle, luckily he had few records in his attic which he promptly sent to me (thanking me for vacating some space in his attic). Later I found there are some Vinyl records available in Flipkart.com – I have ordered Vande Mataram for Rs.767.
Now I am happily listening to the music from my new Gramophone – and it does sound just as good as I remembered, I love the hisses and the imperfections.
I came across and purchased iMovie today for my iPhone4. I was curious to see how you can do video editing on a small screen in a handheld.
In general I have found Video Editing to be like a miniature rocket science course. I use Windows Live Movie Maker for quick edits and publish to YouTube as it is easy to approach and use. For anything even a little important I struggle my way each time with Adobe Premiere Elements.
With this background, iMovie on iPhone4 was super cool to use. It took me less than 5 minutes to figure out the way in the App, compose this video (below), trim it and publish it to YouTube – and all of them from my iPhone. Of course, the App is very limited on what it can do. But isn’t that what makes it so easy to use, anyways you are not going to doing special effects in an handheld.
After the Nokia & Microsoft partnership announcement last few days back, it has been the main news on the tech world. Many pundits have rushed to criticize the partnership and writing it off as failure even without knowing the full details, with Google’s Vic Gundotra leading the pack with his pre-emptive tweet “Two Turkeys do not make an Eagle”.
For me this deal can be best described as “The Devil is in the Detail”. At this moment, none of us know any details about the partnership, the timelines, money’s involved, exact IPs that will be exchanged – basically who brings what to the table. We only the broad one-liner – Nokia brings Hardware & few software assets like Maps, Microsoft brings the Operating System (Windows Phone), Bing! & XBOX Live. I have had few lively discussions on this subject this week with two of my good tech-buddies in the industry and it turns out I see this deal a little different from them.
Today my primary phone is iPhone4 which I upgraded after 2 years of satisfied usage with iPhone3. Last year once WindowsPhone7 came out I bought HTC Mozart with a BSNL 3G connection and I feel it is a promising device, yet it hasn’t replaced iPhone4 as my primary phone. Few months back I used HTC Legend (Android 2.1) for some days, though its touch is usable & comparable to iPhone I find Android to be less polished than WindowsPhone7 on the interface front. Many things in Android UI are counter-intuitive especially for me coming from iPhone world.
Coming back to the Nokia-Microsoft deal, inferring from what we know I see lot more positives than negatives. I see Nokia gaining more from the deal than Microsoft. For Nokia this is the only business they have, for Microsoft Mobile is just a portion of their $60B empire.
Other than iPhone & BlackBerry, all other smartphones including all the Android variants are pathetic when it comes to Battery life and voice clarity. A smartphone primarily is a Phone and as a Phone battery life is super critical. In this area, no one can beat Nokia. In general, all Nokia phones including their Smartphones or their Communicator easily last for more than 2 days on one charge. I believe the Battery Life is an area where the Hardware, Drivers and OS have to work together very tightly. That’s the reason why generic OS like Android or Windows Mobile have failed in the past, whereas vertically integrated players like Apple & Blackberry have succeeded. With Nokia-Microsoft, they can get this right by making WindowsPhone more efficient on battery usage.
So far both Nokia and Microsoft are not known for being agile. Both have wasted precious last four years in giving the lead they both independently on the smartphones to Apple & Google in a platter. But this time around the writing for both of them is in the wall and no company works great than Microsoft when it is paranoid. Look at how well Microsoft responded to competition including Netscape, OpenOffice, Java, Sony Playstation, Linux on Netbooks & Adobe Flash.
Nokia’s hardware is world famous for its reliability and durability. They still make the largest number of phones in the world. Outside USA, especially in Asia & Africa (which is where the next 1 Billion phones are going to be sold) Nokia is a much bigger brand than iPhone, BlackBerry, HTC, Android, Motorola, Sony – all put together. Nokia makes phones at every price point. Android OEMs like Motorola, HTC, Dell & others may find it difficult to play the low & medium end of this game. Apple always likes to keep its variations limited to 1 or few and I believe all the news about low-cost iPhones are nothing but rumours. The only player I see who can play the game across price points is Sony-Ericsson and they seem to have much bigger problems than Nokia or Microsoft.
Let us take one important feature in a Smartphone – Camera. Hands down Nokia Phones with their Carl-Zeiss lenses are the best, I find even my iPhone4 not able to deliver photo or video quality like a Nokia phone that costs half. Software features like HDR in iPhone does help a bit, but ultimately it is the optics and the physics there that matters.
How about manufacturing?. Today majority of the smartphones including iPhones are manufactured by contract manufacturers like FoxConn. Though these manufacturers help in reducing the cost, in the long term they offer no differentiator at the manufacturing level. Once consumers especially in Asia & Africa become more sophisticated they will demand better finished, well polished devices – which can be executed well if you own the manufacturing. For example, look at the Nokia’s manufacturing facility in Chennai (India).
Today’s Mobile Operating System are more like PC operating systems of the 90s. They are becoming more and more complex and I see them to converge/unify in the near-future with the PC Operating System. In PC Operating System if you take Windows – developing something like Windows today is like building a Rocket or even more complex. Only firms like NASA can accomplish this. The competition for Windows, Linux has struggled for last 20 years to make any significant impact in the Desktop market. Only another closed source OS, the Mac OS is able to garner about 10% market share from Windows. To continuously develop and improve an OS like Windows, you need phenomenal resources, engineering talent & discipline. Microsoft has proven time and again they have it. I don’t consider Windows Vista to be a failure, from an Engineering Perspective Windows 7 is nothing but faster Windows Vista. The reason I am bringing Vista is that Microsoft has proven it has the ability to recover itself from a failure as grand as Windows Vista and come out more stronger with Windows 7. Even in the development of Windows Vista, Microsoft did a complete over-haul, a complete reboot when it was known as “LongHorn”; to do something like that you need massive amounts of cash and resources and Microsoft has it. Even more relevant will be their Windows Mobile 6.5 (Windows CE) which was a failure, but Microsoft did a complete reboot and came out with a decent OS with WindowsPhone7. Compare this with the darling of the markets – Google with their Android. Google is struggling and delayed with their Google Chrome OS and they have no long term track record on managing & delivering a OS like Microsoft do. The only serious competitor to Microsoft on the Consumer Operating System who has done massive platform changes over the years and still succeeded is Apple – even their movement from PowerPC to Intel was not as smooth as Microsoft made the switch for developers and users not once but so many times from 16 bit to 32 bit or to 64 bit now.
Lastly, today’s smartphone it is all about Software & Apps. iOS has succeeded in making Apps the centre stage of activity in the Mobile world, and iTunes is the best marketplace out there for Music & Movies. In both these areas Microsoft has the best comparable offerings in terms of technology. For developers to develop great Apps, you need great developer tool & ecosystem. And no one knows developers & developer ecosystem like Microsoft do – remember SteveB shouting Developers, Developers, Developers. Yes, they have been late to the party with their Marketplace & Zune Marketplace doesn’t resonate anything with consumers like the way iTunes does. Still technically Microsoft has the best developer toolkit out there with their Visual Studio, SilverLight for the developers and it is free. Android can’t match this. You can show me number of Apps in Android is 100x like in WindowsPhone Marketphone, but look at the quality of Apps – Apps in iOS and WP7 platform are class-apart from the lousy Android Marketplace. And don’t get me started on the confusion with multiple Android Marketplaces and the fragmented Android versions and variations. Developers hate variations, users hate to spend $$$ and find the app not working on their firmware/device/OS. Lastly the one thing I hate in my Apple iPhone experience is their iTunes client software, Apple seems to have no clue on how to write a user friendly client software – I find it so confusing on how to organize my music files, editing meta-data of them, manage photos in iTunes (it doesn’t show photos at all). Microsoft makes the best desktop applications in the world including MS Office and Solitaire. I find Zune client software better with syncing, managing Photo Albums, allowing drag and drop and on many more. Compared to that, iTunes shows its age as a CD Music software.
Of course, all the above depends on how well the two companies (Nokia & Microsoft) are able to work together, execute and deliver. Overall, I will give the deal a 70-30 chance of success.
I have been using in my Desktop PC, Pinnacle PCTV Hybrid Tuner (330e) to watch TV with Tata Sky DTH. It is quite useful to catch up on News & happenings during the day and for a break few episodes of 30 Rock/How I met your mother in late evenings. After working for few years without any issues Pinnacle PCTV conked off this week. So I went around shopping for a replacement and settled with AverTV Volar GO A833 USB drive. It has drivers for Windows 7 x64 and works fine.
The device is advertised to have support for Windows Media Center (to be used as the Player), but it turns out that works only for TV Cable as input video source. In my case with Tata Sky DTH the input video source was Composite and Windows Media Center requires you have a IR Blaster for it to work. AverTV Volar Go doesn’t ship with one, so I tried to use the IR Blaster from Pinnacle but it didn’t work. So I had to uninstall Windows Media Center and stick with the AVerTV 6 Player Application. The device comes with a small remote control that you can use to adjust volume control, ON/OFF the player and it works fine. The Player supports TimeShift & MP4 recording as well. Since there is no IR blaster I am not able to control the set top-box from TV Player application itself.
The first impression you get after you open the package with the $99 device is how small & cute it is. The device on the sides came with a Black Tape stuck all around, so for few minutes I was wondering why there are no ports or even power socket. The remote is even more smaller & unbelievably thinner. Hat’s off to Apple on the minimalist design.
Apple TV allows you to access YouTube Videos (Favourites & Most Popular), Movies & TV shows from iTunes & Digital Media (Photos, Music & Videos) that you have stored in your Home PC (or Mac) in iTunes libraries. The device has no hard-disk or any other drive, so no noise or heating. The device runs iOS (as in iPhone & iPad), so Indic Language (like Tamil) files names appear legibly. You also get an iPhone app “Remote” that allows you to manage any iTunes Library including Apple TV from your iPhone – quite convenient and thoughtful. The app (unlike Logitech Harmony app) is minimalist and easy to configure & use.
While accessing Music & Videos the experience is great thanks to iTunes. But when it comes to Pictures the experience nose-dives due to same iTunes & its poor Pictures management support. I have like 15,000 pictures in my PC, neatly organized into folders like Personal, Events, Travel, Family, Friends and so on, with each of them having sub-folders for each year in which the photos were taken. It took a long time before Apple TV could showed the first photo, then it displayed all the 15,000 photos in one go – how can you scroll through thousands of photos?. There was no way for me to sort/group/search for a particular album or year or keyword. After some time I gave up the fruitless exercise and took my son to my PC where I showed the photos he wanted to see. I am at loss at why even after 10 Versions iTunes doesn’t have proper features to add/delete/edit pictures, categorize them into folders/sub-folders and so on. If there is one thing I hate in iPhone & iTunes it is Pictures management.
The content of this site are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in anyway. In addition, my thoughts and opinions often change, and as a weblog is intended to provide a semi-permanent point in time snapshot you should not consider out of date posts to reflect my current thoughts and opinions.
%20300_3.jpg "AVerTV Volar GO (A833) 300")
