A quick look around the Microsoft RoundTable

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 17 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Earlier this week, I blogged about some of the gadgets I’ve been using whilst I’ve been learning about Exchange Unified Messaging and Office Communciations Server (OCS) 2007 and today I got to experience one of Microsoft’s showpiece web conferencing devices – the RoundTable.

Microsoft RoundTableBasically, it looks like a normal conference phone, but with a 30cm pole at the top of which are mounted a number of mirrors reflecting a 360-degree view from the room back onto cameras.

This means that Live meeting can display a panoramic view of the room and (this is the really cool part), the RoundTable recognises who is speaking and displays the appropriate part of the image. It really has to be seen to be believed – so here’s a screen grab from the PC that had the RoundTable connected, showing the panoramic view, the currently selected view (with picture in picture from the remote caller’s webcam). Other LiveMeeting content could also be shown (e.g. a presentation, or a shared desktop), but the point here is the camera.

Microsoft RoundTable images viewed in LiveMeeting

(Incidentally, the guy in the blue shirt is Peter O’Dowd – an Exchange and OCS MVP whose claim to fame includes playing guitar under the pseudonym of Pete Petrol for the punk band Spizzenergi, who were most famous for the song where is Captain Kirk?)

Some might feel that the RoundTable is a solution looking for a problem but I’ve been dialled into enough conference calls where I haven’t a clue who is speaking because as soon as there are more than three people on the conference it becomes unclear who is speaking at any one moment.

With the RoundTable and Live Meeting, remote attendees can have their individual webcams running and people back in the office meeting room can use the RoundTable to project an image of whoever is speaking at that time. Or multiple RoundTables can be used for conferences between multiple groups of people.

I’m sure that Cisco, Polycom and the others who have been doing this stuff for years have devices that are just as exciting but this really rocks.

Gadgets for audio-visual interaction with Microsoft’s unified communications products

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 17 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

18 months ago, I attended one the Exchange “12” Ignite training courses – basically Exchange Server 2007 training for early technology adopters. This week I’m refreshing my Exchange knowledge for the release version product but in train-the-trainer style with the intention that I will be training a number of colleagues across the UK and Europe in the coming months to bring them up to speed. I’m also doing the same for Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007.

One of the nice things about this training is that it’s being held in Prague. Our hotel is a few miles out to the east of the city centre but it’s a great place to visit in the evening (and I get to do very little international travel in my job and even less sightseeing, so I’m making the most of it).

The other great thing is that we have each been given a webcam and headset for use with Exchange unified messaging (using the Exchange UM test phone and headset for voice access to Exchange) and Office Communicator (with audio and video from the headset and webcam). I already have a desktop webcam at home (the Microsoft LifeCam VX-6000), as well as the iSight on the Mac, but this is a great portable setup – a Microsoft LifeCam NX-6000 webcam and the geeky but surprisingly comfortable Microsoft LifeChat ZX-6000 wireless headset (which includes the XBox 360 wireless gaming receiver for wireless communications).

Later in the week we should be playing with one of the Microsoft RoundTable conference phones/webcams too.

Oh, I do love my toys!

Virtualised demonstrations eating all your memory? Try a ReadyBoost USB key

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 17 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Even though Windows Vista will run on lower-specification PCs (it’s fine on my ThinkPad T40 with 512MB RAM), once you add a few applications (like Office 2007), it really starts to bog down and I was struggling recently with 1GB RAM on my work notebook (it’s been fine since I added another gig). If you also run virtual machines (e.g. for product testing or demonstrations), then its not long before the requirements for physical RAM run up against the limits of a 32-bit address space.

Last week, my colleague Alistair (soon to be an ex-colleague as he’s off to Conchango – where I used to work, proving that the UK IT industry is a very small world!) was raving about the Corsair Flash Voyager USB drives. Not only are they shock and water-resistant, but the GT model is ReadyBoost compatible, meaning that if you need a bit of extra RAM in your PC you can plug in your USB key. USB will be slower than on-board memory, and other ReadyBoost compatible drives are available, but the Flash Voyager GT is heralded as one of the fastest such devices available today. Even better, the ReadyBoost memory is a separate address space, so you can exceed the 4GB limit for a 32-bit architecture.

There’s a useful ReadyBoost FAQ at Tom Archer’s blog.

Windows Vista and ATI display drivers

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 17 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

My IBM T40 is not an old PC. Well, it may be three years old but it’s still a perfectly capable machine. One of its great features is the S-Video display output – perfect for watching films from the computer on a TV – at least it would be if I could get it to work under Windows Vista.

The trouble is that the T40 has an ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 graphics chipset. The Windows Vista setup routine had installed the standard VGA graphics adapter driver (v6.0.6000.16386) but there is no supported Windows Vista driver for this chipset. I could rant on about how this lack of device support is a terrible way for ATI to treat customers and how it’s not as if I have any option to upgrade the graphics in a notebook PC but that won’t get me anywhere (and my blood pressure is already high enough). Nor will it sell me another PC, which is what hardware manufacturers really want, rather than developing modern drivers for old products. Instead, I spent far too much time today trying to get it working:

  • I found a forum post that suggested the Windows XP drivers would work (at least on pre-release versions of Vista) so I downloaded the latest available drivers from the IBM website, extracted them to a folder on my hard disk and let Windows Vista look there for updated drivers. After a successful installation (v6.14.10.6547) Windows reported the correct adapter type and provided support for multiple displays. So I was half way to my goal but without ATI-specific device options to enable advanced features (like the S-Video) connection.
  • Next, I tried running the full installer for the XP drivers and all the associated bloat but all I got was a blue screen of death (ati3duag.dll PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON_PAGED_AREA)… not a good result.
  • So I downloaded and installed the latest version (v7.5) of the ATI Catalyst Control Center (CCC) – except that it ignored my graphics adapter completely and just gave me some Catalyst Install Manager (CIM) links for updating/uninstalling CCC. At one stage, I was even dumped back to 4-bit 640×480 graphics and had to roll back my driver to the standard VGA before reinstalling the XP driver that had previously been working in Vista.
  • I tried running individual installers from within the extracted CCC package (e.g. ccc-graphics-full-existing.msi) and something happened to make a desktop right-click option for ATI CATALYST(R) Control Center appear (I hate excessive capitalisation in menu items!) but CCC still doesn’t load, so I guess it doesn’t like the XP display driver.
  • After reading Koroush Ghazi’s ATI Catalyst Tweak Guide, I tried Ray Adams’ ATI Tray Tools but these just produced memory errors on Vista, even when run as Administrator.
  • Finally, I went back to my extracted driver package and ran the ATI Control Panel (v8.133.2.1.1-061116a0949984C) setup (from the CPANEL folder, rather than the top level CIM installer). Even though Vista informed me that “this program has known compatibility issues” and that “ATI Control Panel is incompatible with this version of Windows”, it gave me access to all the advanced display settings but I couldn’t get it to recognise that the TV was connected.

ATI Control Panel

Now it’s the end of the day and I’m giving up. I guess I’ll have to go back to XP to use my TV-out (or watch videos on the laptop display). Grrr.

Struggling with SATA

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

One of my PCs includes a Serial ATA (SATA) controller (Silicon Image SiI3112A SATALink – BIOS v4.2.83 and 32-bit Windows driver v1.3.68.0) together with a Seagate ST3500641AS (500GB SATA) disk. Both these devices were added in preparation for installing Windows Home Server (so I haven’t tried them with any other operating system, although I suspect the results would be similar) and I’ve been having trouble with the system’s stability – suffering occasional crashes (sometimes followed by an inability to find the disk) and frequently seeing the following errors in the event log:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: si3112
Event Category: None
Event ID: 9
Date: 13/05/2007
Time: 12:22:25
User: N/A
Computer: servername
Description:
The device, \Device\Scsi\si31121, did not respond within the timeout period.

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Disk
Event Category: None
Event ID: 11
Date: 13/05/2007
Time: 13:54:00
User: N/A
Computer: servername
Description:
The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk0.

MaplinThe first message doesn’t mean much but following the link from Event Viewer to the Windows Help and Support Center indicated that the disk event ID 11 means IO_ERR_CONTROLLER_ERROR and can be caused by a loose cable. The controller card (bought last week) was supplied with a power cable but not an interface (data) cable, so I bought one at Maplin for £4.99. When I got home I found that the data cable connector housing made the connection too tight against the power cable, making it a slightly incorrect fit (although probably good enough). Armed with this new advice, I set off to buy another cable – this time for £2.99 from a local computer services company… a perfect fit, with a latching connection and less expensive (that’s why it pays to shop locally!). Unfortunately though, this new cable didn’t resolve my disk errors.

Googling the error messages hadn’t turned up much; however searching for the disk model number told me that my disk is actually 3Gbps-capable and that, even though SATA/300 devices should be compatible with SATA/150 controllers, there can be issues with legacy controllers when a technology called spread spectrum clocking (SSC) is enabled. Seagate supplies a utility to enable/disable SSC on their SATA drives bit it won’t run under Windows, so I created an MS-DOS 6.22 boot floppy disk (thanks to bootdisk.com) and ran the utility from MS-DOS. As it happens, SSC was already disabled on my disk but it was worth checking out. Another potential issue is the autonegotiation between SATA/300 and SATA/150 and, following the Seagate SATA troubleshooter, I found this advice:

“Some older 1.5Gbits/sec SATA cards do not support auto negotiation with newer 3.0Gbits/sec drives… Seagate Barracuda 3.0Gbit/sec drives can be forced to 1.5Gbits/sec to allow support with these older SATA cards.

To force the Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 drive to 1.5Gbits/sec mode, apply a jumper to the outer most pins of the jumper block…

This jumper block uses a 2mm jumper. This is the smaller of the standard jumper sizes.”

Seagate knowledge base article 3116

After digging around in my “box of PC bits and bobs”, I found a suitable jumper and applied it; however I followed the diagram in Seagate knowledge base article 2850 (which relates to certain Maxtor SATA drives):

Maxtor Serial ATA jumper options

Instead of this, subtley different one (which I found afterwards in the ST3500641AS Product Manual):

Seagate Barracuda Serial ATA connectors and jumper options

After having applied the jumper to the wrong pins, there were no more disk event ID 11 errors and, as it seems that those pins are for factory use only, I have no idea what they meant; however, after a few hours, I saw the si3112 event ID 9 errors return, so I decided to switch the jumper to the location in the second diagram. I won’t go into the details of what heppened next, suffice to say it resulted in a blue screen of death, followed by a hard disk that no longer spun up and a warranty call… oops!

After receiving a replacement disk, I rebuilt the system (without any jumpers on the hard drive) and confirmed that the errors still occurred with a new disk (ruling out a faulty component as the cause). Then, I shut down the system (always a good idea before performing hardware maintenance) and fitted the jumper to the outermost two pins. Since powering on the computer, there have been no errors, so (fingers crossed), it looks as though the problem was down to a SATA/300 drive and a SATA/150 controller.

I’ve since come across a low-cost SATA controller with an eSATA port, based on a VIA VT6421A chipset (which could actually provide me with some more flexibility – and I can still return the first controller for a refund); however, having got a working driver and hardware combination, I’m reluctant to switch to another chipset (and another set of problems)… maybe that’s something to consider if I experience any more problems later.

If only all warranty calls were like this…

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A couple of years ago, I had the misfortune to require warranty support from Dell (a frustrating experience). Then, problems with my IBM ThinkPad left me stuck between a 3-year hardware warranty and a 90-day software warranty. Well, thankfully my recent experiences with HP have been considerably better.

Last year I had some warranty repairs carried out on a couple of my notebook PCs – the warranty cover was for a back-to-base repair: a courier arrived from DHL and packaged the computers, then a few days later they were returned with the faulty components replaced.

Then, yesterday, one of my hard disks failed. I checked the warranty status on the Seagate website (one of the reasons that I use Seagate drives is the 5-year warranty) but it wasn’t valid as the component was originally supplied by HP. So, I called HP, who were happy to take my word that a few whirrs and clunks from the disk, then nothing (except a system that was stuck attempting to boot from drive C: ) meant that this device was broken and needed to be replaced (even if I did have to explain to an overseas call centre operator that I work for a company with 20,000 employees and I couldn’t check every address they had on their system for that company name, but that my home address certainly wouldn’t be there). Half an hour later, HP (or one of their agents) called me to check the part number and promised me a replacement within 24 hours.

By 9:00 this morning, I had a package containing a new drive in my hand (even if the courier didn’t know anything about collecting the faulty component) and a few minutes later I had installed it in my system. By lunchtime, everything was up and running again. Then, I found the instructions that told me to package the failed drive in the box used to ship the new replacement and peel off the label, underneath which was a pre-paid returns label. All that was needed then was a call to UPS to arrange collection and a few minutes ago, the same UPS driver returned to collect the package.

Overall, it was a positive experience (as positive as a wrecked hard drive can be) – less than a day of downtime on a standard parts-only warranty. Thank you HP.

ThinkBook? MacPad?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Firstly, let me point out that I am not publicly condoning software piracy. To run Apple Mac OS X 10.4 on anything other than a properly licensed Macintosh computer would be very, very naughty.

If, however, you did have a spare copy of OS X and you wanted to install it on a well-built black notebook PC (say, for example, an IBM ThinkPad T40) without shelling out extra cash for a black MacBook, this is how you might do it. I’m not sure if the end result should be known as a ThinkBook or a MacPad…

Following Profit42’s advice for installing OS X 10.4.x on a “normal” PC (and assuming that all data on the target computer’s hard disk can be wiped):

  1. Make sure that the target computer supports at least the SSE2 instruction set (if you are running Windows then CPU-Z will help).
  2. Obtain a pre-patched OS X install DVD image (available to Apple developers… although I understand that googling for JaS OSx86 may help out a little…).
  3. Burn the OS X install image (e.g. 10.4.6.install.dvd.iso) to DVD.
  4. Boot the target computer from the DVD and press a key when prompted to install OS X.
  5. After the grey screen with the Apple logo, follow the installer prompts until there is a blue screen and a menu bar at the top. At this point select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.
  6. Create a single partition on the disk formatted as Mac OS X extended (journaled). Then close Disk Utility.
  7. Continue with the installer prompts, customising the installation after selecting the target hard disk and ensuring that all appropriate patches are selected (e.g. 10.4.6.Combo.Update, Intel.SSE2 and 10.4.6.Radeon.Mobility.Support).
  8. Continue until the installation is complete and reboot into OS X.

If presented with a b0 error message, then there are a couple of methods to work around this. The basic problem is that the partition has not been set active (bootable). Live CDs such as GParted (or even an MS-DOS boot disk with FDISK) may help but one method is to boot from the install DVD again but this time don’t press a key. OS X should boot and once set up it should be possible to launch Terminal (from the Utilities folder, under Applications) and set the appropriate partition to be active, following the advice from Rammjet at Insanely Mac:

  1. Type diskutil list and verify which disk holds the OS X partition.
  2. Assuming that the disk is disk0, enter the command sudo fdisk -e /dev/rdisk0 (note the r in rdisk) and enter your password when prompted.
  3. Ignore the fdisk: could not open MBR file /usr/standalone/i386/boot0: No such file or directory error.
  4. At the fdisk: 1> prompt, type p and verify which partition holds OS X.
  5. Assuming that it is partition 1, type f 1 – the response should be Partition 1 marked active and the prompt should change to fdisk:*1>.
  6. Save the changes with write then enter y to confirm that a restart will be required, followed by exit.
  7. Remove the install DVD and reboot.

Finally:

Utility to discover detailed information about PC hardware

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I needed to know a little bit of very technical information about the hardware in one of my PCs today (whether or not the processor supported the SSE2 instruction set) and in the process I found a great utility that details just about everything I could ever need to know about a PC’s CPU, cache, mainboard, and memory – the utility is called CPUID CPU-Z is and it is freeware. It’s also worth checking out some of the other utilities on the CPUID website.

Should I avoid Western Digital hard disks?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Over the years I’ve had many hard drives and by and large they have been pretty reliable. I did lose data once when the hard disk in a Dell laptop died but then, last week, the disk in one of my external Toshiba PX1223E-1G32 (320GB 7200 RPM external USB 2.0 hard drive with 8MB data buffer) let out a “clunk” before failing – there was still power to the enclosure but the disk was not spinning. To open the enclosure and investigate further would have voided the warranty and thankfully, it was the drive I use for backups (strangely, the one which sees least use) so I hadn’t lost any data – just the previous night’s backup. As it was less than a year old, I had no problems exchanging it for a new one (although it was the last one on the shelf at PC World), but it has dented my confidence in these drives.

Toshiba PX1223E-1G32 320GB External Hard DiskPrior to the failure, the disk inside the Toshiba enclosure was reporting itself within the Mac OS X Disk Utility as a “WDC WD32 00JB-00KFA0” (a Western Digital Caviar SE WD3200JB), as does the one which is still working. My personal preference over the years has been to avoid Western Digital drives and to use drives from Seagate (one reason is that many Seagate drives have a 5 year warranty). Interestingly, the replacement for my failed disk is reporting itself as a “Toshiba USB 2.0 Ext. HDD Media”, which does make me wonder if there have been problems with failure rates on these disks and if Toshiba have switched their drive manufacturer as a result.

I accept that an occasional hard disk failure is inevitable (that’s one reason to take backups) but my understanding is that failures should normally be in early life, or after a few years (the curve is sometimes described as a bathtub); however on the way to work this morning I was listening to Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte discussing Google’s white paper about failure trends in a large disk drive population on episode 81 of the Security Now podcast. Interestingly, Steve Gibson commented that he doesn’t use Western Digital drives – maybe that’s something I should be considering too.

Providing extra USB and FireWire capacity for a Mac Mini

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

One of the problems with the current Apple Mac Mini model is a lack of USB ports. Strictly speaking, not so much a lack of – 4 USB and 1 FireWire sounds plenty but the keyboard takes one of them (although the keyboard includes a 2-port USB hub, which I can use for my mouse, it’s not powerful enough for most devices), my external hard disk takes another, then there’s my iPod, my scanners, my video camera, etc.

If I had an Apple Cinema Display then the balance would tip back in my favour (as it includes a USB and FireWire hub), but I don’t – instead I saved almost £200 by not buying an Apple monitor and am very happy with my Fujitsu-Siemens Scaleoview S20-1W (incidentally, this seems to have dropped in price since I bought mine).

The trouble with most external USB hubs is that they come with a huge power brick, but for Mac Mini owners wanting to maintain the stylish appearance of their components there is an option – the Belkin Hi Speed USB 2.0 and FireWire 6-port hub for Mac Mini. Designed to be placed under the Mac Mini, with the same width and depth dimensions, it uses one of the existing USB ports and the existing FireWire port as uplinks and power sources, providing a net increase of 3 USB and 1 FireWire port, of which two ports (1 of each type) are positioned at the front of the unit – ideal for iPods and other often-removed devices.

Belkin Hi Speed USB 2.0 and FireWire 6-port hub for Mac Mini - F5U507uk

The only drawback I found was that the supplied USB uplink cable didn’t reach to the uplink port – I guess Apple must have moved the ports when they redesigned the Mac Mini for Intel; but thankfully they work, regardless of whether I use the port marked “to computer”. The power indicator, which exactly matches the Mac in both location and style, is also a nice touch although I do wish the device had been given the aluminium finish of the Mac Mini rather than iMac-style white plastic.

There are alternative products available, some including additional hard drive capacity, but they are difficult to get hold of in the UK, and mostly seem to be much taller, with ugly manufacturer logos on the front, or huge power indicators.

There’s also a 4-port USB-only version, but the 6-port USB and FireWire hub seems a better option to me and it was only £29.99 (shop around on the ‘net and you should be able to get if for less than £25). Now… if only they made one in silver with a built in CF slot, and perhaps even room for a 2.5″ SATA hard disk drive, I’d be very happy!