Tuesday, October 06, 2009

I've been happy with my PC for the most part, but I have had some issues with overheating, my mobo, and RAM.  I decided to upgrade a bit as well.  Here's what I went with:

• Case: Antec 1200 
• Motherboard: Asus Rampage formula
• RAM: 8GB (4x2GB) OCZ Repear
• Monitor: Dell P2010 20“ Widescreen
• Video Card: XFX Radeon HD 5870

I had a lot of trouble deciding on a video card.  I went back and forth between ATI and NVidia.  I've always used NVidia in the past. I went with ATI this time because of the Eyefinity feature.  This allows one card to support 3 monitors and make it appear as 1 large monitor.  I've used 3 monitors for a while and this has worked great with Windows.  The issue is I've always had to use 2 video cards instead of 1.  Also most games don't support multiple monitors so with Eyefinity you can play games with multiple monitors.

I should get all the parts by next week and be able to put it all together.

  Thursday, April 09, 2009

A while back a friend showed me this video. I decided today that I should see how long it takes to load all of Office.  It's hard to tell exactly what Office components they used, but I settled on Word, Excel, Outlook, Publisher, OneNote, and Powerpoint.

I'm not sure the best way to launch a bunch of apps at once, but I settled on a batch file.  My batch file looks like this:

START WinWord
START Excel
START Outlook
START MSPub
START OneNote
START Powerpnt

And the results....................

2.7 seconds.

Obviously the insane setup in that video is faster, but I think 2.7 seconds is very good with one drive.

  Wednesday, April 08, 2009

I needed a place to keep this handy so I thought I'd post it here.

Look here: C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\CONFIG\Browsers\mozilla.browser

Then Look for this:

<browser id=”Safari” parentID=”Gecko”>

Then remove this:

<controlAdapters>
    <adapter controlType=”System.Web.UI.WebControls.Menu” AdapterType=”System.Web.UI.WebControls.Adapters.MenuAdapter” />
</controlAdapters>

  Sunday, April 05, 2009

I've been hearing a lot about SSD (Solid State Disks) lately.  When Joel Spolsky posted his results. I decided to try it myself.  I started by looking around at what to buy.  I found that prices varied a lot.  The drive Joel used in his test was among the most expensive.  I looked into why that was.  I found 2 well written articles here and here.  Based on this information I felt it was best to pay the extra money and go with the Intel X25-M 160GB Model.  I thought about getting 2 and spanning them, but that was just too much money.  I ended up getting the drive from Newegg.

To back up just a bit, I had other reasons for getting the drive.  I've been fighting some odd blue screens lately.  It has not been real bad, but about every week or so my computer would BSOD.  It seemed to be a memory issue, but I couldn't reliably narrow it down.  It had been a year since my last re-build and it was time.  I was hopeful that a complete re-build would also get rid of my BSOD issues.  This was the perfect time to install a new boot/app drive. 

The drive that I purchased was a 2.5“ version which presented the first issue.  I installed this into my beefy desktop rig.  I ended up getting a mounting kit. This is the only kit I could find.  It ended up not being ideal.  It does expand the width to fit the 3.5“ bay width wise.  It does not expand the length.  I didn't worry too much about this, I just attached the front 2 screws in my case and let it sit on the bottom bay.  There aren't any moving parts to an SSD so I'm not that concerned.  Probably not the cleanest install though.

I simply disconnected my primary disks (4 in a Raid 0+1) and ran with just the SSD drive.  It detected it fine and I installed Windows Vista 64.  I wasn't paying much attention to the Vista install but it did seem fast.  It took about 30min to get to booting for the first time.  I then spent another 3 hours or so getting all the latest updates and all the software I need re-installed.  Once that was all done, I connected my RAID back up and made sure the BIOS was set to boot from the SSD.  Everything worked great.  Actually, one of the smoothest re-builds I've done.

Before I re-built I did do some simple, non-official timings of tasks that I do on a normal basis.  Let me start with the details of my rig:

• Mother Board: ASUS Striker II Formula
• Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4ghz
• 8GB Crucial RAM
• GeForce 6800 (drives 2  - 20“ monitors)
• GeForce 8600 (drives 1 - 30“ widescreen)
• 4x250GB 7200RPM drives (RAID 0+1)

Here are the results of my timings before the re-build:

• Boot - power off to Vista side bar displays: 4:06
• Launch Word : 26s
• Launch Outlook: 31s
• Launch Visual Studio with a large solution: 1:27
• Re-build large solution: 2:35
• Launch PhotoShop: 22s
• Launch IE8 loading google: 5s
• Launch Safari loading google: 8s
• Launch Zune Player: 17s

I was most disappointed with the launch time for Visual Studio and the re-build since that's what I do most.  Here are the times with the SSD drive.  Keep in mind, this is with all of my code files on the SSD:

As you can see, that's a huge difference in speed.  This of course comes with the caveat that my previous build had been running for a year and had accumulated crud as always.  I'm sure if I simply just re-built using my existing drives that it would have been faster.  I don't believe it would have been as fast as it is. 

It will be interesting to see how it goes over the next few months, but I now believe adding the SSD drive was the single best thing I could have done to my rig to make it faster.

  Saturday, November 22, 2008

Here's an article on how to enable MSDTC on Windows Vista:

  Friday, October 10, 2008

For anyone who's interested, I started a flikr site and am going to start posting pictures up there.  Here's my URL: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jfanz/.  Enjoy!

  Wednesday, April 09, 2008

I just finished installing my new computer parts:

• Asus Striker II Formula Motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4Ghz processor
• 4GB Crucial RAM
• Antec quattro 1000w power supply

that's all I needed since I already have a GeForce 6800 and 8600 ( I use these to drive 3 monitors, 2x20” widescreen and a 30” widescreen center).  I also have 4 250GB 7200rpm drives which I run in a RAID0+1 configuration. 

I'm currently installing Windows Vista64.  Wish me luck.

  Thursday, March 06, 2008

Hey everyone... My comment notifications are broken, so I'm sorry if you posted a comment and I didn't reply.

Oh, and Joe, no I'm not planning on going to any VS Live events.  Are you?  If so, which ones?  Maybe I'll change my mind.

I had to do a deep traversal of a simple parent/child hierarchy in SQL today.  I found an old article that explained a very easy method.  I made a few tweaks, and since my base table is so small, I ended up creating the hierarchy as a temp table in my sproc.  If it was larger, I'd create the table ahead of time. 

  Monday, February 25, 2008

I like good beer.

In fact, most people consider me a beer snob.  They are probably right, but I can explain why. 

Most people I talk to start drinking beer when their dad's leave a can laying around.  Then in high school and college they drink whatever they can lay their hands on.  The cheaper the better.

This is where I'm different.  I never drank beer until I was about 28.  The beer I first started drinking was a Hefeweizen. I then moved on to some Belgian Ale's.  I never knew what crap beer tasted like.  I can still remember the first time someone offered me a Bud Light.  I can remember thinking, “This is beer? It tastes more like water with a little beer flavoring.“ 

So yes, I am a beer snob.  I might as well celebrate it.  So I've begun a journey to taste a lot of different beers. So far I have focused on the seemingly endless offerings from local micro-breweries found in Michigan. Mind you, I still consider myself a novice in this arena, but I figured it may be interesting to post my current favorite five brews:

5) Arbor Brewing Company's Old 22

4) Arbor Brewing Company's Red Snapper

3) Bell's Oberon

2) Bell's Hopslam

1) Bell's Double Cream Stout

So, yes I am a Bell's fanboy.  I am trying to break out of that and explore new brews.  Please, if you have any good suggestions for me, drop me a line and let me know what to try and where to get it.

Cheers.