Problem solutions – Page 13

Left 4 Dead 2

November 18, 2009 matt Comments 0 Comment

If I’m not at work right now, I’m playing Left 4 Dead 2. It just released on Steam for PC Tuesday night. It’s one of the first games I’ve actually pre-ordered well in advance of the game and pre-loaded from Steam’s online service. Here was my experience:

It was unexpectedly late by over an hour with no explanation – Steam prominently posted that the game would release/unlock at 9pm PST on Tuesday. I loaded up Steam on my PC at 9pm, but it showed as still not released yet. I went to the forums, but the Steam Forum website was so overloaded that no amount of cajoling would get the page to come up – it just timed out continually. The main purchase page said it was still set for 9pm release, but there was absolutely no status, news, or updates on why it wasn’t working. I went to other gamer forums where people were beginning to rage. It was midnight on the east coast, and folks had been staying up late to try it out. I watched an episode of Mythbusters and a Twilight Zone while the online rage continued – and utter, complete silence from Valve as to what was going on.
Unlocking/decompressing it went awry – Around 10pm, the Steam forum started to come back enough to read what problems people were experiencing. First off, restart the Steam service (which took several tries while the login attempts timed out) – then my machine recognized that the game was released. I clicked on the app to trigger decryption, and after a little while with the dialog up indicting it was trying to verify something – the box went away and it did nothing. No error message, also no playable, decrypted game. I rush over to the forums which are already lighting up with folks having all kinds of problems. I dug through the problem descriptions until I found a likely solution and had to follow these steps to get the thing to start decrypting:

# Exit Steam
# Open a ‘Command Prompt’ (cmd.exe if you are using ‘Run…’ from the start menu)
# Run: “c:Program FilesSteambinSteamService.exe” /repair
# Note: Change “c:Program Files” to wherever you have steam installed. For a 64 bit OS the default would be: “c:Program Files (x86)SteambinSteamService.exe” /repair-
# Start Steam

This worked, but I STILL need to do this every time I restart Steam or the game won’t load…
Random crashes to desktop: After decryption (about 20-30 minutes total – now making my 9pm release time about 10:40pm), I finally got the game to play after a few more clicks on the game with silent failures while it’s trying to ‘sync’ with something, then it fires up. Glorious! I hop into a game and start having a blast (literally and metaphorically). I play for about 2 hours, then right in the middle of the finale of Dark Carnival – it crashes me right to the desktop. No warning, no error, etc. Wham. I restart and after about another hour, it does it again. Then one final time and I go to bed. Already folks are seeing all kinds of problems, and this was one of them. Next day, I have Steam verify the downloaded game cache – and it has 2 corrupt files that it re-downloads. Shesh – had been playing it for hours and it didn’t check that? But it still keeps randomly crashing to the desktop – and someone on the forum suggests this solution:

1.Click on Start
2.Click on My Computer
3.Click on Your C: Drive
4.Find & Open Windows Folder
5.Find the CSC folder/right click then properties/Security
6.You will need to get or give your user account admin rights to the folder once you do that make sure you give all rights to that user.
7.Click apply & click ok
8.Close down Steam and Restart it
9.If Done Correctly Your Left 4 dead 2 game will work with no problems.
10.Enjoy The Game
11.If your still having problems make sure you look over the steps in this list and make sure you did everything right
It works – but still utter silence from Steam/Valve – All this finally appears to fix my problems – but there’s lots of others still having problems (such as the dread error 35, error 2, and others still around from the demo release) that prevent them from playing the game. Valve has still said absolutely nothing on the forums about anything going wrong. It’s just users helping each other. Overall, I’m seriously re-evaluating ever buying something pre-load from Steam again. For the first time in a long time, I really felt utterly helpless after getting a new game and wondered how many days it might be before the game I bought a MONTH ago might work.

Still, Left 4 Dead 2 is an amazing game – and it’s fantastic fun. Steam has now left a horrible taste in my mouth – but it’s done that before. Still, I’ll certainly be spending most of my nights playing this for the forseeable future!

Error: File ‘is too large for the destination file system’ – but there is tons of room!

November 14, 2008 matt Comments 25 comments

Fun fun. I was trying to copy 6gb iso file to my 8gb flash drive (where 7gb was free) and I kept getting an error message that the file ‘is too large for the destination file system’. I didn’t have time to fiddle with it – so I left it. Yesterday during a backup, I got the same message again trying to back up my Windows Media Center recorded tv shows. The 1tb drive was empty, yet I kept getting errors about not having enough disk space. Ok, what’s going on?

USB drives and external HD’s are often formatted with FAT32. You cannot copy a file larger than 4gb to a FAT32 system. Unfortunately, Vista gives you the cryptic file is too large for the destination file system error instead of telling you the real reason is that FAT32 cannot handle files that big and what to do to fix it.

So, how to get around it? You need to convert the file system to NTFS (or other file system that can handle files that big). You can obviously reformat the drive, but that’s a pain if you have data on the drive already. You can, however, do a one-way convert to NTFS without data loss on the drive by using the command:

convert X: /fs:ntfs /nosecurity

Where X: is the drive letter you want to convert. As long as you have about 10-15% of the volume empty, and you don’t have any files on that drive open, the file system conversion will happen and all your files will be there as before. It’s a fairly quick process – about a minute or two on my external 1tb drive (drive was almost empty). So, a very poor Vista error that doesn’t tell you how to fix it, but a very smart tool that does what you need.

An interesting puzzle: eyAnOicgPT4gJycsICcgJyA9PiAnLScsICdzXG4nID0+ICdzLmNvbVxuJyB9 (3548, 4648)

December 23, 2007 admin Comments 0 Comment

This mysterious email popped up on craigslist in the jobs section – spawing an interesting online contest that sucked up most of yesterday.

http://www.networkmirror.com/hUmsXHsC3yihic9B/denver.craigslist.org/sof/514727825.html

I was very skeptical that it was more viral marketing for Cloverfield (http://www.1-18-08.com/) Which I was not at all interested in promoting. But the puzzles got interesting, then more interesting, then more. I got interested in the coding parts, and a small community popped up to answer the questions.

The solutions broke down like this.

1. The original text was simply Base16/32/64 Data Encoding, which gave you some instructions:
{ ‘:’ => ”, ‘ ‘ => ‘-‘, ‘sn’ => ‘s.comn’ }

on how to decode the message title – which gave you a web address to go to: wanted-master-software-developers.com

2. You then had to code up a function that satisfied the sequence of test sections. It turned out to be a logic diagram that had ‘falling’ true/false parts of the matrix that acted like tetris pieces with an extra ‘sticky’ rule. There were a variety of ways to solve this coding function – brute force, or mimic the logic of the falling true/false sections. Here was a short answer:

f = function(d) {
for (var i = d.length – 1; i > 0; i–)
{
for (var j = 0; j < d[i].length; j++)
{
if (d[i-1][j] == true && d[i][j] == false && d[i-1][j+1] != true
&& d[i-1][j-1] != true && (d[i][j-1] != true || d[i][j+1] != true)) {
d[i-1][j] = false;
d[i][j] = true;
}
}
}
}

peopled tried cheating by doing:
f = function(d) { TDD.assertEquals = function(a,b) { return true; } }

But when you got through all the tests successfully, the function spits out a weird list of words. These words are from the wikipedia article on Henry Ford (gained from the other clues embedded in the html). People wrote down the indexes of those words, then wrote the indexes in the form of which were the deltas of the distances in between the words which lead to the sequence:

0,1,1,2,1,1,2,1,1,2,1,1,2,2,2,1,1,2,1,1,2,4,2,3,3,1,1,-2,0,1,1,-2,0,1,1,-5,0,0,0,-1,2,-4,-2,1,-1,2,0,-2,1,-5,0,1,1,-4,-2,0,1,1,-4,-2,0,1,1,-2,0,-2,-2,0,1,1,0,-2,1,-5,0,0,0,-4,0,0,0,-2,-2,0,1,1,-6,0,1,1

When these are fed back into the correct F function (which you figured out above), the algorithms true/false matrix is converted to blue blocks that spells out “coLLAborATE” in the 2D grid below, which you add to the ?key= http at the top:
http://www.wanted-master-software-developers.com/?key=coLLAborATE

Which gives a cryptic box with text and a strange pixely border around it.

3. Problem 2/3:

When viewing the HTML, the id tags on each section were strange. When pulled out in order, they gave this sequence:
IMCB OMC JHKC PHL ODLTP ACC DCOLDB OH IMCBJC VTT AOVDOCK BHI SHAOXBQ
PHL CZLVTA EC ODVBASHDOA OH DCVTEA LBJMVDOCK

Which was a simple substitution cypher:
WHEN THE CODE YOU TRULY SEE RETURN TO WHENCE ALL STARTED NOW POSTING YOU EQUALS ME
TRANSPORTS TO REALMS UNCHARTED

So go back to problem 1/3, and enter the http address:

wanted-master-software-developers.com
and change it to:

wanted-master-software-developers.com/?you=me

Which leads you to page 3/3

Problem 3/3

People started noticing that the text in 2/3 hadn’t been solved – and that the image around 2/3 was unique and not around the 3/3 question. People noticed the name strawberry-rhubarb.css was strange too – along with the font name called Boulder-18. There was also some patterns in the bit layout of the weird border image. After looking around at the image a bunch, they counted the number of grey pixels between black pixels and got: 3 1 4 1 5 9 2 6 5 = pi. From the first red pixel to second red pixel is the pi encoding. From the 2nd to 3rd red pixel, the number before the green pixel is the index into pi, and the number after the G is the 6 digits of pi at that location (to verify you’re not insane). After the 3rd R is many more indexes in this form. So, someone downloaded the first million digits of pi and wrote a program to do the work for us. You get a big list of indexes into pi, and the values they point to. Every one of those indexes is a 6-digit value – and was unique in they all either started with a 0 or 1. This got people thinking and if you take those indexes and interpret them as ascii, each 6-digit index is a pair of ascii characters:

So the first few indexes extracted from the image give:
111112 = 111 112 = o p
032099 = 032 099 = ‘space’ c
111100 = 111 100 = o d
101115 = 101 115 = e s

equals: “op codes” – wow! Keep going and get:

op codes: e: push integer value of next ascii char (list 1). u: pop
value and output as ascii char. l: pop value, push ceil (value/2). a:
pop two values, push sum. i: pop two values, push 1st popped – 2nd
popped. n: pop value, push value + 1. t: pop value, push value – 1. r:
pop value, push value * 2. other: discard. list 1: -, A, B, I, N, R.
eAeNlaueNe-nlaueAe-ttaueAe-ttaueBe-au = hello

This ‘algorithm’ makes sense when looking at the garbled text on 2/3 and 3/3. I followed the algorithm on the text by hand, but after 2 minutes, I realized that writing up the solver in java would be faster. I wrote up the stack machine/rules in Java and I ran the text on 2/3 through it and got:
cerebrum, vere-tempus, together (adv).

The text on 3/3 gives:
Explain the significance of the date:
(with 1-18-2007). The button’s text is: Go.

So, you put the answer on 3/3, but the question is 2/3. But what did it mean?

So, folks brainstormed to get cerebrum=brain, vere-tempus = real-time, and together = simul/una = as one. After scads of folks googling all kinds of combinations, one guy hit on: “+brain, +real-time +una” comes up with a link to http://www.n-brain.net/faq.html

Which is a collaborate project called UNA being released mid-January – and is in Boulder, CO (which the text encoding was Boulder-18 non-sense font)

So, the significance of 1-18-2007 is that it’s the release date for their UNA project by n-brain. More fiddling around with combinations (spaces/not/etc). People looked at the code for the button and tried them encoded as well as not and hit upon the phrase:

UNAreleasedate

Re-encoded using their method to get (can be re-encoded in many different ways if you’d like):

eRnnnueNueAueRleIaue-leNaueRleBanue-leNaue-leIanueBleRaue-leNaueBleBanue-leIanueBleRanue-leNau

Enter that in the text box on 3/3 page and that gives you the solution and a link to the congratulations page – indicating I was solver #88. I entered the form, but declined the job interest (I’m happy where I am right now). But come mid-January I should have a copy of some free software!

My holiday gift to you – sanity.

December 13, 2007 admin Comments 0 Comment

Here is a collection of things to make your life easier. I have used all the indicated ones and they are officially sanctioned by various government or credit agencies (i.e. not scams like most of them) and do work – I’ve used all but one.

Stop all mailed credit card offers:
This one was a godsend. I would get 3-5 credit card offers a WEEK. Each one is a time bomb because it only takes one being picked up and filled out by a stranger to enter the wonderful world of identity theft. If you fill out the online version, you get no offers for 5 years. The service is free and seems to be run by a partnership of credit card companies. Fill out the paper one, mail it in, and they stop forever. I filled it out a year ago and they’ve all stopped. There is a stipulation for offers you request or folks you have recently done business with, but my rate has dropped to 0-2 a month.
https://www.optoutprescreen.com

National Do Not Call registry:
Kills all those telemarketers up front. This is one the government runs and keeps annoying calls from happening during dinner. Yes, this does work – I’ve had it for over a year. If you do happen to get a call (I have not) – find out who it is calling and file a complaint for a multi-thousand dollar per-violation fine to be slapped on them.
https://www.donotcall.gov/

The nuclear approach – freeze it all:
As of October 1, 2007, all Oregonians will be able to place a security freeze on their credit file maintained by a credit reporting agency such as Equifax, Experian or TransUnion. Once activated, anyone who has fraudulently obtained your personal identifying information would not be able to open new accounts or borrow money – in fact – nobody can open anything (including you) unless the freeze is lifted. The freeze also prevents lenders and others from gaining access to your credit report for review. Which means companies cannot even look at your credit to profile or screen you.

This is stronger than a credit alert. Credit alerts are what people usually put on their credit reports if they are victims of identity theft. But credit alerts still allow companies to open lines if they have done ‘due diligence’ to make sure it’s really you. The steps most companies use are up to them. And most are just a simple phone call to the number on the application – which is nearly useless if the application is fraudulent. A freeze prevents ANY activity unless you file to unfreeze – a process that requires $10 and a mailed in form.

I know of one guy doing this now, and he says it seems to work great. I’m still looking for information about whether this leaves any blemish/ding on your credit rating, but so far it looks ok in my initial reads.
http://www.dfcs.oregon.gov/identity_theft/security_freeze.html

libPNG/zLib compile error fix

October 30, 2007 admin Comments 0 Comment

Annoying little gotchas whos solutions are hard to find. Here’s one I’m making a note of on my site so I don’t have to look it up later:

Compiling libPNG requires compiling zLib as well. On Microsoft Visual Studio, you’ll get errors about invalid instruction operands:
inffas32.asm(647) : error A2070: invalid instruction operands
inffas32.asm(649) : error A2070: invalid instruction operands
inffas32.asm(663) : error A2070: invalid instruction operands
inffas32.asm(720) : error A2070: invalid instruction operands

All due to the same assembly language problem. Fix them using the dword ptr command to clear up the reference:
– movd mm7,[esi]
+ movd mm7,dword ptr[esi]

Link

Intel 965 chipset + Vista + 4 gigs ram – saga resolved!

July 3, 2007 admin Comments 0 Comment

I call the Intel motherboard support guys, and they were very good – probably some of the most knowledgeable front-line phone crews I’ve ever run into (and I’m not saying that just because I work there). I’ve only had to call them about 3 times, but every time they are right on the money and know exactly what obscure feature of the SATA raid controller I was trying to use, strange chipset interaction, etc and have some clever way to do what I was trying to do by pointing me to an article/whitepaper.

First they tell me to try a Microsoft patch: KB929777 (for those who want to know/try it). This is a manual patch, so I go and download it (did you know you must download the patch from the machine you’re trying to patch? The Windows Genuine verifier tool actually re-directs the website to the matching OS download (and not show you the other versions) based on the WGA response code. I did it from my XP laptop and got the 32-bit version which wouldn’t install on my Vista box. So I download it from my Vista box and you get the 64-bit version. I personally think this is colossally stupid because what if you need a patch for a machine that can’t use the internet/boot properly/etc – sigh) but no luck.

Another call to Intel’s support and we back and forth the info, and he nails it right off. He asks what bios version I’m using (ver. 1687) and says, Ahh, well, the 965 chipsets have a known problem we just discovered with these last two bios revisions. Turns out there is a bug in the bios (as I predicted) that shows itself if you have 4 gigs/4 sticks of ram in at the same time. You must go back to bios ver 1669 before they introduced the problem. Well, upgrading a bios is easy as pie, but rolling back a bios requires a multistage process of setting a recovery jumper, burning a cd, etc (go to support.intel.com and look up article 023360 for the process) then go download an old version of the bios 1669 by going to your board’s update page, scrolling down to the bottom and select “This product has Previously Released software” then download version 1669. Flash your machine, and voila! Super-fast machine. But not only that, I did a test. It took ~1:45 sec to boot with 3 gigs using bios 1687; but with bios 1669, the same 3 gig setup takes ~0:45 sec. That sounds like more than one problem, but anyway…

So, there’s your answer. Go to bios 1669 and wait for a bios update after 1687 that specifically mentions a fix for this 4-stick/gig problem.

Intel 965 with Vista and 4gigs of ram

July 2, 2007 admin Comments 0 Comment

Well, well. I installed a very beta Vista application I used to use, and low and behold – it goofed up my system something fierce. Unfortunately, uninstalling left buckets of configuration problems that I could fiddle with for hours, or in the same time just backup and re-install. I chose option 2. But something strange happened. When I tried to run the install DVD again, it took 5-10 minutes between each dialog box – mouse was slow, screen repaints were painfully visible, etc. Everything was going at a horrible snails pace. What happened?! I did my last install in like 20 minutes.

I methodically unplug all my devices until I get back down to the bare system board (no effect), then on a whim I take 2 gigs out – since I’d recently upgraded from 2 to 4 gigs of ram. Maybe those were bad sticks of memory. Voila – super-fast again. Huh? I try different combinations of the sticks, and the same result. It’s not bad ram, it’s the fact there is 4gigs total ram. I start looking on forums and sure enough, other people are having similar problems. Seems there are various motherboards that are having this problem when they upgrade from 2 to 4gigs, or in some cases, 4 to 8gigs. Extremely slow system responses, etc but pull the memory out and it works like a champ. I downloaded the latest bios and flashed it, but it didn’t fix the problem. Guess I’ll have to wait or order another motherboard. This isn’t a huge problem as 2 gigs has been more than adequate for everything I’ve been doing so far; but now I have 2 extra gigs of really nice DDR2 800mhz ram sitting around waiting for a bios patch. Bogus. For the record it’s a DG965OTMKR motherboard (which I really love b/c of it’s built in SATA raid, etc)

Notebook graphics card benchmarks

March 20, 2007 admin Comments 0 Comment

So, I’m in the market for a nice low-end laptop but there are about a hundred different kinds of graphics cards in those laptops. Even from the same vendor there are very cryptic model, performance, and feature specifications.

Question is: Which ones are actually good? It’s useful to know specs, but that doesn’t actually tell you how fast are they really (i.e benchmarks). Turns out, there is a great website that collected all this info in an easy to compare table. This has been needed for a long time:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html

Vista review – Day 2 – The Bad

January 15, 2007 admin Comments 0 Comment

Continuing from last time, here’s part 2 – The Bad – of 3 on the Vista review. Tomorrow is Part 3: The Ugly. However, I did forget one extra ‘The Good’ about Vista from last time:
System Restore Points and Automated recovery
Most of the time I’m never impressed by these tools. They only partially work on most systems and often only succeed in taking up lots of disk space, slowing down the system, and delivering random results. Going back to a restore point is often just as big a gamble of it working as is just uninstalling stuff back to that point by hand. But Vista’s restore point system works. Yes, it has in fact saved me from re-installing the OS twice now. It makes transparent restore points after every software install, and restores system files. I installed a beta graphics driver that just went all wrong for some reason. The system wouldn’t even boot up anymore (well, booted up to a black screen and I couldn’t see anything). I tried the uninstaller in safe mode at which time I found that beta drivers uninstall features are often more buggy than the driver itself. I booted from the Vista install CD and it started an automatic error detection. It detected the error as a faulty video driver and backed up to the previous restore point made automatically before the driver was installed. Took about 30-45 minutes total – but it worked flawlessly and the system was solid as a rock afterwards. I wasn’t able to get all the burrowed tidbits of the faulty driver out in safe mode which meant I normally I would have had to re-install the OS. But the automated recovery worked, and worked really well. The only sad part is that you need this feature at all. If things actually worked properly – this would be unnecessary. But this is a great feature that’s already paid for itself twice for me. OK, now for today’s review installation:

Day 2: Il Brutto (the Bad)

Driver support and Protected Content Playback
Ah, the most important topic for those of you who just got new hardware for Christmas. You’re not going to like what I have to say now that you have that new $100 sound card or possibly that new flat panel display. Driver support is WOEFUL behind – less than one month from ship and there isn’t more than one or two major vendors who have anything but beta drivers available. And nobody has full video card drivers ready. These aren’t strange, out of the ordinary hardware manufacturers either. This is ATI, nVidia, Creative Labs, Intel, etc. Vista comes with a good collection of drivers built in but most of them only control the most basic features of your hardware. To get the full functionality of your $100 sound card’s features, you need the vendor’s drivers; and those vendors, at best, have only partially functioning beta drivers out. Most of there drivers are pretty good and totally usable to get the basic hardware functionality (you get video, you get sound), but if you have anything made by any non-leading 3rd party hardware maker or want all your bells and whistles, I’m going to bet money you’re in deep trouble for now.

My advice: don’t buy any new hardware until after Vista comes out. I only invested in a few hard drives to set up a raid, a new processor, motherboard, and memory with my Intel employee discount. But don’t buy a new video card, flat-panel, sound-card or other media device until well after Vista comes out and the driver picture becomes clear. Why? It is just not worth it to commodity parts makers to go back to spend a lot of money on software development to make Vista drivers for their old hardware that they sold for a $2 margin in the first place. Creative Labs has already stated they aren’t going to back-port many old sound card drivers. If you have commodity 3rd party hardware it is extremely doubtful you will find Vista drivers for your hardware. The business model will probably be to just sell them new card with the new drivers. How this pans out has yet to be seen, but that will be my bet based on the fact very few companies even have the word Vista mentioned on their main pages, let alone on their driver download pages.

The other serious problem is protected content playback. These are new paths that both graphics and sound hardware along with their software stacks and drivers must support. If the hardware was designed without protected playback capabilities, you’re probably going to have to buy new hardware or go without features. Microsoft seems to be favoring functionality over strict adherence more and more as we get closer to ship (thankfully), but many companies are just about flat-out saying that they will not go back and make Vista drivers for their old hardware – often for hardware selling right now. So don’t get all excited about all those hardware price drops you see advertised – they might be coming with planned insolence. They seem to think it’s better to dump them now for a big discount than get $0 for them in a month.

For some hardware, backwards compatibility isn’t so difficult a hurdle. Many XP drivers install just fine on Vista. Drivers also have a compatibility mode just like programs, so a lot of old drivers will work. I have a cheap Airlink network card that the XP drivers worked just fine (almost better in fact) on Vista. But for video and sound, your life is going to get very difficult. Just expect to have to buy new hardware if you want all the bells and whistles back. Go to most Vista forums and just look at all the fighting people are doing to just get sound cards working in stereo, let alone surround sound. The only companies that I can find that has 5.1 surround sound working on Vista is some Creative sound cards via their beta drivers and some of Intel’s motherboards made in the last 6-8 months. Both, however, indicate digital out won’t be supported anytime soon. Alas, you can also forget about EAX, sound expansion, balancing independent speakers, or any other nicer features. Nobody has anything even close to working.

I had to go out and pick up a $29 Creative Audigy 24 card just to get any sound out of my system. I did find it’s 5.1 surround sound support is very nice for movies and works in Half-life 2 (I do like Vista’s new surround speaker control/testing control panel unit). The beta driver for the Intel motherboard audio card initially spit out crackly, screechy noises that coincide with when music or system sounds. They just a week or so ago released new drivers that do give 5.1, but it’s still very beta feeling with no independent speaker controls or sound expansion/digital out support. Vista’s built-in driver for that card only gives you stereo out. The card is some strange re-brand by some company in Korea and I found myself comparing chipset numbers on their overseas website to the numbers on the motherboard chip to figure out what was onboard. Then I ran driver installs in compatibility mode after downloading the latest XP drivers from Korean ftp servers with the hope they might work. Who the heck wants that hassle (especially since it didn’t work anyway)? On the bright side, Intel’s website seems to have new Vista drivers for it’s motherboard components coming out every week and everything but my integrated sound has a Vista driver. Long story short: Video and Sound are going to be very problematic on Vista for the near term and you absolutely should wait before buying new hardware for those components.
As for video, another sore point is that I can’t use the HDMI plugs on my ATI x1900GT video card – too bad my video card only has HDMI outputs. I plug into a really nice older Trinitron 22″ CRT (it has VGA inputs only) via a HDMI to VGA cable. Near as I can tell, the HDMI plug tells the driver to signal the monitor to return protected playback support, and obviously doesn’t get it from this pre-HDMI monitor. The result? After the Vista loader bar appears during bootup – you get a blank screen. The OS runs fine and you can reboot by remember the right key combinations; but no video. Instead, I have to use the 5 cent HDMI to SVGA plug adapter so it doesn’t try to key off the protected content signal line and the first boot or two after installing the video driver I need to turn the monitor off while it booted. Why? I’m guessing that since my monitor doesn’t support digital protected playback signaling, I need the video card to switch to ‘analog output’ mode. In order to switch to analog mode it needs the monitor off so it isn’t signaling the card it’s got HDMI plugged in (since I don’t have a separate VGA out). So, I can use the 5 cent adapter and turn off my monitor on the first few boots until it remembers to boot in analog mode or buy a new monitor.

I don’t blame Microsoft per-se. DRM got pushed on them too; but this just sucks. I feel very bad for anyone getting a cheap flat-panel with only HDMI inputs this Christmas – I’m guessing they are flipping a coin if you’re going to have to get a different flatpanel since a lot of cheap panels probably don’t signal protected playback correctly or Vista doesn’t have a protected playback feed for it. In analog mode, I can play back my DVD’s just fine – but when HD-DVD playback comes, it might get interesting (yet again).

All my networking devices ran with their XP drivers flawlessly. The Intel RAID controller software/drivers for Vista are *very* good. The SATA driver informed me of non-data corrupting SMART errors being generated by one of the SATA drives in my RAID. I didn’t notice any wired behavior at all. It told me which drive (serial number) was throwing the errors and it’s severity. SMART reporting is a newer feature of SATA drives. I pulled the drive to find it twice as hot as the other drives, sent it in for repair (thank you 5 year Seagate warranty). When the replacement arrived, I plugged it in. After I added the drive back to the logical raid set, the easy to use volume manager automatically started rebuilding the volume redundancy (I am running RAID 5). Meanwhile – the system was completely usable! I was watching a movie at the same time, and 2 and a half hours later it was done without a single hiccup, reboot, or visible performance degradation. Wow. Flawless operation. I give super-high marks for Intel’s raid controllers and the drivers that come with them – and that’s not just because I work for them.

Device software – get ready to buy new versions
Wonder why right now you can actually pick up McAfee, most virus scanners, and Zonelabs excellent firewalls for free after rebates right now? Because they are dumping them. Unfortunately all the firewalls, and (outside of AVG) all virus scanners don’t even INSTALL on Vista. Personally, I hate the performance hits and instability of integrated virus scanners, but they are a necessary evil. For laptops where you don’t want to drag around a hardware firewall, Zonelabs makes a great software firewall which works great in free wi-fi computing environments like coffee houses.

Most likely you’ve read the fights and threatened lawsuits McAfee is having with Microsoft. Personally, I don’t buy McAfee’s argument they have any ‘right’ to source and integration with Microsoft’s kernel. I’m sorry, but you don’t and you’re starting to sound like the kid on the playground demanding ‘a right’ to be picked first for the team when he isn’t better than anyone else. Anybody remember when virus scanners were just that – scanning programs you ran when you wanted? Now they try to be the operating system and (as Jessie Ventura would say) burrow in like an Alabama tick. I’ve personally had to reinstall the OS on a number of my friends’ machines because Norton AVG or the like has completely foo-bared a machine to where even safe mode won’t work. But I also do not buy Microsoft’s argument that their scanner and firewall is any more effective than a screen door. In the spirit of that analogy, it might be good at keeping flies out – but is useless against things as subtle as a sand or a less subtle brick. For now, only AVG works but it does work well.

Also chocked up on your upgrade list will be Nero. You need at least Nero 7 for Vista. Nero 6 does not work. Slysoft’s suite (AnyDVD, CloneDVD, etc) seem to work great as well. But in the end, add another $25-100 for the upgrades to Nero and a virus scanner to the price of updating to Vista. Peergaurdian and other lower-level device helper apps don’t seem to work either.

While I’m at it, here is a quick/top of my head list of which programs work/don’t work under vista:
Works:
MS Office 2005 suite, Firefox, WinAmp, Winzip, WinRAR, Realplayer, Rhapsody, iTunes, Quicktime, VLC player, WinDVD 7, Python SDK, MSDev Studio 2005, Java VM, foxIT (PDF reader), FileZilla, Media Player Classic + k-lite codec pack, Google Earth, Tera Term, Quake 3, Steam/Half-life 2/Counter-Strike Source (online is perfect), Password Depot, Photoshop 5.0 and CS2, (lots more, will add later)

Partially works:
Shockwave/Flash – don’t work in Firefox, do work in IE

Doesn’t work (even in compatibility mode)
Nero 6
Quake 4
PeerGaurdian
ZoneAlarm (lots of errors/instability during reboots + doesn’t work)
McAfee (won’t boot after install)
Kaperski antivirus

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