a month on
Well, it’s just over a month since I last posted and the PC is still running. 
I’ve updated the motherboard BIOS once but it hasn’t improved the situation with slow Windows installation, nor with the on-board LAN chip not working properly. The chip works fine in Windows 7 which I tried out on a spare drive but it doesn’t work properly in Linux (2.6.29/2.6.30).
I’ve been using a an old 100Mbps 3COM 905 PCI card I had set aside to be used in a VIA Mini-ITX router box. That project hasn’t progressed for a while since we discovered that the issues we’d been having with our ADSL connection for years were in fact just due to a bad microfilter which we had replaced a while ago and so thought was fine.
That little machine is a VIA C3 500MHz. We’ve populated it with RAM and an SD card reader that connects to an IDE socket. I’ve ordered a new ethernet ADSL modem and D-Link Gigabit PCI card. The gigabit card is going in my desktop machine and I’ll move the 3COM back to its original home in the router box. I’m intending to run Smoothwall saving log files to a ram disk to reduce wear on the SD card.
I’ve had a few issues with the Hauppauge WinTV Nova-TD 500 PCI card. After a bit of uptime with the DVB tuners being idle, sometimes one of them would show no signal, sometimes both. I had added the options usbcore autosuspend=-1 line to my /etc/modprobe.d/options file and so thought I had this covered. I later realised, while perusing the output of lsmod, that usbcore had been compiled into the kernel and was not a module so I had to add the option usbcore.autosuspend=-1 to my kernel options in the grub menu.lst. Since then they’ve been OK.
I’ve switched to Claws Mail from Icedove because Thunderbird has always had some annoying little issues that get under my skin. When writing e-mails, if I pause mid-paragraph while thinking what I’m going to write, it sometimes inserts some new paragraph character. It did this in OS X too and I went to the Thunderbird developers to complain about it once but they had no idea to what I was referring. It’s also kind of slow. Claws is working quite well so far, though the interface is a bit clunky in places.
I’ve installed Google Chrome for amd64 Linux and OS X and I’ll be tracking its progress. Hopefully they’ll get the two essentials completed for all platforms soon – Flash plugin support and some form of ad blocking. I heard about the latter being supported via a plugin API in Windows but no noise on other platforms yet. Chrome is certainly much faster than Firefox.
Out of curiosity, as mentioned, I tried Windows 7 on my desktop PC. It really does feel like Vista done right. There are lots of tiny little tweaks to the user interface and such that make it easier to use. Hidden system tray icons can be dragged between being visible or an expandable ‘bin’ of hidden icons. Simple, but effective. Performance-wise it has come along in leaps and bounds it seems.
I tried GTA IV for the PC to see if it faired any better on the new monster. It seems that a Core i7 920 and 6GB DDR3 is not enough for GTA IV. It demands sacrifices to the gaming Gods and a monster graphics card too. In short, my 7800GT is the weak link in my machine so I won’t be playing GTA IV multiplayer with it. Oh well. I still have it on the Xbox 360 so maybe I’ll get Live! Gold for some racing fun. That reminds me, I’d like a fun driving game for the 360. Any recommendations?