verydodgy.com blog!

Upgrading a Philips Showline 9350i from Vista to Windows 7 RC

2009-05-04T18:22:00.002+01:00

A little while ago I wrote about upgrading my Philips media centre to Vista. Microsoft have just released Windows 7 RC and the media centre was starting to need a reboot more and more so I thought I'd try the upgrade. I've been using Windows 7 beta at work for a while and find it much faster and better to use than Vista.

To my surprise, I chucked the Windows 7 RC x86 DVD in the box, ran the upgrade and an hour later I have a fully functioning Windows 7 media center! It transferred all of my settings and recordings etc... and plays back all my movies, TV progs etc perfectly. The new media center interface looks much nicer than the Vista one.

I'll update the blog when I've used it a bit more but am very happy so far....

Why I chose Equallogic over NetApp

2009-03-09T10:27:00.006Z

I recently had to buy some more storage for our virtualized XenServer cluster at work and just wanted to comment on how I believe NetApp have shot themselves in the foot when it comes to SMBs. I don't usually post such techie stuff, but this really annoyed me.

We currently run an older entry level NetApp FAS250 box. Its a single controller model with 14x300Gb FC disks in it and I can say it is one of the most reliable things on our network, although performance isn't incredible.

So I went to upgrade and wittled the choices down to boxes with comparible pricing: the NetApp FAS2020 (12x1TB SATA disks) and Equallogic PS5000E (16x750GB disks), both with dual controllers.

Here is a big problem with NetApp I found:

You cannot create RAID groups over 8TB on the NetApp. In addition to this, on a dual controller setup you need at least two aggregates anyway.

So, on a one box filer you not only lose a massive amount of space but also, as the more spindles you have in a RAID group the higher the performance, you lose that too!

Compare the two standard setups and see the difference:

NetApp FAS2020: 1x Five Disk RAID-DP, 1x Six Disk RAID-DP, 1x hot spare ~7TB raw space (1TB disks).

Equallogic PS5000E: 1x Fourteen disk RAID 10, 2x hot spares. ~ 5.25TB raw space (750GB disks) or 1x 15 disk RAID 50, 1x hot spare. ~7.5TB raw space.

RAID 10 is probably going to be faster than RAID DP anyway, so add the extra spindles and it should be MUCH faster than the NetApp box. Does anyone from NetApp want to comment on these stupid restrictions? I'll report more when my box arrives and tell you about the performance.

Roisin Murphy - "Overpowered"

2009-02-18T11:53:00.003Z

I've recently came across this album, and I must say its great! :) I loved the later stuff Moloko did and was looking forward to hearing Roisin's solo stuff. Unfortunately, her album Ruby Blue was a slight disappointment to me, but when I read that the follow up was produced by Andy Cato (Groove Armada) and Seiji (Bugz in the Attic) I had to give it a try.

Here is the title track, a proper pulsing disco track that I love :) Download the original track and listen to it on headphones for the full effect!

Bang after bang after bang after bang!

2009-01-21T13:34:00.000Z

Roots Manuva - Witness

2008-09-30T16:23:00.001+01:00

A great song that I'd never seen the excellent video before, until today!

Roots Manuva - Witness The Fitness
by yanndirtybastard

Messiah Remix goes off!!!

2008-08-08T09:57:00.001+01:00

Crazy idiots calling 999

2008-07-31T14:57:00.001+01:00

Last circle line party!

2008-06-01T02:05:00.003+01:00

I attended the last circle line party today on the London tube. Due to the stupidly of Boris Johnson legislating for a problem that doesn't exist (I thought the idiot Conservatives didn't want a nanny state) this was the last night you could legally drink on the tube, bus or DLR. I must say that some people were taking it a little too far (smashed bottles and ripping the carrages up), the atmostphere was quite fun.

Mixtapes are back!

2008-03-27T15:18:00.002Z

Check out http://www.muxtape.com and create your own! A simple idea brilliantly executed.

Mine is at http://verydodgy.muxtape.com

BLTs in Iraq?

2008-03-17T16:06:00.001Z

Why the Amazon A-Z Guarantee is useless for sellers...

2008-02-26T10:36:00.005Z

I've sold about 50 items over the last year on amazon using their marketplace feature. All in all it has been a pretty good experience. Buyers seem to pay a pretty good rate for CDs on there.

However, I have a couple of big reservations which I is why I have decided to stop using it.

1. Their fees are very high and they even charge fees on the postage they charge the seller!

2. The Amazon A-Z Guarantee seems useless for sellers. As I've mentioned... I've sold over 50 items, but a couple of weeks ago I had a complaint. One of my buyers had not recieved their item. Now, whether he was telling the truth or not is another matter, but a 1 in 50 hit rate using royal mail isn't bad.
Therefore I got the buyer to launch a claim with the A-Z Guarantee that I thought was there to protect buyers and sellers from this. It turns out that sellers have no protection. I got an automated response telling me that I was responsible and I had to refund the money.

So, the massive fees paid to amazon to facilitate the transactions do not cover you at all for any loss by the post office, even though they barely charge buyers enough to cover 2nd class postage of the item.

What I'd like to know is why Amazon give the impression that the A-Z Guarantee is worth something to sellers when clearly its not!

Looks like this guy had the same problem: http://www.complaints.com/directory/2005/february/20/15.htm

Ray Von!

2008-02-08T15:17:00.001Z

Back to the old school!

2008-01-11T09:57:00.000Z

Hours of fun....

http://www.ravegenerator.com/

Big shout out to the Ratpack!

The Biff song!

2007-12-26T22:31:00.001Z

Merry Christmas!

2007-12-24T12:37:00.000Z

The Most Perfect Technical Glitch

2007-11-19T10:41:00.000Z

Converting a Philips Showline 9350i to Digital TV (DVB) and Vista

2007-10-29T10:45:00.000Z

I just picked up one of these great media center PC's off of ebay for £200. Unfortunately they have dual analogue tuners which are nigh on useless these days. Therefore I went to Maplin and picked up a USB dual tuner DVB TV adapter (K-world 399U I think) for £40.
I plugged it in but couldn't get XP Media center to work with it so I decided to install Vista.

Firstly I backed up the partitions using Acronis True Image Home. This was very important as the 9350i does not come with any recovery media!

I then added another 1GB of RAM to the 9350i as Vista is notoriously memory hungry. It takes standard DDR2 RAM (533Mhz or faster preferred but I used 400Mhz and it worked fine).

I installed vista and everything worked fine apart from three things:

1. No sound. The sound did not work initially. It took me ages to get it working....eventually I found that backup I took very useful as on the original C drive of the install there is a folder called Philips and in there was drivers for all the hardware. The audio driver in there was the only one I could find that worked so don't lose them!

2. Stuttering picture on live TV. I googled this and found the answer to be that Microsoft's Vista bundled MPEG2 decoder sucks. I downloaded NVidia's PureVideo decoder, rebooted and everything worked perfectly! You need to use this tool to change the default codec: link

3. Front Panel display says "Starting Up" constantly. I haven't fixed this problem yet. The drivers/program for this did not install properly on Vista. Anyone got any ideas?

Pictures to follow....

Update (Thanks to Ronald):

Vista drivers are here! : http://www.p4c.philips.com/cgi-bin/dcbint/get?url=/sca/sca/070314/070314170811_18207.zip&ofn=Vista drivers.zip

Van Halen disaster! :)

2007-10-25T15:38:00.000+01:00

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2007/10/18/onstage-tech-disasters-van-halen-goes-microtonal/

Daft Punk by hands!

2007-09-16T20:40:00.001+01:00

This is awesome, bear with it until after the song intro! :)

FIFA stamping out racism? Start with Jack Warner

2007-08-09T17:05:00.000+01:00

They should start near the top, vice president Jack Warner : "Nobody in Europe likes England. England invented the sport but has never had made any impact on world football."

For a man who is notoriously corrupt and with the region he presides over only producing Mexico as a team who are world class I wonder why he's got such an important job and can say such rubbish!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_%22Jack%22_Warner

"FIFA's auditors, Ernst & Young, estimated that his family made a profit of at least $1 million from reselling 2006 World Cup tickets that Warner had ordered."

intel Q6600 (quad core 2.4ghz) in a Dell Optiplex 745

2007-08-07T15:30:00.000+01:00

yes it does work. I searched google for this problem and couldn't find anything so bought the chip and it works! Hope this helps someone else.

Stupid people

2007-06-11T22:32:00.001+01:00

A problem with people today is stupidity. I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?

My Humps - Alanis Morissette :)

2007-04-05T15:10:00.001+01:00

The Beer Prayer

2007-04-03T13:46:00.001+01:00