First of all, the drive is Super, Just like all my other hard drives, All other 3.5′ hard drives i have are either WD, Segate, Or deskstar, i have never owned a samsung, but i assure you, all reaining hard drive manufacturers are surely the good ones, i remember back in the day when a MAXTOR drive would eventually get you into unexpected trouble (Never liked maxtor, they were problematic)

Now, my favorite is Western Digital, i am a loyal customer, and they are loyal manufacturers.

So, what’s the deal on this black edition ?

In short, unlike what you expected the real boost comes from the Dual Processors that can do the math faster to enable that lovely 145MB/s (1160 Mb/s). the 32MB cache is nice, but the processor is the real deal, along with the 3 internal disks and the 6 internal heads.

The reviews of the drive on the internet say it is an average drive, i assure you it is not, it is a very nice drive up to now, even windows vista admits it, but i will need to get some numbers ready for you.

I already have a bunch of other 1TB hard disks, and so i will be comparing to those here, i will also collect as much data as possible to find out if this drive is really worth the extra $30 you pay over a standard seagate drive that is also 1TB !

My first impression is that it is, my Home made random access tests did not show any advantages for the drive (4 seconds disadvantage in the 10 min imprecise test), but don’t count on that, i wrote this software in 2 hours flat and so it is not The best test to compare drives…

I doubt there is 64 NCQ in the drive, but i will see once i move this drive to another computer that can detect this stuff (Intel’s tools).

For now, i will go on with my testing, but i assure you, the drive looks like it is the best drive i have owned to date in the 7200RPM category. Stay tuned.

What about the green edition WD10EACS ?

Never owned one, But i did not go for it for the following reasons

Ok, so you do understand it is a 16MB cache, comes at a very close price, with a promise to save you up to $14 a year in electricity costs, and therefore save the planet.

1- Power Saving: $14 is an exaggerated number when i did the math with the numbers on the website, You can only save half of this in a laboratory and it will take an expert from western digital to assist you if you want to save that amount of money/Power, as for the environment, you produce much more carbon dioxide in a 2 second run of your cars engine compared to what this drive can save and still be usable, Don’t get me wrong, i am obsessed with saving planet earth, but i can really do better saving energy from my toaster and TV than from a poor hard drive with 2 small motors and a low power consumption processor (The hard drive’s processor).

2- The whole concept somes at a price (Low to be trutheful) in terms of responsivness, the drive has variable speed disks, and heads need to dock at certain speeds so that they do not fall onto the disk (IntelliPark)! the wind generated by the disks is what keeps the heads floating.

It all sounds nicer on paper, the truth of the matter is, not much is the difference, the Black edition does have all the power saving features that Green has as long as they don’t compromise performance..

And if you really really want to save energy, ask Windows/Linux to do the saving… with a 5 Year warantee, i assure you they took into account the start stop cycles of your drive and you can have the computer switch it off as often as it takes to save mother earth.

Damn, i sound like an OIL PIG, i am not, i value nature and our future, it is just that i don’t want to lose my Objectivity and get obsessed.

The DVD for the 64 bit came out with the MD5SUM 05b2ebeed273ec54d6f9ed3d61ea4c96, before calculating the sum i did check that the SHA1 is correct (For those of you who just want to throw in an md5sum Fedora-x86_64-DVD.iso and get a number.

Anyway, i downloaded it since everyone is saying the reasons i left fedora for are no longer true, and hardy (Ubuntu 8.04) has bugs i never could imagine might come out in an milestone release that has LTS).

Somewhere on the fedora website, they said they are doing XEN kernel differently to keep it in synch with the linux kernel (Since the xen kernel lags behind allot)

Anyway, i will finish my review for this as soon as i try it out.

I have LOOKED EVERYWHERE but no use, if i boot the patched xen kertnel, i don’t get the lovely GNOME login screen.

So, i was looking at my extreemly untidy desk, under the piles of paper i noticed a VGA card (NVIDIA 7300LE), then i remembered that i took this out because Ubuntu generic would not boot with this claiming 7676 stolen memory or something similar, i even remember fedora beta not booting with this same error message, Anyway i had a baseless idea (At least it was not my smarts that got me to the idea, i don’t know why i did it), i put the Nvidia VGA card back on the DQ965GF mobo, booted what i had already set as default kernel and got the No-Go stated above, then rebooted to the XEN kernel, and surprise, it is working again…

I thought people reported success with the DQ965GF motherboard… maybe the had PCI-e VGA cards that ran bothe XEN kernel and Generic Kernel !

Anyway, i will report this probably, when i get the time later today.

The computer runs an INTEL Quad Core that supports virtualization.

Happy XENNING….

It took me ages to get the firmware, and ages more to learn how to install it.

1- Get this CD ISO file, burn it in closed session and finalized disk.

2- Unattach all drives but the reader… if you are sure the writers are properly attached, Just put the CD in the reader

3- Press Mode for 4-5 seconds, then click MODE a few more times to get to update

4- Click GO until it tells you to restart

Now i have a WD800BB HDD i want to have there, i connected it to the second spot on the IDE cable connected to the reader (The one comming from the back of the unit), Now to where do the 7 writers go ?

Anyway, i found out that the bug has been addressed here

Anyway, I will probably post a video of this thing here soon.

I have been waiting for this one (For virtualization), so i went and downloaded it with the masses.

The download was very slow, 50-80 KB/s, but sometimes it can drop quite a bit more than that
So, i finished the download, checked the MD5, compressed it, and broke it into 80MB files (You need the free 7zip for windows or linux), the compression didn’t do wonders (since the files inside the ISO are already somewhat compressed), it only made the total size 3’844’044’174 instead of 3’912’095’774 bytes, that is it saved only 68’051’600 bytes !

The compression came out with 46 files, each 83’886’080 and 1 file with the size 69’170’574

an About 68 MBs smaller file is not bad, and rapidshare has plenty bandwidth so i posted the somewhat faster downloads on rapidshare

The URLs of the files are on this page.

once you download and extract the files ubuntu-8.04-dvd-amd64.iso will come out, burn that and you are good to go !

If i have time soon, i will put the file in other places as well for you to download

The page with the download links for the 64 bit version (AMD64) along with the MD5 Sums is here, enjoy

This time, i will remember, it’s on my blog !

So, problem solved.

Here are the pictures you are looking for, beware, every pic is 4.5MB

Works with PowerCinema 5 = ??? Y/N

Driver for Windows Vista = http://btwincap.sourceforge.net/

The model = Smart TV Sterio

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See picture

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Conexant Fusion 878A 25878-13 E298778.1 0248 TAIWAN

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TP18PSB12P 212H2403

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So, setup complete, i installed Windows Vista, Installed the application (NIS 2008), the addon pack, did many restarts after that for device drivers etc.. and finally, went on to setup parental control accounts.

Setup complete and all is OK, her windows user account is set and parental controls active.
So, i logged in using her account to make sure it is functional, Nice… works as advertised up to now, then control panel, User accounts, Manage another accounts and i went ahead and setup a new account on the computer.

Now back into the NIS control thingie, and damn, the user is added with no control.

To tell you the truth, you just can’t miss this while designing such a system, I am a programmer and software engineer, i know how it works, and in your design phase, you will find such a flaw 99% of the time.

Is symantec using an ad hoc approach (No design phase), even if they were, you do have a good chance of catching this while implementing? what kind of a software giant is this, the guys suck bad, a 12 year old can break there system without even meaning to !

So, i would like to hear your opinions on what other alternatives i have, i already paid for a multi-PC license (Including my own) which i regret, but surely i want to change this package since it is undoubtedly inferior in design… i don’t care if they fix this, other things will come out no doubt (One silly bug like this, i assure you they will have ones much worse that i have not identified)

NOTE: If only i had the time, i would be developing a community maintained, open source, GPL software, i think protecting our children from Guns, Violence, Extremism, Profanity, Drugs, Pornography, hatred, etc.. should be free, if your teen neighbor gets all obsessed about guns, you will pay, so simply put, it is not just your children that you want protected.

I recently noticed that when i download SOME youtube videos or other FLV files from other websites, WINDOWS EXPLORER crash, Hangs, Restarts, Halts, Whatever you want to call it.

When i expand the Windows Message, explorer tells me that (In a different language) FLVSplitter.ax is not playing nice, it keeps telling me things i don’t understand !

Is it an XP thing that don’t work in vista ? if it is, please drop a comment for i have not investigated enough..

UPDATE: You can download the new K-Lite codec pack and your problems should go away, no more reading necessary

For now, you are probably looking for a solution, one way of going about this is to unregister this FLVSplitter from explorer, you will no longer get thumbnails for FLV files but you should be able to find a different tool to read those FLV frames..

So, to unregister, start by holding down Winlogo (On your keyboard)+R, type “cmd” and a blank black screen appears with a prompt, regsvr32 FLVSplitter.ax and you are done

A different way (Recommended), is to update the file , Download this then replace the file in the folder C:\Program Files\K-Lite Codec Pack\Filters, Or if you are using a different software, anywhere you can find the file, maybe C:\Program Files\ffdshow

Happy Video Viewing