It was last year that I started the saga of
The Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player. I'll not recap, but give a catch-up: the Media-PC is about to, I'm afraid, be the recipient of its third Vista OS install. In trying once again to fix the
Logitech MX Bluetooth keyboard's driver, the SoundMax HDMI-accessible driver was blown away. The machine doesn't see that the device exists. The Windows "native" drivers for the "HD Sound" won't install. So the SSBRP is, once again, rendered rather useless. Because there really aren't all that many silent movies released in Blu-Ray and though I can and do enjoy foriegn films with subtitles, I miss the music, sound-effects--and after-all, what's a sub-woofer without any woof?
How did I get to this state? Did the SSBRP ever work at all? Oh, yes. It worked. Gloriously. Beautifully. Not-quite-perfect-but-quite-serviceably-thank-you. Just the other night my son Chad, and his fiancee, Heather, were visiting from Las Vegas and Chad had brought along his Blu-Ray copy of
The Incredible Hulk. We all watched it, and the "making of" special feature and I was quite happy. Prior to that I'd watched "Dark Knight", "Wanted" and "
IJatTotCS", all in Blu-Ray. This going back to November when I'd finally straightened out the driver mess that I've come to understand is, inevitably, unfailingly, but quite regularly fallibly, Vista.
Could my life have been easier had I decided to go with Vista-32, the more direct decendant of XP? Surely. But I had a terabyte drive, the idea of multi-gigabyte video files and more addressable RAM than you could throw a pointer at. And I had four cores of 64-bit capable processor! Why would I leave all that on the table in the name of compatability and stability!!? Bah! Take me straightaway to the Bleeding Edge, Jenkins, and don't spare the cycles! Or sectors. Whatever. The point being that this was going to be a New Computer. I'd tried Ubuntu and though it was nice, we agreed to remain friends and talk occasionally, but well, it just wasn't mature enough for a lasting, committed relationship based on movie viewing (
Hardy Heron, we'll always have DivX). So it had to be Vista, and what is it they say? In for a penny? Yeah. I went for eight bucks worth. Sixty four bits, to be punny about it.
One would like to think that an operating system produced by the
Worlds Largest Vendor of said-same, and Richest Company, etc., and one that was mature by at least eighteen months, would be pretty well shaken-out, right? I mean, by the time Windows Millennium came around, Windows 98 had been around that long, right? And it was good enough so that "ME" was really a mistake to leave tried-and-true '98 for. The ME was the "wait for XP" edition. So I guess what has happened is that Vista, despite being eons in development is really the "ME" of the 21st century. Folk are clinging to their XP until, what's it called, "
Seven"? Comes out. Seven. That's
got cachet up the yin-yang, baby! Riiiight. But I digress.
An Endless VistaVista 64 should, by all rights, have vendor support and community support and lots of high-version drivers and software and devices and...and...and.... Well. It does have a lot of community support. It has to. One wonders if a course in being a Linux geek and having to figure all that out with the help of the fine Ubuntu User's Forum is a prerequisite for installing Vista x64 onto one's system. Let me tell you, friend. It couldn't hurt.
At the first attempt at living with Vista (now, in 2009, aka, "C:\Windows.old") I installed into a clean system. With no nVidia nor Asus nor LG (Blu-Ray) drivers. I was smart enough not to install the AirLink300 Wi-Fi card. Its XP drivers were nothing to sing home about (some of the worst Chinglish documentation and software strings I've seen since Epson manuals of the mid-80s), and so I wasn't pinning any hopes on finding Vx64 drivers. But I didn't need it, because the Comcast modem, with its loverly 8Mbps was just an RJ45 cable and a WRT54G 10/100 port away.
The initial install was fine. I tip that to the 'geers at nVidia and Asus, and to the fact that its pretty hard to get a reference VGA driver wrong. But props also to the fact that the onboard HDMI output worked from the get-go. But there wasn't any sound. 'Salright, I'm just warming up. More stones for the soup were to come. Registration occurred, nagging diminished, and I even managed to find my way through the very first layers of the onion that is Vista Security. I was able to turn off the nagware that is Vista's User Authorization Control (UAC). This is an absolute necessity when you're a safe and knowledgeable user installing vendor-provided software (i.e., you're not practicing unsafe warez). Otherwise, at each CD, at each setup.exe, you'll be asked, "Do you really, REALLLY want to do that, huh? Do ya? Do ya? Huh?" Or dialogs to that effect.
That the default for video and Human Interface Devices (HID--that's keyboard and mouse to you and me) worked out of the Vista DVD install was great. Because the Asus and nVidia softwares need an operating system to go against. So you can switch out of "800x600" mode and up to glorious 1080p (1920 x 1080 x 32bit) mode on that deliciously big screen. And so you can use the northbridge and southbridge chips for sound, and for the exotic bits that came with this motherboard, the "Hybrid SLI" mode--HDMI out through the motherboard connector from both the PCI-e MSI 9800GTX+ and ALSO the digital sound out from the LG Blu-Ray player.
Oh, yeah. I could taste it.But what does any geek worth his salt do when he first puts together a new system? Install the CDs that came in the box? HEEELL, no! You go on the net and download the latest! And true to form, even though the motherboard was a scant four months old, there were updates to be had, and nVidia can be counted upon to have a Detonator set that's at least a rev newer than anything that has to make it all the way through a manufacturing chain--and that isn't even the Beta stuff!
So I started in with v178.xx (an old v151.xx was on the disk) and flashed the MB Bios and grabbed the latest MB drivers and... hmm. Some of the stuff wasn't quite right. Should I reinstall this one? Re-do the order? Maybe the Beta software.....hold on there, cowboy! This ain't your first rodeo. Put your professional hat on and start approaching this like an engineer and not a kid who's read too much Extreeeme PC. So I got out a fresh page of quadrille and started Keeping Records of All Changes.
To make a long (very looong) story short, the magic moment came when I applied sufficient discipline to change only one thing at a time and started with the software that came in the box. The magic pieces of which were the Connextant drivers which enabled the glorious HD sound out through the HDMI connector.
All Was Right With the World (or, Mmmm, Good Soup!)The LG Blu-Ray disk came with a software bundle, and in it was a DVD player that supported Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. The only thing was...it didn't respond to mouse inputs. The Play and Stop buttons worked okay, but the in-menu controls didn't (like, "scene selection" and "special features". You know, trivial stuff). But the controls responded to the keyboard. Would an upgrade from the (perhaps crippled?) version work? I don't know, because they wanted $90 for the upgrade ("special pricing for LG Blu-Ray owners!" Uh. yeah. thanks.) At $120 for the player and $90 for the software, I could have easily bought a standalone Blu-Ray player. It was starting to look like that was going to be the best solution, and the SSBRP was going to be relegated to a gaming platform only.
But it did work to play HD disks. And using the keyboard wasn't horribly inconvenient. And besides, when one day I got a universal remote for the PC, maybe that stone would somehow make the soup the complete and satisfying meal it should be with the full adult minimum daily requirements of Niacin and Iron.
And so, we watched the Iron Man Blu-Ray in HD in all its glory! It was wonderful. And wanting is not always more satisfying than having. Although, in retrospect, having once had makes wanting once again an even more covetous state. But at that time, I had seen the future, and it was good in 1080p.
And then I got cocky.
To really get the best effect of Windows Media Center (WMC), you need to have a tuner, right in the computer. Someday soon all content will be by TCP/IP or some other IP variant [insert Net Neutrality plug here] but there's still a lot of broadcast and cablecast content that needs to be deplexed into channels. So I got myself another stone for the soup pot. A Pinnacle PCTV HD card was (I thought) a good buy. Maybe it was a good buy because it was about to be a discontinued item: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16815144018
But it was HD, and Pinnacle was a good name. There were Beta Vx64 drivers available. I told you I was cocky.
Unfortunately, when the software installed, it put a virtual shim into the sound driver stack. Makes sense, you have to output the sound the card receives to the computer output. But it totally busted the state-of-the-art HDMI and Hybrid-SLI driver stack. Undo, uninstall, reinstall, nothing worked. I tried registry edits with some clever GUID searches, but...Vista ain't exactly XP. The end-result was a non-functioning sound system. The system didn't recognize that there was any sound hardware installed for the drivers to work against--indeed even for the drivers to select the right hardware profile.
I might have continued fighting with this, but for one other problem. The Logitech Bluetooth MX keyboard and mouse combo. I installed their approved Setpoint ver 4.60 drivers for Vx64, but on launching the interface, there were only "help" and "update" tabs. The functional tabs that allow you to change mouse and keyboard settings simply weren't there. Shortly after my trials, Logitech tech support put up a note on how to maybe fix this problem--but it wasn't available then, and to discuss it now would be getting way ahead of my tale.
So I had no sound and a keyboard that was working but had some glitches. Like none of the multimedia keys worked. Okay, that's not entirely true; the volume wheel did work--but you wouldn't know, because of the motherboard sound problem. And more irritatingly, the spacebar launched WinMail. Really. The space bar. I don't know how that ever came to be a default keyboard macro, but imagine. Imagine typing in a path. Like, oh, "Program Files". Or a tech support question on the Logitech forum. I had to resort to using the mouse to select a space, then copy it to the clipboard, then use Ctrl-V instead of the space bar as I was composing. One slip and bang! WinMail in the foreground. I got good at "space Alt-F4 Alt-Tab Ctrl-V" key combos to correct my well-trained fingers. But you know, that's not really a skill that you want to get into muscle memory.
So after a few days, and with the release of Indiana Jones staring at me on the calendar, I capitulated. I did a reinstall.
Take Two: The Right OrderThe second install was fairly straightforward. The only thing was that I didn't want to do a destructive install because I had all this downloaded driver content and installed programs (I had managed to get Halo going for a short campaign before audio meltdown). I had a hundred-odd megabytes of stuff on there. Now the sane thing to do would be to run a backup out to the NAS. After all, I have this old Buffalo system that has a couple hunnert Gigs. And it has another hunnert or so gigs attached to it via USB. All accessible through WINS. But wait! That would just be too darned easy for this project. The WINS it seems is the oldest implementation, going back to NT 3.x. Which is incompatible with more recent NTs and apparently Vista is "right out". Even following their techsupport suggestion of setting some flag for compatability from "2" down to "1" then to "0" still wouldn't allow my Vista to see the drive by browsing. I could get to the FTP server just fine, but no mounts. Credentials didn't match. I remember something from work about passing cleartext credentials in WinNT 3.x, but ye gods that was a long time ago and besides, I couldn't find it in my email archives. Anyway, it looked like I could manually xmit
and restore via FTP, or nuke it, or....just leave it where it was!
No reason to re-download it all again. I mean, I had a TERABYTE, bro! Wide open spaces. The plains as seen from the western banks of the Mississippi. So I did a non-destructive reinstall, and Vista handled that quite gracefully. "C:\" became "C:\windows.old". Think about that for a moment, and you'll see its a nice trick. The root partition stays the same, but everything is moved to within a subdir on that disk. In reality, its a couple of MBR pointers and away you go!
So score one for Vista. Minus a hundred for me having to reinstall in the first place. Or, rather, second place.
After the second installation, it was pretty straightforward to get all the drivers installed in the right order, following a plan I developed from re-reading my notebook on the first pass. So then I had a working baseline. The Pinnacle card was out. That will have to be revisited later. Maybe never, now that I see it is discontinued. Sigh. But the hybrid SLI and the HDMI sound were working again and channeling the Blu-Ray player properly. Plus I got the Logitech Momo Force Feedback Steering Wheel with Paddle Shifters working. So that was a big plus!
What do do when you have a stable system? Make a backup! I already knew the NAS was out of the question--put it on the list of future Stones to acquire, a NAS with more emphasis on the "A"-able. Making a backup to the same drive wasn't allowed. I wasn't about to try my years-old copy of Partition Magic in order to make a "D:\" drive on part of the unused "C:\" (besides potentially throwing the LG Blu-Ray into uncharted "E:\" territory). So the alternative was to make a full backup using DVDs. I'd even pop for the dual-layer.
But wait, it couldn't be that simple, could it? Of course not. Because the first time you make a "complete" backup on Vista, it wants to make a complete disk image. And in my case that meant an image of the couple-hundred gigabytes of "C:\Windows.old". Nevermind that I only wanted a small part of that, "C:\Windows.old\Users\Chris\Downloads". It wanted all or nothing. It told me to get 24 DVDs ready. Oh, no. Not me, brother. I'd already on more than one occasion had a "backup set" on 5.25" floppy disk (and later on 2.88Mb 3.5" disks) from "Fastback". Remember the cheetah on the box? Nothing speedy about it when you're trying to do a recovery and the entire index is on the last disk.
Please insert disk 48 of 50... Press Any Key.
Disk Unreadable. Abort, Retry, Continue?So once again I decided to swing without a net, fly without a parachute, bathe without a raincoat...ahem. You get the picture. No backup, damn the torpedoes! Besides. I had a very workable system now, why would I want to do anything at the system level that would upset the applecart?
Indeed the system worked well for IJatKotCS, despite still not being able to use the mouse to navigate. And so I started in on buying Blu-Rays and setting them to be my preferred medium on Netflix. Nice. I wasn't quite ready to retire the Toshiba HD-DVD/DVD player, but the Ol' Vista box did have the ability to handle the whole shootin' match. Plus gaming. Yeah, baby. The Stone Soup was tastin' mighty good.
So it was with no surprise that after this holiday break, after watching Chad's copy of The Incredible Hulk on the SSBRP, after setting up print drivers to the family's new
Epson Artisan 800 multifunction printer, and after moving the whole setup off the RJ45 tether to a nice
Linksys/Cisco Wireless-N interface and into the family room (to make room for the Christmas tree, but we're going to leave it where it is), that I decided to tackle that keyboard problem again. Because, you know, that an FPS game uses
to jump almost all the time, and though I could remap, the fingers already know that is jump. Launching WinMail in the middle of a tight Half Life Episode I session when you need to avoid some headcrab just isn't any fun.
Besides, Logitech now had ver 4.70 up on the website; I had reported the problem with the tabs, they had a technote on how to get past the issue and it had to come my way, didn't it?
Didn't it just have to work out for me eventually?
Stay tuned for the Entree course on the Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player dining experience.
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