Lesson from the 80s: backup, backup, backup

You know what I'm talking about. The topic which makes everyone who owns a computer nervous. They look at the floor, the wall, a meek grin creeps up their face, they favor you with a non-commital shrug. It is the data equivalent of flossing. It is preventative, proscribed and yet frequently inconvenient or more time-consuming than you want to commit when you're in a hurry. I'm talking about data backups.

Why is it that most people don't have a rigorous method to be able to recover anything they've ever written, shot, videoed, installed or downloaded? We all put a pretty high price on our financial records, our family photos--nearly all our intellectual effort these days. We all know we should have backups, and most of us have suffered the pain of losing something. I'm not talking about the last bit of typing before the last Ctrl-S, but a Real Loss of a Significant Amount of Irreplaceable Data. So why do most people just not have a plan? Is it like earthquake insurance in CA? Too expensive and complicated if you ever have to rebuild? Is it like a structured weight-loss program? Necessary for good health and peace of mind, but, in practice takes too much discipline? Something you'll start after the holidays? "I'll start backing up everything when I get a new computer and have to move all my data anyway."

I count myself amongst the "most". I have a vague collection of external disks, thumb drives, optical media backups, online accounts. None of which are used in a cohesive plan which allows for recovery. I have, for example, some in-car video of a track day at Laguna Seca in 2006, my first time driving my Porsche on a race track. Tens of gigabytes of raw and edited files, as I recall. Maybe 30GB. I have it somewhere. At least, I hope I do. I don't really know where. DVD-R? External USB? Bare IDE drive in that stack over there? On one of the kids' computers? A little-used "E:\" partition somewhere? Not being able to recover from a backup is as bad as not having one at all. Its funny that I can reach onto a shelf and pick out one of more than 300 DVDs or one of more than a thousand books in my home, but finding any/all of my own electronic data--which should by all accounts be easier, not harder, is just not that easy at all. The most eggregious is really the perhaps 200 (don't even know exactly, really) collection of self-burnt CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs in a number of racks and shelves in the family room. The best I can say is that I know which rack to grab and throw out the window first in the event of a fire, but I can't really say that everything I most want is on those particular disks. I have a paper label pack, an ink-jet printer, a program that does labels. I even have LightScribe and a stack of blank (and expensive) LightScribe DVDs. Yet most of the disks are labeled with a marker. Too brief and too cryptic. "Downstairs computer, misc docs, pics, Disney trip, MP3s, 11-04". Um, okay.

It is amazing to me that here we are in the 21st century--nearly a decade in-- moreover we're 40 years into the Personal Computer information revolution, and "backups" aren't a thing of the past. Of course I don't mean not having backups, but I mean not having to jump through hoops to create, manage and use backups. That's what I mean by "backup". The "Fastback" or "Ghost" or other kind of managed backup process plus software. And I mean for the home, not the Small-to-Medium Business. Dell, IBM, all the big names are falling over themselves to service that market.

There have been some really interesting and relevant products in this arena, but it really should just "happen". I guess the closest thing to this ideal is Apple's Time Machine. But when you start thinking about real disaster recovery--I'm talking about your laptop going missing from your car or your home (God forbid) be flattened by some effect of man or nature--you need something more than just a hidden cache of files on the same disk.

Like flossing (if you don't do it already, regularly, by habit or discipline) you only hear about data backups or recovery from your professional care representative--like when you're suffering other effects of not doing it. As when you talk to the Apple Genius Bar about recovering from a hard disk crash. We recently got the soft admonition, after the hard disk was replaced under warranty, to perhaps talk to a data recovery specialist. We might get a quote on scraping any remaining data from the otherwise useless hunk of metal now residing in the antistat bag in our hands. Or learn to live with the lost data. Kinda like hearing you need to go see the periodontist for a root planing. Ugh.

But that event, no matter that it happened recently to not just one laptop but two in the space of one day (it was a very sad day at the Markham home), is in the past and I took it as a slap in the face to look toward the future. Fool me once, etc.

Some day (its always "some day", isn't it, with technology. Man's vision exceeds his grasp), we will have all our stuff in some variation of The Cloud. It may not look at all like The Cloud that is out there now, but I mean, pedantically, "off-site, anywhere-accessible, store". There's certainly a lot of work in this area, which maybe I'll ponder in a later post. But there are plenty of others pontificating about using Google Mail as a hard drive or any of the other umpty-dozen startups with whom you can trust your data in small-gigabyte chunks. Hopefully they'll still be around after their round two funding dries up. Hopefully your data will still be around. But I digress.

It is time to revisit the home NAS. What we currently have is an ancient Buffalo 160GB system, with FTP and WINS sharing, but rather poor implementations of both. It supports an external USB drive or a very short list of printers on its one port. One disk, no RAID. The web management interface is poor. It has been a sometimes network backup tool but mostly it is off. I can't say for sure, but I believe that a folder delete through the web interface led to a large data loss. User error, sure, but due to an oblique interface. To be fair to Buffalo, it was their first offering, and it appears (from the language of the user manual) that it was an OEM'ed import. So kudos to Buffalo for getting out ahead on the home/SOHO NAS, but bad on me for being on the bleeding edge.

That was at least five years ago. With the Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player (SSBRP) cum media-PC running the living room, I've decided to revisit the backup and warm-store issue. We need a place for all the computers in the house to be automatically backed-up as well as for file sharing (beyond the 1TB the SSBRP offers for music, pictures & video.

Buying a NAS means buying hard disks. Some day in the future, when we're all wearing spandex jackets and driving flying cars, we'll either have everything digital we own or use in The Cloud or on a Solid State Disk. Until that shining day (2012, maybe) we'll be using the tried-and-true (but still fragile) spinning platter magnetic store Winchester Hard Disk Drive (HDD).

Markham's two rules for purchasing HDD space are simple:

• Rule 1: Never buy disk until you can use it, because empty disk is flushing money. Disks always get cheaper and bigger.

• Rule 2: There are two price points to keep in your pocket when shopping for Disk: $0.10/GB for internal (bare) drives, and $0.15/GB for external drives. By these metrics, a "good deal" (at this writing--the price points slip by a penny or two regularly) is $100/TB for a bare drive.

But these two Rules work against each other. That's because the bigger the drive, the cheaper the per-GB cost, up to a point. Size increases with technology, so the biggest drives are the newest drives which aren't the cheapest drives. So there's a saddle point in effect at all times, which moves up in drive space over time as the saddle moves down on the price axis. For example, NewEgg currently has a 1TB drive for $0.10/GB--right at the Rule 1 Price Point--and a 3TB drive (!!) for ~$0.08/GB.

And of course, with the bigger size drive, even at cheaper $/GB at the saddle point, there is a bigger total outlay. Which is where Rule 1 kicks in: Don't buy the bigger disk until you can use it. So you may end up paying a penny or more per GB for a smaller disk, but it more likely you'll actually spend that penny on storing your data rather than just heating up your enclosure.

I may have to ammend Rule 1. Do I need 2TB (1TB in RAID/5 format) of disk? No. Do I want a terabyte of striped NAS always-on backup!? You bet I do!

This may be my new NAS RAID 2TB RAID0/1 for $220 This is ~$0.11/GB, well under the External Drive Price Point and very close to the Bare Internal Drive Price Point!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822101091

Or there's this from Buy.com:
http://www.buy.com/prod/cavalry-2tb-hard-drive-dual-interface-usb-2-0-esata-raid-external-hard/q/loc/101/206461304.html

I saw a similar at the Apple store last night for $500 and this is $100 off MacMall pricing and $30 off Buy.com

It is eSata, which the StoneSoup BluRay Play (SSBRP) supports. That does mean leaving the SSBRP on all the time, but it has some good pwr mgmt capabilities. I just have to make sure that it doesn't go completely to sleep overnight. Or test waking up the SSBRP over the network via one of the laptops with an external shared drive access (e.g., a nightly automatic backup).

All this is being driven by two (count-em! two!) catastrophic laptop HDD failures on the same day at our house Monday.

First Cheryl's laptop started issuing the "click of death" for no reason other than she uses it 18h a day. It required a disk replacement at the Apple Store (under warranty) and ~5mos of her work was lost.

Then, hours later, Karey knocked my laptop that she was using off the arm of a recliner. The case was chipped but ThinkPads of that era have an HDD shock detector. Apparently it isn't fast enough or they don't do their accelerometer tests from higher than 24". Because she asked me that evening, "It says, 'A fatal hard disk error has occured. Press CTL-ALT-DEL to restart.' I did but it keeps saying that. What should I do?" This wasn't even the BSoD, it was the Black Screen
ROM alert that You're Screwed. I spent several hours running the Windows Recovery Console off the XP install disk, and CHKDSK (wow...1982 flashback) showed, "irrecoverable errors". Swell.

So the question for me, currently, is one of interface. Choose the eSata disk, leave the SSBRP on 24x7 but have all the Windows networking stack and file sharing at my fingertips, or Choose the true NAS, gigabyte interface and a lower power footprint than the eSata host--but with an unknown quantity in the form of the web browser user interface and access control? I may have to try both and return the loser.

The important thing is to get a backup system in place, and this is the first step. After that: software.

Other spaces, other uses

Kaisa introduced me to Deviant Art a few years ago. Lots of great art there. I've had a poem in my drafts folder here since October, but this space isn't really right for it. So I made my first submission to Deviant Art today. I used my nom de guerre, "cesium356". Okay, that's actually my gamer name, but it seems like no one in the ultra-hip deviantart world uses their real name. Artists, gotta love 'em.

Stone Soup Blu-Ray -- Part 3: Windows 7 rescues us from Vista

The second installation of Vista was attempted with a bit more clarity, aforethought of planning. The entire desired software stack was present and the end-goal of the system was understood.

It is important to know where you're going before you start out. Sure, you can just go for the journey, but some trips are better with a destination in mind. To wit, The Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player (SSBRP), after much mission creep, was determined to have to meet this RFP:

1. Vista Media Center
   
   • Netflix add-in
2. Blu-Ray Player
   
   • Being able to play Blu-Ray and HD disks with the sound through the HDMI connection
   • Being able to connect the PCM-optical output of the motherboard to the home theater system and have the Blu-Ray play through it.
   • 1080p, full-screen, w/o skipping, artifacts
3. 1080p Gaming (Steam Support)
   
   • Having a network connection that can sustain GB downloads of game content
   • Support for the Logitech Momo steering wheel setup (incl. drivers!)
   • Being able to play reasonably recent driving games: GTR, Race '07 at full-resolution and with the knobs turned up to 11 (e.g. 4xAA, 8XAF, water details, long-distance rendering, etc.)
4. Hulu, Adobe Media Player, et al.
   
   • Having a network connection that can stream HD w/o skipping or pausing.
   • Audio and Video capable of said-same.
   • Did I mention that the network connection was now wireless?
   • Something you wouldn't think you would have to mention is that this sometimes web-browsing involves typing. So the keyboard has to work.
     

   Modest goals, no? Well...it's Vista. So we'll see.
   

The networking was ably handled by Comcast, as described in a previous post. In this incarnation, the system was moved from the living room to the family room. Nominally, this was to make room for the Christmas Tree, but removing the boob tube from the calm social setting of our living room has turned out to be an important permanent change for the positive. For example, I'm spending my evening writing this for y'all rather than watching another episode of "That 70's Show".

The point about Comcast being that because most of the computing happens in the living room and adjacent bedrooms, I decided to leave the wireless router upstairs (erm, our house is on a hill, therefore topsy-turvy with the upstairs being the entry and living area and the downstairs is a family room and bedroom). This also leaves the antennas well-placed for wireless connection to the now-famous "Lamb Cam" (subject of a future post). But the SSBRP loses its hardwire 8-megabit/sec connection to the world. Theoretically, switching to a 802.11g network shouldn't slow it down any, but there's these walls and floors and air in-between now.

So the one update to the hardware of the system from Part 2 was the addition of an 802.11x card. I chose Linksys/Cisco because 1.) Their drivers are good 2.) The AirLink 300N I had didn't work with Vista64 in another computer and 3.) I was tired of saving a couple bucks on a 2nd tier brand only to burn that savings in hours and hours of configuration nightmares. True to form, the Linksys worked out of the box. QED.

So once again, armed this time with a Windows 7 Beta DVD, I moved the existing C:\Windows.old directory to C:\Windows.oldest to allow Windows 7 to do its non-destructive trick. Someday I may reclaim the couple hundred Gigs I have as a double-archive of a useless Vista x64 install, but for now, it's forward and damn the disk space!

I'm not going to recount how pleasantly uneventful the Win 7 install was. This is broadly known, now 5 weeks into the Microsoft Beta for the new Operating System. What you may not know is that this Beta has a Nexus-6 feature. It times out. In August of this year 2009, my fresh installation which I will undoubtedly become reliant if not completely dependent upon (despite warnings about "not using it for production purposes") will on promise from Microsoft, become inoperable. Aauugh! The sweet promise and the real sweetness ripped out of my hands in the heat of summer? Ah, but perhaps not. Here's something that I'm betting almost all of you don't know: according to a friend-of-a-friend who works for Microsoft, you will be able to purchase a copy of Windows 7 before this beta expires. So none of that "in 2010" stuff. That's just the MS PR machine trying to avoid a Vista version 2.0 catastrophe. You know, like how they promised us Vista in 2004 or something and it was a long time coming after that. This time they're playing their cards close to their chest. But I have to tell you that the way Windows 7 Beta is being installed all over the place, displacing Vista in almost all occasions, Microsoft could release this Beta as-is for money and it would be an improvement.

So proceeding carefully from my clean, clean install of Windows 7, I first installed the Asus motherboard drivers from their "all-in-one" CD that came in the Box. This includes the nVidia v15.11 southbridge driver and the v168.something Detonator. Several revs back from most recent. But tested with this board! So caution, caution this time around. I got the Hybrid SLI working and the HDMI Sound. The Linksys drivers went in as expected, slick. Updates were now possible from Microsoft and from the other vendors (though I already had everything in C:\windows.old\install). The LG Blu-Ray firmware was still the latest and the default cdrom.sys picked it out and the Cyberlink DVD 7 bundle hooked up.

The SSBRP was back in business! I went back to my Netflix queue and switched my default media back to Blu-Ray. I popped in my copy of The Fifth Element and enjoyed.

But there were still a couple of wrinkles. The Logitech MX keyboard was still, infuriatingly, sending an "open mail" shortcut every time the spacebar was pressed. Win 7 doesn't have bundled email though (thanks, EU!) and so it merely gripes about trying to launch a DLL. A modal dialog that requires dismissal and which will open multiple times and swallow follow-on spacebars, but marginally better. But it only feels good because the hurting is less than with Vista, not because it is gone.

I enabled the audio device (new in Win 7) and could send the audio out to both the HDMI and the S/PDIF optical out concurrently. Which you can't really do because there's about a 1/4 sec delay difference between the two channels and it sounds like you've enabled "hall echo". But you can turn one or the other device's output down and it sounds just fine. Optical for the Blu-Ray and HDMI for the video games. Sooo niiice.

So back to that Logitech keyboard. I got fed up, so I decided to install my Gear Head 2.4Ghz wireless keyboard. Purchased for another computer (the predecessor and antecedent of the SSBRP) I hadn't tried it before because the driver stack looked a little sketchy. Indeed I never tried it for Vista x64. But what the hell!! All the caution, caution went out the window (pun intended) with the hubris that came from a good soaking of audio/video streams by the Blu-Ray player. Dammit, I wanted to have it all and that meant a good keyboard, too!

Now I've shopped a lot of other keyboards, and they all come up short. Either they're Bluetooth and have good range but they're fru-fru or they're IR and have crummy range. Neither are cheap. But by "fru-fru" I mean with matte aluminum and other HTPC upscale presentation features and upwards of $100. For a friggen keyboard! I wanted the WebTV keyboard. Laptop compact but with Bluetooth for the range. And no more that $60. Less than $40 would be ideal. Guess what? Doesn't exist. Hear that Logitech? You can't win in the living room unless you have a plain wireless keyboard that doesn't belong in the MoMA but has the range to reach from the couch to the screen.

But I already had the GearHead keyboard, and I had the hubris working for (against) me, so I gave it a try. Worked fine. But, um, the Blu-Ray stopped working.

I mean, not at all. The device disappeared. Trying to load the cdrom.sys interactively, I could only get the "no appropriate hardware detected" message. Which was bull because it was just working with that driver!! Auugh! What had I done!!?

Lots of uninstalls and reinstalls and trying the Vista x64 version and trying to reinstall the LG software that came on the disk.....nothing.

One of the culprits here is the lack of an uninstall for default drivers. The guids come from MS and once they're in your registry, there's no way to back them out w/o going to manual methods. You can disable them in the device manager, but that doesn't remove their registry entries. So when you reinstall....you basically have the same thing over again. I understand why it is done this way--it has a high likelihood of success and is hard to break. But when the defaults don't work for you...well, you're kinda screwed.

Unless, that is, you happen to trip onto a solution via Google. I got onto a Win 7 board, and someone there posted a Vista solution link and that person remembered something he had done back in 2003 with there being "upper filters" and "lower filters" to the CD-ROM driver guid. Remove those, specifically, manually, and all will be right with the world. And I did, and it was and I really couldn't believe it for a while. Real shock that a one-liner edit in a number of profiles in the Registry really could revive the Blu-Ray.

So for now I'm back to the original Logitech. I tried another IR Logitech wireless on loan, but it didn't work any better. So I took my lumps, but I have my SSBRP back and as long as I don't try to use the keyboard for, I dunno...writing? I'm fine. I just have to remap the "Jump" key in a bunch of games to something different. Like "R", which is next to "E" for "Use". Run-Jump is still possible, if not easy, but the Reload has to be mapped to CTRL or something. I'll get it, eventually. Half-Life 2, Episode One was a fun do-over and even better w/everything turned up to 11.

The Logitech Momo wheel drivers installed w/o error and the force feedback on the wheel works fine. Over the holiday break I was able to turn four laps at the Nürburgring in GT/R and it was pretty damned cool doing it on the big screen with a proper wheel and pedals.

The Hulu and Adobe Media Player content work famously. The 3-cable 802.11n antenna that came with the Linksys adapter is excellent and there are no dropouts due to streaming faults.

The goals for the system are largely all met. With the exception of the keyboard (not a trivial problem but also without a trivial solution, but with a 90% workaround) every RFP item was met and mostly spectacularly.

The SSBRP is alive, I've watched a number of movies with Cyberlink 7, I've had no problems other than the aforementioned mouse-menu button interface and I was even able to do a fairly good (if I do say so myself) compare between the DVD version and the Blu-Ray version of Casablanca. So it really is in use. Confident? I picked up Boondock Saints director's cut and The "20th Anniversary Edition" (oof) Adventures of Baron Munchausen (sale: Fry's $12.99) DVD replacement. I've watched Wall-E and Wanted and the gluttony of HD movies from the Stone Soup Blu Ray Player can continue unabated.

Now if it only had some help booting faster and accessing programs faster. Like maybe a Phenom 2 chip and a SAS-RAID-10 system built on 15k rpm drives? But that would mean (for "reasonably" priced HDs) moving the installed software to the "warm store" SATA disk mapped to the "D:" drive. Naaaah! I'll keep it as it is for now. Maybe I'll add a Harmony Remote, but that's a different story altogether.

Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player

[Credit to the title and concept goes to my good friend Michael. Thanks for that and again for listening to the original tale of creep, recounted here.]

It always begins with The Wanting

Ever since I made the wrong choice in the HD video disc format wars of the first part of the 21st century, I realized that some time in the future I'd have to find a means to switch horses, to get a Blu-Ray player and hence a method to continue to get HD disc content, at least until such time as the Internets pipes are big enough to handle on-demand HD to all comers. Since I'd already bought an HD-DVD player, and wasn't about to toss my couple-dozen HD-DVD disks, I wasn't really inclined to just up and buy a Blu-Ray player. I had an alternative plan brewing in the back of my mind all summer. All the plan needed was a catalyst.

Last month, as we tooled around Costco during a lunch break, my buddy Michael picked up the new Iron Man movie, on Blu-Ray. He'd been waiting for it to come out and to be able to watch it in the high-definition format. Of course, he also needed a Blu-Ray player to go with. With some (very little) urging by me, he picked up a Sony which at Costco comes with an HDMI cable. It was quite a deal at $279 before tax. Michael hadn't made the wrong turn down the HD disc aisle that I had made months ago, so it was a substantial but not painful choice for him.

And then there's my son Chad & his fiancee Heather in Las Vegas. Chad's always been a gamer, so for him the Blu-Ray was just a feature of a gaming system he was going to have anyway. The system was around $400. And that's with a full PS3 gaming rig attached.

I mention the prices of the options that Michael and Chad chose; it is important for this story. I was sure that I could come up with a Blu-Ray drive for less by upgrading the Media PC I already had. I knew, from previous shopping, that one could get a Blu-Ray player add-in for a computer for well less than $200.

I was also intent to upgrade the Media PC (aka a Home Theater PC, HTPC) to be able to see high-definition streamed video off the internet. That requirement came from the family. We had tried to watch episodes of House which were on Hulu, but which stuttered and sound-delayed on our current HTPC. So I had an inkling that this would be more than just an optical drive swap, but I didn't know how much more.

And continues with The Having

The first component to be upgraded was the optical disk. It was a DVD-R/+RW which lacked only Blu-Ray to keep its place in the New Scheme. My first (of what would turn out to be many) trips to Fry's had me leaving with a combo LG Blu-Ray/HD-DVD player. The sticker was $199, but the shelf price was $169 and at the register it rung up at $139. Big score! This was going to be the cheapest Blu-Ray player, ever. It would leave me with many tens of dollars with which to re-purchase much of my existing DVD collection. After all, how many copies of 2001: A Space Oddesey is too many?

Now, I didn't actually need the HD-DVD capacity, as I have a fine Toshiba A35 player which should serve until, well, who knows but it isn't completely antiquated yet; I just received a new software update in the mail the other day. I do, however, think the LG combo player is a coup, because it will allow me to someday retire one box from the media presentation stack in the living room. But not right away. The thing about the Toshiba? It works.

I had my Blu-Ray player to read Blu-Ray discs (which I didn't have yet), but I also knew that what would really make the Blu-Ray player "taste better" (you're catching the Stone Soup bit now) would be to upgrade the graphics card. The existing card was an nVidia 7600GS. Which was fine at the time--the time being when my son Chad put the computer together. That would have been about 2006, after he entered UCSC, and then traded it for a much more convenient and dorm-friendly laptop. Chad gifted it to me some time after that and by mid-2008, the seven-thousand nVidia card series based on the "G73" chip was getting a bit long in the tooth. What I saw this computer really had going for it was that it was PCIe-capable. The 7600 could have been an AGP bus card, but this one wasn't, it was PCIe which meant the motherboard was up to an upgrade to the most modern of GPUs.

So after not a small amount of shopping around to find that price-performance sweet spot, I settled on a 9800GTX+ from my favorite on-line vendor, NewEgg. The MSI version was a great deal and the card's specs were awesome. All I needed to do was to drop that puppy into the HTPC with the LG Blu-Ray player and I'd be watching Iron Man in Blu-Ray format. Not only that, but the 9800GTX+, with its "G92" chipset--while not quite up to the latest-and-greatest two hundred series from nVidia--is completely capable of playing all the latest games: Crysis, Far Cry 2, BioShock, etc. My old standards Half-Life 2 (and Portal--I love Portal) could be turned up to Eleven. And then there were the driving games. The latest SimBin driving games, Race'07 and GTR Evolution couldn't really be driven at full 1080p by the 7600 with its GS shaders and small memory footprint. But it would sing with the 512MB of memory on the 9800GTX+. $149 after a rebate. But look at all the "flavor" it will add to the Stone Soup Blu-Ray and HTPC..and Gaming computer.

Then I started looking at the processor, a 2.0GHz Sempron. Single core. Ugh. Not hardly enough to smoothly run all that 1080p 24hz DTS-HD audio goodness. The current HTPC wasn't even socket AM2, so we were at a dead-end. But Fry's to the rescue! As it turned out, while I was there for an HD-DVD sale (totally different story), I was tipped to one of Fry's typically very good motherboard/CPU combos. In this case, I got an Asus M3N-HT HDMI/Deluxe motherboard, with a quad core AMD Phenom 9550. That's a 2.2GHz chip, not a big bump from the Sempron, but with four cores, obviously. A big, big jump up from the Sempron.

The Phenom CPU is great, but the motherboard is superb. It runs the brand-new 780a chipset, which has a new nVidia feature, "Hybrid SLI". This allows an on-board graphics processor, (in the case of this mobo an 8-thousand-ish spec GPU) sharing system RAM to SLI with a short list of PCIe graphics cards. And guess what's on the list? That's right! My newly acquired 9800GTX+! Woo-hoo, the soup was really heating up. I was getting a real SLI rig for gaming! W00t! And at the price of only one GPU card! Plus, the other salient feature of the Hybrid SLI which is really perfect for systems like mine--part HTPC and part gaming rig--is that when you use softare to switch to using the on-board GPU only, the PCIe slot is turned off. As in completely off, draws no power, runs no fan. And everyone knows those tiny GPU fans are noisy.

And as if that weren't enough, if you couldn't tell by the name of the mobo, it has native HDMI out. Perfect for the HTPC-out to our living room 46" LCD 1080p Samsung, and it uses the RealTek onboard 7.1 Audio without any SPDIF jumpers to get HD audio out of the HDMI. A very nice board.

Now CPU prices fall notoriously fast, especially lately as we're into another drop into the 45mm die processes. So an early-October smokin' deal may not sound as good in early November, but its a merry-go-round. You grab ahold of something as it goes by and get on. Besides, the opportunity return in having it now, rather than waiting for the price to go down is..well, in the case of a new Blu-Ray player, worth it. Or so I thought. The two hundred dollars bundled price meant the CPU was practically free. I hedged my bet with a store warranty, giving me a little bit of overclocking insurance and obsolescence insurance for another $30.

The Stone Soup Blu-Ray player was really starting to take shape now. But, um, of course the new Mobo takes DDR2 dual-channel memory. Wow, I hadn't bought DIMM memory in a long time. It is tuned now for gamers, the mobo BIOS settings allow all kinds of soft tuning for timings and they even have their own heat sinks. My wallet hardly felt the $70 (after rebate) for the four Gigabytes of Dual Channel Corsair XMS memory in two matched 2GB sticks. The motherboard can take 8GB, and I'd read how if you have a huuuuge amount of RAM you can set your swap partition to zero size and your computer will really scream. But this socket AM2+ motherboard can't set more than two memory sticks into dual channel mode. If you put in more, it will slow the d/c memory down to the slower single channel mode. So more is faster disk-wise, but slower speed wise.

Which sent me down the path of thinking about the disk. A 10k RPM Raptor was out of the question. This was going to be an HTPC and so it had to be quiet. Indeed, one of the things I didn't like about the current HTPC was that the disk was loud. Or maybe it was a case fan in front of the disk. Whatever. It was of 160GB capacity, which just doesn't seem like very much these days. Especially since I figured I could use this upgrade, when the TV set wasn't on, as our home NAS. The new motherboard was RAID-capable, after all. So a bit more mission creep was added to the Stone Soup Blu-Ray player. But I wasn't going to introduce that right away. One of Markham's Maxims of Personal Computing (apologies to Jerry Pournelle) is "Never buy disk capacity that you can't use right away, because it will always be cheaper by the time your disk fills up." So I bought a little insurance, on the high side of the "sweet spot", which was, at that time, the 750GB disk. Instead I got a Seagate 1TB disk, at a very nice $150. That's $0.15/GB, which is well under my $.20/GB classification of a "good deal". Later I'll get another TB disk and setup the RAID mirror. Then it will be ready for the family photos, Music and home movies.

I was ready to add all these "extras" to the Stone Soup Blu-Ray player and get about the business of actually using my new upgrades in the HTPC, but I ran into my first sticking point. The Asus mobo is ATX. I didn't check beforehand to find out that my current HTPC is micro-ATX. She won't fit! So that led to another few shopping trips and a dalliance with a Zalman HTPC case and other esoterica. These HTPC cases are expensive. Like an empty metal box will set you back more Benjamins than an entire Home Theater in a Box rig--and I'm pretty sure they're made up of the same metals. So that bit of kit was a bit too spicy for this Stone Soup. Instead I settled on a Antec Sonta III upright mid-tower case. It has a nice piano finish that matches the Samsung LCD screen quite well and has sound insulation and other HTPC-ish features. Plus it came with a great Antec P/S. Price was $103--less than I would have paid for an add-in power supply.

So let's recap what's in the Blu-Ray HTPC "upgrade":

$103 new case w/new power supply
$200 new motherboard
and new CPU
$ 70 new memory
$139 new optical drive (the Blu-Ray, remember?)
$150 new winchester drive
$150 new graphics card
$ 16 an HDMI cable
------
$828 That's a lot of stones in that soup pot!

And the OS. Vista? I had an extra license laying around. Its legit, it just didn't cost me anything.

What's missing? Oh. Networking. This turns out to be the next "long pole" in our current HTPC setup. It uses an Airlink 300 wireless card. Its "N" protocol, but though slogging through an Ubuntu driver setup was not completely painful, I knew that it would be nothing compared to getting that card to work with Vista Ultimate. So I decided it was time to get a speed upgrade and hard-wire the WAN ethernet into the motherboard port. No wireless for the HTPC.

So that introduced two new ingredients into the Stone Soup Blu-Ray player: Comcast cable to replace the ATT&T DSL and the aforementioned Windows Vista Ultimate operating system. Why the Vista "UE"? Because it comes with Windows Media Player for Vista. Which is where I want this PC to spend most of its waking time. I had dallied with the MythPC interface in Ubuntu, but never really got it so that it was more (or, rather "less") than a nerd's delight. To be candid, it wasn't ready for prime-time, which was when my family would be using it to watch TV!

The six-fold bump in speed from the cable networking over the DSL was as-advertised and I'll never go back. The setup wasn't completely smooth--but I'm getting ahead of myself. All the ingredients were there and ready to go together.

Assembly day was round about October 11th, as I recall. The hardware assembly was mostly straightforward, with a few Memory settings that needed some tuning. After shuffling the parts in and then out, I realized that the old HTPC was completely intact and so still is. I'll find a use for it or donate it, paying it forward as Chad did for me a year or so ago. And the base Vista OS went in along with the Asus drivers on the included CD, so picture (Hybrid SLI mode) and sound (through the HDMI with an nVidia driver) were available forthwith.

But I didn't have a Blu-Ray disk to try it out with! I couldn't wait when Michael bought his, so Iron Man was going to be the last DVD that I'd ever have to upsample. But that didn't solve my Blu-Ray test problem. So instead I used my Matrix HD-DVD disk to try out the new HTPC. It played well--after I allowed the LG player to update itself and allowed the bundled HD-DVD software player to update itself as well. Which required the networking to work, and that wasn't exactly smooth sailing.

So is this a happily-ever-after story? Of course not. This is the end of but the first chapter of my tale. What is to come, you might ask. Imagine if, in the original Stone Soup story, the soldiers got the villagers to throw all the goodies into the pot, but they didn't have a ladle or the bowls leaked, or the fire under the pot wouldn't stay lit? Pretty frustrating and everyone is still hungry, eh?

My Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player's story will contine in the next entry.