A friend of mine has a laptop with an SSD. Recently the system was crawling at a fraction of its former speed, with no logical explanation. After a lot of time with tech support, he discovered that the DMA controller on the drive was shot, which forced everything to go through the CPU. To check this out for yourself, look at the IDE channel’s properties in Device Manager. If the IDE channel is set to “Auto Detect” but is running in PIO mode, that’s the problem and the drive will need to be replace. The screenshot if from Windows XP.
J.Ja
Updated 11/22/2009
Anyone who has ever tried to get wireless BlueTooth A2DP working in the last three versions of Windows will come to the following conclusion. Getting A2DP stereo BlueTooth needs to be WAY easier in Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7. Getting basic BlueTooth connectivity working for wireless mice or keyboards is fairly painless and easy because everything just works out of the box after you plug in a BlueTooth adapter into your computer, and you’re tricked into believing that everything is already working and installed. Trying to get low quality monophonic headset audio working is hard enough and trying to get A2DP high quality stereo working is a royal pain. This is something that’s amazingly simple on any modern cellular phone but it almost seems like rocket science in Windows.
The first thing you’ll notice in any recent version of Windows when attempting to connect a BlueTooth headset is that it will ask you for a bunch of drivers. Scanning the Internet or local hard drive won’t yield any results, and you’re left scratching your head wondering what happened and why the headset doesn’t come with any drivers. But as it turns out, you need additional drivers for your BlueTooth adapter to make any of this stuff work.
On my Lenovo X200, I downloaded the latest BlueTooth drivers compatible with Vista or Windows 7 here only to find out that only low quality 8-bit monophonic audio is supported. I had to search the Internet to figure out that I needed the WIDCOMM BlueTooth drivers from Broadcom, and Broadcom BlueTooth chipsets are very common though there are others on the market and you’ll need to get drivers from the chipset manufacturer. The driver install was fairly automated, but it took a LONG time to install and it required a reboot. I also had to connect and disconnect the A2DP headset and reconnect to get it working, but it worked beautifully when it did and sound quality was amazing.
Now my problem is that I need to find functional A2DP drivers for these super mini USB 2.0 BlueTooth dongles I got from DealExtreme.com for $2.36. Bluesoleil for Windows version 6 worked fine with this cheap adapter, but Bluesoleil costs $30! There’s just no way I’m paying $30 for a set of drivers to run a $2 dongle. You’re much better with a jWIN JB-TH101 which comes with A2DP drivers and it’s smaller. It’s only $10 if you can pick it up at a Fry’s store and avoid shipping charges. Getting it online might double the price due to shipping. I have a nice little IOGear GBU421 which comes with drivers but I used the Broadcom WIDCOMM drivers but it might cost you $20 with shipping.
And here’s a parting tip. I bought this amazing BlueTooth to 3.5 mm stereo jack adapter (includes a microphone as well) for $13. The cheap plastic earphones are lousy but you don’t have to use them and it’s worth it even without any earphones. More importantly, having the ability to connect your own high quality earphones is even more important.
Many of use suspected that there were ulterior motives behind Net Neutrality regulations, but we never thought it would be this blatantly underhanded. I had a chance to speak with one of the biggest experts on Internet peering William Norton and it was an eyeopener for me. The resulting article below has some very interesting revelations.
FCC NPRM ban on Paid Peering harms new innovators
The current FCC NPRM would prohibit paid peering agreements and harm small content providers while ensuring Google’s dominance on content distribution. Google is big enough to get free peering, but the NPRM would force their competitors to pay more for inferior transit access.
There’s an old adage in the IT world that no one ever gets fired for buying IBM. The problem was that it never said anything against firing IBM, especially if they botch things badly.
Litl LLC is apparently selling a new hardware-crippled netbook for $700. I just want to know what they’re smoking when ultralight laptops with dual-core processors are selling for $400.
The story that the new BitTorrent client uTorrent 2.0 is “network friendly” is making the top headlines on the Web and mailing lists. The only problem with this story it that it has no actual data to back up its assertions. I took the time yesterday to run some tests on the new uTorrent 2.0 beta build 16850 which supports the new “friendly” BitTorrent UTP. Based on my initial testing, the claim that the new BitTorrent client is network friendly appears to be false.
The GAO concluded that just 40% of the workforce staying home from illness would lead to severe Internet congestion, but what happens every day after school and after work when everyone is home? That’s just one obvious hole in the GAO report but the draconian conclusion it draws about the need to block recreational services, especially low bandwidth applications like online gaming is particularly alarming.
Read the rest of my article at Digital Society.
GAO concludes 40% sick employees can cause severe congestion
It’s hard to believe that it was less than a year ago when higher end netbooks still commanded $600 and maybe even above. But if you bought a netbook in the last month or two for $400 or more, this is a good time to kick yourself. Last week a premium netbook should fetch well below $400, but that market just died with the arrival of cheap $400 Acer Aspire AS1410-2285 ultraportable.
The AS1410-2285 has the following notable specifications.
- Dual-core 1.2 GHz SU2300 “CULV” processor
- Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics chipset
- 11.6″ LCD w/LED backlight
- Full size keyboard
- Windows 7 Home Premium x64 edition
- VGA and HDMI port
- 6-cell battery
- Gigabit Ethernet and 802.11 a/b/g/n
- 0.87″ to 1.18″ thick and 3.08 lbs
- 160 GB 2.5″ SATA HDD
- 2 GB RAM
- Two real mouse buttons instead of a cheap imitation MacBook button that works like garbage.
- Did NOT see anything about BlueTooth but you can buy one of those tiny dongles for $10 or less if you get a bargain.
This is the sort of specification that would have probably fetched close to $2000 just two years ago but the “race to the bottom” has been won by Acer. While I’m sure this saddens those in the notebook industry, consumers are rejoicing. I saw an ad over this weekend for a netbook with Windows 7 “Starter Edition” for $368 so I feel for the poor guy/gal who buys it.
It’s worth noting that the HP Mini 311 netbook with NVIDIA Ion still sells for $400. While the NVIDIA Ion LE graphics chipset in the Mini 311 is about 79% faster than the GMA 4500MHD in 3DMark2006, the Atom CPU in the Mini 311 CPU is slower than a dual-core 1.2 GHz SU2300 especially for multi-thread optimized workloads. So which product is better depends on your preferred workload, but I personally don’t take gaming on netbooks too seriously.
Barns & Nobles are apparently launching a new eBook reader, and someone is apparently decided to call it the “Nook”. Now maybe I’m dating myself but did some young Product Marketing person not know the slang meaning of “nook”? Almost sounds like they’re marketing some adult toy.
Funny names aside, the dual-screen (one color touchscreen and one ePaper), AT&T 3G connection, and the reasonable price of $259 sounds very impressive. Forrester isn’t too impressed because the device has a low or non-existent profit margin, but that may be a bit short sighted if this device turns out to be wildly popular and it turns into the “razor” that sells the “blades”. Besides, the competition for eBook readers is heating up and the days of selling bulky ugly eBook readers for $300+ are long gone. If the device is as good as its specification suggests and Barns & Nobles is able to execute properly, the device should do extremely well.
Now if this cool new gadget can actually get its owner some nook, that would actually be the most impressive feature set of all.
When I tried to start a capture using Microsoft Network Monitor 3.3 on Windows 7, I received the following error:
None of the network adapters are bound to the netmon driver.
If you have just installed, you may need to log out and log back in order to obtain the proper rights to capture.
Please refer to the product help for more information.
I’ve found that a simple “Run as Administrator…” resolves the problem. Sorry Wireshark users, that relies on a component (winpcap) which does not install on W7 at this time.
J.Ja