Building a New Gaming Computer

May 11th, 2010

Lately I’ve been kicking around various thoughts on upgrading my computer, an Intel Core 2 Duo-based system pushing three years old. It began with upgrading my video card from a Geforce 8800GTS to a Radeon HD 4890, but I was met with lackluster performance despite the fact that the new card should smoke the old one. Obviously, I had other limitations, and this simply would not stand.

It took me several more weeks of research, but soon it was decided. I would no longer be upgrading; I would be replacing. The advent of the new Intel LGA 1156 socket meant I would not be simply adding a processor and RAM, but also a new motherboard and a new power supply. When all was said and done, the only part remaining from my old computer was an ASUS DVD burner.

At first, I was planning to use the Core i5-661 for its 3.33 GHz clock speed, but when I realized I could save almost half on the Core i3-530 and only lose 400 MHz, it was a no-brainer. I was fine with the lesser speed, especially with the excellent overclocking capabilities of the Core i3-530.

I felt like I took a bit of a leap with the ASRock motherboard, RAIDMAX power supply, and G.SKILL memory. I had never used any of these brands before, but for the most part, the reviews for all were promising, and RAIDMAX and G.SKILL are rather well-known amongst gamers. (As a side note, customer reviews on practically any computer part will make you nervous.)

Finally, I had the build locked in and I placed the order.

Chassis Cooler Master Centurion 5
Power supply RAIDMAX Blackstone 750W
Motherboard ASRock H55M Pro
CPU Intel Core i3-530 @ 2.93 GHz
RAM G.SKILL Ripjaws DDR3 1600 MHz
Graphics card XFX Radeon HD 4890
Hard drive Western Digital Caviar Black 750 GB

Quick note: Up until the last moment, I had planned to use my old IN-WIN Z611T case for the new build, but ended up deciding to get a new case for better airflow and cooling right before placing the order. Only a day later did I realize I purchased a full size case and a micro ATX motherboard. Oops! Of course the micro ATX board will still work just fine in the full size case, it just feels like a missed opportunity.

The parts all came in one box (except for the case of course.)

Box of Computer Parts Computer Parts Computer Parts

I immediately opened up the Cooler Master Centurion to get to work. The case uses an easy to use screwless design, though the expansion slot snaps are rather flimsy. Optical and disk drives are held secure by sliding plastic clips.

Cooler Master Computer Case

The RAIDMAX power supply is modular, but just like my last experience with a modular PSU, I ended up using all but one of the cables. I do like that it has smaller “tails” protruding from the casing instead of sockets embedded in the side to attach the modular cables, making it easier to manage when already installed in the case.

The large 135mm fan has blue LEDs built into it if you’re into that sort of thing, and I will shamefully admit that the blue glow inside my computer is kind of nifty.

RAIDMAX Power Supply

After getting the power supply and motherboard installed, I had a little laugh at the micro ATX board sitting in that big case, and also encountered a pretty large (though easily worked around) design flaw in the case; the front case fan cable is stupidly short. Stretched to its fullest, it was still a good inch and a half too short to reach the fan header and I was forced to use the included 3-pin fan power to 4-pin Molex power adapter and an entire extra modular power cable.

Short Fan Cable Micro ATX Motherboard

The rest of the build went smoothly, and I was pleasantly surprised by the video card’s clearance. A card of this size will block one of the 3.5″ bays, but there are four more available; more than enough for me.

Computer Build Computer Build

After installing Windows 7 64-bit and getting drivers installed, I, of course, went straight for Crysis, which not only got a poor framerate on my old machine, but even with low graphics settings for higher framerates, it would be frustratingly jittery, presumably due to the dynamic loading of textures and models. None of this was to be seen anymore.

While I didn’t run a proper Crysis benchmark, the first two levels were pretty consistent mid-30s FPS (and no stuttering!) at 1680×1050 resolution, DX10 mode, all settings “very high”, no AA/AF. Perfectly playable.

For a proper benchmark through 3DMark 2006, a comparison between the two machines:

CPU: Intel Core i3-530 @ 2.93 GHz
Motherboard: ASRock H55M Pro
RAM: G.SKILL Ripjaws DDR3 1600 MHz
Video: XFX Radeon HD 4890
3DMark score: 14274

vs.

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 @ 2.33 GHz
Motherboard: Intel DG33BU
RAM: Kingston ValueRAM DDR2 667 MHz
Video: Foxconn Geforce 8800GTS 320 MB
3DMark score: 8757

That’s good enough for me!

—CB

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Posted in Gamer, Personal Computers | 1 Comment »

StarCraft II Beta Review

May 5th, 2010

Here at Blizzard, despite having no relation, we’ve been longtime fans of Blizzard Entertainment. I’ve been playing StarCraft since its release in ‘98, when I was about 7 and a half years old, and was playing Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness and Beyond the Dark Portal before that. When I saw the previews for StarCraft back in ‘97, I knew it was going to be awesome. I still play the expansion, Brood War, to this day.

When the original announcement trailer for StarCraft II started popping up on the internet one weekend back in May of 2007, I was giddy. I gathered up any information I could, which was limited at the time, and then spent the rest of the day playing StarCraft: Brood War in celebration.

I was never a big competitive player, mostly because I played with my brother and dad, and Battle.net didn’t work with multiple players on a single IP address, but after we played so much that the three of us were no longer challenged by five AI players, there was a stint during which we each had static IP addresses just so we could play on Battle.net and get a real challenge. This, as it turns out, is a fact that would later get me a spot at the launch of the StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty closed beta.

In September of 2009, I saw that Blizzard Entertainment was doing a contest through their StarCraft Twitter account: Tweet your reason that you are StarCraft’s biggest fan, and the 300 best answers would be selected to receive beta keys. So I, of course, tweeted that I loved StarCraft so much that we had static IP addresses so we could play together online.

Come October, I got a message that I had been selected. I’m sure I said the old “I’ve never won anything in my life!” bit. Of course, there was no word yet when the beta would actually open, but come February 17, 2010, it was upon us.

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty Closed Beta

The first thing I noticed as I jumped into my first game of StarCraft II was how much it felt like classic StarCraft while still being so new. I never got into Warcraft III simply because it was just so immensely different from previous installments in the Warcraft series, with its focus on smaller armies (even going so far as to penalize your income if you had too big an army) and “hero” units with RPG elements. This is certainly not the case with StarCraft II; while there was still plenty of new stuff to learn, I found it easy to draw on my experience in the first game to get me through.

Each of the three playable races has gotten an overhaul while still retaining the basic feelings that made them what they are. Units like the Terran Firebat and Protoss Reaver have been replaced entirely, while others like the Terran Ghost and Zerg Queen have gotten a complete makeover, making things fresh and interesting.

I’ve heard some remark that the game does nothing new, that it’s just “StarCraft with new graphics”, and that modern real-time strategy games like Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War and Company of Heroes do so much to mix up the RTS format while StarCraft II is stuck in the past. Maybe StarCraft doesn’t do anything particularly innovative for the RTS industry, but there isn’t a game like it out now, and hasn’t been since, well, StarCraft: Brood War. There’s still plenty of room for the StarCraft format; just look at South Korea’s e-sports scene. Even so, StarCraft deserves a new coat of paint. The new graphics and particularly the new unit AI and pathfinding make the game much more comfortable to control. (Remember trying to fit Terran Goliaths or Protoss Dragoons up a ramp choke point?)

The beta version is limited to online multiplayer, as Blizzard Entertainment is remaining pretty secretive about details on the single player campaign until the full game is released. With the beta, you have the options to play unranked against random players, your friends, or computer AI (on the “very easy” difficulty setting only), or get into the ladder and play ranked 1v1 or 2v2 with people automatically matched to your skill level. 1v1 matchmaking seems to do a pretty good job, but 2v2 is almost always a tossup.

The StarCraft II beta is remarkably stable; moreso than many release titles these days. I get the occasional unexplainable performance drop that requires restarting the game to resolve, but I can count on one hand the number of times it has crashed, and that’s playing pretty much every day. My experience with PC games’ stability is less than stellar, such as the period when playing Team Fortress 2 that every time I equipped the Heavy’s primary weapon, the game crashed to the desktop, so when crashes and freezes are this rare, I can pretty much overlook it.

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is fun and addictive, and impressively polished, even since the start of the beta. Some retailers like GameStop and Amazon.com are offering beta codes with a preorder, so you can get in on the action right now, before the July 27 release date. My life for Aiur!

—CB

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Hardware Upgrades – Don’t Forget Your CPU

April 7th, 2010

As I’ve mentioned before in passing, my personal computer is fitted with a GeForce 8800GTS video card, a Core 2 Duo E6550 @ 2.33 GHz, and 2 gigs of DDR2 667MHz RAM, and has been for about two and a half years. While the only PC game I’ve been playing a lot lately has been the Starcraft 2 Beta, which is not very hardware intensive, it still bothers me on occasion when some of my other favorites (Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead) aren’t comfortably playable at their maximum graphics settings. This fact, combined with a stewing plan to purchase a 24-inch widescreen LCD and the accompanying screen resolution increase, led to my decision to upgrade my video card. Who wants to have to back down graphics settings when you’ve just gotten a large, 1080p monitor?

It took several weeks of hemming, hawing, research, and shopping, but with a budget of $200, give or take, I finally decided that I would make the jump to an XFX Radeon HD 4890. This was an interesting choice for me, as I’ve never owned an XFX product before, and I had also forsaken ATI (or now AMD) video cards a few years ago when I had been forced to replace the stock cooler of a non-overclocked Radeon X700 due to overheating, and it still overheated on occasion. My mind was changed when I looked at the current landscape of the graphics adapter market and found that NVIDIA products are, in general, too expensive for what they offer; benchmarks showed that the Radeon HD 4890 generally outperformed the GeForce GTX260 in roughly the same price point, all the while NVIDIA’s better performers were simply outside my budget.

This is where the mistake was made. I purchased the video card (from Tiger Direct, who got it to me two days after the order was placed, and with free shipping to boot – nice!) and installed it, and soon realized that my CPU is disproportionate! While the framerate boost was noticeable, my aged Core 2 Duo is bottlenecking performance and leaves me only able to bump up some graphics settings in my games – not the kind of performance I could be getting out of this 4890.

Due to Intel’s new sockets for the new Core i3/i5/i7, the LGA 1156 and LGA 1366, I won’t just drop a new processor in my existing motherboard; I’d just be upgrading to an already outdated Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Quad. While I hadn’t been looking originally to begin a new build, this has been what it’s turned into: a new video card turned into a new CPU turned into a new motherboard turned into new RAM and a new power supply! All from wanting to move up to a 24-inch monitor, which is now on the back burner.

What can you learn from this? If your gaming computer is aging and you want to pep it up, don’t just upgrade your video card; your CPU will hold you back. If it’s not in your budget to do what it takes to upgrade both CPU and GPU, wait until it is! You’ll see a bigger performance improvement and be much more satisfied with your upgrade if you do it all at once.

—CB

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Acer and Lenovo Support or Non-Service

September 10th, 2009

I used to brag about Acer service but it now appears they have joined the ranks of many other computer giants and having nothing to offer but an endless dialogue of GOODBYE! In the past when I needed to order a part I would call and the same person that took the call would complete the entire process. Now I get the automated attendant and NO option to speak to anybody. It goes like this – “Thank you for calling Acer, what are you calling about?” (respond sales then parts). I can better help you if I have your SNID (respond with SNID). “To purchase parts please visit us at store.acer.com GOODBYE” – CLICK!

So I run over to store.acer.com and the only parts are batteries and power adapters. Thanks Acer!

I must have done it wrong, let me try again. 800-816-2237 “I see you recently called us are you calling about the same system?” (yes) which are you calling about……” (respond sales then parts) “To purchase parts please visit us at store.acer.com GOODBYE” – CLICK!
OK, let’s try to trick the system, “I see you recently called us are you calling about the same system?” (No), “what are you calling about…”(respond sales and computers rather than parts) “sorry, we must be experiencing problems right now, try your call again later”

Time to hit www.eBay.com, 1-2-3, all done, keyboard on way from 3rd party vendor.

This is almost the same experience I had with Lenovo and why we don’t sell Lenovo G530 models any more. I opened a brand new Lenovo G530 and booted it up to start preparing it for a client and the Windows image was bad. It looked like maybe it had an issue with the Lenovo camera software. I call Lenovo and the non-support agent came to the same conclusion that it had a bad image and recommended that I run the restore disk. I informed her that I did that and it rebuilt the image with exactly the same issue. She replied that it must have been shipped with the wrong disks. I asked if she could send the right disks and she said no because I wasn’t the owner, I was just the reseller. I replied that I am acting on behalf of the owner and she replied that I can get an RMA and send it in to have it repaired. I told her that I could just send it back to the distributor and get a new one rather than wait for depot service (I just opened it after all) and she said that would be fine. I said but wouldn’t it be less expensive in the long run to just mail the correct disks? She said that wasn’t an option and have a nice day.

Sometimes I think I should just open a tire shop, better yet maybe a tree service.

I need some coffee! (Excuse me, Mr. Pink, but the last thing you need is another cup of coffee)

—DB

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Antivirus and Antispyware

April 12th, 2009

At Blizzard Computers we test and then use the same software and hardware on our own computers that we sell. We have tried numerous antivirus applications rarely finding a better performing or better value than CA antivirus until we started testing BitDefender Antivirus 2008. By the time we started selling and recommending this product they came out with a new version 2009. What a nightmare! We have given numerous refunds and sent the balance of our BitDefender 2009 stock back to the distributor for a credit. For now we highly recommend that you avoid upgrading from BitDefender AV 2008 to the disastrous 2009 version. It has mail sending issues with Microsoft Outlook where outgoing mail with attachments will stay in the outbox and continue to send over and over again. It never removes completely when you perform an uninstall, you have to download the Bitdefender uninstall tool or Windows Security Center will continue to tell you Bitdefender is not functioning properly. There is a noticeable performance decrease over version 2008 and plenty of issues where it just reports that it is not functioning or it won’t update. It also has an issue where Vista doesn’t recognize it as a valid antispyware application.
We were lucky that we had started testing AVG Network Edition for our business clients and since the release of AVG 8 it has proved to be an exceptional antivirus and antispyware application. For personal use you can’t really beat the free AVG antivirus since version 8 was released. For our business clients AVG Network Edition is very impressive with a minimal footprint and the remote administration utility is, in my opinion, superior and much easier to use than the equivalent Computer Associates remote administration application. Now AVG 8.5 has been released and you can imagine my hesitation to adopt an upgrade to a product we have just started selling and recommending after the nightmare that was BitDefender 2009. Good news! AVG 8.5 is working just as well as version 8 and it has some new antispyware features that should help prevent future spyware methods of infection. AVG continues to focus on minimal use of resources. We love Malwarebytes for spyware removal and we are excited that we have actually seen AVG 8.5 find some items that Malwarebytes had missed.
So, why did we quit using CA Antivirus? Well, mainly because it was an antivirus only. We would get customers complaining when they would get infected with spyware and we constantly found ourselves explaining that it wasn’t an antispyware application and that Windows Defender was the product that they were using that did not stop the spyware infection. We could not argue that CA AV did not stop the malware though. We do believe that in today’s security environment an antivirus program should be antimalware and include prevention and cure for both virus and spyware types of malware. Computer Associates wants you to pay extra for spyware protection. Their offering still seems to be the core application that was Pest Patrol. We were never impressed with Pest Patrol’s cleaning ability, its use of resources, or the user interface.

If you are infected with malware we highly recommend that you remove the product(s) that failed you, install AVG 8.5 and then install, update and scan your computer with Malwarebytes. Happy cleaning!

—DB

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Building a Gaming Rig – Part 1

March 27th, 2009

A customer of ours recently approached us about building a really nice gaming computer. Yes, I’m a gamer, and I enjoy building computers. I’m still running a 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo and a GeForce 8800GTS on my personal computer, and it’s starting to show its age, so how could I pass up this opportunity to build a (hopefully not literally) smoking machine? To drool at Crysis running at “Very High” without breaking a sweat? To think about taking this baby for myself?

The customer had in mind what he wanted from a similar machine he found elsewhere, so we had a bit of a guideline. Possibly the most important factor was the video card, so that’s the first thing we settled on. The BFG Technologies GeForce GTX 280 OC2 (factory overclocked to 650 MHz, with 1 GB of onboard memory) was an obvious choice. What else was obvious? Putting in two of those suckers.

BFG Tech GeForce GTX 280 OC2

Next up, the processor. On our reference sheet, we were looking at an Intel Core 2 Quad overclocked to 3.2 GHz. We didn’t want to fuss with overclocking and potentially destabilizing a customer’s computer, so we selected the Q9650 (3.0 GHz from the factory, with 1333 MHz frontside bus and 12 MB shared L2 cache).

Eight gigs of RAM was also expected. We decided on four two-gigabyte sticks of Kingston HyperX DDR2 at 800 MHz.

But as important as all that is, you’re obviously not going anywhere without a good motherboard. On our reference sheet, we had an MSI P7N SLI-FI. However, this model does not have PCI Express 2.0 slots, and we were not sure about MSI reliability or quality, so that was out. It seemed the Asus P5N-D was the right choice, but as we began assembling the computer, we soon discovered that the second video card blocked the motherboard’s SATA ports.

 Asus P5N-D Motherboard

With a little more research, we came back with an EVGA nForce 750i SLI FTW. An added benefit to this was an extra PCI slot between the PCI Express slots, giving the video cards a little extra breathing room, though this would soon be taken by the sound card. The EVGA board’s SATA ports are at a right angle to the motherboard, giving the video card clearance even when it sits directly over the ports. I still had to swap for the SATA cables included with the Asus motherboard though, since the EVGA SATA cable connectors were too long to fit in our chassis due to the hard drive bay sitting too close.

The customer requested an add-on sound card, and we selected the Asus Xonar D2 PCI sound card. Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell you why, as I didn’t pick it and… let’s just say audio technology is not my field. Unfortunately, I didn’t even take a picture of the thing, but it’s a monster. The color coded LEDs inside the audio jacks are a nice touch.

Speaking of chassis, the chassis was perhaps the most difficult piece to choose. Obviously it needed to be flashy, with good ventilation and cooling, but most importantly it needed to fit those mammoth 10.5″ long video cards. We almost decided on the Antec Nine Hundred, but with many power supplies now having bottom-mounted internal fans and the fact that the Nine Hundred placed the power supply at the bottom of the case, this just didn’t seem like a wise choice.

Then, when we saw the In Win Extreme Series B2 Bomber, we knew.

 In Win B2 Bomber computer case

Its fighter jet/bomber styling (including electric front hatch) and the B2 bomber shaped side vent almost seemed tacky to my conservative sensibilities (I consider case windows “over the top”, so you can see where I’m coming from), but ultimately it was just too cool to pass up. Though the front panel may look a little closed in, there still seems to be plenty of ventilation.

Of course, we also needed a power supply that could push all this. For two GTX280 cards, we wanted at least 850 watts, and with the quality of In Win’s 350 watt units we’ve been using in the shop, we selected In Win’s SLI-certified Commander 850W.

In Win Commander 850W

The modular cables are a nice touch, though I only omitted one or two thanks to the graphics cards alone requiring four cables. I was pretty impressed with this unit, which could pretty much be used for anything. Aside from the cables being detachable from the power supply, the connectors are also modular, such as the 2×2 processor power connector having another clip-on 2×2 connector in case you need a 2×4 connector. Also, as with many power supplies now, the motherboard power is easily changeable between 2×20 and 2×22, and even the PCI-E power cables can be used for 2×3 or 2×4 by simply clipping on or removing the extra pins.

With all this excitement, it’s easy to forget a hard drive. The original request was a 1 TB drive, but considering the current reliability issues 1 TB drives seem to be having, we backed it off to a 750 GB SATA Western Digital Caviar Black, and to top it all off, an LG Blu-Ray/DVD/CD burner plus HD-DVD reader with LightScribe. With the cost of one of these things, you almost wonder why you’d buy a dedicated Blu-Ray player.

Alright! So we’ve got our parts. Tune in next time and we’ll build this monster!

—CB

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Posted in Gamer | 2 Comments »

BitDefender 2009 Settings

January 15th, 2009

We’ve been recommending and selling BitDefender Antivirus for some time now, but we’ve found it has its quirks.

Recently we’ve been getting some fairly widespread complaints about sending and receiving multiple duplicate emails. It wasn’t long before we determined that everybody that was sending out duplicates was a customer using BitDefender 2009! The culprit? The outgoing email scanner. Evidently, the scanner would hold up the email client, and the client would simply try sending the message again until it went through. An outgoing email scanner isn’t especially important, considering you must already be infected if you’re sending infected files. So off it went; one by one customers disabled the outgoing email scanner, and one-by-one customers stopped sending duplicate emails.

Despite being an excellent antivirus and antispyware, that’s not the only setting we’ve found to be better off disabled. Identity control has caused some problems as well, as it gets overzealous with blocking changes the registry without even giving the user a choice. I’ve seen Windows service packs fail to install because BitDefender blocked necessary registry changes. The downside of this is that such registry control is sure to reduce your chance of getting infected with spyware, but breaking Windows is a rather unwanted side effect. So off it goes.

Automatic game mode, while good in theory, is somewhat obnoxious as well. “Game mode” in BitDefender disables all BitDefender popups and alerts, and sets BitDefender real-time protection level to “permissive”. When running games in full-screen mode, this will prevent BitDefender popping up and taking focus away from the game, which, as a gamer, I know is very annoying. The problem with automatic game mode is that it detects all full-screen applications, including screen savers, as a game and prompts you to add it to the automatic game mode list. So off it goes.

BitDefender also includes an automatic anti-phishing add-on for web browsers, but so does Internet Explorer 7. Being a browser add-on, it can slow down the browser, and as it scans every page you visit, it slows down your web browsing. So off it goes.

With these configuration changes, BitDefender should run smoothly and problem-free.

While I’m on the subject, I haven’t yet made any ground on getting Windows Vista’s Security Center to recognize BitDefender’s anti-spyware component. Bummer!

update: BitDefender 2009 is not recommended.

—CB

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Useful Tools

January 15th, 2009

All the time, I see customers bringing their computers into the shop because of a spyware infection. No matter if it’s a minor or major infection, at least half of them have AdAware and/or Spybot - Search & Destroy installed.

Think about that for a moment. For years, these have been two of the most recommended tools on the internet for spyware removal, and yet they obviously don’t do a very good job of it! I suppose this is similar to Norton or McAfee products. They’re nigh on useless, but by having their name out there–and in the case of Norton and McAfee, coming preinstalled on many PCs–many think that being the most popular means they’re also the best.

There was a time when malware cleanup involved running at least three tools, often more, and still required booting in safe mode, manually finding and deleting infected files, and often times going through some complicated processes to give yourself the ability to delete the file. Then, when you think it’s all done, it just rewrites itself.

For a time, SUPERAntiSpyware was my preferred spyware removal tool, but not only was its scanner fairly slow, many times it still didn’t catch everything, and the tedium of manual cleanup remained. Spyware cleanup became such a timesink that as a business, our option was to have a computer on the bench for hours and charge far less, therefore losing money, or charge the customer very high fees for a spyware cleanup. Instead, it became policy that if we couldn’t fix it with SUPER, the customer had the choice of having the hard drive wiped and Windows reinstalled (saving any data the customer needs, of course) or living with the still-infected computer.

A lot of computers got a fresh install of Windows during that period.

Then we found MalwareBytes’ AntiMalware. I can’t praise this application enough. The scanner is fast, definition updates are frequent, and it comes in a very small package–as of this writing, 2.31 MB.

False antiviruses, trojans, spyware browser toolbars; you name it, it kills it. I’ve never been disappointed. I couldn’t even guess how much time this program has saved us, or the amount of money it’s saved our customers. I still sometimes make use of HijackThis, and more recently AutoRuns (a very useful tool in other situations as well), but these are practically formalities. MalwareBytes’ Anti-Malware’s quick scan is fast and very effective so long as it has the most recent updates, which are frequent. If you buy it for $24.95, you can get real-time protection, but I have yet to try it, so I can’t attest to it as a proactive solution. Either way, it’s about worth $24.95.

For post-infection malware removal, don’t waste your time with other tools. MalwareBytes’ Anti-Malware is where it’s at.

—CB

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Small Business Setup

January 3rd, 2009

Today we are completing the setup of a new Dell Server with Microsoft Windows Small Business Server. The installation is at a small office here in Ellijay Georgia. In addition to the new server the client is having us install 4 new workstations and we need to connect two existing workstations. We continue after the initial server setup with a new OU (organizational unit) for the workstation users. We then create a new policy for those members and redirect the “Desktop” and “My Documents” folders using that group policy. This will automatically keep the user’s desktop and documents on the server so they can be easily included in the daily backups and the shadow copy service. Using shadow copies makes it very easy to recover user data like spreadsheets or documents when the user deletes the file by accident or when the user makes a change to a document that renders the document useless. At that point the user can restore an older version rather than re-create the entire document. Once that’s complete we use the backup wizard to setup the daily backup and the shadow copy scheduled tasks. If you aren’t redirecting user data and using shadow copies you should ask your IT department or support provider why and how you can start, it’s a true life saver at times. One last item for user data, we usually have disk quotas set up on the server to limit the space available to each user. Most small offices don’t have policies in place to restrict personal data like photos or music being stored by their employees. It’s usually a good idea to move the “My Music” folder on each workstation so it’s not redirected to the server and wasting disk space and backup space. In Windows XP you can do this by right clicking the “My Music” folder and choosing cut, then you can navigate to the location you want the files like the C: drive and choose edit on the menu and then paste. Windows will automatically set the registry for the virtual mapping to the new location.

—DB

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It’s the Little Things…

December 12th, 2008

…especially if they’re loud.

Another tale from the bench for you: a laptop came in, so I went through the motions; take it over to the bench, get it hooked up, read the work sheet. From the information on my sheet, it seems that the customer is having trouble turning on his e-mail program.

In slow motion, my index finger descends to the power button. Immediately after the button is depressed, I reel backward from the racket now being emitted from this beast. Unsure of what this terrible caterwaul is, I quickly turn the computer off. My ears ring as peace returns to the land.

At this point, I am told that the customer said something along the lines of the fan being kind of loud. While likely not the winner of such a title, this is certainly a contestant for understatement of the year. This thing sounded like a running vacuum cleaner, or maybe a jet engine.

I decide to give it another shot. I hit the power button and plant my fingers firmly into my ear canals. The sound dies down after a few moments, the fan’s speed slowing after bootup. After a few moments of poking around in Windows (and determining that it has come equipped with a rather unhealthy dose of spyware), the roar reemerges with a vengeance. I live with it for a few moments, but I’m rapidly driven toward homicidal madness. I shut the computer down. It’s time to take care of business.

I begin my descent into the Toshiba’s bowels, removing the faceplate, then the keyboard, then the plate below, revealing its juicy internals. Without removing the fan from the heatsink, I simply try applying some oil to the bearing. Power on; my poor ears! This crying cacophony was not cured. Time for some open heart surgery.

Unscrewing the fan, I lift it from its cradle and look inside.

A piece of paper. No more than two centimeters long, less than one wide, lying in the fan’s housing. With a tilt of the assembly, the paper falls free. Having never owned Operation as a kid, I awkwardly removed the paper from inside the laptop and, crossing the fingers of my other hand, applied pressure to the power button.

Ah, peace. The noise was gone; the scrambling of my brain and rise of my blood pressure was all thanks to… this little piece of paper.

I wish I could say that was the hardest part, but now it’s time for spyware. However, I won’t bore you with that story… at least until it becomes more interesting.

—CB

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