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April 16th, 2008

OneCare Safety scanner

I was looking for do a cleanup of my registry and I came across the free Beta version of OneCare Safety scanner. Let me talk about the OneCare client that I already own. Some of the reasons I purchased this products are -

Now, coming back to the online version of OneCare Safety scanner (beta for vista). IT comes with a comprehensive (which you can customize to run only selected scans) and quick scan options. The scans included are -

onecare_beta

The complete scan took about 2 hours for me and was pretty thorough. I understand that you can have all these done using some of the utilities included with Windows and some free 3rd-party utilities. That is what I had been doing in the past as well, but it is nice to have a one-stop place for all your needs. Microsoft recommends to run this once a month, however the way I install/uninstall software for trying software, games and the amount of data I move around, I think once a fortnight will be more helpful.

Posted by admin as system, windows at 8:07 AM MST

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March 7th, 2008

Windows Home Server - Part 2

If you are recycling one of your old machine to be used as your Windows Home Server box. But also want to give it a hot-swap functionality (like HP MediaSmart Server), I would recommend getting one of those multi-bay hot swap HDD racks. There are quite a bunch available at reasonable prices. The advantages these offer include -

Here are some available on Amazon.

You can find some more on other stores like newegg and tigerdirect.

Posted by admin as Network, system, windows at 8:31 AM MST

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March 4th, 2008

Home network upgrade

Yes! The new member of my network is a Windows Home Server.

If you are like most people, you probably fall under one of the two categories - people who do not back up or the people who do not back up soon enough. Till about a few years ago, my idea of back up was just copying data to an external hard drive or burn DVDs. That was till a friend of mine lost a lot of invaluable data (mainly pictures) due to crash of his external hard drive. It was then that I started backing up data online with one of those free web space providers. But there is only limited data you can backup there. Also I could not back-up as often I would like to as it takes a lot of time to manually upload (no automated service from my provider). It was then, that I started using a old box for a file and backup server.

I am currently running a file server on my linux box for back-up and file sharing. I had been wanting to try out the Windows Home Server product, for the same. It is basically a stripped down version of Windows Server 2003, hence based on a very stable, well tested platform. Another reason for switching was that since I changed my jobs last year, I haven’t worked on linux and am kind of drifting away from the latest in that market. I had two options, I could just get a out-of-the-box Windows Home Server or go with a home brewed server. I decided go with the latter for 2 main reasons - one, I was going to recycle a lot hardware that I already have for it, so it would be cheaper and second, this way I will be able to learn more about the product and its internal workings.

Step 1 - the Hardware
I am going to use the current file server box for the installation. The specs are quite low but so are the minimum requirements of the Operating System. Here are the specs -

Step 2 - Installation
Since I am not going to use a DVD drive on the server after the installation, I just borrowed on from my other system. Here is how it went. First I decided to install the OS on the 500GB drive to avoid hitting the copy size “Wall” (more on that here). But I faced a issue in that right away. Apparently WHS does not like my motherboard’s chipset. There are no drivers available for the SATA on Windows Server 2003 platform. A little search showed that there are issues with the SATA drivers for the Uli chipset. So I ended up moving a spare 200GB ATA133 HDD from another system to this and using it as the sys drive.

So I popped in the disk again and after a couple of questions in the beginning, the installation process begun. After about 1.5 hrs and a couple of reboots, I was logged in. now comes the next step. I connected the 500GB hard drive, and surprisingly it got recognized. I added it to the storage handled by WHS. and now I have 700GB of storage on the Home Server.

Step 3 - Configuration
The network configuration was easy. WHS auto-configured my router Netgear WGR614 using uPnP. I got a subdomain registered for my home server. Microsoft provides you a free subdomain - <subdomain>.homeserver.com. Through that you can log into your home server and other systems through it. All you need to do is enable remote access for your computers.

Next I enabled the back-up for my systems. Also copied the media on the home server so that I can access all my songs, photos and videos over the network and play it on my HDTV through my Media Center PC. I also created a couple of guest accounts that I can give to my family/friends to share my pics with them rather than loading them to an online gallery.

I have to say that the installation and configuration went with no-hassle (except the non-available drivers for the SATA during installation). The configuration was a breeze.

Step 4 - Installing Add-Ons
Now I need to install various Add-Ons already available for the platform. The best site I would recommend for finding a comprehensive list of the Add-In’s and other tweaks you can do with WHS, would be We Got Served. I will be trying these over the next few weeks and posting about them. So stay tuned.

My opinion so far - Windows Home Server is a really good product based on a well tested platform. The functionality it delivers is highly beneficial in today’s day and age everyone has multiple computers and media extenders and want common storage and back-up, and don’t want to spend too much time maintaining it. But as any other Microsoft product, it has some issues and some bugs. So wait for Power Pack 1, and we should see a really stable product, which does not have any current competition in the market.

For those who do not want to go through doing this and want a good out-of-the-box product with support, can get the HP Mediasmart Server. It is priced very decently and has a really small form-factor.

Posted by admin as system, windows at 12:09 AM MST

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March 3rd, 2008

Mommy, Why is There a Server in the House?

I am working a new member for my network family over the last few days. I am almost done, so soon you will hear the complete details.

Meanwhile, a hint:

Posted by admin as Network, system, windows at 8:47 PM MST

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February 29th, 2008

I made the move - to Vista, finally

Few weeks back, I decided to upgrade my Gaming System by adding 2GB more RAM making to 4GB all together. I knew that I would have to upgrade my OS to 64bit as well for it to recognize the complete 4GB (Windows XP was displaying only 2806MB). While I was upgrading, why not go with the latest OS. So I decided to go with Windows Vista Ultimate 64Bit. I installed by completely formating my hard disk. The installation went without a glitch. So far so good.

Now the next step was to get drivers for my components/peripherals which the OS did not auto-detect. It was good that the list consisted of only 3 devices
1. Airlink101 Super G Wireless PCI Card - Model AWLH4130.
2. Logitech Quickcam Chat WebCam.
3. Creative Audigy 2 ZS.

I found the Webcam driver on the manufacturer’s website. Creative Audigy has always been a problem as this is an OEM card which came with my old HP computer. Even the latest drivers from Creative donot work with this thing.

But the main issue was the Airlink101 Wireless PCI card. I really needed to install this because otherwise I will have no network access on this box - hence, no internet, no LAN Parties, no online gaming. I tried installing the Windows XP 64bit drivers available on the manufacturer’s website. No success. I checked the FAQs on the website which said

“AWLC4130/AWLH4130:
XP driver 4.1.2.714 can be installed for Vista and works fluently. You can insert the card and let Vista install the drivers automatically. Drivers are available for download in the drivers and firmware section.”

I had already tried that without success. Next step - call the support. Result - The manufacturer is working on the drivers and will be available soon. No idea about how soon. I was suggested to return the card if I could and replace the one which already has drivers for Vista. This was the last option. I started searching online to see if anyone else was having the same problem, only to find out that this model is not that popular. However I was able to find out the chipset on this card (not the chipset number, only the maunfaturer). The chipset is Atheros which is used by a lot of the vendors today. I started searching online to find drivers for this chipset.

Luckily found this website - http://www.atheros.cz/ which is think is Czech version of the same company’s website. There are some drivers available there for the Atheros chipsets. The Vista 64 drivers did not work but the XP 64 bit drivers did. I took me about an hour to go through all this. If the company do a little research on their part and worked with the chipset company, customers will not have to through this trouble. Most of the people would have given up. So I decided to write this post in the hope that this would come up in some search engine result and help other people.

P.S. - The card is shown as Atheros Wireless Network Adapter in the Device Manager instead of Airlink101 xxxxxxx …. But I don’t care as long as it is working.

Posted by admin as system, windows at 12:49 AM MST

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