The hard part(s) came when I booted XP 64bit after doing the swap. It was only 1 generation up for the northbridge, and the processor should just be detected as a quad core 3.2 GHz chip. Well Windows decided to not boot up. Weird, I thought, and put in my BartPE disc to image the install before I just installed fresh. Once in BartPE, I tried to make an Acronis image of the LUN to my network storage, but the partition table was corrupted. I tried fixing it, but decided my backup was recent enough, and I store all important data off to the storage server. Wrote zeroes to the beginning of the drive to wipe out the MBR and partition tables, and just installed XP Pro 64bit fresh. Speed. Raw speed that I have only seen on servers that I set up at work. But for some reason, my Asus Xonar D2 wasn’t installing properly, and the onboard firewire wasn’t accepting drivers. Ok, so I google like crazy, update the BIOS (note this point) and move the cards around. The card worked in the bottom most PCI slot, but it blocks the heatsink fan for my 2nd video card, which caused crashes before due to overheating. This was 11 PM on Wednesday evening. I needed to go to bed and work the next day.

After work, I came home, and called EVGA. They too found the problem weird, and moved me up to level 2 support. The level 2 support guy asked if the card I was installing was a Xonar. I laughed and said yes. He told me the latest BIOS had a specific fix for this, and that my updating it should have fixed it, so I flashed it again via a boot CD and wrote the CD at 8x. Booted into XP 64, and it saw the sound card in the middle PCI slot, and the firewire controller worked fine. Yay? Not quite. I finished up installing everything, and wanted to play some WoW. So, I’d launch it up, start killing things, and get a crash. What? I disabled all the addons, still crash. Hm. Reinstalled fresh, and still crash. Weird. I had installed Windows 7 on my spare 10k RPM drive so booted into that, finished installing drivers and such, and copied over the WoW directory. In the 15 minutes I was playing, no crash. Looks like I’m now forced to stay in Windows 7 64bit, Vista 64bit or Server 2008 64bit. *sigh*

TL;DR version: I got hardware for free, bought hardware to make it work, and it was a PITA making it work.

Despite having forced myself to touch type to a very high level, I still ocassionally look at the keyboard. In a darkened room, this is difficult as the keys are going to appear black, or just hard to see if the game I’m playing is not a brightly lit paradise. So, armed with Best Buy gift certificates, I bought the Logitech Illuminated Keyboard.

If any of you have used a really thin keyboard, such as the new Apple keyboards, or most laptop keyboards, the feel can be described as mostly similar. There isn’t a lot of travel in the keys but they took the effort to lengthen them so they do move more than a standard laptop keyboard. After a bit of adjustment, I was typing on it at my normal pace. The characters on the keys were lit up bright and crisp. I believe each key has an individual LED under it, and the characters are laser-cut.

I’m not using it right now because its going to go to HTPC use once I set that up, and I prefer the Logitech Cordless Wave keyboard I have for my desktop for everyday typing.

Overall, however, its a really nice keyboard, I’m just not the exact target audience I guess.

This device, even before you turn it on, is pretty. HTC went a long way to make it very aesthetically pleasing, and feels solid. Comparing it to my iPhone 3G, it was about 1.5 iPhones thick (its a valid unit of measurement!), and about as heavy. Turning it on, you’re presented with the usual Windows Mobile startup screens and initial setup. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to see that screen.

Once you’re done and on the main screen of the phone, you’re presented with HTC’s TouchFLO UI, which sits on top of Windows Mobile and uses hardware graphic accelerators within the phone to make a flashy UI to hide Windows Mobile’s relative ugliness. Personally, I turned it off. Sprint went through the trouble of rebranding TouchFLO to be a Sprint TouchFLO and really ruined it for me. What I still look for in a phone is a decent data connection with instant messaging (AIM/Gtalk/MSN/Jabber, etc) and Exchange sync, good signal, and a battery life that I’m not searching frantically for a power outlet as soon as I unplug it.

Data Connection/Signal:

I work in the Denver area, specifically, Broomfield, CO. Its quite developed, and on other phones I’ve had no problems maintaining an excellent signal back to the towers. With the Touch Pro, this was no exception. Solid coverage for EVDO around work, with some dropout over the farmlands I basically drive through to get home, and then it picks back up just fine. No problems there. I was able to stream Digitally Imported at a high bitrate WMA with almost no dropout while walking around the office.

Instant Messaging:

Sprint/HTC’s bundled IM clients were rather lacking, and Agile Messenger still is a substandard application. However, Beejive, who makes, IMO, the best mobile IM client ever for the Blackberry and iPhone, had a beta of their app for Windows Mobile. This was where the Pro’s full keyboard both shone and dulled. I do understand its not a blackberry keyboard, but a single-membrane keyboard that has no tactile positioning is a bit hard to type on. I probably could have gotten used to it, but I wasn’t going to keep the phone for that long. I’m not going to go into Beejive in detail as that is not directly related to the phone.

Exchange Sync:

Its a Windows Mobile phone. My company has push sync properly set up. It works. Nuff said.

Battery Life:

Here’s where I get mega anal retentive, but I’m going to explain myself. If I’m going to pay $400 for a phone, I want it to do a crapload of stuff for that money. The HTC Touch Pro has A2DP, which allows for stereo Bluetooth audio to stream to a headset that will recieve it. My intent on buying this phone was to use either a Wifi connection or EVDO to stream music on the run. I love Digitally Imported and they’re single handedly making beatport.com get a good $50-60 in music to be bought monthly. My commute is approximately 40 minutes each way, so I will get tired of the music on my iPod if I’m not careful. That said, I did a test. I hooked up my Jabra headset, clipped the Touch Pro to my belt, and walked around the office for a good 30 minutes listening to some trance. The battery came out to about a quarter charge left. I was not satisfied.

Now before any of you scream that this is some amazing feat and I’m expecting way too much out of the device, this is my gripe: CDMA/EVDO 3G technology is much more battery/energy intensive than a GSM/UMTS 3G connection. If I were on the Touch Pro on AT&T (its the Fuze there) I would have roughly double the battery life left.  Granted, I’m not going to always be streaming music, but if I’m stranded somewhere without outside connectivity and want to keep myself from boredom, I will want that much battery available to me. So, back it went.

Overall, if you’re not me, and not that demanding of a battery in a phone, I think you’ll be very pleased with the HTC Touch Pro.

FINALLY.

Announcing the New 32GB, 64GB and 128GB Ridata Ultra-S Plus MLC SSD.

Lately I’ve been just doing work/eat/sleep. Looking forward to Thanksgiving and especially Christmas (friends coming out to visit). I’ve installed Mac OS 10.5 Leopard on my Mac Mini and Macbook Pro and its quite awesome. Time Machine is, bar none, the best consumer level backup solution on the market. Now, it is not without flaws and shortcomings. It doesn’t support backing up to a SMB/NFS server share out of the box. This is irritating because I have a 1.4 TB storage server for such purposes, and would rather the backups go there than monopolize a couple firewire/USB drives for backing up. There is a way to force it (defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1) but allegedly it puts your data integrity at risk, so I’ve been just backing up to some external drives and going to rsync them to the server. We’ll see.

Other than that, I’ve been rebuilding the gallery, and putting up all those stupid things I’ve found over the internets, and pictures of my cat.

Accounts will be recreated shortly. Working on getting everything situated.

On Friday, November 9th, we had 2 drives on our RAID-5 array die. This resulted in the loss of all data on the array. I do not make backups for anyone other than myself (and in this case, mine are so ancient I’m starting from scratch). You will need to restore your own data once accounts are back online.

Sometime tonight or early tomorrow morning, the server should be back up with a NetApp SAN backend.

Please contact me if I have missed restoring your account. I can be reached at (408) 676-2227, or russ@ksilebo.net, or those that use AIM know how to contact me on AIM.