One of those days! :|

Every once in a while, things just do not seem to go the way we planned and leave us seemingly spinning our tires.

Today was one of those days.

A client system with a RAID array failure, has an nForce on board RAID where the RAID BIOS refused to allow us to rebuild the array on the seemingly failed drives. The drives tested 100% okay. We had a ShadowProtect image of the Windows Vista x64 OS installation, but that failed to restore on a Winload.exe error after recreating the RAID array.

Another client system with a Hauppauge Win TV-HVR-1800 series PCI-E TV card in it keeps locking up Windows Vista on the AudioHG.exe driver. This one did not have the automatic updates enabled. When it was realized that the machine needed updates, all of them were allowed to download and install … including the MU drivers. The system choked with no hope of recovery. It was running fine until all of the updates happened.

Then, one of the Sapphire Radeon video cards on the system here has failed. There looks to be no way of bringing it back from the dead.

So, lots of troubleshooting with no real resolutions.

It is days like this one that really hone those rough personality edges. There is a need to take a deep breath before answering that thousandth phone call by the same person having an ongoing problem, to those crazy fog horn blasts in the ear because someone has a free cruise for me if I but, “sell my first born and give a pint of blood!” ;)

Yeah … one of those days. Tough on the professionalism to the Nth degree.

Leaves me thankful that I can go home to my wife and kids, after a number of really deep breaths, and enjoy a warm welcome from Monique and the fact that the kid’s screams of delight at my coming home act to separate work and home.

Refreshed, and repurposed, I will be able to approach things outside of the box and try again.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)

Windows Live Writer

Display Flicker - Change the Refresh

With the advent of LCD monitors, image flicker has become a thing of the past ... at least relatively speaking.

For the most part, a screen set to refresh at 60 Hz will provide a clear and flicker free image.

Some LCD monitors are a little more sensitive to outside electromagnetic interference (EM) than others. It used to be that one could change the refresh rate in the video card driver to 70 Hz or even 75 Hz to eliminate any EM interference.

On the newer and larger LCD monitors this does not seem to be the case.

Electricity cycles at 60 Hz. Sometimes, when the monitor is set to refresh at 60 Hz, the image will flicker.

Some may never notice it, but for those of us with relatively sensitive eyes we pick it up immediately. In the case of CRT monitors, the refresh rate was the first thing to get adjusted due to the annoying characteristics of the CRT's image flickering.

In this case, the monitor in question is a new Acer X243w. When the ATI driver was set to refresh at 60 Hz, there was no end to the amount of flickering in the monitor's image.

But, there was no option on that monitor to bump up the refresh rate to 70+ Hz.

There was however an option to bump it down:

Acer X243W Refresh at 59 Hz

Once the setting change was made and applied, the flickering was gone.

Having the refresh rate on the monitor set to 60 Hz along with the A/C being at 60 Hz when having EM issues is a bit like having two fans, one directly behind the other, spinning at the same rate but not synchronized. One will notice the lack of synchronization in the way of a flicker.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 on Intel X38BT Install Issue

There are just some things we never got warned about in school! ;)

When it comes to the more exotic system builds, it is always good to be prepared for the unexpected.

As our previous post on the conflict between the Zalman CPU Cooler bottom bracket and the back of the Intel X38BT makes clear, there were going to be more challenges putting this system together.

Even with the Cooler Master Cosmos' open design, there were some space and cable path issues between components.

One such conflict is between the ATI HD 3870 X2 and the on board SATA ports.

The Intel X38BT board layout is as follows:

19: On Board SATA Ports

We have the on board SATA ports directly in line with the PCI-E 16x lanes for the video cards.

So, when we go to install the ATI HD 3870 X2 video cards, which are full length and double wide video cards, we end up with a space limitation right above the on board SATA ports.

The out of the box SATA cables that came with the X38BT motherboard have the standard straight in plug style with the metal clip:

Intel X38BT Supplied SATA Cable

In this situation, they will not work. The cable ends plugging into the motherboard port would stand too tall for the ATI video card to seat itself properly in the PCI-E slot.

In order to make things work, we needed a SATA cable with a plug that had a profile that was as low as possible.

We were fortunate that we had a pile of SATA cables to sort through.

We ended up finding four of the following (we were installing four hard drives):

Intel Server Board SATA Cable with 90 Degree Plugs

Both ends of the cable had a 90 degree plug on it. Because of the tight space limitations behind the drive connectors, having these cable types on hand to connect the drives to the motherboard served up a double bonus:

• Enough room to properly seat the full length ATI video cards
• Better clearance on the plug side of the hard drives

One never knows when those spare parts may come in handy. In this case, they saved us a trip to one of our local suppliers to pick up some of the required SATA cables.

We will however, make sure to pick some up on our next trip through there or on our next order from Synnex or Tech Data.

As a system builder, one can never be too prepared! The above parts run would have cost us enough to cut right into the margins on the system itself.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.