Dish Network VIP 722 receiver vs KQED ATSC signal

The Echostar VIP 722 receiver is a very nice DVR. It can play and record TV from both over-the-air DTV broadcasts, and from satellite. It has one OTA tuner and two satellite tuners.
One of my most frequently watched channels is PBS, specifically KQED out of San Francisco. The 9.1 subchannel is their HDTV channel.
I have found that on half the broadcasts, the Echostar 722 displays a picture on 9.1, but is unable to decode the sound.

In the process of setting up a software DVR on my HTPC, I found that it can decode the same broadcasts, with sound. This is a problem with the 722 DVR.

I filed a report to Dish network tech support and had the issue escalated to their engineering department. I will update this page if I get a response.

Logitech Webcam Software trouble under Windows 7

Earlier this year, I reported my good experience with the Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000 under Windows Vista x64. Unfortunately, after installing Windows 7 x64 (clean install), my experience is no longer good. The application that comes with the camera causes many problems.

1. Clicking on "microphone" in LWS causes the application to hang
   
2. Cannot bring up "manage audio devices" in Windows control panel . It never comes up
   
3. LWS 1.10 installation does not complete (window not responding, hung for hours)
   
4. Skype settings window hangs (clicking tools/options in the menu)
   
5. Skype won't make calls . An endless dialtone rings even after one tries to terminates the call.
   
6. Skype won't exit
   
7. LWS.EXE cannot be killed from task manager
   
8. uninstalling the LWS application 12.10.1113 solves all of the above problems.
   But of course one can no longer take snapshots without this application installed.
   
9. Reinstalling the software does not help. All the problems come back. This is with the latest LWS110_x64.exe package.
   

I'm hoping that Logitech will provide a solution, and I will update this blog if they do, but so far, I have been out of luck. In the meantime, if you have similar problems, and can live without the Logitech Webcam application, uninstalling it may solve your issues.

Windows 7 vs Fedora Core 11, and Linux in general

This year, my father also wanted to upgrade his computer, as did my mother. I had a shop build one with the exact same parts. I imaged my mother's computer drive with Acronis, and imaged it back to my father's computer. So far so good. But I had installed Windows 7 with its default setting, which creates two partitions - a "recovery partition", which was about 100 MB, and a regular Windows 7 NTFS partition, which was about 931 GB.

My father has been a Linux user for a very long time, and only desired Windows for very occasional use. In the past, it was fairly easy to dual-boot Windows & Linux. Not so this time.

First, I had to shrink the Windows NTFS partition using the "shrink" tool. But this didn't work. There were a variety of unmovable system files towards the end apparently. Even after defragmenting the drive, the shrink feature of the Windows disk manager could only reduce the drive by a measly 300 MB ! The solution was very complicated : I erased all the partitions, reinstalled Windows 7 with a small partitions, and then re-restored my mother's computers into the small partition from my backup drive using Acronis True Image 2009. Now, I had a working Windows 7 installation, and some free unpartitioned space.

The next 3 days were spent trying to install various versions of Linux, mostly Fedora Core 11 64 bits, as well as Ubuntu 8.x. This was always unsuccessful. Typically, the Fedora installation program just crashed with exceptions. Just hours before I was supposed to leave, I got the idea to delete the 100 MB Windows 7 recovery partition. I then restored its content from the Acronis backup onto the large Windows partition, and booted with the DFSEE tool to make the Windows 7 partition active. But Windows 7 still didn't boot correctly. I then booted the Windows 7 DVD and used the recovery option. Amazingly, that worked. I now had a single 212 GB NTFS Windows 7 partition that was booting. After that, the Fedora Core 11 installation proceeded like a breeze.

Moral of the story : if you want to dual-boot Windows 7 and Linux - do not let the Windows 7 installer create the recovery partition when you get prompted to let Windows create additional partitions. Just say no !

Windows 7 vs LSI Logic 53C1030 Ultra160 SCSI controller

I have been using SCSI controllers in one form or another in some of my PCs for over 15 years. At this time, I have only a couple of SCSI devices left - one 36 GB hard drive made by Seagate that spins at 15,000 rpm, and a DAT DDS-4 tape drive made by HP. The last SCSI controller I bought was purchased in 2001 and is based on the 53C1010 Ultra160 SCSI chipset by LSI Logic, formerly Symbios, formerly AT&T, formerly NCR. This chipset worked wonderfully under a variety of operating systems, from OS/2 up to and including Windows Vista x64.

Enter Windows 7. Earlier this wednesday, I attempted to migrate the system containing this SCSI controller from Windows Vista x64 to Windows 7 x64. I was told that there was no driver for Windows 7 for the controller. This was quite disappointing, after 8 years of loyal services. I disabled the device in the device manager, and proceeded with the installation of Windows 7 anyway.

At the time of this writing, I have been unable to locate a proper driver for this controller under Windows 7 x64. This means the OS can no longer see my two SCSI devices. I don't care much about Windows no longer seeing the DDS-4 tape drive as I wasn't using it under Windows. But I am bothered by no longer seeing the SCSI hard drive, which still contains a bootable copy of OS/2 Warp Server for E-Business SMP. While that SCSI hard drive is formatted as HPFS, and can therefore not be mounted under Windows 7, it could still be imaged and backed up with Acronis True Image Home, at least under Windows Vista back when the SCSI controller worked. I may end up going back to Windows Vista on this system if I can't resolve this issue. Or I might move my OS/2 installation to another drive.

Windows 7 vs Acronis True Image Home 2009

For the last 6 months or so, I ahve been using the excellent Acronis True Image Home 2009 software to image the hard disks of several home computers under Windows Vista x64. During a recent trip to France, I traveled with a hard drive containing a drive image so I could get to all my files.
To my dismay, I found that I was not able to fully access the data under Windows 7 (RTM, ie. final version). True Image Home 2009 still has some issues under it. Specifically, at the time of this writing, it's unable to mount drives from the backup archive as local drive letters under Windows 7. All is not lost, since the restore feature of True Image still works. However, it takes much longer. I wanted to mount the drive to use the command-line XCOPY program to only copy certain types of files from the archive. Unfortunately, the True Image Restore feature is limited, and does not allow such file filters. I ended up having to restore a full directory, and then deleting all the unwanted files, which took much longer - in fact about 4 more hours than it should have.

Let's hope that Acronis will issue a patch for True Image 2009 to fix the drive mounting issue under Windows 7.

Windows 7 ATI HDMI audio vs digital coax audio issue

A few weeks ago, I was in France. I took advantage of the occasion to upgrade my mother's computer to much more recent hardware, as well as her television to a new 46" LG LCD HDTV. The PC was setup with the final version of Windows 7 x64.

She kept her old PC monitor, a 15" LG LCD, with only a VGA connection, as well as her old Yamaha RX-V420RDS amplifier, which long predated HDMI.

The PC sported a Sapphire video card with an ATI Radeon HD4850 chipset and dual DVI outputs. One output went to the 15" LCD with a DVI->VGA adapter, and the other went to the TV with a DVI->HDMI adapter and a 15m HDMI cable.

The PC audio was connected to the digital coaxial input Yamaha amp via a 15m coaxial cable.

After I taught her how to switch back & forth between her 2 displays in Windows 7, my mother noticed a very odd problem : when she was using the TV as her display, all sound disappeared ! But when she switched back to the 15" analog VGA LCD, it came back. I was unable to debug the issue for her over the phone. But I still had some more time before flying back home, and determined the root cause of the problem in person : Windows 7 had seen it fit to automatically redirect all audio to the HDMI output of the video card when the display was switch to the TV !

This was of course not what was desired for her setup. The TV's audio was muted and we had no intention of using its built-in speakers. We wanted the audio to always stay on the digital coax output hooked up to the Yamaha amplifier . I fixed this in the Control Panel by disabling the ATI HDMI audio output device. I hope this will help someone else running into the same issue of lost sound when switching displays.

Annoying Cubase license scheme

Last week, I bought a pair of Yamaha KX61 keyboards to replace a broken organ. They came with a limited version of Cubase software, called Cubase AI. Unfortunately, the software refused to install on my Vista 64 box, crashing in the annoying license checker scheme. The exact error message was Syncrosoft Protected Object Server has stopped working.

After much research, I found the solution to this problem :
1. Disable DEP in Control Panel/System/Advanced/DEP
2. Reboot the computer
3. Reinstall Cubase
4. Re-enable DEP, with the exception of the SYNSOPOS.EXE program., which lives in the C:\Program Files (x86)\Syncrosoft\POS on my system, but might be in C:\Program Files\Syncrosoft\POS for those with 32-bit systems.

IDE DVD drive + IDE to SATA converter + AHCI BIOS + Vista

This is your free "incompatibility of the day report".

If you try the above combination, the Vista install DVD will take about a half hour to boot, and will never be able to install.

The moral of the story : if you are going to enable AHCI in your motherboard BIOS, you need to make sure that all your devices are real SATA devices, and not using any IDE to SATA converter. I found this out, the hard way.

The specific components I ran into this with were a Samsung DVD burner, Unitek IDE to SATA converter, XFX nForce 750a motherboard with AMI BIOS, and Vista x64 SP1 boot DVD.

Incompatibility of the day : GA-P35-DS3R vs Hauppauge HVR-1800 vs PNY 9500/9600 GT

For inexplicable reasons, installing a PNY 9600GT video card together with a Hauppauge HVR-1800 capture card on a Gigabyte P35-DS3R motherboard causes Vista not to be able to resume from ACPI S3 sleep mode.

Other combinations are OK with S3 resume, including P35-DS3R + E-VGA 8600 GT + HVR-1800, P35-DS3R + PNY 9600GT . I even tried on another motherboard, an XFX nForce 750a SLI . No problem there with the same PNY 9600 GT video card and the HVR-1800.

I also own a PNY 9500 GT video card, which I tried. It has the exact same compatibility problem as the PNY 9600 GT video card.

So, I can't really say which of the 3 components - the Gigabyte P35-DS3R motherboard, the PNY 9500/9600GT video card, or the Hauppauge HVR-1800 is most at fault. All I know is that they don't work right together with ACPI S3 resume . This is one of the major problems with PCs today - so much hardware can be installed together, but most of the combinations are never tested.

Central Computers HCV0101 VGA to HDMI converter vs Roland VS-2400CD

I have been wanting to go all-digital for my displays in my home office. Don't ask me why, the reason would be longer than this blog entry.

One device has stood in the way until now - the Roland VS-2400CD digital audio workstation. As I have mentioned before in this blog, it is an embedded system, featuring only a VGA analog connection, and there is no possibility of installing a different video card. It outputs a fairly low 640x480 VGA resolution.

Thus, the only way to connect this device to a digital display (DVI or HDMI) would be to use an analog to digital signal converter. This used to be an expensive conversion box. Not anymore.

Earlier this week, I spotted an inexpensive signal converter on Central Computers' web site, model HCV0101 . The total cost was under $40. On saturday april 11, I decided to give it a try. I first drove to the Santa Clara store. They were out of stock, and directed me to their Sunnyvale store, where I purchased it.

Once I got home, I hooked it up - and got no picture whatsoever. The specs on the unit listed 640x480 as one of the resolutions :

640x480 60Hz 75Hz

I hooked up the VS-2400CD to my display via the analog VGA connection again. I then noticed that it was set to output 640x480 at 66 Hz for some reason. One of the very few display settings on the Roland is the vertical refresh rate. I turned it down to 60 Hz . I hooked up the converter again. And then, I got a digital picture ! I guess the converter can only handle those two specific refresh rates of 60 Hz and 75 Hz, and nothing else in between.

The 640x480 picture did not look good on the Gateway FHD2401, but that's because it tries to stretch it accross the screen in "wide" mode, and it's supposed to be a 4:3 resolution. That problem is common to both the direct VGA connection and the converted HDMI output. Unfortunately, the only setting on the Gateway that will solve that problem is using the "native 1:1" setting - but this results in the picture only being postcard-size, since the screen is 1920x1200. This problem has nothing to do with the converter though, and everything to do with the scaler in the Gateway FHD2401 and its lack of settings.

I thought I was done with the VGA->HDMI converter, but unfortunately not so. Later in the day, the unit started losing the HDMI connection. It turns out the HDMI connector on it is very loose. I think I got a defective unit. Another trip to Central Computers may be in order.

Update : I got a replacement unit. Clearly an open box one. And it behaved the same. It worked for a minute or so and then kept losing the signal. I guess a signal converter for that price is too good to be true. I returned it on April 13.

Level One DVI PS/2 KVM-0406 vs nearly everything else I tried to hook up to it

DVI PS/2 KVM switches are very hard to come by. Most digital video KVM switches use the USB interface these days, not the older PS/2 keyboard and mouse interface. Most computers for the last decade have featured USB connectors, though not all of them support USB keyboard and mice at boot time. Unfortunately, one of my machines is an embedded system, a Roland VS-2400CD, which features only PS/2 connections, and cannot be upgraded to USB since there are no expansion slots of any kind, and even if there were, it would also require firmware to support it.

One would think that such an issue could be resolved by the use of a simple PS/2 - USB converter. But that is not so. Plenty of converters exist to connect PS/2 keyboard and mice to USB-only computers, but there are no converters that I know of that will allow PS/2-only computers to use USB device.

In fact, the only solution is a smart KVM switch that can accept the PS/2 on the computer port side. That presents a big problem if one also wants to use a digital video interface like DVI or HDMI, since very few digital KVM switches exist with a PS/2 interface.

A week ago, I found one such switch on ebay. It was a Level One model KVM-0406 . The price was ridiculously low - about $45 shipped. The specs said its maximum resolution over DVI was 1600x1200, which was lower than the 1920x1200 resolution that I needed. But it also said that it supported the maximum single-link DVI bandwidth of 165 MHz, and my video card is doing 1920x1200 over single link DVI. So, I ordered it, and received it by fedex on saturday April 11.
I immediately hooked up one of my PCs to it, which was using an nVidia 8600GT video card. The pleasant surprise was that it ran just fine at 1920X1200. The mouse and keyboard worked just as well as with my previous analog KVM switch, too. The only problem was that the Cyberlink Blu-ray advisor noticed that HDCP did not work on the DVI connection - where it worked without the switch, but I did not have the expectation that this old switch would support it.

I thought I was all set and I went on running errands for the day - not trying to connect the 2 other machines to the switch.

Much later in the day, I was cursing at the switch. The Roland VS-2400CD had some major issues with the mouse locking up and jumping all over the place by itself. This was something that could only be attributed to the mouse emulation in the KVM switch.

Worse, my second PC, using an nVidia 9500GT video card, had major problems with it when connected to the switch. When I first hooked it up, "live", the display at 1920x1200 just flickered horribly and the picture was half way off screen. I thought it might be the 15ft cable. So I switched to a 6ft cable (the same length as for the other PC that worked), and brought the machine closer. The problem persisted.
I tried to reboot the system. The BIOS screens showed up without corruption. But the operating system (Vista) would not boot. Not from the hard drive, nor from the installation DVD !
I never could figure out why that was. But when I took the KVM switch out of the way and reverted to the previous configuration, the machine booted just fine.

Needless to say, with only 1 machine out of 3 working properly with the switch, it is not useful to me, and I'm in the process of trying to return it. I am not sure if I will have any luck locating a good PS/2 and DVI/HDMI switch.

For now, I have reverted to using my trusted Iogear MiniView SE for the keyboard and mouse connections, since it works properly with all 3 machines and its mouse emulation does not cause issue. And I am using the previously-discussed Monoprice HDX-501 switch to switch the Gateway FHD2401 digital display. It's not very ergonomic, especially since the HDX-501 uses a single toggle button that only goes forward, and requires four button presses to go to the previous input :-(. I foresee a better digital switch in my future.

LSI Logic 53C1010 SCSI controller vs Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R motherboard

I have used SCSI controllers on almost all the many computers I have built since I was 15 years old. I have a couple that I have been using since 2001 - an eternity in computer times - which are based on the LSI Logic 53C1010 chipset.

When I did a major computer upgrade in 2007, I chose a Gigabyte GA-P35-DSR3 motherboard.

The LSI SCSI card worked OK with it, with one exception : the SCSI BIOS always searched for all 30 SCSI targets, 15 on the LVD bus (Ultra 160) and 15 on the regular wide SCSI bus (40 MB/s). It seemed to ignore the SCSI BIOS settings that I had set, telling it to only search for the SCSI targets that I actually have. This annoying problem increases the machine's boot time by about 20 seconds. There are 3 other disk controllers in the system - one Intel ICH9R SATA controller on the motherboard, one Gigabyte SATA controller also on the motherboard, and finally one VIA IDE/SATA controller on a multifunction PCI card. That's a lot of BIOS storage target scans to go through before the computer can even start booting the operating system from a hard disk or other device. It's a little bit over a minute's worth of BIOS time. Unfortunately, too many programs still require reboots after installation or uninstallation, or I would seldom reboot the computer - I normally use ACPI S3 sleep/resume feature which works great.

DataColor Spyder 3 Pro colorimeter

Having caught the digital photography bug, I decided that it became important for me to see the colors as intended on the screen. This especially helps with printing color photographs, and I happen to own 4 different color printers of various technologies - two inkjets, one dye sublimation, and one laser.

As astute readers of this blog may know, I just replaced one of my monitors with a new Gateway 24" FHD2401 . It features a very bright picture - much brighter than the screen it is currently placed next to - a cheap Chimei CMV-221D . As a result, the photograph looked extremely different between the two screens. Just dragging windows between the two was pretty bad - they also has a mismatched number of lines and different picture height, 1200 vs 1050 .

I did much online research, and also had the Pantone Huey Pro 3 on loan from a coworker, and was unhappy with it. So, I decided for a slightly more expensive product, the Data Color Spyder 3 Pro. This is a neat little USB sensor device that comes with calibration software.

I bought it last saturday night, March 28 at MicroCcenter. I had the software installed, and my 2 monitors calibrated in about a half hour. The picture looked matched much better. To be fair, there is still a large difference due to the Gateway's brightness , but the colors match fairly well - the tones don't change much when moving one window accross monitors.

I repeated the process with the second computer on my KVM switches, which was also hooked up to the same two monitors . Again, no problem.

I was about to post a glowing review of Spyder 3 Pro, but did not get the time to post on Sunday. That's when I discovered the problem today : the Spyder's monitoring agent process, Spyder3Utility.exe, had consumed over 1.6 GB of RAM, all by itself , after I had run my NSS software QA tests overnight in a loop for 24 hours ! The only job of that agent process is to remind the user to recalibrate - I set it to check daily, and remind once a month - or take ambient light samples, a feature that I disabled. Apparently, there is a huge memory leak. The agent seems to leak some data for each process that is started on the computer. My software QA tests easily ran over a million processes overnight - my PCs don't have quad-core processors for web browsing word processing. If the machine sits idle, there is basically no leak in the agent, but while the QA tests run - which are all text-based programs, by the way - the leak is over 1 MB per minute, which accounts for the 1.6 GB overnight figure .

The good news is that this agent can be stopped without too many negative consequences for me. Stopping it does not lose the monitoring calibration. But the agent may still be needed to set the calibration at startup time. I haven't tried to disable it completely at boot time.

I have reported the memory leak to DataColor.

The agent also doesn't play too well with the KVM switches - when displays disappear or reappear, it gets confused. Another day, another problem.

Free after rebate software : Corel Media One vs Hauppauge Win TV HVR-1800 video capture card

It pays to resist the temptation to acquire and install more software, especially software that is free after rebate, like my neighborhood Fry's Electronics likes to do to empty their shelves.

Assuming you do get your rebate - and so far I have gotten nearly all of mine, although not in the delays advertised, the costs of "free after rebate" software can be far higher than your time spent filling out, scanning, OCR'ing, and mailing out the rebate forms, the interest on your money during the 6 months period you can expect to be out your cash, or the amount of the sales tax which isn't refunded by the rebate.

Buying retail software was something I had rarely done - I used OS/2 as my home OS from 1992 to 2007, and I never found much of anything in stores. But in 2007, I switched over to the dark side - I started using Windows Vista x64 instead.

I have since bought many, many software programs for minimal cost due to "free after rebate" deals. Some of which I needed, and many others that I never actually used.

I needed a good photo editing program, and I thought Corel Photo Impact Pro 13 would be it. Very big mistake. This program has conflicts with many others, not the least of which is with the programs from the Hauppauge HVR-1800 WinTV capture card. Everytime I started WinTV, it would display the message "Please wait while Windows configures Corel Media One". One would click cancel, and the dialog would come again 3 times, until WinTV would actually come up. And then the picture was square instead of 4:3 format, not filling the whole windows, even if maximized.

Since the error message seemed to point out the source of the conflict, I decided to uninstall Media One. Unfortunately, that did not solve the problem with the shape of WinTV. After reinstalling WinTV also, the picture now came in the right shape at startup. But there was no longer any sound, or video motion. The software only displayed the initial from the VCR hooked up to the composite input, and nothing more.

It was time to boot to my "test" Vista partition, setup for the purpose of checking compatibility issues only. That partition never had either Corel or Hauppauge software installed. I installed the Hauppauge WinTV. It worked fine the first time, with sound.

The conclusion - there is still another software conflict somewhere remaining on my production Vista partition, which prevents me from using WinTV. But I don't know what it is.

Maybe after my next full system backup, I will delete a few of the 100+ programs that are installed and try to figure it out. I will be sure to update this page. Stay tuned - I won't be on my WinTV.

New webcam : and the winner is, the Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000 webcam.

I found an acceptable replacement webcam on my second try. The first one was a Creative Live Cam Optia AF. It was unsuitable due to poor image quality and poor software. It went back to Fry's the next day. The final choice was a Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000, which does wonderfully, especially with Skype. There isn't much of an improvement when using it with apps like Yahoo Messenger, since it transmits in such a low quality, if it transmits at all.
I no longer have random crashes with Pinnacle Studio 12.1 when the cam is attached to the computer. However, Studio will crash with a corrupt stack when recording from the cam. But I think that's more of a bug in Studio than a problem with the webcam this time.

24" monitor saga, vs Monoprice HDMI switch HDX-401E

On March 7, I noticed a nice, 24" monitor at Microcenter in Santa Clara. It was a Sceptre brand and featured 1920x1200 resolution. It sold for $289, with a $40 rebate. That was relatively inexpensive, and I decided that it was time to replace one of the two monitors in my home office.

I was running a two monitor setup. One was a 7 year old Dell 2001FP, which was 20" and 1600x1200, which I was running with its analog VGA connection. The other monitor was a 22" Chimei CMV-221D with a resolution of 1680x1050, running using its DVI connection.

I have multiple source devices in my small home office : a Roland VS-2400CD digital audio workstation, which is a sort of embedded systems with PS/2 keyboard and mouse connections, and analog VGA video; as well as two PCs, both setup with dual monitors.

One of the switches I was using were an Iogear MiniView SE 4-port PS/2 - VGA KVM to switch the analog video and keyboard/mouse for the Dell monitor between the VS-2400CD and the 2 PCs. The other switch was a Monoprice HDMI switch, to switch the digital video of the second screen between the two PCs, with the Chimei monitor. All was running fine up to that point.

Because the new Sceptre monitor had a higher resolution - 1920x1200, I decided that it should be run with its digital DVI connection. That meant the Chimei would now be run in analog VGA. That part was no problem - and the Chimei ran fine in VGA at 1680x1050 without any visible ghosting.

The problems started when I connected the Sceptre to the HDMI switch, with the help of the very same DVI-HDMI adapter I was previously using with the Chimei DVI connection. There was troubling video corruption in the upper left corner of the screen. This corruption was minor when using the computer that was connected 6ft to the HDMI switch - for a total of 12ft of cables. But that corruption became intolerable when switching to the other computer, which was 15ft away from the HDMI switch. Through many hours of trial and error, I determined, that I could make the video corruption go away if, and only if, the Sceptre was directly connected to a single computer, with a 6ft cable, and without a switch. I also tried to directly connect it to the farther computer - but the video corruption reappeared.

The next day, on March 8, I went back to Microcenter and told him about the problem. He gave me a new unit of the same Sceptre 24" model. I plugged it in. The problem was back, instantly. I packed it, and went back to the dealer within the hour. I then picked up an HP w2408h floor model, for $299. This appeared to be a very nice monitor, with rotation capability, and a built-in USB hub.

I brought it home, and it worked fine with the HDMI switch, to my relief, without any corruption problem. I noticed that the colors were way off compared to the other Chimei monitor, and was not able to manually make adjustments to match the two screens. I figured I would use a color calibrator eventually to solve this issue.

I thought that this was the end of my monitor problems. Unfortunately, that was not to be. Over the next week, the nice HP monitor developed issue going into sleep mode, wasting electricity and heating my room unnecessarily. At other times, it would go to sleep mode, and would be unable to wake up at all, except by pulling the power cord. This was annoying. I started googling and found that this was a common issue, that was sometimes resolved by installing HP software. I had never installed software monitor. I found that there was about 100 MB worth of HP software for the monitor indeed, which I installed on both computers. This software had capabilities like auto-pivot, and software control of brightness and contrast. But it only worked properly on the one computer that had the USB connection to the monitor. And it actually did not resolve the problem with the sleep mode. The problem kept popping up. In addition to the way-off colors of this monitor, this was too much of a problem to live with. I knew I had to do something to resolve it.

On March 21, I purchased a Gateway FHD2401 24" monitor from Fry's electronics. It had a very nice picture in the store, seemingly more accurate than many other monitors. When I brought it home, it seemed to match the Chimei monitor's colors better, too. Unfortunately, trouble started immediately when I started switching computers with the HDMI switch. The monitor went into a "hung" state as soon as I switched source. The picture went black. None of the buttons on the monitor worked anymore, including the power buttons. Also, even when not switching the source, the monitor would not go to sleep when it should, just like the HP. At that point, I became extremely angry. Many expletives were heard. I spent the next few hours trying to resolve the problem, to no avail. I verified that the monitor worked perfectly fine when directly connected to either computer, even with the long HDMI cable run. But being able to switch to a different computer source on this monitor was a requirement for me. At that point, I was starting to think that I should return both this Gateway FHD2401, and the HP w2408h, and just get my old Dell 2001FP back from my boyfriend. Around 2am, I had the idea to try one last thing.

In my home theater, I had another HDMI switch. It was also from the same brand, Monoprice. It looked almost identical. But it was a slightly different model, a 5 port version, called the HDX-501. I decided to exchange the HDMI switches between the home office downstairs, and the home theater upstairs. And that did it ! With the HDX-501, the Gateway FHD2401 worked just fine. There was no longer any problem when switching computer source. It went to sleep when the computer went to sleep. And it woke up when the computer was turned on. If only I had this idea earlier. I really didn't think that the HDX-401E was the problem, since it worked fine with the Chimei CMV-221D monitor, and I did not expect that the HP or Gateway monitors should have problems. Perhaps the reason is that the Chimei is not an HDCP monitor, and the HP and Gateway monitors are HDCP, although I did not attempt to play any content that requried HDCP at any point, and have no need for it.

My home office was working with the new Gateway FHD2401 monitor and the HDX-501 switch. But I wasn't done yet. I had to test the home theater with the HDX-401E switch. The HDMI components in use were a Sanyo PLV-Z2000 projector, a Sony BDP-S300 Blu-ray player, a Dish network 722 HD DVR, and a home theater PC. Fortunately, it appeared that the HDX-401E did switching the job withoua a problem with this combination, although much more slowly than the HDX-501 - there was about a 3-5 second delay after a button press before the source was actually switched, vs about 1 second with the HDX-501 previously. I suppose I could live with that. Next came the realization that the infrared remote codes for the two switches were different. That meant my Sony RM-AV2500 universal remote could no longer switch HDMI source. I spent the next hour trying to find the tiny HDX-401E original remote, so that I could feed the proper IR codes into my RM-AV2500. I finally went to sleep at 4am.

On March 22, I returned the floor model HP w2408h monitor to Microcenter, with no issues.

Video editing programs vs Philips SPC700 webcam

For the last year and a half, I have been using a Philips webcam, model SPC 700 . It has a good picture quality compared to many webcams in its price range.

Recently, I started doing some video editing. I noticed that every single video editing application that I used was unstable and would crash inexplicably.

I have now discovered that the culprit was this webcam. The Microsoft developer studio led me to this highly suspicious stack :

> vphc700.dll!153163ce()  
 [Frames below may be incorrect and/or missing, no symbols loaded for vphc700.dll] 
 ole32.dll!76e4b381()  
 ole32.dll!76e4b536()  
 ole32.dll!76e4b454()  
 ole32.dll!76e4b5f3()  
 mfc80u.dll!733b9c80()  
 mfc80u.dll!7337d04b()  
 mfc80u.dll!733a89ee()  
 mfc80u.dll!733a9d15()  
 mfc80u.dll!733a8874()  
 mfc80u.dll!7337d33b()  
 Studio.exe!0078ab76()  
 kernel32.dll!76a7e3f3()  
 ntdll.dll!776ccfed()  
 ntdll.dll!776cd1ff()  
 Studio.exe!00790065()  
 Studio.exe!00700079()  
 Studio.exe!006e0065()  
 Studio.exe!006e0065()  
 Studio.exe!006e0065()  
 Studio.exe!0062005f()  
 Studio.exe!0062005f()  
 Studio.exe!006e0065()  
 Studio.exe!00700079()  
 Studio.exe!00700061()  
 Studio.exe!00700061()  
 Studio.exe!00700061()  
 Studio.exe!00700061()  
 Studio.exe!00700061()  
 Studio.exe!00700061()  
 Studio.exe!005c0032()  

After unplugging the webcam, I am able to do video editing without any problem.

As it turns out, Philips has not updated the webcam software for Vista since april 2007, so there is no fix that can be downloaded.

I will no longer use this webcam. I may use it with another computer where I don't do video editing, sell it, or maybe even give it to one of my cats to chew - he loves chewing webcam cables.

Apple iTunes and HP LightScribe gripes

No, this isn't another iTunes RFE. Although, it would sure be nice if iTunes supported burning labels to LightScribe discs.

This is more of a bug report. And a very annoying one at that. On my system, running Vista x64, using iTunes simultaneously with any of the free Lightscribe labeling programs is a recipe for disaster. What happens eventually is that all LightScribe progress will stop. The label application cannot be stopped. The Lightscribe disc can not be taken out of the drive. The computer cannot even be put to sleep. The only "fix" is to ... Press the reset button to reboot your whole OS. Or if your computer doesn't have one, hold the power button for 5 seconds. The Lightscribe label can be reburned over - it will position correctly. At least the media is not wasted. But this is totally unacceptable.

The only "solution" that I have found ?

1) Close iTunes while burning LightScribe labels
That's rather annoying, given that if you print graphics, a label can take a cool half hour.

2) Burn Lightscribe labels from another computer
See 1) :-(

Did I mention I have two computers, each with 4 optical drives. One has 3 LightScribe burners, the other 2 . I should be able to burn 5 simultaneous LightScribe labels, in theory, while listening to iTunes, if it was not for the crappy LightScribe software, and the iTunes interaction.

In practice, the LightScribe software also has the problem that it really doesn't like to run simultaneously on multiple drives. It will be extremely slow doing that.
Apple, HP, are you listening ?