During the paleolithic period, primitive man made tools out of stone and everything “electronic” used vacuum tubes. We’re talking all those ancient computers, televisions, radios, audio amplifiers, spacecraft and so on. Vacuum tubes were everywhere and you could find a tube tester in pretty much every grocery store, along with a stock of tubes in case you needed a replacement. Most importantly to guitarists, vacuum tubes were the lifeblood of guitar amps, delivering amazing tone and the occasional burned fingertip. Noble, savage, paleolithic rockers reveled in the awesomeness of tube tone, crafting epic rock anthems to commemorate successful mammoth hunts and the discovery of fire. Thousands of years later, a competing tribe of lab-dwellers invented the practical-yet-soulless transistor and lots of guitar amps went over to the solid state dark side. Many purists feel you just can’t get great guitar tone without tubes. Not that I have a strong opinion on it. I’m just saying…
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Yesterday I purchased an XBOX 360 with the new 65 nm “Falcon” chipset, which is smaller and more energy efficient than the previous 90 nm build. The biggest differences between this new chip and the old one is heat, which is the prime suspect behind the dreaded RROD. It took a few days of research to understand how to discern whether a unit has this new chipset by inspecting the outside of the box. The best ways to tell all involve a quick glance at the barcode label on the box:
- The build team should be FDOU. This is the only build team that has been confirmed to have access to the Falcon chip.
- The power supply should be 175 watts. The Falcon chip requires less power than the previous 203 watt power supplies.
- Lot # 735 or higher.
- Manufacture date 8/24/07 or later.
The sales person at Best Buy was cooperative about going to the stock room to check on the label for me, and he understood exactly what I was looking for. He told me they sell through a lot of units and are constantly restocked by Microsoft, and at this point ALL of their stock is Falcon-based. I hooked it up last night and fired up a few games. So far, so good. Assassin’s Creed is going well, although I’m back to the beginning so there is some tedious rework until I’m caught up to where I was before. Hopefully no RROD on this one. I purchased the 2 year no-bull extended warranty thing through Best Buy, so if there’s so much as a minor glitch I’m heading back there for a replacement.
Bring on the beasties! I’m looking forward to some serious clobbering this week.
Ten days. Then the dreaded Red Ring Of Death. XBOX 360 owners universally dread the RROD, and it seems to happen to every unit eventually. Oh sure, you can cheat the RROD briefly with the old “wrap it up in a towel” trick, but it will just RROD again (permanently) in short order. Mine died an ignoble death without so much as a whimper. Oh well. I’ll replace it with a new unit and should be back in the gaming saddle again without too much delay. But sheesh… I’m thankful Microsoft doesn’t design airplanes.
Gah. My XBOX 360 is turning into “mr freeze”. Seems like every game eventually hangs and requires a system reboot! I hope this isn’t a sign of misery to come…
I’ve been considering the purchase of an XBOX 360 for some time and have finally arrived at the conclusion that I should get one. My mission at this point is to locate one of the new “falcon chip” units which are supposedly less prone to the overheating problems associated with earlier units. I’ve made a list of what to look for when examining the packaging to ensure I’m getting the new version.
Yesterday an employee at Best Buy offered some helpful advice including “buy the extended warranty.” I don’t find that to be very surprising in terms of advice, given the reliability track record of this gizmo. Still, I’m thinking it’ll be fun to have it, and I’m planning to make the purchase some time in the next week or so.
After nearly a week of my work computer being in the shop, it finally returned to me today… in a completly newborn state. It doesn’t have any of my old applications, documents, drivers, settings, bookmarks, or cookies. Bleck. I’ll be busy for a few days getting this thing back to a state of usefulness. Merely locating some of the files will be a challenge…
As a digital photographer, I keep all of my pictures organized into folders on my computer’s hard drive. Since getting my Canon Digital Rebel XTi last year, I have generated about 20 gigs of images. I’ve kept telling myself I really need to back them up somewhere. While I consider my main desktop system to be pretty stable and issue-free, there is no guarantee that it will always function smoothly.
Last month I had an issue with another of our computers in which one of the hard drives appeared to be corrupted (thankfully it was a minor problem with a driver). My greatest concern was the contents of that hard drive; there are a number of files on it that aren’t currently backed up. One of the unfortunate rules of computing is that you probably won’t have a decent backup strategy in place until after you’ve already lost a bunch of irreplaceable data. I got the system back up and running, and after breathing a sigh of relief I realized how close I had come to being a statistic.
The incident renewed my determination to be an exception to this data-loss rule. So this weekend I spent some quality time setting up robocopy scripts on my home computers. Robocopy is a powerful command-line utility that has been around for a long time. It requires some understanding of the command-line environment and can be a bit difficult to work with. Fortunately, there is now a robocopyGUI interface that acts as a standard windows front-end to the utility.
I generally set up our computers with at least 2 hard drives. One is dedicated to the OS and to programs that require installation on the “C” drive. The other drive is for user documents and other data. I’m a bit believer in having a separate drive or partition as a backup area, so I set up robocopy to keep a mirror of my data in this space. After running it on my digital images director, I worked on copying other documents from the computers in the network. I am even thinking of backing up the windows partitions just in case.
This weekend I took inventory of my often-used computer software to determine which titles were most in need of updates. As a general policy I don’t go for every major update; there usually aren’t enough new features to warrant the upgrade. At this point, I’m two full versions behind on many software titles.
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In the past couple of days I’ve had curious experiences with fairly large companies, involving problems with technology. It’s surprising when such companies overlook seemingly obvious opportunities for service recover, and it makes me wonder what happened to the fine art of paying attention to details.
My position is this: sophisticated technology requires a sophisticated user. Especially if the user is a large corporation.
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If you happen to be a Verizon wireless customer, you may wish to know that Verizon will share your CPNI call data unless you speficially call them to opt out. The information being shared doesn’t individually identify customers by name or address, but since it does include call data and services used, it strikes me as inappropriate for them to take this liberty based on an opt-out model. Originally, telecommunication providors were only allowed to use this data if their customers had explicitly opted in. Recently, telecoms have begun to argue in court that their use of customer data is somehow protected as commercial free speech… as in free speech for the providor, not the speaker (!)
Verizon is increasingly annoying me with their policy changes. This is an example of a policy change that is being slipped under the radar of most customers and doesn’t seem to be getting noticed except by wary users and watchdog groups. Verizon may have the best network, but I’m beginning to consider whether I should renew my contract with them when it expires in a few months.
