Category Archives: Rich’s Random Podcast Generator
#16 Rich’s Random Podcast Generator – Windows 8: Start Screen, Charms, Keyboard Shortcuts, Reset and Restore, File History, and the Splashtop app
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Jim Collison is off today, visiting family in Kentucky. Mike Howard of jpeg2RAW joins Rich O’Neil as co-host for the show, and joining those two are John Stutsman, Paul Braren, and John ‘Diehard’ Zajdler. Discussions center on Windows 8 – Start screen and features such as Restore + Reset and File History, plus the Splashtop app for iPad and Android, and more.
There’s been some push back on the new W8 user interface – the Start screen in particular. The community is not exactly feeling all cuddly about it, yet I think it has possibilities; folks just have to get used it. To know is to love, no? Like, then… ok..tolerate… maybe. Knowing about screens that pop up when you mouse over the edges of the Start screen, and knowing the keyboard shortcuts goes a long way towards getting acclimated. I like the ability to search from the Start screen – no need to hit a search box or anything like that, just start typing and results pop up on the left and right. Very nice. Other tweaks and improvements in W8 include the use of the context sensitive ‘ribbon’ in Windows Explorer. So ya, I know we can get used to this new look, and of course we can still access the normal looking desktop. But then this UI was designed with a tablet in mind.
#14 Rich’s Random Podcast Generator – Hacking the HP Proliant MicroServer, VMWare ESXi, BIOS mods, Port Multiplier, VM’s
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This week’s episode is all about hacking the HP Proliant MicroServer N40L. John Stutsman, John Zajdler, Jim Collison, and Jay Moore each own one. Check out this post over at the Home Server Show forums to see what John S. has done with his MicroServer. It’s a great post with benchmarks and photos. While you’, you might want to check out the other posts in the HP MicroServer section of the HSS forums.
The guys owe a debt of gratitude to Christian Johnson over atBIOS-Mods.com for hacking the BIOS to get at some additional hidden features of the little server’s motherboard. You can directly download the modified BIOS here: bios-mods.com/BIOS/AMI/HP/o41072911mod.rar
You can also join in the discussion about it here: bios-mods.com/forum/Thread-HP-Proliant-Microserver-AMI-BIOS-MOD
The guys are doing everything they can with this box, which includes running virtual machines – VM’s. Jay Moore deals with VMWare ESXi (hypervisor) at work and he answers the guys questions about using the VMWare platform. There’s a lot of good technical discussion in this podcast.
#12 Rich’s Random Podcast Generator: Roku 2 XS, WD TV Live Streaming Media Player, Apple TV 2, Mushkin Enchanced Chronos
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This week the guys help Jim buy his first SSD. They talk in depth about the characteristics and inner workings of SSDs while trying to help Jim get the best bang for the buck. Though it’s an excellent choice, you might be surprised to see what Jim finally settles on.
The guys also discuss media streaming devices in the sub-$100 range. Over the last month, Rich had been testing the Roku 2 XS, WD TV Live Plus, WD TV Live Streaming Media Player, and Apple TV 2. The following is by no means an in depth review, but rather an evaluation of points relevant to what Rich wants specifically in a media streaming device. That said, the devices are listed in order of worst to first.
ROKU 2 XS
#11 Rich’s Random Podcast Generator: Hybrid Drives, Drive Caching, Icy Dock Xpander, RocketHybrid 1220, Acronis True Image Home 2012
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Today I’m joined by John Zajdler MS WHS MVP and Mike Faucher of BYOB. Jim Collison is off today. So…John’s HP MediaSmart Server EX 490 has died (motherboard) so he’s modding it with plans to turn it into a port multiplier drive bay. Mike had an issue caused by a miniport adapter in bridge mode that was absolutely killing his wired network speed. The miniport adapter was likely installed when he put VirtualBox on his PC. He disabled it in Device Manager and the issue went away. I had the same issue on my laptop where it would occasionally fail to connect to WiFi. I also had been using VirtualBox.
They guys talk about different types of hybrid drive options. A hybrid drive is one that pairs an SSD with a regular spinning hard drive in order to gain speed improvement over using a hard drive only. The trade-off is that you lose the full speed of an SSD but end up with a drive that is still faster than normal and which has a lot of capacity.
#10 Rich’s Random Podcast Generator: RAID Benchmarks, WHS 2011, Ivy Bridge, Power Factor Correction, W7 Backup & Restore
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Michael Martis of BYOB joins us for the first time along with regulars John Stutsman and Mike Howard of jpeg2RAW. Michael M. works with servers
, RAID and virtualization so we hit him up with a bunch of questions. The guys analyze some RAID 5 benchmarks and talk about RAID setups. Most any drives will work in a RAID, but some have better firmware, a better controller so they have better performance.
Do you rely on Windows Update to keep your hardware drivers up to date? Rich recently ran into a network problem which could only be solved by grabbing the latest driver direct from the manufacturer, Realtek.
Although some of us are fans, WHS 2011 hasn’t been quite what we hoped it would be. Remote Web Access, for instance, is a common problem though this really should be a straightforward thing. And pulling a large amount of files from a backup is painfully slow, as Mike Howards found out first-hand when he tried to recover a partition’s worth of files. The transfer speed is markedly different from the 1st version of WHS.
