This bundle of joy was one of the first Intel P35 Bearlake boards released. From day one it has been the WORST board I have ever used. I have had three different ASUS boards in the past that are still working flawlessly (A7N8X Deluxe (nForce2), P4C800 Deluxe (875P), P5GDC Deluxe (915P)) but this one takes the cake.

This board was used as part of Project Halcyon back in July of 2007. It was a reasonably high end gaming machine (an upgrade from the now obsolete Project-X).

From day one I had received a faulty board. It had taken me at least a month to troubleshoot and find that this piece of hardware was the culprit for all my stability issues. With 4GB of RAM inserted the board caused BSODs from every single Windows driver you could imagine, no matter if the RAM was run at DDR2-1066, DDR2-800 or DDR2-533. Stress tests and Memory Tests showed up passes but it was impossible to keep an uptime of over 2 days without BSODing from clicking a link in Firefox! With 2GB of RAM inserted I was able to keep an uptime of 8 days! Shortly after this I BSODed and the P5K would not POST. I had Googled endlessly but alas the board was not yet popular and there were few relevant answers.

I had sent the board back to the suppliers for replacement and was told the board was not faulty, it was POSTing! I was damn surprised when I heard this. They sent it back, and yeah, it POSTed but it was still an unstable piece of shit. A few days later, it wouldn’t POST…again. Yes, I had tried all the usual things….take out the CMOS battery, disconnect everything, try different RAM, reseat the CPU, blah blah blah. I sent the board back again, this time it didn’t POST when it got to them and the RMA continued. It was up to TWO FUCKING LONG MONTHS LATER till I finally received a replacement.

Within these 2 months, it took ASUS 1 month to “Flash the BIOS” (which I could fucking do at home if I had the board, THANKS GUYS). Did this fix the problem? Of course not, back it went. This time for a definite replacement….But this took yet another month because ASUS decided to make this board End of Life within less than 6 months.

Finally, I received a brand new board. Did it work? Amazingly, Yes! I haven’t BSODed since with 4GB of RAM in. But we haven’t finished yet, the board is still incredibly flawed.

1. SATA Ports are located in the most retarded place ever
OK, This board was a brand new P35 board. You’d think this would be an enthusiasts board right? You’d expect that perhaps someone would use an 8800 GTX or Ultra with this board? Well I sure did, and if you do, you lose 2 of the 6 SATA ports because the heatsink gets in the way. So how would you over come this….with a SATA controller….more on this later.

2. The CMOS battery is also in the most retarded place ever. The CMOS corrupts itself….OFTEN.
Yes, that’s right. Behind your giant 8800 GTX/Ultra. You’d think this wasn’t a problem because you should rarely have to do this. Unfortunately, no. The P5K’s BIOS (even with the latest, 705 as of Jan 08′) is the most delicate and unstable ever. Disabling a simple option like the IDE Controller, or one of the LAN Controllers will most likely result in CMOS corruption in which the only way to POST again is to take out the battery and reset.

3. More on the delicate BIOS issue….Pressing keys restarts your PC!
Being the shitty P5K BIOS that it is, sometimes you’ll find yourself that even though the board is POSTing you will be unable to enter the BIOS because pressing any keys on your keyboard will cause the board to reset. What causes this is completely random and the only way around it is to keep trying (for up to 20 resets) or a CMOS reset. The most annoying part of this is that the bug still occurs when in the boot loader. What that means is pressing F8 to get to Safe Mode…or typing in boot parameters when loading Linux, restarts your PC!

4. Adding SATA Controllers…or any controller for that matter. Limited BIOS space.
Explaining my setup will help understand this: I have 2 1TB drives JBOD (that means not RAIDed), 2 150GB Raptors (in RAID0, using Onboard Intel ICH9R) and 2 IDE CD Drives.

The BIOS works in such a way that you have the “Main” BIOS and some add-in BIOSes (Add-in BIOSes being things such as the Intel RAID manager). The P5K Deluxe also uses an Add-in BIOS for the IDE controller (so that you can RAID IDE drives if you wish). However, even if you don’t want to RAID IDE devices an Add-in BIOS still loads because it seems to be a requirement. On the other hand, if you don’t want to RAID SATA drives you can choose not to load the RAID BIOS, freeing up an Add-in space and just using the SATA drives as “JBOD”.

So, I go out and spend some money on two Adaptec PCIe SATA Controllers so that I can add more drives (seeing as the SATA Ports are in a crappy position)…I install the controllers just fine however, I find that the SATA controller will use Add-in BIOS space. The P5K Deluxe happens to have a limit of TWO, yes JUST TWO extra BIOSes before it runs out of space.

OK, so cut to the chase…what does this mean? Well I need my CD drives, that’s one position, and my Raptor drives are currently RAIDed, that’s another position. See the problem yet?

Disabling the IDE controller (loss of CD drives) means I can use all the drives however, Windows won’t boot because boot.ini needs modifying. The only way I can edit boot.ini is with a BootCD…Sure, I could go between configurations, disabling the IDE controller (or RAID) when I want to access different drives but that’s an inconvenience….oh yeah, now go back and read POINT 2. If you haven’t got it yet…the CMOS corrupts itself fairly often when messing with options in the BIOS. Taking out the 8800 Ultra to get your board to POST again is. not. fun.

If you want to use a SATA controller with this board be prepared to format, stop using the Intel RAID controller and start using the new SATA RAID controller (performance loss yay!) If you do want to use IDE drives with your SATA drives you’re not going to be able to use Onboard Intel RAID. What a pain in the ass (for me anyway). On a slightly unrelated note you’d think that by now RAID would be standardized, but no, moving my Raptor RAID over to the new controller’s isn’t possible thanks to proprietary bullshit, making this a long and annoying process.

Conclusion: What do you think?

- Updated content
- AJAX
- Vista style (yay.)
- Simplified blog
- Dynamic CSS
- Cookies – saves your preferred CSS style
- Cool fading buttons

You can use the following syntax to jump to a page using the URL:

http://digitaldj.net/?page=x

x being newsheadlines, blog, halcyon, music, network, sigs and desktops.

Still in testing though, especially AJAX mainly because of browser compatibility. Currently seems to work smoothly on Firefox 1.5.0+, Opera 9+, IE6 and 7 Beta. The next goal is to test out the original Mozilla and maybe Safari? I tried to make this design as close to the XHTML standards as possible. Most of the site will definatly validate with XHTML 1.0 Transitional (except maybe parts of the blog because of dynamic content an my lazyness). Many parts are very close to XHTML 1.0 Strict except Strict does’nt allow < a >’s target attribute, which is just silly.

I’m thinking of adding one last section to the site, mainly just screenshots of previous versions of the site, but we’ll see what happens. Enjoy!

Edit: Mozilla works fine, my Mac OSX on laptop died so I can’t test Safari or Camino

Edit: Test for MT4.01

Over the last few days I haven’t really been doing much. Everything has been reasonably dead and I haven’t really been playing WoW as much as I have usually for some reason. There has been a couple of things that are sort of interested lately (mostly Microsoft things).

Firstly, Windows Vista Enterprise Febuary CTP was released to Testers on the 23rd claiming to be “feature complete”. The GUI will still be changing and bugs will still need fixing of course but the main features or Vista are all there and probally what you’re gonna expect for a final release. The 32bit version weighs in at 2.7GB and the 64bit at 3.6GB. I haven’t tried the build yet, mainly because I can’t be bothered, but most say its a reasonable improvement. I must say my enthusiasm for Vista has sorta died off again. This version carries build tag 5308.x86fre.winmain_idx01.060217-2200

The second interesting thing from Microsoft is the Origami project. It all started off with the Origami Project website which basically had a cryptic flash announcing something would come on the 2nd of March. This then lead to research and this article about Origami being a mobile communicator (keep in mind this article was dated back in 2001). Finally DigitalKitchen, one of the companies that create Microsoft promo movies let the cat out the bag by releasing their promo movie for Origami on their website. The video is sorta cool and it shows the Origami as being a Tablet PC type device that can do so many things. Media player, photo viewer, Web access, MSN Messenger, Gaming, Remote for MCE, Notetaker, Picture Drawer and GPS (just to name a few). I suppose some could say “its just another PDA” but theres something about it that I think just makes it cool. It soulds like it might be a powerful device. Check out the promo video Here (Enter Site > Work > BrandTheatre > MS Origami).

Thirdly, and not long ago too, MS officially announced the “flavours” that Vista will come in.
- Windows Vista Business (Aero (All versions have this), Searching (ORLY?!), Tablet PC Functionality)
- Windows Vista Enterprise (BitLocker Drive Encryption, Built-in Virtual PC, Subsystem for UNIX based Applications)
- Windows Vista Home Basic (Not much. “Search Explorer, Sidebar and Parental Controls”)
- Windows Vista Home Premium (“Aero”, “Search”, Media Center, Tablet PC, DVD Burning/Authoring)
- Windows Vista Ultimate (“Everything”)

Now basically the first 2 options are under the Vista “Designed for Businesses of All Sizes” section and the other 3 are under the Vista “Incredible New Experiences and Choices for the Home PC User”. I’m really really hopeing that the features of Enterprise WILL be in Ultimate and Ultimate just won’t be bloated home user crap. It annoyed me when you couldn’t run MCE on XP Pro so I installed XP MCE (which IS basically XP Pro and MCE). I will be extremely disapointed if the Built-In VPC and Drive Encryption are not implemented into Vista Ultimate, however, I have a feeling Ultimate is just going to be all the home features. We can only hope.

As for other news – not much. Today Bigpond announced their new craphole plans. Basically adding in a 10GB data usage plan with 20Mbit speed for $10 extra. They also added 20Mbit/20GB and 20Mbit/60GB which charge at $0.15c per MB when you go over the limit (instead of shaping) AS WELL AS costing more than $100 a MONTH. Seriously Bigpond, LRN2ISP. I could go on and rant about ADSL2+ being 24Mb/1Mb while being extremely cheap but I’m not gonna bother. For now I have upgraded one of my two cable plans to the 20Mbit/10GB plan just to see what the speeds are like.

I personally was thinking that they might make the 20GB/20Mbit plan about the price as the 10GB/20Mbit plan ($69.95 a month) but I was dreaming. I would have even been happy with a 20GB/10Mbit plan that was at a “non-extreme” price.

As for the 20Mbit speed, I mean who really cares. I suppose its sort of an upside for the upload. Keep in mind that you’ll most probally only be maxing out your cable on Australian sites or caching services like Akamai. 20Mbit to the US at a constant speed, well thats something I would dream of.

So basically as I was saying, I haven’t been doing much. I am however, really starting to get into the whole PodCasting thing (even though I don’t have an iPod, yet.) There are ton of good PodCasts out there, throw them together with Armin Van Buuren’s A State of Trance on Di.fm every Thursday and the occasional Family Guy/American Dad/Simpsons episode its a great way to entertain myself.

So basically, I decided I’d put together a list of my current cool podcasts.
-Diggnation
-Digital Life TV
-InDigital
-Systm
-This Week In Tech
-AvB’s ASOT
-TV Eps …well torrents duh

Well I’m done, bai.

About 2 weeks ago I bought a Logitech MX5000 Cordless Desktop as part of Project Halcyon’s Phase 2. It is, the biggest heap of shit I have ever used in my life. The keyboard looks flashy mainly because it comes with an LCD that changes each time someone signs into MSN or my Winamp song changes. However, each time this happens, it causes the keyboard to lag. Even if the song changes the keyboard still lags, so if I type “hello” I end up with “hhhello”. It comes with the Bluetooth version of the MX1000 which works slightly better than the keyboard, however, I think the bluetooth adaptor is faulty so its going back for a replacement in a couple of days.

Tech news I suppose has been reasonably minimal, the only thing that has really caught my eye is the public release of Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2. I’ve installed it, seems to work well and its reasonably fast. It adds a couple of new features but since Firefox has extentions I’m gonna stick with that for now. You can download IE7 B2 (build 7.0.5296.0) from the Microsoft site.

I set them up and they work great and look awesome. I had a bit of trouble with playing WoW on the 2nd monitor because Direct3D doesn’t do 3D acceleration on secondary monitors so I had to make a simple VB app to change to primary then back again. Unfortunatly, I don’t have the digital camera because parents took it with them when they went overseas so I took some really crap pictures with my phone:

I also found that the Hampstead exchange is “In Build” and so I finally ordered the ADSL2+ plan so now I have cable accounts and an ADSL2+ plan. Location is only about 1km from the exchange too, so I should get some pretty awesome speeds.

Christmas Eve was pretty boring family stuff. Cousin let me borrow his MX1000 mouse because he doesn’t like wireless until I get my new keyboard and mouse (hopefully in January). MX1000 works really well. Christmas Day was great and had a great dinner with Sunee’s family.

Anyway, there hasn’t been much news, so yeah thats it.

Got up at 8am, wen’t on to the SSABSA website which was getting hammered and got my results.

What more can I say than, I’m gonna get in to the course i wanna get into. IB don’t get their results till the first week of January so Uni placements don’t occur till the 2nd week.

Dell LCDs expected on the 3rd of January

Shoutbox Fix
I’m gonna go and fix the shoutbox now, seems to be a bug where it doesn’t parse the ‘ and ” correctly. So no, you didn’t type those /s in :p

Results
Well in about 8 hours or so SSABSA will be releasing the Year 12 results. I’ve been told to many dates that range from last Friday till this Friday but finally in The Advertiser today they announced that at 8am it would be available on the Internet and also in mailboxes tomorrow. Hopefully, I want to get 70+ even though my course only needs 66 (from last year anyway). Hopeing to do Computer Science and Commerce Law at UniSA.

Project Halcyon
I have split the project into 3 phases. Phase One will include the 2 Dell 20.1″ Widescreen LCD monitors that were ordered today. Hopefully these will arive around the 3rd of Janurary 2006. Phase 2 is small and only includes the new keyboard and speakers, hopefully completed by around March-April. Phase 3 is the main box which will be completed around June-July. I have put up rough specs which will obviously change as time goes on. http://digitaldj.net/halcyonparts.html

Microsoft News
Theres been a ton of new stuff, especially to do with the whole “Live” thing. Live.com is a new site launched by Microsoft basically allowing you to set it as your homepage and use RSS feeds to display what you want.

The Live Mail Beta is the new Hotmail. At first I thaught it looked bare but it really is starting to shape up. Not many new features have been added but the way you use Hotmail has definatly changed.

MS also are working toward home security with in the new Live phase with the online check at http://safety.live.com/ and the new OneCare Live Beta, which is currently only available to testers.

As usual they are also working on the Instant Messaging and Mobile Messaging deal, and so the Windows Live Messenger Beta has begun. Current build is 8.0.0365 and available to download at http://digitaldj.net/msn/. An update to MSN Messenger 7.5 has also been released bumping up the build to 0322. With Windows Live Messenger comes Windows Live Favorites and Windows Live Search which basically allow you to either search and check out your favorites from anywhere.

Finally, in the Live deal comes the Windows Live Local which is basically a copy of Google Earth, but not as good. Can be found at http://local.live.com/

Office 12 Beta has begun and released to testers but there hasn’t been much news on it. The December CTP of Vista was also released yesterday with a ton of new features and improvements and hopefully Beta 2 will be out soon. The build tag for this build is 5270.x86fre.winmain_idx03.051212-1830

R2 products like Windows Server and Virtual Server have also RTMed and been released and there were a few updates to Windows the other day, so make sure you get them.

Tech News
I haven’t followed that much tech news lately because I’ve been playing WoW and there ain’t much new in WoW either. Patch 1.9 is still in development but isn’t ready for release yet (I don’t think).

I personally can’t think of that much lately, however, DivX 6, AutoPatcher December 2005 and ATi Catalyst 5.13 were released in the past few days.

Thats all for now. I’m gonna fix the shoutbox, then bed probally – Just wanna get my results. I’m also gonna have a great time alone for a few weeks which will be great

All exams are over, no more, all done. Music was ok, Maths apps was easy….now just to wait for the results…

Anyway, no new tech news

WLM 8.0.0363 leaked, all patches and updates etc are at: http://digitaldj.net/msn8

A new Vista CTP should also be coming out soon too.

Thats all for now