Something that I have been meaning to write up for some time now...

In nearly every environment I have worked in I have always come across some type of issue with Broadcom NICs.

In my most recent bout, it was determined that the network wasn't always (seemed to swap between having link negotation issues and invalid IP addresses) 100% initialised in WinPE before a task in the unattend.xml started executing. In our particular case we were working with Microsoft Deployment Toolkit which builds a custom WinPE image as part of deployment point synchronising.

Sample boot.bat

@echo off
echo.
echo INFO: Executing Sleep
echo.
cscript //nologo "%systemdrive%\sleep.vbs" 10
echo.
echo INFO: Renewing IP Address
ipconfig /renew
echo.
echo INFO: Executing Sleep
echo.
cscript //nologo "%systemdrive%\sleep.vbs" 10
echo.

Sample sleep.vbs

If Wscript.Arguments.Count = 0 Then
   ' Print Usage then quit
   Wscript.Echo "Usage: cscript sleep.vbs <Number>"
   Wscript.Echo " <Number> - Number of seconds to sleep."
   Wscript.Quit
Else
   ' Print how long we are sleeping for
   Wscript.Echo "INFO: Sleeping for " & Wscript.Arguments.Item(0) & " seconds"
   NumSeconds = Wscript.Arguments.Item(0) * 1000
   'Sleep
   Wscript.Sleep(NumSeconds)
End If

Unattend.xml Extract

<RunSynchronous>
   <RunSynchronousCommand wcm:action="add">
      <Description>CommandBreak WINPE Customisations</Description>
      <Order>1</Order>
      <Path>X:\boot.bat</Path>
   </RunSynchronousCommand>
   <RunSynchronousCommand wcm:action="add">
      <Description>Lite Touch PE</Description>
      <Order>2</Order>
      <Path>wscript.exe X:\Deploy\Scripts\LiteTouch.wsf</Path>
   </RunSynchronousCommand>
</RunSynchronous>

I love my media center and for some time now it has been playing/pausing/recording all my media without major issue (especially after moving too Vista Ultimate). Now I did say major issue! Since day dot I have had one problem; 1+ second delay on key presses with my Terratec remote control.

The explanation is simple; the Terratec remote has programmed keys, and it requires that you install a hardware application to capture the incoming signal, and then process them as actions in whatever application you happen to be using, making it one of the most versatile remotes available. It’s just unfortunate that the user experience and general design are so crap, just look at it, what were they thinking?

Until recently there haven’t been many other options just a lot of promises (and more promises) that there will be a new remote available for Vista MCE although nothing ever appeared on the Microsoft Hardware site. :(

Well here they are... turns out that Microsoft has left it to hardware manufactures to take up the fight and conform to the new IR RC6 and Windows Logo Program.

    

Now all that is left is deciding which one to buy :)

I’m in the market for a new workstation and with the latest release of the 3 series chipsets from Intel the market has been flooded with a magnitude of new and exciting options, but be careful, as I found not all seems as it appears.

After checking several manufacture website and reviews I found this little beauty, ABIT IP35 Pro. The IP35 Pro is ABIT’s top line motherboard built around the Intel P35 chipset, which supports today’s latest processors and has the ability to address 8 GB of memory (about time really, Windows x64 here I come), sure to keep any enthusiast happy… Well that’s what I thought until reading this review.
"...a few corners cut, for example while the board does offer dual Gigabit LAN controllers both use the PCI bus."

First off, PCI should be taken out the back and shot! The devices I am interested in are all available on PCI Express interfaces. I consider PCI to be an obsolete architecture and, short of the backwards compatibility argument, the only reason we keep it around is because the devices are cheap.

So why is PCI (in particular PCI revision 2.3 – 32bit, 33MHz, as found on the Intel ICH9) dead to me? Bandwidth - with HD DVD/TV, Dolby 7.1, DirectX 10 Graphics cards and Gigabit demanded for the media rich experience on computers these days device interconnectors limited to 133MB/s just seems daft!  The math is simple – there just isn’t enough room to move all that data around, look at the diagram below?

You could argue that bottlenecks on other interfaces would be reached, disk transfer speeds, before you see limits on PCI devices, however with the ability to address 8 GB of RAM and high-performance SATA RAID controllers coming down in price the limiting factor in system performance is already PCI devices.

What are your options if you ‘must’ keep that SLI Voodoo2 setup in your system? PCI-X. PCI-X is an enhanced version of PCI, it has a 64bit bus and supports speeds of 133MHz giving it a total bandwidth of 1064MB/s. PCI-X has backwards compatibility for most 3.3Volt PCI cards but don’t think you will get any higher frame rates due to the 64bit bus or increase speed of the bus, you will still be limited by the PCI card. Currently the only 3 series Intel chipset available with PCI-X is the Supermicro C2SBX which is built around the Intel X38 chipset and only supports DDR3 memory.

The ABIT board I have attacked in this post is not alone. Really the issue here is with the chip ABIT and other manufacturers use to provide on-board controller network, the Realtek RTL8110SC. This chip is designed to only connect to a PCI bus which means that, not only does the existing P35 offering from ABIT suffer from this problem, but the new ABIT IX38-Max, ‘workstation’ class motherboard, the will have the same problem, along with other manufactures such as ASUS, Gigabyte and Foxconn.

For the moment I am still undecided which motherboard I will finally purchase for my new rig, hopefully I will find one with no PCI interfaces at all, somewhat of a pipe dream I feel.