Keeping Windows XP happy on a 1st gen SSD (minimizing writes)

SHORT VERSION:

Minimize writes to the SSD to keep the speed fast...

• install the EWF (Enhanced Write Filter) using this tool
• manage the EWF using the EWF Administrator program
  
• create a ramdisk, set 'temp'/'tmp' and windows 'temp'/'tmp' environment variables to point to it
• eliminate pagefile (caution, might be good or bad)
  

1st Gen SSD's and Windows XP don't support the 'trim' command, which means that the drive will slow down once all the internal pages have been written/erased, so the best plan is to minimize writes wherever possible.

In order to keep my HD-playback PC in top shape, I try to minimize any writes to the hard drive, which keeps the drives nice and quiet and reliable. Even before I got my SSD I had installed the EWF filter, which sends all writes to a hard drive to ram instead, and when you shutdown, you have the option of saving the changes to the drive, or discarding them. By default the EWF tries to protect your 'C:' drive (or whatever your OS is on), but leaves the other partitions alone, free to be written to.

The advantage of this is that once you have your pc set up just the way you like, every reboot brings you right back to it, since you can discard all changes that were made between reboots, perfect for running a pc as a reliable appliance. This is especially good since it minimizes the writes to the SSD, which slows it down.

The downside is that you can't do anything that takes a lot of RAM or resources, like Photoshop, but thats ok, since this is for my HTPC partition. I have Win7 installed on a different partition not using EWF for 'real' work.

Tips for installing Windows XP onto an SSD

SHORT VERSION:

Windows XP by default installs to a bad spot on a new SSD (sector 63). You need to install starting at sector 64...

FRESH XP INSTALL:

1. connect SSD to working pc
2. wipe all partition info off the drive, must be unpartition, unformatted for next step
   
3. run 'diskpar' on the drive to repartition *IMPORTANT* set partition offset to '64' (32k)
4. format OS partition using 'quick format', *MAKE SURE TO SET 4096 for the ALLOCATION UNIT*
   
5. reboot and start the install, DO NOT REFORMAT, select the new partition you created above
   

MOVING/MIGRATING EXISTING XP TO NEW DRIVE:

1. prep the SSD using the instructions above (1-4)
2. make your backup of the working OS partition using something that doesn't ruin the sector alignment when restoring (I use an old version of Norton Ghost (dos), and was able to copy directly HDD partition -> SSD partition)
3. power off pc
   
4. *IMPORTANT* swap sata cables on the SSD and your old HDD, so that the pc thinks your SSD is in the same 'place' where the HDD was
5. restore OS backup onto the newly created partition on the SSD
6. set SSD partition to 'boot' or 'active' (I used Partition Manager , dos-based, free)
7. set bios to boot from SSD
8. reboot :)

more details about SSD prepping and screenshots here.

If you have a 1st gen SSD like I picked up on sale (OCZ Solid 60GB, jmicron-infected), there's a few extra steps you should consider to keep the drive running smoothly (minimizing writes to SSD), which I will go into detail in my next post.

Borg-HD: Upscaling DVD's to near HD quality?

HD disks have 2 big features, and a 3rd bonus one:

- better video resolution (1920x1080), and better color (bt.701)
- better sound, up to 7.1 channels

the bonus one is 24P output, which if your equipment supports it, is great at eliminating the 'judder' caused by 24fps films being displayed on 30/60fps devices. You notice it most on panning shots in movies where the camera moves from side to side, a slight stutter can be seen.

DVD's only have a 720x480 frame displayed at 30 fps, and up to 5.1 channels of audio. I can live with 5.1 audio, since thats all my receiver can handle, but the resolution and framerate need improvement, epspecially if you have a big screen TV, where the DVD image will be magnified 6x.

'Borg-HD' is a set of upscaling settings that I think greatly improve the output quality of standard DVD's, making them once again watchable on a big screen HDTV. I call it Borg-HD since it will evolve and 'assimilate' any other suggestions, techniques, or challengers :)

The 3 main areas it covers are:

- video resolution/size (480p -> 1080p)
- video color (gamma, colorspace)
- playback rate (24p from DVD)

The last one is only of real benefit for those that have 24hz displays, or some multiple of it (48/72/96/120hz), but can make a very noticable difference to the 'flow' or smoothness of the movie.

The frontend I use is 'Media Player Classic - HomeCinema Edition'. Its a great, simple player with a ton of built in filters, including everything needed to navigate and playback DVD's. The first 2 areas listed, video size and color, can be tweaked using 'FFDShow', another great swiss-army knife of codecs. The last, playback rate, will be handled by Dscaler IVTC, which can recover the 24p frames back from the DVD via inverse-telecine.

Stay tuned for the settings...

Toshiba XDE, and HTPC DVD Upscaling

Toshiba, having abandoned the HD market, have come up with an interesting 'tween' device for enhancing standard-def DVD's, the Toshiba XDE.

The XDE is rumoured to be based on 'super resolution' tech that has been around for a while, similar to supersampling, where extra resolution can be determined by looking at a series of frames before and after the current frame to be enhanced. The most common implmentation seems to be for upscaling 720x480 DVD res to 1440x960, 960P.

At first I didn't see the point, since HD DVD and Blu Ray are still the kings, but then realized not everything is going to be re-released in HD, or at least not for a long time, and some of us don't like the thought of rebuying movies, so this device will help bridge the gap. Early reports sound like it is the best upscaler to date, enhancing video quality, colour, and playback rate, 24P, which is common on HD players, but new to DVD.

Home Theater PC (HTPC) users have been playing around with different upscaling formulaes for a while now, and some of them really can compete or even exceed some upscaling dvd players on the market. I recently wanted to watch a DVD that isn't available in HD, so I thought I'd look into a better solution than my typical PowerDVD software, and roll my own upscaling chain...

Borg-HD was born.

Still Alive in 2008!

TODO: I will be updating this blog again, now that I am starting to experiment with OTA & HDTV & Vista again.

Vista RC2 / 5744 - Reinstall went well

previously this week....

- RC1 / 5728 installed
- streaming live HDTV to xbox 360 would affect recording in background
- CPU spiked between 60-90% while streaming HDTV
- CPU 5-10% while streaming HD WMV
- USB external drive where recordings are made is using 50% CPU while active itself (!)

seems like my external USB2 drive is causing spikes in CPU while transferring, causing glitches in a recording while navigating in a different video during playback.


Vista RC2 / 5744:

Cleaned off Mono's hard drive, repartioned to 10GB(sys)/2GB(swp)/16(storage), and did a clean install. 35 min later, I'm at the Windows login screen. Very smooth install, more 'billboards' to look at while installing. I then checked for updates, and for my USB Fusion HDTV I followed DViCO's advice on installing their Vista drivers and installed their 3.5obeta app from their ftp site, then stopped the automatic driver install, and installed the downloaded vista driver.

The HDTV app that comes with the product crashed after finding a bunch of channels, kinda to be expected, I think the laptop isn't fast enough for live HDTV decoding, but only to serve as a backend server/recorder. The heavy lifting of decoding and displaying content is done by my XBox 360, or so the idea goes.

Vista is smoother, snapper than previous 2 builds. My CPU is still spiking between 70-90% while streaming live HDTV to xbox360, but not the wild swings it was doing before, between 30-90% every 2 secs. Live TV playback seems smoother now, seems to have a higher priority than previous builds, or just my disk access isn't choking the system anymore.

Having learned from previous weeks, adding my channels and guide listings was fairly straightforward. I still had to pretend to be from Lewiston NY, since the DVICO tuner doesn't like Canada as selection in MCE. Added back missing local channels, adding missing listings, updated guide, and wow, they were all there.

I'm not sure what kind of Vista/MCE minions are hard at work at MS, but everytime I start my xbox360, more album covers appear. Although the rescan at the beginning is a bit annoying, I'm somehow up to about 95% Covers found. The remaining ones are mostly rare or homemade compliations, so pretty happy about the number it found sucessfully.



I still need to look into an antenna solution before it gets too cold outside...

Todo, Vista MC, Xbox 360 Multimedia Remote

TODO:

• Better antenna to pull in Buffalo stations reliably, maybe CM4221 or CM4228
• Work out some sort of permanent cabling solution from antenna on balcony
• Slim down Vista to make it more efficient on older laptop
  

My current digital cable and internet come in through an existing cable and hole from my balcony. During my tests so far, I would open my balcony door, and run a coax from the antenna to my USB tuner. If I go completely OTA (Over-the-Air), and give up my digital cable subscription, I could reuse that existing cable for my antenna; except it's supplying my internet as well, d'ohh!

I'm really trying to stick to using my older laptop as my backend server, based on the challenge, and its more power friendly to leave on, so I'm going to need to slim down Vista as much as possible, turning off unneeded services, etc. Stay tuned...

Vista Media Center:

The new interface is VERY nice, smooth, although I didn't use MC2005 very much, so I'm not sure if there's any downgrades in the Vista version. The new interface is much like a certain handheld's interface, sliding efficiently left-right, top-bottom. The navigation can be slow at times, mostly when my PC 'Mono' gets bogged down, but does seem much better in #5728.

After transferring my music collection to Mono's external 40GB drive, I ran Album Art Fixer to correct the missing cover art, and got about 80% fixed, but the remaining ones stand out like missing teeth in MC. I think MC relies on the AlbumArt_{XXX}.jpg format, whereas Media Player will use it or 'folder.jpg'.

Xbox 360 Universal Media Remote:

I bought it due to the fact that using the gamepad was a pain. While watching DVD's it was always powered down when needed, and with the addition of Live TV and Media Center, I thought it was worth the convience. It's pretty nice, backlit keys, but only supports operating a TV and the Xbox360; no receivers, dvd players, etc. Being able to hit the green MC button, and have the XBox360 power up, and go directly into Media Center is very nice.

Vista RC1 5728 Released into the wild

Microsoft released another version of Vista, 5728, to the public preview.

Install goes well, faster by about 10 mins, and more polished. I start by doing an upgrade, but then reconsider and do a full reinstall. Installer makes a backup copy of Windows in Windows.old, and then does install.

After install complete, system seems snappier, more responsive than RC1. Mem footprint after login at keyboard is around 350MB/40 processes, without x360 connected.

With x360 jacked in via Media Center, resources jumps to about 500MB, with eShell.dll eating up about 80% CPU while streaming live HDTV from USB tuner. 80%? All the laptop has to do is forward the stream to the x360, so why the jumping between 60-80% ?

I'll have to try streaming a WMV and see what the CPU usage is like then.

Vista RC1 MCE + USB Tuner + Canada = Eventual Success

Time to configure the TV options within Vista RC1 Media Center.

I start Media Center on 'Mono', and go to Tasks/TV. It recognizes my DVICO USB Tuner, but when asked what country, and answer 'Canada', the next screen tells me that the video format isn't supported in my country. huh?

I go back, and answer USA instead, and the install continues. The tricky part came when it was time to configure the Guide listings. It asked for a zip code. I got on the 'net, and located a city on the other side of the border, that might get both my local Toronto stations, and Buffalo listings. I settled on 'Lewiston, NY' zipcode 14092. I'm not sure if this actually made a difference, since I still had a lot of problems configuring my local Canadian stations, but through adding channels manually in MC, and 'Edit Listings', and several 'Update Listings', I was able to get all my channel listings. Success!

Summary of past events

... in previous episodes:

4 months ago:

• 'HAL', server in closet (3ghz, 1 GB, 2x320(640)GB sata raid0)
• running Server 2003
• running MCE 2005 within VMWare Workstation instance
• streaming content to x360 from MCE2005 instance
  
• limited success with streaming non-native x360 formats using Transcode 360
• pain in the butt trying to use Xbox 360 gamepad for DVD and MCE navigation

1 month ago until present:

• Bought DViCO Fusion HDTV5 USB Gold, from Sensuz, great local (Toronto, ON CA) store specializing in HTPC, HDTV, fast service
  
• RCA ant706, $50, Active Surplus
• Xbox 360 Premium remote $29(sale)

Vista RC1 comes with the new version of Media Center, which no longer needs to have an analog tuner present, so I install it on 'Mono', my older laptop. Install goes well, I grabbed the Vista driver from DVICO's ftp site and the supplied TV app runs well, recording TV.

MCE within Vista was another story.

Adventures in Convergence

In the spirit of the pioneers, I ventured forth into uncharted territory, placing my faith in the unproven technology called 'Vista', and a device call the 'Xbox 360'.

Hardware:

• Acer Centrino 1.3ghz, 768MB, 30GB internal hard drive, (laptop circa 2004)
• DVICO Fusion 5 HDTV USB ATSC Tuner
• RCA ant706 indoor/outdoor antenna
  
• External 40GB 2.5" USB2 drive (music)
• External 80GB 3.5" USB2 drive (video)(todo: replace when running stable)
• Xbox 360, 20GB HD
• assorted cat 6 and rf6 cabling

The theory is that I will use my x360 as a 'frontend' to a media server running Vista Rc1 5728.

Originally, from previous adventures, the thought was that I would store everything if a main, high powered, multi drive pc, running in my closet. After having fun times running Linux + ctorrent on my original softmodded xbox (which, by the way, makes a great, low watt torrent machine, better than leaving on 400+ watts all day), the plan is to try to be as low powered as reasonable; enter my recently replaced Acer 1.3ghz laptop. We'll see it if can hold its own, running Vista, and streaming video to the x360. Early tests are very promising, but not perfect.