One of the funnier bits I ran across was the dueling AMD / Nvidia booths in the North Hall foyer. I’m not sure if this was intentional, or an accident, but they’re almost right next to each other.

The potentially coolest thing I saw was Nvidia’s FG100 DX11 graphics card actually running in a PC. No word on final specs, pricing or power consumption, though. Now it’s off to CES Thursday and more meetings.

CES is a strange show in some ways. It’s really a show for buyers, the people who decide what to order for store (and virtual store) shelves for the coming year. There are also classes, mostly targeted at those buyers. But it’s also a giant show for media. There are way too many journalists and bloggers trolling for too few stories.

Perhaps more accurately, there are too many journalists trolling the same ground. In some respects, that’s why blogging is great. A blogger who only cares about Internet connected fitness gear, for example, can just write about that.

On the other hand, if you’re a casual, but interested, reader, you’ll find vast numbers of articles on various web sites and newspapers about the same stuff. There is a definite herd mentality, particularly among the tech-focused, mainstream press. That’s the nature of the beast, though, so I’m not sure how it could change. Good writing makes up for this, and if I come across some really good articles, I’ll either post links here or in my twitter feed.

If you want to read my impressions, I’ll be posting daily reports at Tom’s Hardware. I’ll also be posting tweets from my twitter account, @loydcase.

I’ve got a busy schedule, mostly focused on enthusiast PC technologies. I’ll be talking to Intel, AMD, Asus, Gigabyte, MSI and many more. I’ve managed to squeeze in a little show floor time, too.

I’ve got some plans for Improbable Insights, too, but I’ll share those upon my return from Las Vegas.

We’ve had a Dish Vip622 DVR running for several years now. The 622 is an HD DVR, which can record standard definition and high definition content. The day after Christmas, we were watching a DVD when the audio was almost completely drowned out fan noise. Have you ever heard a PC graphics card when its fan spun up to full speed? That’s similar to what we were hearing.

I paused the Blu-ray player and discovered that the Dish Vip622’s fan was spinning at full speed. Using the Logitech Harmony One to switch to TV mode revealed… nothing. No picture, no audio, nada. The Vip622 had bit the big one.

I didn’t get around to calling Dish Network for several days, but once I did, they scheduled a tech to come in and check it out. The wait, surprisingly, was less than 48 hours. Like most service organizations, Dish doesn’t give a specific time for an appointment. Instead, you’re given a time window. In my case, Iw was too expect the tech between 8AM and 12 noon.

Imagine my surprise when the Dish van rolled up to our house at 8:05AM. When the tech arrived, he listened to my description of the symptoms and immediately went back to his van to get a replacement unit.

Dish apparently no longer carries ViP622’s, so instead the tech swapped in a ViP722k. Interestingly, you lose built-in over-the-air support with the 722k, but do gain another 100GB of hard drive capacity. It took about a half-hour to set it up and verify it was working. While he was setting it up, we talked, mostly about business and new gear. Business has been down somewhat – no real surprise given the recession – and most of his work has been satellite dish relocations as people have moved.

I signed some paperwork, and the tech left. The whole affair had taken less than an hour. After he left, I picked up the Harmony One and fired up the TV.

Nothing.

Actually, there was something: my Onkyo TX-SR875 receiver fired up and the Sony HDTV also powered on. But the Vip722 remained resolutely off.

I grabbed the Dish remote, and tried to turn on the ViP722. Sure enough, it turned on.

I realized that I probably needed to reprogram the Harmony One, which meant downloading the Logitech Harmony software, since I hadn’t programmed the remote since upgrading to Windows 7. Harmony remote are actually programmed via a web app running on a PC or Mac.

The process of programming a Harmony is somewhat cumbersome if you’re a sophisticated user, mainly because Logitech seems to want the whole affair to be idiot-proof. For example, once you start down a path (adding a device, for example), that’s all you can do. Despite this linear mode, you can still click on the tabs at the top of the screen to switch to other modes – you just can’t do anything until you actually press the “done” command.

Also, Logitech’s database of device controls is user-generated. I discovered that the control setup for the ViP722 was severely limited, at least compared to the 622. I actually needed to add a soft button so I could switch to DVR mode to manage or watch recorded shows.

Once the program was uploaded to the remote, I took it upstairs and fired up the TV.

You guessed it: once again, the TV turned on, the A/V receiver fired up, but the DVR stayed off.

It turns out that the 722k has multiple addresses for receiving either IR or UHF signals (the Dish Network remote can operate in either IR or UHF mode, if you have a multiroom setup.) The Harmony apparently sends out its IR signal over a different channel than the 722k’s default setting of IR channel 3. I had to reset the channel to IR channel 1. Dish actually maintains an online copy of the manual. Chapter 10 of the manual describes the process of changing the Dish IR receiver remote address.

Resetting the VIP722k Remote Receiver Address (from the manual)

Once that little chore was done, everything worked as it should.

This took more research than anyone just wanting to watch and record TV should have to perform. It’s as if the complexity of the PC universe is gradually encroaching on the world of consumer electronics. I suppose it’s the price we pay for more flexibility and programmability. But as PC interfaces become easier, the CE world seems to be adopting the worst of the old ways. Let’s hope this all improves over the second decade of the 21st century.

The problem is, though, I’m spoiled.

When we were first looking into buying our house back in 1997, we discovered it had a daylight basement. At the time, I was a full time freelance writer (as I am once again.) The basement doesn’t actually appear as floor space in the county assessor’s report – something about below-grade areas not being considered part of the living space. It’s an odd quirk around here, but then most houses in northern California don’t have basements at all.

The basement was partially finished, so when we moved in, we added carpeting and third wire ground to all the basement outlets. I also added a 200A service to the house, replacing the aging 100A box that came with the house.

The basement has two rooms, a large storage area off the larger room, plus a bathroom and a roomy closet where the hot water heater and furnace live. The smaller room became a spare bedroom while the larger room, with its associated storage area, became my office and lab space. Eventually, when my wife began working out of the house full time, the spare bedroom was converted to her office.

If you want to check out more details on the basement lab, check out the blog post on the http://www.improbableinsights.com/2009/08/17/294/ basement lab.

Ever since the network was set up in the lab, we’ve had LAN gaming sessions most weeks; eventually, these multiplayer gaming sessions were dubbed “Friday Night Follies.” The office space itself is pretty large – 18 x 15 feet or 270 square feet. I’ve added workbenches (http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/categories/departments/workspaces/11723/ IKEA GALANT tabletops with the T-legs), plus a couple of older rolling PC workbenches from http://www.anthro.com/ Anthro, which were part of a budget line the company no longer makes.

I can – and have – crammed up to ten working systems into this space, though the most we’ve had on the LAN for gamin is eight. Most Friday nights, though, it’s just four of us, though tonight (November Friday the Thirteenth), there will be six.

We’re pretty eclectic, though we tend to favor co-op against the AI to playing PvP. We have a mix of gamers, too. Two of them play MMORPGs (one is an MMORPG fanatic), while the third player is like me: single player when on his own, and multiplayer when he comes over to my place.

We have, on occasion, even played an MMO game or two, including D&D Online, Guild Wars and the flawed, semi-tragic failure that was Hellgate: London. That’s the only time I’ve ever really played MMORPGs – on my LAN, with my friends.

I’m completely spoiled by the experience.

The idea of playing online, talking to other gamers through a headset, dealing with lag and griefers, is simply unappealing. I realize I’m also missing out on some potentially great experiences. It all comes down to simple time budgeting: how much time I have for gaming, versus work, versus family life versus other interests. A lot of the time I might spend in online gaming is instead spent with single player games. Lately, for example, I’ve been completely sucked into Dragon Age: Origins.

So maybe it’s a hit on my geek cred that I’m very rarely found in any online games. But then, I’ve got my own LAN party going most Friday nights. How much more geeky can you get?

The timing is certainly interesting, coming so soon on the heels of New York State’s recent filing against Intel on that same topic. Toss in the European Union judgment, and you get a picture of a beleaguered Intel, fighting a battle on multiple fronts.

What does the settlement really mean for consumers and OEMs? How will it affect AMD going forward?

There are still a lot of unknowns from this brief announcement. In many ways, it’s a classic settlement – AMD gets cash, rights to some Intel patents and an agreement from Intel to stop it’s anti-competitive behavior. Intel, on the other hand, readily agrees to ceasing and desisting said behavior because, after all, both companies want “To avoid the time and expense of litigation, and without any admission of liability or fault…”

Intel is substantially larger than its arch-rival, generating around six times the revenue of its smaller competitor. It’s also very profitable, while AMD has only recently been able to pull itself closer to profitability. Still, all the litigation is a drain on Intel’s resources, a continuing pall on Intel’s reputation and a distraction from developing new technologies and products.

According to a conversation with AMD spokesperson Drew Prairie, the way to think of the agreement is as a logical extension of past agreements with Intel – and hence only applies to the CPU side of the equation. That’s an important point, which I’ll get to shortly.

Intel had recently complained that AMD’s split into a fabless semiconductor company – AMD – and a separate, manufacturing subsidiary – Global Foundries – was a violation of past patent agreements. Intel now drops that claim, which has two key implications:

• Global Foundries can now fully split with AMD, and isn’t required to be a subsidiary even in name.
• AMD can contract with any chip manufacturing company to build any AMD product.

While the legal wheels are still turning, this logically completes the split of AMD into two separate entities. This also means that Global Foundries really needs to stay competitive – it can’t rely on a captive AMD to give it business forever.

Now let’s get to the graphics question.

As I noted earlier, you can think of this settlement as a logical extension of past agreements between AMD and Intel. According to Prairie, this gives Intel no rights to AMD’s intellectual property on the graphics side. That’s pretty major, since Intel is trying to build its own GPU in Larrabee. If Intel violates any patents AMD might have that are purely graphics related, AMD would be free to pursue legal action.

There’s one other important point: AMD and Intel will continue their separate paths. There’s no bus licensing involved, so you won’t see AMD or Intel suddenly ship pin-compatible CPUs. This is by no means a return to the socket 370 era.

Consumers probably won’t see much of a difference at first. I’ve started to see an increasing number of interesting products built around AMD technologies, including the recently Dell’s recently announced Inspiron Zino HD. Given that increasing number of AMD-based PC products shipping recently, it’s likely that Intel had pulled back from whatever anti-competitive behavior it may have engaged in (that it doesn’t admit doing, mind you.)

OEMs will win, too, having a little more freedom to develop products that they see suit their own customer’s needs. AMD is pushing forward with its plans, including a renewed strategic approach that more tightly integrates GPU and CPU sides of the company. If AMD can just stick with a single core strategic message, OEMs will feel much more comfortable doing business.

If you get right down to it, though, Intel is a big winner, too. Sure, it’s out of pocket $1.25 billion, but it avoids losing to AMD in court, along with the potential of much larger punitive damages. In some ways, Intel is actually getting off cheap. And since Intel is so profitable, it can still use big discounts to lure OEMs to use Intel-based solutions.

Let’s hope that the playing field really is leveled. AMD still has a big chore ahead of it, building its Fusion products, keeping its feet in the server side and trying to keep Nvidia at bay in the GPU business. It’s a daunting task, but at least AMD can hope that this settlement means that it has a fair shot at the market now.

up here. Some, of course, have already been running Windows 7, which I obtained from my Technet account, and have been using in articles on Windows 7.

There’s not really a lot I can add to the hoopla about Windows 7. Like any new OS release from Microsoft, there is good and bad. But for our weekly LAN party group, I’m looking forward to moving everyone to 64-bit Windows 7.

Four of five gaming rigs in the basement lab are now running Windows 7.

Windows 7 & Gaming: So Far

I’ve been running games on Windows 7 since the release candidate. Bear in mind that most of my games are either fairly new or, if older titles, have been re-purchased from Steam or Good Old Games. I’ve run into relatively few issues. The most common problem between different titles, oddly enough, is the inability to play the startup video. This is true with Blood Bowl and the updated, free-to-play Dungeons and Dragons Online. As far as problems go, this is pretty minor.

Here’s a partial list of games I’ve played under Windows 7. These are games I’ve actually played fairly extensively, not just fired up and checked to see if they ran:

• Anno 1404
• Left 4 Dead
• Mass Effect (needed to install the free DLC to get it to work — but this may have been a Radeon HD 5870 driver problem.)
• Plants Vs. Zombies
• Risen
• Dungeons and Dragons Online
• Demigod
• Sins of a Solar Empire
• Section 8
• Prototype
• Red Faction: Guerrilla
• Blood Bowl

None of these are particularly old titles. All of these run on Windows 7 64-bit.

Friday Night Follies & the Windows 7 Launch Party

The usual crew was on hand, plus Robert Heron from HDNation. We played D&D online for about five hours.

I’d mentioned earlier that four of five of the gaming systems were running Windows 7. By that, I meant the actual release version; the fifth system is still on the release candidate. All are running the 64-bit version.

We did run into a couple of glitches, but I’m not convinced they were Windows 7 related. D&D Online crashed to the desktop on a couple of systems. Another odd quirk: occasionally the game would spontaneously change resolutions, and you’d see a “window” on your desktop. I put the word “window” in quotes, because it wasn’t a real window. You could see the desktop underneath, but the game was still running in full screen, exclusive. Fixing the problem was easy: press ALT-ENTER twice. The first time would put it in true windowed mode, the second time would kick it back into its original resolution in full screen mode.

The reason I’m unconvinced that this is a Windows 7 specific issue is that we saw the same behavior on at least one Windows Vista system a couple of weeks back. The problems seem to manifest mostly on systems running ATI graphics, though I haven’t tested this extensively to be completely sure — only one of the systems is running an Nvidia-based card (a BFG 275 GTX OC), and it had relatively few issues.

Next steps is to install Windows 7 on some of the other family systems, and see how those fare. One thing is for sure: XP and Vista are done in the Case House. I’ll keep a couple of Vista and XP partition backups, just for testing. But we’ll be a Windows 7 household going forward.

Most of them will be successful. Windows 7 setup is remarkable forgiving, but some users will still have issues. Even I had a problem with one older laptop based on the original Core 2 Duo, in which Windows 7 installed fine, but the HD audio device refuses to work even though the driver reports itself as working normally.

Of course, there will be people who have issues, sometimes serious ones. That’s the nature of the PC.

The PC Ecosystem

Let’s talk about Apple’s Macs for a moment. That may seem odd, but the Mac – specifically the iMac and the Mac Pro, illustrate a key point I’m going to make shortly.

If you buy a Mac from Apple, you can get a Macbook, iMac, Mac Mini or Mac Pro. With the sole exception of the Mac Pro, all Apple PCs are completely closed. With some effort, you can upgrade hard drives and add memory, but that’s about it. Any other expansion is through USB.

The exception is the Mac Pro, which starts at $2,499. In reality, the Mac Pro is a dual Xeon workstation – not really a desktop PC.

On the other hand, companies like Dell, HP and a host of smaller companies sell a host of expandable desktop PCs, for considerably less money than a Mac Pro. In some cases, they cost less than an iMac. That’s not to denigrate the iMac. Apple pushes useful technology forward in interesting ways. For example, the latest 27-inch iMacs offer a 2560×1440 resolution display – more pixels than the average 27-inch monitor, which is typically 1920×1200. Better yet, they’re LED backlit displays built on IPS panel technology, making them excellent for photographic work and video editing.

On the other hand, what you see is what you get. Want to upgrade that Radeon HD 4850? Sorry, you can’t. Want to build  RAID array? There’s no provision for even eSATA connections.

While the major manufacturers of Windows-based PCs also sell all-in-one systems, their desktop bread and butter is the standard PC with expansion slots. And, of course, you can build your own PCs; all of the systems here in the Case house are built from scratch.

That open hardware ecosystem evolved over time, and wasn’t intentional. It all began back in the 1980s, when several companies (Compaq being the first) reverse engineered the IBM PC BIOS, and the world never looked back. IBM’s attempt to dominate using proprietary technology – Microchannel – proved to be an abject failure.

That evolution created a rich ecosystem of hardware and software manufacturers. The staggering variety of components that can be installed into any of a number of motherboards creates an infinite combination of hardware possibilities. No one, not even a company with the resources of a Microsoft, can test all the possible combinations.

So someone, somewhere, will have problems with Windows 7. It’s the nature of the PC. What will inevitably happen is that some blog or news organization will report these inevitable issues with undisguised glee, suggesting that the evil Microsoft has gotten it wrong again.

That’s happening with Windows 7, with the actual official launch date still ten days off. The most visible slam against Windows was from my old boss, Jim Louderback, who wrote of his woes with Microsoft’s new OS, stating that Windows 7 is Vista all over again. Whoa, now that’s harsh.

The Curmudgeons are Wrong

We’ll no doubt see more people taking potshots at Windows 7 as the launch process continues. And I’m not going to to a point-by-point counter to Jim’s article. He clearly ran into some technical issues, but his experience has been counter to just about everything written about the OS. Heck, even Walt Mossberg, who never met a MacOS he didn’t like, thinks Windows 7 is a pretty big deal.

(It probably comes as no shock that the Mac Faithful are starting to take potshots at Mossberg’s review.)

It’s always interesting to me to see the constant back and forth about new software. While my experiences with Windows 7 has been almost uniformly positive, I can certainly understand how people can run into issues with complex operating system, be it Windows, MacOS, Linux or anything else that requires supporting the vast array of hardware and software that people want to use.

I like to think historically. I’m reminded of ongoing arguments that I had on the old Compuserve OS/2 forums (talk about dating myself.) Brad Wardell and I carried on a spirited discussion about whether OS/2 or Windows 95 was better. He argued that OS/2 was technically superior to Windows 95. I argued that Windows 95 had an undeniable momentum, including substantial support from hardware and software developers.

We were both right, but we also know who won that battle.

Today, of course, the world is more complex. MacOS has made some pretty serious inroads, particularly among laptops. It’s unlikely that MacOS will ever overtake Windows in terms of unit sales, but it’s also true that Apple’s success has been a spur to Microsoft to do better. Competition is never a bad thing.

The real problem Microsoft is facing is not whether or not Windows 7 is a good OS, although I believe it’s the best desktop OS that Redmond has ever shipped. The problem isn’t the competition from Apple or Linux. The problem is competition from Microsoft itself.

Windows XP was, by any measure, a hugely successful product for Microsoft. It’s been around for almost eight years, officially launching October 25^th, 200.

People forget all the wailing and gnashing of teeth when Windows XP shipped. Complaints abounded, whether it was the painful transition from Windows 3.1, the big jump in hardware requirements, issues with software compatibility or the lack of 32-bit drivers.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Then came Vista.

Yes, I’m being snarky. A little.

So the Windows 7 House Party Kit arrived. Now, I signed up through an email blast I received, well before that lame ”Hosting Your Party” video hit the street. Since I host our Friday Night Follies LAN party most weeks, I thought that having some weird theme like this to one of them might be mildly amusing.

So I signed up without really reading the fine print. I didn’t realize Microsoft would actually, you know, send stuff. That is, until I received the notice that my House Party Kit was in the mail (well, on a UPS truck, actually.)

So the box arrived today.

Oooohhhh. Shiny!

What was in the box was a mix of mildly useful, actually useful, pretty cool and pretty lame. Let’s start with the lame.

In the box were various items, including this item, which is supposedly a “table top centerpiece.” Now, if I were putting this together, I’d have something visually striking for a center piece… maybe an action figure of Steve Ballmer drop kicking an iMac or maybe a foot tall MacOS logo inside a red circle with a slash through it. Instead, you get two visually bland pieces of cardboard cut so that you can make them stand up.

A center piece that cries out to be replaced.

Lame.

Also lame is this.

It's all Greek to Me...

In the box are a set of thank you cards that, I suppose, you’re supposed to hand out to people who come to your party. On the cards is web address for additional offers.

That’s not the lame part. The lame part is that the page that’s up is only a placeholder. Now, I realize that the official party and Windows 7 launch date is a couple of weeks off, so having a placeholder page might be needed. But actually having greeked text? Come on, have some kind of cool countdown animation or something.

Lame.