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Fun weekend


This weekend was interesting.

On Saturday I picked up a Samsung SyncMaster 191T, using the funds that have been donated by the generous Cygwin/XFree86 supporters (I also chipped in a substantial amount of money on my own, for anyone keeping score :) This gives me a nice readable display and it replaces the hideous 15 inch LCD that I had caused two permanent vertical lines (one blue, one yellow) by not wiping off the windex before it ran down under the bezel (stupid, stupid me). I hated looking at the monitor because it reminded me of my own stupidity. :)

I then ran back to the store and picked up an ATI All In Wonder Radeon 8500 DV since it has a DVI-I output. This was necessary because I was getting some interference patterns when running in 1280x1024 with the analog DB-15 input. The DVI input cleared up the interference completely and my display is now beautifuly. However, getting the display to work perfectly took about 8 hours, as it was dropping frames when playing DVDs (the motion was extremely jerky) and recording video was dropping tons of frames as well. I was misled by the ATI documentation and utilities into thinking that this was either due to a misconfiguration of the hard drive interface (i.e., UDMA may not be enabled) or due to a poorly synchronized clock on my sound card (which is used for decoding the audio). I stumbled upon the correct solution, more on that below, after an entire day of poking around. I thought that the solution was the hard drive drivers, but I was wrong.

Anyway, on Sunday morning I booted up the machine, after having spent all of Saturday and Saturday night until 3:00 AM configuring it. Windows reported that WINNT\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM could not be found. Great. I ran setup to a repair, but setup could not find my Windows installation. So, I ran the recovery console. All of my data was still there, but chkdsk reported errors. This totally agrees with the fact that running some executables over the past two weeks would completely lock the machine. These executables were most likely corrupt. In any case, I needed a new hard drive. (Luckily, I could copy data from the damaged drive to the Zip drive).

I returned to the store again and bought an 80 GB Western Digital HD. I reinstalled Windows 2000, only to find that the drive letter assigned to the new drive was F and the old drive was C. So, I changed the old drive to C, and reinstalled Windows 2000 again (since it will not let you change the drive letter of the boot drive, yay). Now the new drive was C and the old drive was D, perfect. I then copied over all of my data. Thank god none of that was lost. Unfortunately, I had lost the entire weekend due to computer troubles.


As for the video problems, I would have known exactly what was wrong had I tried to run XWin.exe at any point during my attempts to fix the jerky DVDs and video recording. The first time I ran XWin.exe after setting up the new hard drive, I noticed that the X background took about 4 seconds to draw, and directory listings were visibly crawling. This new card was 10 times slower than my old card when using the DirectDraw engines; the GDI engine, on the other hand, ran very quickly. So, I uninstalled my graphics card drivers (keeping the Hardware Manager applet open, otherwise this does not work), then reran the setup.exe for the updated ATI drivers that I had downloaded. I then rebooted the machine and the DirectDraw engines were as blazingly fast as expected. The problems with the DVD playback and video recording were also fixed. I had originally installed the downloaded drivers, thinking that they would not be overwritten with an older version when I installed the ATI software from the enclosed CD-ROM, but the drivers were, in fact, overwritten with an older version. That older version has terrible performance. The newer version is amazing.


In sum total, I now have a machine that I can actually stand to use for programming again. You could probably chart my fall-off in involvement with Cygwin/XFree86 and notice that it has only been happening since I damanaged my monitor. Now that I have a normal monitor, I expect to get a little patching done now and then.

Thanks once again to all of those who have contributed (source code, donations, anything) to the Cygwin/XFree86 project!

Harold


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