My problem with the two-day 37 GB file transfer appears to have been caused by poor quality network interface drivers.

I had a growing suspicion that the problem was unrelated to Vista and therefore was not going to be solved by the eventual installation of Service Pack 1. So did a little more diagnosis. I downloaded QCheck, a free network performance testing utility and discovered that my slow PC could get a blazing 2 megabit per second connection to the server using its gigabit Ethernet connection.

After eliminating the cable, Vista Ultimate and driver settings as possible causes, I looked into the network interface driver associated with the Ethernet ports on the PCs nForce 680i motherboard. Per the nVidia site I had the latest drivers. More searching at the nForceHQ website's forums revealed that there were actually more recent drivers that were WHQL certified (version 67.72). I further discovered that this was the set of drivers that Windows Update would install if asked to look for drivers in the Internet, so that's what I did. The issue may not have been the driver version, it may have been two other related nVidia applications (e.g. ActiveArmor) that were uninstalled as part of my uninstall of the existing drivers.

Net result: I now have a working 95 megabit connection to the server, a roughly 50-fold improvement.

But I am annoyed by the fact that I can't get the gigabit connection that I should be able to get. I now blame nVidia, however, not Microsoft.

Update: I now no longer blame nVidia, because I remembered that inbetween my PC and the Gigabit switch was a 100 Mbps switch. Doh! So I replaced that with another 4-port gigabit switch (the DLink DGS-2205) for about $35 and now get about 650 Mbps between the server and my PC.

I just finished listening to 1UpYours Podcast with Dennis Dyack, where he and the crew discussed at length the merits and feasibility of the "one console future" in which hardware manufacturers all designed to a common spec that allowed write-once run anywhere game development on a common platform. Just as with PCs, multiple manufacturers could still exist, but no longer would Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo have different platforms to write to and design games for. I have written about this possibility before.

Dennis's rhetorical style is a little scattershot, but I believe the future he depicts is realistic, but for reasons not really discussed directly on the podcast.

The advantages of such a regime, would yield too many advantages for the players in the market to ignore. The main advantages would be the following:

1. Gamers would not have to fear that their decision of which console to purchase could leave them unable to play a great game on their console.
2. Game developers would have easy access to the entire console market without the financial and feature sacrifices inherent in multi-console development today. Just as in any market with elastic demand, these benefits of these savings would be split between developers and gamers.
3. Console manufacturers could avoid duplicative costs in developing their platforms. These savings would inevitably be shared with gamers as well.

A few issues that would need to be addressed for this to happen:

• First, is it possible to maintain the financial model of game consoles? Currently console makers sell their hardware at artificially low prices and make their money back from licensing fees from game developers. This allows a low price of entry and price discrimination in that buyers of many games end of "paying more for their consoles" than those who buy few games. (This is also a big reason why the attach rate is so important.) Microsoft's "E" has expressed a view on Major Nelson's podcast that this model is incompatible with a "one console future." So could this model continue in the "one console future?"

In theory, YES. Obviously, if all but one manufacturer abandoned the business then the current model could continue without modification. Even without other manufacturers abandoning the business, the model could still continue as long as there was a consortium that subsidized consoles and collected licensing fees from developers who wanted their games to run on the consortium's platform. Alternatively, perhaps a part of the common platform would be games that were locked to a given manufacturer's platform; that manufacturer could then collect fees from developers to allow their games to be played on that manufacturer's hardware (the price of which had been subsidized by the manufacturer).

• Second, would this fragment in the same way as PC gaming on the common platform of Windows-- with different hardware creating compatibility problems?

Possibly, but UNLIKELY. There would always be a tradeoff that the members of the consortium would have to address: allowing hardware innovation within a platform/generation always runs the risk of decreasing compatibility. I see no systemic or inherent reason that the members of the consortium wouldn't do a decent job managing this tradeoff however.

In sum, a common console platform is feasible and has some significant advantages, this is why I continue to believe that a common console platform is likely.

Last night I tried copying 37GB of files from my Vista Ultimate PC to my server running Windows Small Business Server 2003. Even though I was using Robocopy, and had installed the Vista hotfixes meant to help address slow file operations (see, e.g., Knowledge Base articles KB931770 and KB938979), the process was proceeding abysmally slowly (about 1GB per hour).

So I did a Google search and came up with a few new ideas to try: turning off Remote Differential Compression and Receive Window Auto Tuning; and  trying various other Microsoft suggested workarounds. I had just recently updated network drivers and even restarted Small Business Server 2003, but none of these did any good.

I do not appear to be alone, but neither do my symptoms appear widespread. These large file transfers are infrequent enough and difficult enough to diagnose, that I'll put off further research until after Vista SP1 is available and installed.

I had been experiencing cold boot times of over five minutes on my Vista Ultimate PC, so I decided to follow up on some of Ed Bott's advice from a November post and was able to cut the boot time roughly in half. At the end of the day, with all non-Microsoft startup items disabled, AntiVir antivirus software, no PDA plugged into USB port and Google as the page to load, I can boot to a loaded web page in about 2:40.

This may not be great, but it is significantly better than the more than five minutes the bootup took previously. I should note that this PC is connected to a Small Business Server 2003 domain so that might affect my boot time as well.

Here is the marginal impact of some of the changes I made:

• Using My.Yahoo as the start page added about 30 seconds.
• Using AVG antivirus in place of AntiVir added about 60 seconds.
• Plugging my HTC Mogul into the USB port added about 45 seconds.
• Disabling a bunch of startup items seemed to take a little over 60 seconds off the boot time. Interestingly, I haven't missed these at all-- with the possible exception of the Vista Sidebar.

I also note that switching from AVG antivirus to AntiVir may well have detected a couple of viruses that AVG had missed as well as it noted activity from two files that should not have been executing.

From Peggy Noonan's column today: "That's the great divide in modern America, whether or not you had a functioning family..."

Keeping track of our family expenses and investments would be far more time consuming and less accurate without Quicken. The ability to download transactions for bank accounts, credit cards and investment accounts is a huge time saver.

But in my experience it tends to have issues with file corruption and other errors that creep into one's electronic records. Dealing with the issues tends to be time consuming, but not fatal.

I was moved to write this entry because several weeks ago Quicken stopped downloading transactions for one of my credit card accounts. Quicken's diagnosis was that this was due to some data corruption and its suggested remedy involved copying my entire database of transactions to a new file, running a data integrity check and then setting up online access for all my accounts again. As described, this was a couple-hour process, but the process of setting up online access for all my accounts again resulted in the past 600 transactions for over a dozen accounts being downloaded by Quicken. Each of these duplicate transactions needed to be deleted by me manually and individually-- they weren't hard to find, but this process consumed several hours itself.

Now at the end of this process, some balances appear to be off by thousands of dollars. I'll take a shot at trying to figure out what might be the cause of any large discrepancies, but I'll eventually just have to put in dummy balancing transactions. Not great, but not the end of the world either.

Several days' perspective allows me to see this multi-hour fix as worthwhile for the convenience of the application, but I was not so sanguine immediately afterward!

This episode had me wishing for several things:

• Data being kept online and accessed by a web app so that mine could not be corrupted. There is a beta of an online version of Quicken, but even when released it will lack the features of the desktop application.
• Better ways to automatically reconcile online balances and online transactions so that Quicken's records don't get to far from the online records maintained by my financial institutions.
• Better support for large files or a good way to archive old data. I now have about 16 years worth of data in my Quicken database, which I am sure causes performance and data integrity issues. Unfortunately, there is no good way to do incremental archiving.

Although Vista is working better, there are still currently a few problems with my office PC that I'll try to address now that my spate of playing Burnout Paradise and Call of Duty 4 has abated:

• One of my credit cards won't download transactions properly to Quicken 2007.  This has been going on for about 6 weeks but the Inuit suggestions relating to the error I am getting are such a pain and so time consuming, that I have put off trying them.
• My HTC Mogul will not sync with my PC using ActiveSync (the Vista entitled "Sync Center"). All I really want to sync is files to back them up (as PIM information is syn'd with my law firm's Exchange server wirelessly all the time). Syncing has been a chronic problem, but I haven't really tried addressing this for about 6 months so it is time to start trying again.

I recently purchased the Kingston FCR-HS219/1 USB 2.0 Hi-Speed 19-in-1 Media Reader. Aside from the lengthy name, I have been quite satisfied with the purchase. Our new DSLR takes Compact Flash cards, while the card readers in our HP laptops read SD cards, but not Compact Flash cards. So in order to do photo importing from our laptops I decided to purchase a card reader. Finding one with all the characteristics I wanted proved more difficult than expected.

Here are the nice features of this unit:

• Really seems to work at USB 2.0 speeds. (Important when dealing with a 8GB card)
• Can be used for Compact Flash cards
• Not too expensive. ($17 and shipped free from Amazon.)
• Native support for microSD cards. (Allowing me to sync podcasts to my HTC Mogul's microSD card from any laptop without finding a MicroSD to SD sleeve.)
• A cord that wasn't too long that would get tangled when stored. (This one has a very short cord that tucks away when unplugged and comes with a USB extension cord.)

Because I run Media Center exclusively through extenders, many of the cool Media Center applications are unavailable (at least as a practical matter) to me. There are however four very nice applications that I would encourage users to install. All work with Vista and all work well with extenders:

• My Movies - used for accessing ripped and converted DVDs on any extender
• Media Center Health Monitor - a nice free application from Ian Dixon that will let you know remotely if there are problems with TV recordings and the like
• Big Screen Photos 2 and Big Screen Weather 2 - two really well put together applications that use MCML (Media Center Markup Language) for a very nice extender experience. Even though I don't have any pressing need for either of these features in my Media Center setup, these applications were so cool that I gladly paid registration fee for each.

I am always on the lookout for other nice MCML applications, so hopefully I'll be adding to this list as MCML development ramps up.

After installing the hotfix for the intermittent non-responsiveness I had been experiencing on my office PC, I discovered that the sleep mode had turned into something more akin to hibernation-- in that the power button needed to be depressed to start the PC after "sleeping", I would get a resuming Windows Vista message on the screen, and the PC would take a couple of minutes to become fully responsive.

So I upgraded two sets of nVidia drivers for my GeForce 8800GTS card and my nForce 680i motherboard chipset and these problems went way. Perhaps I should have done this a while ago as I hadn't updated these drivers in about six months-- but I was loathe to do so as I thought the updates might cause a new problem and there was no specific problems I was having that I thought the updates might fix.

BTW, the hotfix seems to have worked and I'm no longer experiencing the bouts of nonresponsiveness that I saw previously.

I have finally figured out a fairly efficient workflow for processing and tagging photos using J River Media Center and Windows Live Photo Gallery. It took me about 4 hours to go through about 800 photos using these steps:

1. Import photos to New photo directory on server
2. Delete duplicate or poor photos and reorient vertical photos in Windows Live Photo Gallery
3. Copy photos from New photo directory on server to local directory for tagging
4. Run Media Center and import local copies of photos in local library (i.e. not shared library on network share)
5. View all new photos using the top level of one of the viewschemes
6. Make sure columns for Genre, Event,Location,Places, People and Keywords are shown
7. Assign name, genre and event information to photos using details view (or thumbnails view for photos from things like trips)
8. Use Media Center's Library Tools to Rename Files from Properties to make filenames consistent with the new name information (useful for viewing these files from with Vista Media Center)
9. Assign location and place information displaying thumbnails and using tagging mode
10. Assign people tags one person at a time by displaying thumbnails and using tagging mode
11. Sort photos by Genre and drag to appropriate new folders in Drives and Devices part of tree
12. Assign keywords to photos using the following JRMC expression (which creates an XMLs tags from the above information, which can be read by Windows Vista):
    • =if(IsEmpty([Genre]),,Genre\[Genre];)if(IsEmpty([Event]),,Event\[Event];)if(IsEmpty([Location]),,Location\[Location];)if(IsEmpty([Places]),,Places\[Places];)if(IsEmpty([People]),,People\replace([People],;,;People\))
13. Log in to server remote desktop and use running Media Server to import new photos from their new directories
14. Delete copies of photos from New photo directory on server
15. Delete all but one photo (to use for future reference the next time I go through this process) from the local library only

Acting off of this post by the SBS Diva, I installed a hotfix for the following problem identified in KB937228: "A Windows Vista-based computer is frequently unresponsive for 30 seconds if the Documents folder is redirected to a shared folder, and the folder is made available offline." The hotfix is available by following instructions in the Knowledge Base article.

This problem had been bothering me for a while: applications and Windows Explorer would be unresponsive for about 30 second even though I could move the cursor and cursor animations continued.

After installing this fix two days ago, I have no seen any further recurrence of this issue.