One of the advantages to having a multi-room AV system and a somewhat elaborate home network (for example 4 Xbox 360s, 3 laptop PCs, 2 desktop PCs, a PC Acting as a Media Center server, a PC acting as a Small Business Server, 3 Roku Soundbridges, etc.) is that responding to problems is somewhat easier in several ways:

• It is usually possible to swap in a comparable piece of hardware to test a piece that is suspect.
• If a piece goes down and needs to be sent away for service another lower valued piece can be swapped in from another part of the house.

Of course the downside is that upgrades to stay near the cutting edge is more expensive than I like to think about. But its cheaper than many vehicle based hobbies like boating or club racing! 

Ed Bott recommended a Microsoft site that tests your router to see what type of functionality its supports and if it is lacking in some important ways. Before I bought a new router I would want to see how it performed on this test.

As I use Small Business Server as my router I was interested to see how it fared. I was pleased to see that it passed all the tests with flying colors (except UPnP, which it does not purport to support).

Chris Lanier has one of the most informative posts I've read in a long time on what the future holds for Media Center PCs and new CableCard 2.0 technology. It sounds as if CableCard PCs may not be obsolete as fast as many were speculating.

This past weekend up updated our three Roku SoundBridges to the release candidate of Version 3 of their software. The main new feature of this new version is access to Radio Roku.

Radio Roku is Roku's collection of links to over 3500 Internet radio stations. This is a pretty good attempt at making web radio useful and accessible. A number of good features make this service worthwhile:

• You can listen to stations either on a SoundBridge from the RadioRoku website so you are not tied to a particular delivery mechanism.
• You can select both 18 presets (available from a button press) and a longer list of favorites.
• Favorites and presets chosen on the website are immediately reflected on all of your SoundBridges.
• Stations that are not on your favorites list are relatively easily accessible by genre (and by some other less useful (to me) criteria).
• The entire collection of radio stations (URLs, classification, etc.) is maintained by the Roku user community.
• The website has a Now Playing widget, which can should you what is currently playing on 70-100 stations at any given time (presumably the only stations providing such data). This allows you to select a station without having to flip through each one. It's like an RSS reader for Internet radio.

The SoundBridge isn't perfect (I still wish it had fast forward or skip ahead functionality), but it makes a good UPnP music player and these Internet radio features are a welcome addition. Best of all Roku continues to update their firmware to add new functionality.

Worth checking out.

This was a relatively simple tip (and it could just be my imagination), but the following tip seems to have had a noticeable impact on Vista's responsiveness:

The default power plan (in Control Panel, Power Options) in Vista is set to Balanced. Changing it to High Performance will increase the CPU utilization up to 50%.

You can go further and Change Plan Settings, Change Advanced Power Settings, go to Processor Power Management and set Minimum Processor State to 100% and Maximum Processor State to 100%.

For more detail see Microsoft's paper of processor power management.

I recently detailed why I did not think much of RAID storage solutions. Well, I recently purchased and set up the Drobo, which has all of the data protection advantages of RAID 5 without any of the disadvantages:

• The Drobo allows you to add hard drives as you need them, in whatever size you want to purchase.
• This allows you to purchase whatever the most economical drives happen to be at the time, which is why I was able to spend only $270 on two 500GB drives instead of a $700 on two terabyte drives to get a terabyte of available storage.
• When the Drobo's four slots are filled and I want to expand further, I can replace a drive with a higher capacity drive at any time. I don't have to worry about matching drive I already have or building a whole new array with higher capacity drives.
• Adding drives requires only slipping in the bare drive, which the Drobo locks into place. There is no downtime involved.
• Because you never have to start over from scratch, you don't need to worry about redefining NTFS sharing and associated security, which you would when moving from an old RAID array to a new RAID array.

I paid $480 (shipped) for my Drobo and feel like I have already paid for the unit just in the cost savings in buying the drives described above.

The Drobo doesn't have is an eSATA connection (it connects via USB 2.0), nor can it be used as networked attached storage. Neither of these bothers me:

• First, the USB 2.0 is plenty fast (and I understand from Engadget's that the reason there is no eSATA is that the Drobo would not be able to take advantage of faster speeds).
• With a full blown SBS 2003 box I really don't have a need for network attached storage. Others may not need (or want to run SBS 2003) but the enthusiastic response to Windows Home Server indicated that people really do want a PC on 24x7 rather than just a NAS box. A PC lets you run applications (like recording software) all the time, and lets gives you more flexibility even in accessing your media-- you can run whatever media server software you want rather than being tied to some that your NAS box might support.

I wholeheartedly recommend this device (after two whole days of use!).

Note: Credit for the phraseology of the Drobo rocking should probably go to Thomas Hawk, who used this phrase in his review about a month ago.

Although I run a home sever with a lot of very important household files (the bulk of which are media) I do not have a RAID array. There are several reasons for this:

• If I were to run a RAID array, I would want to economize and run RAID 5, but because RAID arrays tend to want the exact same kind of hard drives, I would really have to buy four identical drives at the same time and set up the array. That would force me to choose between buying more storage that I need now (which is a rapidly depreciating asset) or being squeezed for space later if I buy about as much storage as I need now and my needs increase (as inevitably they do).
• RAID arrays tend to be quite finicky. I often wonder if the pain of setting one up is worth any trouble they save if a hard drive fails.
• RAID protects against hard drive failure only, not other problem scenarios such as theft or accidentally deleting critical files.

To date I use a combination of monthly backups (kept on removable drives that I keep at my office) for all files, and automatic daily backups to an external hard drive of non-media data (including my Exchange database). As most of my media files don't change archival, incremental backups on a monthly basis has worked fine.

This approach has given me peace of mind to date, but the need for more server storage has coincided with the advent of the Drobo, which seems to give all of the advantages of a RAID array without its disadvantages, so I have ordered one.

More when it arrives...

An excellent real-world, albeit anecdotal, test of the iPhone is described here.

A number of people have asked if I would be getting an iPhone, not thinking about the fact that I have not owned an Apple product since 1992.

Usually there is something about Apple products that makes them bad members of my electronic ecosystem. In the case of the iPhone, there are a number of such failings-- functionality I would miss:

• No push email from the Exchange server at my firm
• No application support for some key Windows Mobile applications like ListPro and Newsgator Go
• Orb doesn't really work
• J River's Media Center doesn't appear to support syncing media to it
• Fast internet. What good is a web browser if it takes forever to load a page?

Is the pretty interface worth the hassles of always wonder if applications and services will work on your phone? Not for me.

Note that in some cases better functionality is worth less compatibility: only running Media Center plugins that support Media Center Extenders, and running a CableCard PC that has files that can't be played back on other PCs, for example. But I try to avoid these absent some really compelling reason to forsake compatibility.

After seeing the Bluetrek ST1 at CES in January these Bluetooth headphones finally are available in the US, albeit perhaps on the grey market imported from the UK. These had seemed to be the best Bluetooth headphones I had seen to date because they were flexible enough to lie flat in a briefcase, but not so flexible as to get a cord tangled.

Their availability coincided with my purchase of a cell phone I could pair them with,  so I purchased them.

They arrived yesterday and here are my observations so far:

• They are somewhat less comfortable than expected, which might be problematic for long listening but I suspect will not be a problem for my half hour commute on which I listen to podcasts.
• They are too small to leave draped around your neck when not in use, but they seem to fit acceptably well in a front pocket.
• The setup was painless and they paired just fine with the HTC Mogul. The voice commands work just fine with them, although oddly the Mogul repeats the voice command through the phone's speaker rather than through the headphones.
• The best feature is the ability to easily pause playback to listen to something/someone. It is possible with the press of a button now. Previously I had to get out the Pocket PC, unlock it, go to Windows Media Player and press the pause button on the screen.

I finally got around to calling HP about the problem we were having with two of our laptops: the sound would not work after they awoke from sleep mode. HP fixed the problem for me by taking control of my PC and installing a new driver. 20 minutes later the problem was solved. They even called back later that evening to confirm that I was having no problems.

I was surprised that there was an easy fix as the automatic notifications of new drivers I get regularly from HP had never said anything about new drivers being available.

I was just asked by my PC if I wanted to download new software for my Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse. I said "yes" and (to my surprise) proceeded to download over 50 megabytes of data! Installing the software has now required over five minutes!

Can it really be that a wireless keyboard and mouse require 50MB of software to run properly?

After a weeks of use several more observations:

• The volume control seems to require using a stylus.
• There is no short sequence of button presses to do a speed dial.
• The latter is no that bothersome because the voice recognition is excellent. There is a convenient button, that, once pressed, will let you give the phone voice commands to dial a contact or run an application. This has proved a worthy substitute for for a button based speed dial.