In the ongoing saga to get a motherboard that works well with Vista SP1 going to sleep, I have yet again switched motherboards. As previously posted I’ve tried an Intel DG33TL board, and an Intel DQ35JO, and I am now using an Asus P5E-VM HDMI board. I was happy with the Intel DQ35JO, but this did not last very long. A few days after posting I found my machine with garbage characters on the screen, requiring a cold boot. Intel support was of little help, but a few days later I updated the firmware on my ThinkPad T61, and I read that one of the fixes in the firmware was to fix garbage characters on the screen when sleeping or resuming from sleep caused by the AMT feature. The DQ35JO board also has AMT, so maybe that was the same problem. ...

I noted my troubles with the Intel GMA drivers, the Intel DG33TL motherboard, and Vista SP1 blue screen crashing in my earlier post. Since I was running the 15.8 version of the Intel GMA drivers, and Microsoft KB948343 indicates that, based on the driver version numbers, these newer drivers should not be affected by SP1, yet the crash details were clearly the same, and no new driver was forthcoming to correct the blue screen crash, I decided to take the GMA drivers out of the picture. ...

I received my new Lenovo ThinkPad T61 notebook, pre-installed with Vista Ultimate, but also with 3rd party software I did not care for. I wanted a clean Vista install, and that is exactly why I made sure to order the recovery media with the notebook, thinking that this would include an OS install DVD. It turns out that the recovery media is six CDs, I don’t know why not a DVD, regardless, the recovery media does not include a Vista install DVD. ...

This article was originally posted here. Introduction: After my bad experience with the Abit F-I90HD motherboards, read about it here, I purchased two Intel DG33TL motherboards. Although these boards do not have HDMI onboard, they do have HDCP compliant DVI, and by adding an ADD2 HDMI board you get HDMI and audio over HDMI. The Good: Onboard HDCP compliant DVI. Intel ADD2 HDMI card support. Vista installed very fast and with no problems. ...

This article was originally posted here. Introduction: Because of severe performance problems I experienced with both iView Media Pro and Microsoft Expression Media, I decided to switch to Adobe Lightroom. Unfortunately Lightroom does not understand catalog sets nor does it understand people tags, so the transition is not that simple. After I could not find a simple, or even complicated solution, I decided to write my own conversion application. This application will convert hierarchical catalog sets into keywords, and will add people tags to keywords. ...

This article was originally posted here. Introduction: I was very excited to find the Abit F-I90HD motherboard for use in my HTPC, primarily because it had an onboard HDMI connector. I purchased two boards, but I ended up returning them both because of problems. Instead I purchased two Intel DG33TL boards, read about that experience here. The Good: Onboard HDMI with 7.1 digital audio over HDMI. At least on paper, I never got to test it. ...

This article was originally posted here. Introduction: I purchased an Antec Fusion Black case to replace my aging HTPC. The case looks very nice, until you turn on the LCD display… The Good: The case looks very nice. The construction is solid. The Bad: The two included case fans do not have speed monitoring wires, I had to purchase new fans. For such an expensive case this is rather disappointing. There are two fans on the side of the case, both set to extract hot air, but hard drives are located in an area with no direct ventilation. There are ample ventilation holes around the drives, but it remains to be seen if the drives will overheat or not. ...

This article was originally posted here. Introduction: I have been looking for a digital photo frame for a while, and from what I read the Philips Photo Frame models appear to have very good image quality and good features. I bought a Philips 9" wood border model 9FF2CWO. The Good: The frame looks very nice. The image quality is really very good. The frame’s built in software is very extensive and easy to use. ...

I have made various attempts at sharing my printer over my home network. The criteria for sharing are simple; the printer must be available over the network and I must be able to print from Windows and Mac machines. In practice this turned out to be a little more difficult. The simplest solution would have been a network enabled printer, but I had no luck in finding an affordable consumer grade home printer that can directly connect to the network. ...

I previously commented on this problem here and here. I participated in the Microsoft Vista SP1 Beta program. After installing Vista SP1 Beta on my machine with an Intel DG33TL motherboard, and installing version 15.7.3 of the Intel GMA drivers, my machine would blue screen crash when it went to sleep. The crash happens in the igdkmd32.sys and igdkmd64.sys drivers, and I could reproduce it on two machines, both with DG33TL motherboards, with Vista x86 and x64. ...