Uninstalling KB950126 appears to have resolved my screensaver quirkiness explained in yesterday’s post.  The system had also come up, but for some odd reason it did not connect to the network.  Another reboot solved that issue.

I also decided to install Vista Ultimate on my primary PC yesterday.  I had to do a reinstall anyway considering a rootkit somehow found its way on my system.  I had removed this thing a coupe of times before in the past, but I couldn’t get rid of this release.  It was the same one based on srosa.sys/hidr.exe/wintems.exe, but it had replicated much more than I had seen before.

I’m much more receptive to Vista this time around and so far it’s been a welcomed change.  I’m a little more familiar with it since I’ve been running my HTPCs on it for more than a year.  It also seems to support the common applications I use this go ’round.  We’ll see if it stays…

Well, life has given me little time as of late to look after this site, but I recently ran into an issue that I thought may help those that come across it.

I finished a reformat of my bedroom HTPC this weekend following an issue that I thought was the result of a system restore I did early last week.  When the same occurrence was found to resume upon a fresh install and configuration, I became desperate for help when my Google searches came up dry.  Media Center MVP of 2006 Richard Miller at thegreenbutton.com forums informed me that my issue was due to the Vista June Cumulative Update KB950126 and that it would need to be uninstalled.  I did so immediately (it does require a reboot).

My specific issue was more of an extreme annoyance.  For example, if I were watching a movie and needed to pause or stop it in order to take of something, the video would then resume playing whenever the screensaver (blank the screen, in my case) became activated.  Upon returning and hitting stop, I would find that the video would resume at the very beginning after hitting play again.  I do not have this system configured for standby as it never worked,  so whenever I powered on my system (my Harmony turns the TV and receiver on), the last video watched would begin playing.

There were other occurrences to these effects as well, but those were the most prominent and annoying of the bunch.

I’d post my results, but I’m at work and my HTPC has yet to come back up after rebooting.  Damn.

…but not completely uneventful.  My back has been killing me, not allowing me to do a whole lot for the past couple of weeks.  I did manage to add another drive to my unRAID array though.

For the longest time, I’ve been using a Linksys NSLU2 NAS device to act as my networks file server.  For what it’s worth, it’s been a great little NAS-head.  I’ve had a 250GB USB external drive attached to it and it has just worked.  However, it’s pretty slow and it gets used quite a bit…despite the fact that it’s not protected storage.  So, I decided to move some hardware around and made some pretty good changes over the weekend.

My VPNSVR was upgraded and moved away from the old 933MHz Gateway I was using.  I replaced it with an Asus P4P800-E Deluxe, P-M 2GHz Dothan CPU and 2GB PC-3200.  I put a 36GB Raptor in it for the OS and the 250GB drive from my NSLU2 for the data drive (WSUS and FAX directories).  The 320GB in the old VPNSVR went to my unRAID set so that I can have a dedicated file storage drive for all of my applications, drivers, pictures and repository for my wife’s stuff.  So now, all of it is protected and on GbE (the NSLU2 is 100Mb).

The problem I encountered in putting that 320GB drive in my unRAID server was with the IDE controller on the DG965 motherboard…it doesn’t seem to work in unRAID.  Either that, or there’s something in the BIOS that I missed – which is unlikely since the BIOS sees the drive just fine.  I had to put a Promise ATA PCI card in it for the unRAID OS to see the drive.  Not a big deal as I’ll eventually be taking that drive out once I add more SATA storage.  Adding a PCI device didn’t seem to impact it as much as I had thought since clearing, formatting and copying the files took less time than I had expected.  We’ll see what happens when I generate a new parity this week.

The last thing I did this weekend was to clear my old RAID3 set on MEDIASVR2.  A drive had temporarily failed for some reason last week and I had to re-add the drive and restore it.  Once it was finished, I went ahead and moved what I wanted to unRAID and just cleared/reconstructed the array so that it is now 100% free.  I’m considering taking those drives completely offline and save them for the port multiplier PCIE card and 5-bay external enclosure I’ll be getting soon.  Since there’s no way I can afford 5 new TB drives, I might as well get some usage out of the 5×500GB drives I do have.  That’s a lot of storage to do nothing with.  The drives aren’t even a year old either, so they’re not much of a risk.  I should be ready to do that by July.