Oct 22, 2007

my woes with the new machine

its been almost a month with the new computer, the issues I have had so far are:

1- I cannot control the volume on the optical/spdif output, that means my objective to eliminate the receiver remote control is in jeopardy, in lay-man terms the computer sends out all six audio channels (5+1) to the receiver using AC3 or DTS format, these formats are the original unaltered audio signal and to make changes to the volume it would need to uncompress the sound modify it with new volume info and then re-compress it, this would effect the audio quality so its not done this way, the sound card lets the audio pass unaltered all the way to the receiver, the only straight forward work around to that problem is that I take the six individual analog audio outputs from my computer and plug them to my receiver/amplifier, for this I would need to buy a new receiver as the existing SONY STR-K740P doesn't accept individual audio channel inputs (it accepts optical and coaxial), I wonder if the audio signal on HDMI cable is AC3/DTS or something else, if it behaves well, it can be another viable solution.

2- I am still using legacy IDE instead on SATA AHCI mode which if I enable would let me plug in hard drives with out starting/stopping the machine, plus it supposedly have a more intelligent Queuing algorithm, which should translate in to more efficient seeks, this problem is still outstanding, no drivers out there seems to be able to fix the issue.

3- the 720p flat screen displays currently in the market have a max Resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels, my VGA card sees the flat screen as a generic nPNP monitor and hence doesn't let me set the max res to 1366x768.

4- I don't use the native Denovo Edge method of connection, since I need the bluetooth functionality so
I run a small binary that changes the IDs of the bluetooth dongle in the registry so that windows Vista views the dongle as bluetooth, this is not a very elegant solution as when the machine comes out of sleep mode it doesn't always connects seamlessly to the keyboard.

5- the price for internal HD_DVD drives and Blu-Ray are still prohibitive.

6- vista 32 bit cannot address 4GB memory

I would consider the project complete once I have all these issues resolved, I will update this same blog with any resolutions that I come up with.

0 comments: