WebHavoc.com

Commentary and discussion on the items that are on this geek's mind

Archive for May, 2006

Hardware requirements for Windows Vista officially announced

May 18

Posted by Tejas in Software | 3 Comments

Microsoft today revealed the minimum specifications for Windows Vista, in two tiers: “Vista Capable” and “Premium Ready.” And as usual, the emphasis is on minimum.

I was actually, after all the hype, expecting Vista’s requirements to be higher than what was announced. Most people who bought a somewhat decent PC in the last 2 years should have enough CPU horsepower and RAM for the new OS.

One item which WILL require most people to upgrade though is the video card requirements. I’m ok but that’s because I did spend about $400 last summer on an ATI X800XL 256MB card, but nowadays most budget PCs come with internal graphics which won’t do you any good with Vista if you want to see all the special effects.

What I’m curious about is if they’re going to announce separate specs for laptops/notebooks. Not many notebooks out there with 128MB of video RAM!

read more

My XBox 360 had a “hardware failure” after 5 flawless months!

May 15

Posted by Tejas in Video Games | 5 Comments

Well I read all the posts and articles about people experiencing hardware failure problems with their Xbox 360. I thought to myself, “nah” that’s not going to happen to me.

Sure enough, I got the system on December 12, 2005 I have been playing it since then without a single issue. As you can see from my gamerscoe on the gamercard on this site I have played quite a bit and enjoyed it.

So as I said, the thing has been working flawlessly for months and life was good. Today, I got home and decided to play a little Oblivion before dinner so I started it up and it loaded Oblivion fine. Hit Continue and the game started to load my saved game…then rather than see the graphical goodness of Oblivion I saw a bizzarre graphics corruption that reminded me of my old PC gamer days with video artifacts.

Thinking this was just a minor hiccup, I turned the system off, waited a few seconds and then turned it back on eager to get back to Oblivion.

Then it happened – my worst Xbox 360 nightmare – the dreaded 3 Blinking Lights of Doom. This signal is supposed to indicate that either the system is “overheating” or “hardware failure”. I immediately knew it couldn’t possibly be overheating since it had only been on for like 3 mins before it croaked. Also I had played several long sessions in the past five months when an overheating issue would have presented itself.

That led me to sad belief that my $500 video game console had for no apparent reason committed suicide. Not quite sure what drove it to do this since I had treated it quite well but I guess that’s life.

Called Microsoft at 1-800-4-MYXBOX and the guy took my info down. The process is that they will send an empty box (upto 3 days) to me, I return it (? days), they fix it (2 days) and ship it back (upto 3 days) – so all in all we’re looking at like 2 weeks or so to get it back.

What a pain and very dissapointing that something like this could happen without any type of warning.

The only silver lining in this ordeal is that my warranty was supposed to expire 4 days from today so had this issue happened next week, I’d have to pay money for this nonense.

I’ll report back on the process and how long it takes.

BE WARNED if you have an Xbox 360 – it can happen at any time so enjoy it while you can

Sony Playstation 3 (PS3) Missing Features on Low-End Version

May 9

Posted by Tejas in Video Games | No Comments

psxlogo1.jpgSony probably didn’t want anyone to find out until closer to launch but thanks to the wonderful interweb, the cat is now out of the bag.

The “budget” $499 PS3 system apart from having a smaller HD (20 vs 60GB) than the “premium” $599 PS3 actually has several other features missing including HDMI output! WTF? What happened to true-HD? What good is BluRay without HDMI..apart from HDMI, the $499 system also doesn’t have WiFi or a Memory Card Reader.

Read More (Pricing)

Also as if that wasn’t bad enough, the PS3 new controller (which to me looks identical to the current PS2 Dual Shock) doesn’t have any type of force feedback which although Sony attributes to causing interference with the gyroscopics (motion detection) is more likely due to a copyright issue they recently lost.

Read More (Controller)

Personally, I would rather have Force Feedback over motion detection and I sure as hell am not paying $599 for a PS3 that probably won’t ship with any games. What do you think?
Also as with the Xbox360 (which I do own) initially the stores will be selling bundles so you’re looking at close to $1000 for a decent starting system. More than likely, I’m guessing Microsoft will drop the price on the Xbox360 before the PS3 launches making the price gap even more.

Windows Mobile 5.0 System Processes Memory Consumption

May 8

Posted by Tejas in Cell Phones | 2 Comments

One of the main problems with Windows Mobile 5.0 devices is that they don’t have a lot of RAM available to users so you can’t run a lot of applications at the same time, and on top of that some applications aren’t good about returning the RAM they use after they’re done.

RAM in Windows Mobile 5.0 works in the same way as RAM on a PC. It’s volatile storage which means that if power is lost everything in it is erased. It’s used to load running programs and store info temporarily. Windows Mobile 5.0 devices also have ROM which can be compared to a hard drive on a PC and is used for persistent storage. So essentially, much like a PC whenever a program runs on a Windows Mobile 5.0 device (for the most part) it is copied from ROM to RAM and then executed. The code then remains in RAM until it is done and then it’s supposed to free that RAM for something else – except it doesn’t always seem to happen too well. Keep in mind, releasing this free RAM and memory management in general is the responsibility of the application NOT Windows which is why things get messy with third-party apps. 

In any case, I am very much in love with my Cingular 8125 which runs Windows Mobile 5.0 but I got frustrated with the constantly vanishing RAM so I sent an email to the Windows Mobile Team blog, who actually work on the development of the system.

This a great email response from Mike Calligaro of the Window’s Mobile Team. Its pretty self-explanatory.

What do you think? Is Mike’s explanation valid? I think if what he says is true that we need to pick up our pitchforks and go after the OEMs such as HTC for sticking us with a paltry 64MB of total RAM…most of us start with only about 22MB available after a soft-reset and if 10MB+ is “supposed” to be used by the OS then we’re left with 10MB or even less.

Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

—–Original Message—–
From: Me
Sent: Friday, April 28, 2006 8:15 AM
To: Windows Mobile Blog Team
Subject: (Windows Mobile Team Blog) : WM 5.0 System Processes Memory Consum=
ption
Importance: High

Hi,

I would normally accept OS memory allocations and system process memory foo=
tprints as a necessary evil but something just does not seem right.

I have a HTC Wizard device running the latest AKU2 ROM (OS 5.1.195 Build 14=
847.2.0.0)

I start off with about 22MB of free memory after a soft-reset and now after=
using the device for about 8 days, I’m consistantly floating around 7-8MB =
free.

I ran Task Manager (similar to MemMaid) which looks at running processes an=
d memory footprint. Guess what I found….the top 4 memory hogs are ALL WIN=
DOWS MOBILE 5 SYSTEM PROCESSES!!

So in reality it doesn’t matter which apps you are running from third-parti=
es because it’s WM5′s own system processes that are killing your memory.

Here’s my top 4:

GWES.exe – ~3MB

Filesys.exe – ~ 2.5MB

Shell32.exe – ~ 2.5MB

Device.exe – ~ 2.0MB

Total = 10MB!!

VoiceCmd also takes up about 2MB and the rest of my apps/plug-ins take up

—– Reply to Original Message—–
From: “Mike Calligaro”
To: Me
Sent: 5/8/06 4:43 PM
Subject: RE: (Windows Mobile Team Blog) : WM 5.0 System Processes Memory Co=
nsumption

These numbers feel about right to me. It takes code to run an operating sy=
stem, and code uses RAM. All of the processes that you’ve listed below are=
system processes.

GWES is the windowing system. A large number of the system bitmaps are loa=
ded into GWES. Bitmaps (pictures) take up a lot of space. Also, every app=
lication that creates a window causes GWES to allocate space to manage that=
window. Font data is also loaded into GWES. The more fonts used, the mor=
e space GWES will use.

Filesys is the file system. It is equal parts Microsoft code and OEM code,=
but 2.5M feels about right, especially if you had a storage card inserted =
when you took that number. It is the file system that stores data in inter=
nal flash and storage cards. Because flash is considerably slower than RAM=
the file system uses a chunk of RAM as a “cache.” When you want to write =
something to the flash, the filesys will store it in the cache and let you =
get on with your business quickly. Then it slowly writes the data out to f=
lash. A sizeable chunk of the RAM you’re seeing is used by these caches. =
An OEM can configure how big the caches should be, but this is a tradeoff b=
etween RAM usage and performance. If you use too little RAM, the device wi=
ll go too slow.

Shell32 is the user interface of the system, including the today screen. A=
ny today screen plugins you have are loaded in Shell32′s space, as is the b=
ackground image.

Device contains all of the device drivers on the system. Device drivers ar=
e the code that make the hardware work. Without them, your device is nothi=
ng but a hunk of plastic. Device contains, minimally, the Display driver, =
backlight driver, audio driver, keyboard driver, battery driver, usb driver=
, camera driver, Bluetooth driver, wifi driver, and cellular radio driver. =
Remove the display driver, and your screen wouldn’t work anymore, etc. Al=
though all of these drivers are written by the OEM, running more than ten f=
undamentally important pieces of code in 2M seems reasonable to me.

Mike