Fun weekend

[Harold L Hunt II]

This weekend was interesting.

On Saturday I picked up a Samsung SyncMaster 191T, using the funds that 
have been donated by the generous Cygwin/XFree86 supporters (I also 
chipped in a substantial amount of money on my own, for anyone keeping 
score :)  This gives me a nice readable display and it replaces the 
hideous 15 inch LCD that I had caused two permanent vertical lines (one 
blue, one yellow) by not wiping off the windex before it ran down under 
the bezel (stupid, stupid me).  I hated looking at the monitor because 
it reminded me of my own stupidity.  :)

I then ran back to the store and picked up an ATI All In Wonder Radeon 
8500 DV since it has a DVI-I output.  This was necessary because I was 
getting some interference patterns when running in 1280x1024 with the 
analog DB-15 input.  The DVI input cleared up the interference 
completely and my display is now beautifuly.  However, getting the 
display to work perfectly took about 8 hours, as it was dropping frames 
when playing DVDs (the motion was extremely jerky) and recording video 
was dropping tons of frames as well.  I was misled by the ATI 
documentation and utilities into thinking that this was either due to a 
misconfiguration of the hard drive interface (i.e., UDMA may not be 
enabled) or due to a poorly synchronized clock on my sound card (which 
is used for decoding the audio).  I stumbled upon the correct solution, 
more on that below, after an entire day of poking around.  I thought 
that the solution was the hard drive drivers, but I was wrong.

Anyway, on Sunday morning I booted up the machine, after having spent 
all of Saturday and Saturday night until 3:00 AM configuring it. 
 Windows reported that WINNT\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM could not be found. 
 Great.  I ran setup to a repair, but setup could not find my Windows 
installation.  So, I ran the recovery console.  All of my data was still 
there, but chkdsk reported errors.  This totally agrees with the fact 
that running some executables over the past two weeks would completely 
lock the machine.  These executables were most likely corrupt.  In any 
case, I needed a new hard drive.  (Luckily, I could copy data from the 
damaged drive to the Zip drive).

I returned to the store again and bought an 80 GB Western Digital HD.  I 
reinstalled Windows 2000, only to find that the drive letter assigned to 
the new drive was F and the old drive was C.  So, I changed the old 
drive to C, and reinstalled Windows 2000 again (since it will not let 
you change the drive letter of the boot drive, yay).  Now the new drive 
was C and the old drive was D, perfect.  I then copied over all of my 
data.  Thank god none of that was lost.  Unfortunately, I had lost the 
entire weekend due to computer troubles.


As for the video problems, I would have known exactly what was wrong had 
I tried to run XWin.exe at any point during my attempts to fix the jerky 
DVDs and video recording.  The first time I ran XWin.exe after setting 
up the new hard drive, I noticed that the X background took about 4 
seconds to draw, and directory listings were visibly crawling.  This new 
card was 10 times slower than my old card when using the DirectDraw 
engines; the GDI engine, on the other hand, ran very quickly.  So, I 
uninstalled my graphics card drivers (keeping the Hardware Manager 
applet open, otherwise this does not work), then reran the setup.exe for 
the updated ATI drivers that I had downloaded.  I then rebooted the 
machine and the DirectDraw engines were as blazingly fast as expected. 
 The problems with the DVD playback and video recording were also fixed. 
 I had originally installed the downloaded drivers, thinking that they 
would not be overwritten with an older version when I installed the ATI 
software from the enclosed CD-ROM, but the drivers were, in fact, 
overwritten with an older version.  That older version has terrible 
performance.  The newer version is amazing.


In sum total, I now have a machine that I can actually stand to use for 
programming again.  You could probably chart my fall-off in involvement 
with Cygwin/XFree86 and notice that it has only been happening since I 
damanaged my monitor.  Now that I have a normal monitor, I expect to get 
a little patching done now and then.

Thanks once again to all of those who have contributed (source code, 
donations, anything) to the Cygwin/XFree86 project!

Harold