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DD-WRT Review (WRT54G-TM)

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

I’m not sure why I haven’t played with this already, but awhile ago I didn’t have much cash, so I never picked one up. I had a generic linksys router. Guess what? It crashed all the time if I put it under any type of load at all. The best wireless encryption on it was WEP, which I know first hand how easy that is to crack. I wouldn’t really think anyone around here would know how to do it, but you never know because I live here, and I know how to do it :)

DD-WRT is pretty easy to install, I’ve had to do much more in the past to get a modified firmware up and running. Mine came pre-flashed though, it was pretty cheap on eBay, so I don’t have first hand experience, but in the past I’ve had to solder certain points and jtag the device in order to flash it. I’ve also used telnet in the past to flash, so the steps for this router seem all too familiar.

Anyway, just from playing with this router I love it. So many things I can tweak and mess with. Mostly, what I’ve done so far is setup WPA2 for my wireless encryption, MAC block, QoS, and virtual AP’s.

WPA2 is the best encryption out there right now, so I’m happy with it, I’m also blocking by MAC addresses, so only known devices can connect. QoS (Quality of Service) is rather interesting because I can set priority to certain connections, so if one program is hogging bandwidth, I’m still able to surf the web at full speed.

Virtual AP’s is another interesting feature, it makes it so I can setup different AP’s that have different types of access. For instance, one could have the internet only, the LAN only, or both LAN and internet. This could be useful for a bunch of different things.

I can also adjust the wireless mW so that can help cover more area, but after a certain point you’re going to want to get a better antenna if you need longer distance.

So far, that’s all I’ve played with, but there’s many, many more features I may or may not use in the future.

Uptime on this router is awesome, it stays up for weeks.

Statistics are also pretty interesting, I can monitor all my bandwidth, how much bandwidth other devices on the network are using, overall internet bandwidth consumed, and LAN bandwidth.

Overall, I’m pretty impressed with this router, and if you don’t have a dd-wrt capable router what are you waiting for? It’s worth every penny.

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HD5850 First Impressions

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

Recently I did some computer upgrades. First of all, I had a 22″ & 19″ monitor, but I decided since I’m getting an HD5850 I might as well go for 1920×1200 resolution. So that’s what I did. I now have a 24″ LG and 22″ V7 monitor. If you’re wondering, yes there is a large difference from 1680×1050 and 1920×1200. More screen space generally always means more productivity, and with 2 monitors you have even more space. The next major thing I did was buy a 2TB Hitachi drive, I would have gotten a smaller drive, but the price was right since it runs at 7200rpm. I won’t go lower than that on a hard drive. Next I installed Windows 7 on the 2TB drive.

At first, I thought the HD5850 was going to be bottlenecked by my Q6600, after some in game testing, this doesn’t seem to be the case at all. I’m able to run Crysis at the max settings at 1920×1200, and have very playable frame rates. I tested a few other games and the result was just awesome. I probably got more than 2x the performance of my older card, the HD4850 which I bought when it came out. I don’t plan on upgrading the motherboard/cpu until the next gen cards arrive, such as the HD6850 or something, I’m sure by that point the Q6600 will just be too slow to keep up so a full system upgrade is in store around that time :)

If you’re debating about the HD5870 or the HD5850, 10 – 15% more performance just isn’t worth the extra cost in my opinion, just go with the 5850. Right now, it has the best price/performance ratio out there. I didn’t get all into the benchmarks and stuff yet, I might never get to it this time. Usually I always do when I get a new card and go quite insane with overclocking. I guess I’d rather just game than play with the benchmarks :)

Oh yea, almost forgot.. I’m extremely impressed with Windows 7, it runs great. I’m always on the computer for work or entertainment so having a good setup is pretty important to me. Below is a pic of my current desktop :)

Current Desktop

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HDD (Hard Disk Drive) Failure Rates – Should you worry about it?

Friday, October 16th, 2009

I was on slickdeals the other day where there was a lengthy discussion about how this drive could fail due to having 5 platters and therefore produced more heat and was “supposedly” more likely to fail.

Should you be worried about it? Basically yes and no. I have had a few drives fail on me in the past, all of different brands. Some hard drives are more likely to fail than others, depending on the build quality, but basically any drive can fail at any time. Usually even if you weren’t keeping great backups of all your info you still should be able to recover most of it, but maybe not. All my drives that failed had to do with corruption. I lost no data really.

That particular drive (The 2TB Hitachi) I did purchase because I need to replace a corrupt drive. I leave my computer on almost 24/7. I have some fairly heavy hardware though and I haven’t had an issue. Some Dell computers might not be able to put up with it, since they can barely withstand running something like Prime95.

If you’re really worried about your data then you should get server class hard drives and make backups regularly. Desktop grade drives just aren’t built to last as much.

Don’t worry about drive failure too much, if it happens it happens, deal with it then :)

SideNote: I’ll probably never be able to fill that 2TB drive but I’ll try :)

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Building a MediaBox

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

I’ve had this issue for a long time, I always want to play videos in xvid, ogg, mpeg, mkv, whatever on my TV without having to convert them to anything. I would also like to have a DVR. How about also being able to play any kind of emulator on my TV with a PC game pad? Full Internet access & connected to the LAN so I can grab files from my main PC. Could this be possible? You bet. My answer to the issue is building a mediabox.

So far this is what I’ve come up with. I’m using a mini-pc design, I just hope everything is actually able to fit in the box. The reason why I need the cheap video card is for s-video and overall better quality.mediabox

The total cost for everything with shipping would be around $400 or so. Randomly going over the specifications, CPU: Intel Atom Dual Core Ram: 2GB HD: 500GB Video Card: Radeon 7000 PCI, TV Capture Card: WinTV USB2.0, KB/Mouse: Wireless Logitech.

I’ll install Windows/Linux through a USB cd-rw drive that I have already. As far as DVD playback goes, I might be able to use the drive on my PC to stream the DVD over the LAN to the box, or I could just use my PS2 for DVD playback. (Another option would be to just buy an external USB DVD drive.)

According to the specs on the JetWay box, it should be able to fit one 3.5″ hard drive and fit the PCI video card. However, I’m not really sure that everything will fit. Anyway, that’s the current plan, but I’m still tweaking it a bit, and I’m not sure whether I will run windows or Linux on it. I believe either one would be capable. However, it might just be “easier” to go with Windows in case there is some compatibility issues with the hardware.

If you’re curious about the TV this will be connecting to, it’s a 42″ Plasma EDTV.

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