IIS Remote Desktop Connection

My basement network wiring is now functional thanks to a bunch of DIY cabling and a small switch I bought off eBay. This let me get my home server PC up and running. I think I will host another website from it. I have always used a VNC product to connect to my webserver in the past, but this time I decided to try Windows remote connection.

I found a great article by Tony Northrup on how to accomplish this task. It easily guides you through setting up the IIS components, changing the web TCP port (if you so desire), router forwarding, firewall exception reminder, and how to connect to a remote desktop. I ran right through it and had my remote connection up and running in no time. Now I can securly access my home server from anywhere the internets are.

Laptop Puppy Linux

I have an old laptop that is used for couch surfing and Facebook updating. It can run Windows XP (very slowly) and Xubuntu is just a bit smoother. These both take forever to boot up though as they easily max out the laptop’s components.

I have been searching here and there for a lightweight linux distro that would recognize my wireless card and respond promptly with the hardware I have. After a few failed attempts with other distros, I reluctantly downloaded the latest (4.1.2) Puppy Linux release and was pleasantly surprised.

The live CD booted up quickly (after a few general system questions) and blew me away when I easily configured my wireless card to hook up to my network. The card’s lights did not turn on, but the connection worked none-the-less. This was a first for me.

I was so impressed that I decided to install Puppy on my HD and boot time took approximately 1 minute – power button to desktop – very nice! Opening programs is very snappy and I couldn’t be happier. Thank you Puppy Linux! I can’t wait to hop on and cruise Digg stories and chat with my peeps in Facebook!

Motherboard Shocker

At the end of summer my house got a nice jolt of electricity from some nearby lightning. The surge made its way to my Foxconn P35A motherboard and it started to fail. It would shut down at odd times (not a heat issue) and was hard to bring back to life. It finally died a short time ago and I found another Foxconn mobo that fit my needs – the 45GMX.

During the process of problem solving the failing motherboard issue, I acquired a dual core E2200 processor. I decided to stick that in the new motherboard and completed the surgery last night. Everything went great and when I powered the system up, all I had to do was put the driver CD in the tray and everything loaded back up as normal. Thank the stars I didn’t have to do an OS reinstall!

I read the 45GMX has some good overclocking potential. With the great luck I had with the P35A  in this area, I can’t wait to start tinkering with the BIOS.

Wireless Music with Bluetooth

I hate wires! I think most techies do. Since I don’t have a lot of space on my desk for speakers, I wanted to find a way to listen to music and games with minimal wiring fuss. I purchased wireless headphones off eBay, but the base station, along with the headphones themselves, had batteries to monitor and replace. I also noticed that the headphones dropped some of the intense sound effects from games. That was just not acceptable.

I then found an article on how to hook up a bluetooth headset/earpiece to a PC with a bluetooth dongle (I love that word). I had and extra earpiece and dongle in my tech storage box, so I decided to give it a shot. It was rather painless to set up and it fit my need perfectly. While the sound quality isn’t astonishing, it is decent enough for my online activities. It also doesn’t drop out like the wireless headset did.

Router Woes – Wireless Goes to Sleep

I currently have a D-Link 524 wireless router. For wired connections the thing works great. For most of my wireless needs it has served me well… as well. I did notice a strange problem from time to time that I never really thought about until I played with running servers over my home network.

The initial wireless connection would establish without problems, but after a period of inactivity the wireless connection would go to sleep. At first I thought it was an issue with my wireless network card, but then I did some Googling and found out differently. It appears that this is a sporadic problem on D-Link units and no solution had been found. That really sucks.

I like the 524 and have everything set up the way I want it, but since my house isn’t network wired I depend a lot on a stable wireless connection. Therefore, I decided to buy a 2Wire 2700HG-B gateway unit. It has a modem built into the wireless router that works with my DSL ISP. From everything I have read, these are great little units. Hopefully this will correct my sleepy wireless connectivity problem. I will give an update when I have the 2700 up and running.

Overclocking my XFX 8600GT XXX

I’ve had a little time to tweak my video card. If my memory is working correctly today, I think I got the core up to 720MHz and the memory up to 890MHz. Not bad at all. I also bought and installed an Iceberq 5 copper VGA cooler. It has done a magnificent job cooling my overclocked GPU. With the stock cooler, and no memory heatsinks, the card ran in the 50s at idle. Overclocking it with this setup took it up into the high 70s. That is not good. After I installed the Iceberq 5 on the XFX 8600GT, I could not get the temperature to go over 65 celsius – even with the high overclock! Very nice indeed.

Video Card Install – Mobo Discovery

I received my XFX 8600GT XXX yesterday and got it installed. I discovered something interesting about my motherboard through the process that I didn’t know before. I was aware that my overclocked mobo was sensitive to changes, but I didn’t know that every time I swap a component I have to reset the BIOS. I installed my new card and was greeted by a blank screen upon rebooting – no BIOS splash or anything. Luckily I have a reset button on my mobo. I hit that, powered up the system again, and I was good to go. I am glad it turned out to be a simple solution instead of pulling out components trying to figure out what went wrong. Now on to overclocking the new video card!

My New GPU – XFX 8600GT XXX

I am excited to get my new video card! I was able to get my XFX 8400GS unit to overclock nicely and play games like Unreal Tournament 3 and Crysis with decent settings. I know I could get higher performance with a better card, but I don’t have the cash for a Geforce 8800GT model or the new 9600GT unit. I was able to find a deal on the XFX 8600GT XXX video card off dealnews.com and newegg.com. This will be a good improvement over my 8400GS, and I understand the 8600GT XXX overclocks even further than it already is (low OC done by the factory). It should come in today and I can’t wait to see the increased frame rate in my games.

Crazy Busy Update #4

I can’t believe it is February already! This year seems to be flying right along. A lot has happened in the last few weeks. I started my home IT consulting business, but then I also had to return to college. I have had to kick my time management skills back into high gear to handle everything. I also stopped hosting my website at home. The time it took to maintain the system and drives is something I didn’t have. Now I am hosted as a WordPress blog masked behind my MojoTechBlog.com domain name.

On the tech front, I moved my main dual core system upstairs so I could work on my school and business stuff more efficiently… and to do some gaming every once in a while. My toddler loves the blue LED power light on the case and thinks it is great fun to push it on and off when the system is running. Luckily I remembered to configure the power button in XP to not shut down my system automatically when she does this. Now she can click to her heart’s content.

E2160 DC Build – XFX 8400GS Overclock

After reaching the final stable overclock of my new motherboard, I turned my attention to my budget XFX 8400GS video card. After reading some reviews of the card I knew it was a decent overclocker. First thing first though – I upgraded my stock passive cooler on the card because it was running at 62C without any stress. This was not good at all. During 3D testing the temperature went so high that it started freezing the system.

I bought an aftermarket EVERCOOL VC-RF Cyclone Universal VGA Cooler and I have to say the thing is awesome. My idle temperature is now 29-30C and my gaming temperature (with the overclock) never gets past 41C. Now lets talk about the overclock. I used ATITool and was able to take my 459MHz core up to a stable 637MHz. I was then able to take my memory from a stock 400MHz up to a stable 550MHz (1100MHz DDR). This is awesome! It is roughly a 38.5% OC for the core and a 37.5% OC for the memory.

So far I have tested the overclocked card in Unreal Tournament 3 and Crysis at 1024×768. I was able to set everything on high in Unreal Tournament 3 and the game play and graphics are as smooth as butter. Crysis is definitely next gen and a system hog, so I didn’t have high hopes for the 8400GS. I was pleasantly surprised to get a good gaming experience at 1024×768. I was able to set all the advanced settings on at least medium and one or two on high (anti-aliasing is totally out of the question though). Not bad for a budget card I picked up for $30.