Home Desktop Upgrade 2008

Posted by Michael McNamara in PersonalComputing on January 12, 2009

intelq9550I know your asking “who cares” but it’s a blog and not every post needs to be totally useful. In this case I thought I would just spew about my latest desktop creation, yes I still build my own PCs and overclock them as well.

Over the holidays I upgraded my PC by replacing the motherboard, CPU and memory. I also stepped up from Windows XP to Windows Vista Ultimate (64-bit) and I jumped back to an Intel platform from previously using AMD.

I used the following components:

I can honestly say that I’m quite pleased with how everything has turned out. I still play a few games here and there (Left 4 Dead is just awesome and I’m a big fan of Steam) and the DX10 support in Vista is just amazing on the eVGA 8800GTS that I reused from my previous system.  There was only one small issue that I encountered that involves the rear audio jacks from the RealTek HD Audio codec which I believe is a Windows Vista 64-bit driver problem since the audio hardware works with Ubuntu Live.

I also stumbled upon Windows Media Center and I have to honestly say that I’m very impressed. I ripped a few of my favorite DVDs to my hard disk and had my own on-demand library right there on my own PC.

I’m sure there will be a few folks scratching there heads asking why this bloat didn’t just purchase an Intel Core i7 processor inplace of the older Intel Core 2 processor. Honestly, while the price of the each processor was in line with the other the motherboard and memory were much more expensive for the Core i7 platform.

Cheers!

Update: January 22, 2009

I was finally able to resolve the audio issue by installing the latest drivers (v2.14) from the RealTek website for the “High Definition Audio Codec”.

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DESKTOP, PC, VISTA

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Motorola WS5100 and RFS7000 and Wi-NG v1.3

Posted by Michael McNamara in Motorola, WirelessLANSwitch on January 6, 2009

Motorola has released software v3.3 for the WS5100 and v1.3 for the RFS7000 Wireless LAN Switches. This is v1.3 release of their Wi-NG software for Motorola’s Enterprise-class RF & Wireless Switches.

You can find the release notes for the 3.3 (WS5100) software release here. And you can find the release notes for the 1.3 (RFS7000) software release here.

I hope to provide some feedback in the coming weeks.

Cheers!

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RFS7000, WI-NG, WS5100

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UNIStim Firmware Release 3.1 for Nortel IP phones

Posted by Michael McNamara in Nortel, VoiceOverIP on January 5, 2009

call_center_corp_red_32bitWe’ve been running on a very old version of firmware for the i2002, i2004, i2007, 1140e and 1150e for sometime now. We initially put a lot of time and effort assisting Nortel with troubleshooting the LLDP/ADAC integration between the Nortel Ethernet Routing Switches and the Nortel IP telephones. We had been running 0604DBG on the i2002 and i2004 models for the past 24 months with great success on about 350+ phones.

We have another large IP phone deployment coming up in the next few months and thought it would be a good time to upgrade prior to deploying potentially another 300+ IP phones.

We’ve just started upgrading our Data Center (our testbed if you will) with the latest firmware.

  • 0604DCG for Phase II IP Phones (2001, 2002 & 2004),
  • 0621C6H for IP Phone 2007,
  • 0623C6J, 0624C6J, 0625C6J and 0627C6J for IP Phone 1110, 1120E, 1140E and 1150E respectively
  • 062AC6J for IP Phone 1210, 1220, and 1230

I’m happy to report that everything appears to be working properly. The regular i2002 and i2004 handsets work fine. The 1140e works fine with the Plantronics Bluetooh headset and the 1150es still work fine in our three call centers. We are using LLDP/ADAC with all of our phones as a way to standardize their configuration. We utilize CRQM for Contact Recording and that seemed to work fine along with Contact Center 6.0 when used with the 1150e phones.

We did have one or two problems with the Default PVID changing on the Nortel ERS 5520 switch after the upgrade (power cycle). I initially thought it was related to our previous experiences with ADAC which I discussed in this post. However, this problem only involved the PVID and not the entire VLAN so additional testing will probably be required to try and isolate this issue.

I have yet to test either of the new provisioning options, including the new DHCP option (“Nortel-i2004-B”)  or the new “Info Block” files retrieved over TFTP. I talked about the new DHCP options when firmware 2.3 was released back in May 2008.  I’m curious if either of these options will help ease the initial configuration of the IP handsets.

You can find the release notes for the Nortel UNIStim Release 3.1 here.

Cheers!

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1140E, 1150E, FIRMWARE, I2002, I2004, UNISTIM, VOIP

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Issue with Nortel 8692SF and 8005AC Power Supplies

Posted by Michael McNamara in EthernetRtngSwitch, Nortel on January 4, 2009

Here’s another one that I’ve personally seen and I think folks need to hear about.  Nortel has just revised this technical bulletin that was originally released in March 2008 concerning issues with their 8692SF (CPU) for the ERS 8600 chassis and the new 8005AC power supplies for that chassis. If you have non-E, E, or M cards in your ERS 8600 chassis with an 8692SF and 8005AC power supply you should check the hardware version of the 8692SF.

Unfortunately the bulletin makes reference to December31, 2008 as the expiration of the replacement program for folks that don’t have a support contract.

You would never expect a switch to not initialize properly on a hardware reboot would you? That’s exactly what can happen and I’ve seen the problem on a number of occasions since we upgraded all our core ERS 8600 switches about two years ago with 8005AC power supplies to support the new R modules.

Cheers!

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8005AC, 8692SF, BULLETIN, Nortel

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