Michael McNamara

technology, networking, virtualization and IP telephony

Home Desktop Upgrade 2008

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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”.

Nortel IP 2050 Softphone and Windows Vista

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ip_softphone_2050_317x474 Nortel has just released a support bulletin documenting a problem (CR Q1863946) between the Nortel IP 2050 v2 (and v1.4) and Windows Vista that can affect the audio quality. Nortel is advising users to modify the audio quality within the IP 2050 Softphone application (File -> Settings -> Audio) to a setting of 4 or higher. Nortel IP 2050 v1.4 users must also use the Vista Service Manager to disable QoS on the desktop/laptop. There is no mention of the IP 2050 v3 Softphone in the bulletin so I would guess that version is not affected.

We’ve been using the IP 2050 v2 for connecting to our Nortel Succession 1000M Call Servers with very good success. It’s very reliable and the audio quality has been excellent. I should point out that we lease our corporate laptops with a 24 month refresh so we always have decent hardware to work with. And it doesn’t hurt when you have a Gigabit network backbone from Nortel of course.

We’ve held off deploying the IP 2050 v3 because of the new licensing server that is required although we can’t fault Nortel for moving towards such a solution. While we’ve been very honest in our purchasing and deploying of the IP 2050 softphone I can only guess how many others out there haven’t been so honest. If you’re interested in the Nortel IP 2050 just don’t forget that you’ll need to purchase a copy of the Nortel IP 2050 software along with an Internet IP User ISM (license) for each user.

You may also want to evaluate Microsoft Office Communications Server before you deploy the IP 2050 in any large numbers. We’ve started testing OCS in our lab and we’re hoping to start evaluating it’s voice and video conferencing capabilities in the next few months. You’ll probably still want to use the Nortel IP 2050 Softphone for any Nortel Contact Center (Symposium) agents but for basic voice, instant messaging and video conferencing OCS looks very promising.

Cheers!

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