My Vista HTPC has been running great for months. Unless I need to transfer files to or from it over the network connection. Because the network file transfers maxed at about 150kB/s, even though I was using a 1Gbit card connected to a 1Gbit network. And that 150kB/s only happened if I felt like waiting more than 10 minutes for Vista to “Calculate time remaining” which I usually didn’t. Mostly, I just ignored this because streaming DVDs and TV Shows from my Windows Home Server worked fine. Until last weekend, when I installed the WHS Connector so that the HTPC would get backed up. And the first backup took FOUR DAYS to complete. Yeah, that’s not good. Fortunately, Vista SP1 had just been released to manufacturing, and was supposed to fix the network transfer issue. So I waited impatiently for it to show up on a download site, then downloaded and installed it. Yay, no more “Calculating time remaining. . . !” Only, my file transfer speeds were still only about 400kB/s. Not good, since I want to transfer 7GB+ files from this machine to Bunker. A few hours of troubleshooting later, I got the idea to connect an old USB 100Mbit network card. Connected, installed drivers, transfer speed is now 800kB/s. Well, that’s interesting. One hour and a trip to Best Buy later, I have a new PCI network card that has actual Vista drivers, and file transfer speeds ranging from 25-30Mb/s. That’s MUCH better. Wish I would have spent that $30 months ago.
In other news, I finally upgraded the MacBook to Mac OS 10.5 aka Leopard on Friday afternoon. I’ve been putting off the upgrade until I replaced the hard drive and could do a clean installation. Last week, I noticed the internal drive was clicking, so it was time for a drive upgrade NOW. Grabbed a new Western Digital 320GB 2.5″ SATA drive, swapped it with the existing drive, and booted from the install DVD. Which didn’t see the new drive. Uh-oh. A few minutes later I figured out that the pretty menu across the top of the screen was not just for show, and I needed to run Disk Utility from it to create a drive partition. A few hours of validating and installing later, and it’s all pretty. It’s also much faster. I’m sure some of the “faster” can be attributed to a clean install, but other things, like connecting and re-connecting to network shares, are MUCH improved. USB also seems to run better, with my iPods syncing faster and not freaking out if they aren’t connected in the exact right order. I’ve also set up Time Machine to back up my system to a spare external hard drive, which provides some peace of mind. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have about 50 more programs to download and reinstall. Well, maybe not 50, but it sure feels like it.