Sunday, January 18, 2009

Windows Vista restrained - a bit

I'm using Vista for like 2 weeks now and I have to say I really like it. It feels fluent on my comp and everything I want it to do works well.

But, being a Microsoft OS, it still sometimes feels like it simply has a mind of its own. Namely, when I see massive harddrive-operation when the system shouldn't be doing anything. Of course, I went for the usual "suspects" and disabled background defragmentation and the Windows search and indexing. But that didn't stop the harddrive activities.

After using the built-in Resource Viewer of the task manager - which is quite amazing, informative and very useful! - and after consulting google with the results, I found the cause: Superfetch, some kind of prefetch or caching mechanism newly introduced by Vista to speed up the access or starting-time of frequently used files and programs. Problem is that if your frequently used files are very very largs - like certain games - then that process of creating the cache takes alot of time and resources aswell. Yes I know, the Superfetch runs on low priority in background, but we all know Windows: no matter how fast the machine, as long as it constantly accesses the harddisk like crazy, lags in responsiveness are to be expected. And those can be annoying when playing games or watching movies.

So, after disabling those services, my Vista doesn't torture the harddrive anymore - not unless I want it to. I don't need search indexes since I usually know where my files are at, and I don't see the use of having another caching-mechanism. I haven't seen any significant speed improvements when Superfetch was turned on compared to now, so as long as my system works as I want it to, I'm happy with that.

Thursday, January 8, 2009

ghosting on Samsung TV over HDMI

Just as I wrote the article about everything working so well with my new Bluray-capable laptop and my Samsung TV, I actually stumbled over a problem that I didn't notice much at first or didn't investigate:

When watching movie-material over HDMI, I sometimes have "ghosting" issues. It only seems to happen when I use HDMI, and is most noticable when playing video-files with alot of dark areas. I'm not sure what the reason for it is or what component is responsible, but I will keep investigating.

It could be a number of things: the TV itself, maybe the HDMI-cables, the A/V receiver, the laptop's graphics card, etc.

The same videofiles play fine on the internal laptop-display and on an external TFT monitor hooked up over HDMI->DVI. So I kinda doubt it's the player software itself, probably not the gfx driver either - unless it has special options / handling of HDMI-signals. That could be the case of course, considering HDCP and all.

Right now my guess is that it's the TV though. Probably not even a fault or error, but rather simple a setting-issue or a slight incompatibility with the HDMI-source. I'm still hoping that I can solve it by switching off all the "image-enhancement" options of the TV. I tried a few of those already, without any success though.

Another reason might be the HDMI-connection. I don't know if cable quality has an effect or not, but I will try using a different HDMI-cable and omitting my A/V receiver and connect the laptop with the TV directly. At least it will give me an idea where the problem might be.

Another cause could be frequency/synching issues. I was happy to see that I could set 1080p/24 as display mode and it even worked on my TV, but maybe that's a problem nevertheless. BUT: I already tried other 1080p outputs, both 60hz and 50hz, with no noticable difference.

Ohwell, what can I say... "nice new digital world!"? or perhaps my usual complain: "Why can't things simply work?"