It’s been a long time since I posted anything, but I thought I better blog this quick before I got over how pleased I am with myself.

I was one of the first in Australia to get an XBox360 when it just launched. I pre-ordered my unit at Electronics Boutique and went for the launch night and everything.

Anyway, apart from Top Spin 2, I didn’t really play much XBox. I used it mostly to watch dvds. A few months ago when people were complaining about the 3 rings of death I was a bit concerned since my unit was the very first version but things were working fine for me.

Two nights ago, I had a power outage at home and when I tried to boot up the XBox I had the dreaded 3 rings of death! Initially it looked like all 4 rings were flashing but upon closer inspection I realised it was 3.

Having stored my XBox360 packaging box somewhere I can’t remember, I had my receipt in there and couldn’t be bothered looking for it. I searched in Google instead, to see what information I could dig up.

Found this post on xbox-scene.com that had information about the different rings and how to get specific error codes of the problem. My error code was “0020″ which stood for “Unknown Hardware Failure” which meant it could have been anything. Microsoft recommends you send the console in if you get this error.

But I found this video on geeksaresexy.net that basically shows you that by wrapping your XBox360 in towels, leaving it on for 20 minutes and letting it overheat, it fixes the problem! While I was of little faith I gave it a go.

IT WORKED! My XBox360 is back up and running. Apparently this is a temporary fix and the problem may resurface but I’ve left the XBox going for a couple of hours and so far so good. One thing I didn’t do was remove the hard drive, which really is a good idea in case it overheats. The video also instructs you to remove the video cable, but I’d leave it on as I found the XBox360 powers itselfs off after a while if it doesn’t detect the video cable.

Finally, I found this site that claims that for US$23 you can download videos and instructions on how to repair any problem on the XBox360. As I mentioned earlier I have little faith but has anyone purchased or seen this and is the info worth paying for?

UPDATE (16 Dec 2007):
My XBox360 died again with the same 3 rings of death problem, error code “0020″. I gave the towel trick one more go and the XBox360 worked for one more day before dying with the same problem. I’ve given up on the towel trick! Did some research on the net and the next thing I’m going to try when I have the time is to apply Artic Silver Thermal paste and maybe use the heat gun trick to “cook” things back in place.

Just when I thought I had my TPG ADSL2+ connection all set up, TPG cuts my upload speeds in half again! More on that in just a minute.

Following on from my earlier post about the NB9W hanging, I plugged the NB5Plus4 I borrowed and set it up in bridge mode, which means I disabled it’s router features and just ran it as if it was a standalone modem. I connected my existing wireless router, an old school Microsoft MN-500 I got years ago when I worked in the US, and everything connected. But, I was on a miserable 3700/256kbps. This was on last Wednesday.

I called the TPG helpdesk at their opening time of 8am sharp. The tech support guy listened, then put me on hold for 10 minutes. After that, he said check your modem again we have changed your profile on our side of things and now you should have better upload speeds. I checked and indeed it was true but when I started surfing the net it wasn’t stable. He got me to try pinging the tpg site and I kept getting timeouts.

He put me on hold again, and after another 10 minutes, he said the engineer tried a number of things but finally set me at 4000/512kbps as it was the most stable. He said it was probably something wrong with the Netcomm.

In the afternoon, it hit me. I should’ve just had everything run standalone on the Netcomm. Maybe my old Microsoft router didn’t know how to authenticate with TPG over ADSL2+. When I got home, I set everything up to run off the Netcomm, then the next day I called TPG again at 8am.

This time, the tech support person was a pleasent sounding female who asked me the typical questions from the support script. Do I have everything powered on, have I tried an isolation test, do I have any other devices sharing the line etc. I had shared the same line with my cordless phone and fax machine before, but for the purpose of the test I disconnected everything so the NB5Plus4 had the whole line to itself. I also played dumb about what happened the last time but unfortunately I made a fool of myself as she could see records of my call!

I complained about the upload speeds and she put me on hold while she got an engineer to do something on the TPG side. Basically, what I found out from the Whirlpool forums was that they tend to cap your speeds to ensure stability. Once the engineer changed my profile, my modem reported that I was running in ADSL2+ mode instead of G.DMT and guess what mum my speeds went up to 5000/1000kbps! My attentuation and snr figures were more decent too.

But I didn’t stop there. I hunted around the house to see where my Telstra phone line was at and found it at a very convenient location. I then discovered I only had 2 ports for that phone line in my house. I was able to do a true isolation test, having the phone line go directly to the DSL modem, and my speeds went up to 6500/1000kbps. It’s nothing compared to some of the speeds others are getting but it’s good enough for me.

I then decided to buy a new modem router of a different brand. Actually, the friends who loaned me their NB5Plus4 also had upgraded to TPG ADSL2+ and wanted their modem back so I was forced to start hunting. I heard good things about Speedtouch, but apparently their authentication mechanisms are not compatible with TPG. I then decided to go with the Dynalink RTA1025W. I picked that up as well as a central splitter from Cormain, and I recommend this retailer to anyone in the market for anything ADSL related. These guys know their stuff.

When I got home, I hooked everything up and it was all sweet. All was well, I was getting about 4800/1000kbps, but yesterday I found out TPG had once again dropped me to 512kps upstream and my modem was on G.DMT modulation. I tried forcing the modem to connect on ADSL2+ but it wouldn’t connect. A 8am phone call to their helpdesk this morning got it resolved, and I sit here wondering when and why TPG would drop me to 512kbps upstream again. Maybe there’s something on their system that detects if there are frequent disconnects and drops the speeds to ensure stability.

It’s true. The ANZ online banking web site has undergone some recent changes. Apart from a face lift, I’m not sure what else has changed.

I use Microsoft Money to keep track of my savings and expenses. Money works great if you live in the US… alot of banks either let you connect to them directly or give you Money friendly file formats to download your transactions.

I have an ANZ credit card, and they have a feature where you can download transactions into Money but it’s not automated. You have to choose your dates, then ANZ will generate the file for you that you can download and open in Money.

But as a result of their changes, when you download transactions, charges appear as payments!

I emailed ANZ to complain.

“Downloading my transactions into Microsoft Money 2006 doesn’t work properly. In the past, I would use the Quicken option and everything would work but now the Charges appear as Credits in the application.”

The Microsoft Money option you have in the web page is an .ofc file which is a very old Money standard and does not work for Money 2005 and above.”

Please let your programmers know and hopefully you can change it cause it’s a feature I use alot.”

This was their reply:

“Thank you for your SecureMail regarding your inability to download transaction history to MS Money.

We wish to inform you that we are aware of this issue and our Internet Banking Technicians are looking into this matter on an urgent basis. However, till this issue is fixed, regrettably, you will not be able to download to MS Money.”

We apologize for the inconvenience caused to you.”

Big help you are ANZ.

Fortunately, I have found a simple solution. Simply download the file in qif (Quicken) format, open it in a text editor (Notepad) and add a negative sign to all purchases. Similarly, remove all negative signs for payments.

So, this:

D05/10/2006
T72.95
PFITNESS FIRST AUST SYDNEY
^

Should be changed to

D05/10/2006
T-72.95
PFITNESS FIRST AUST SYDNEY
^

UPDATE: ANZ appears to have fixed this. Hooray!

I upgraded my ADSL account with TPG recently to ADSL2+. I was very excited to see what speeds I could get. When the line was activated, I quickly bought myself a new modem router. The Netcomm NB9W had favorable reviews and seemed to have everything anyone would one, with wireless and VoIP capabilities thrown in.

Having installed countless number of ADSL modems for non-techy friends, I thought the NB9W would be pretty straight forward. Plus the phone line in, plug my network cable in, go to the web admin page and enter my TPG username/password and I’d be ready to rock-n-roll.

But I could not connect to TPG. The line would drop out and cause the NB9W to hang. After 2 hours of experimenting with different things, I gave up and read the User Guide, only to find out that you were supposed to connect another phone line to the LINE Port, even if you did not intend to use the VoIP features. When I did that, I could connect!

I was pretty excited, and began to configure the router with my port forwarding rules, then configured the wireless network settings to work with the other computers in the house. But as I started to use the NB9W, it was very unstable.

Basically, it would hang, and while it could still dish out IP addresses, no computer could access the internet and I could not access the web admin page. Only by pulling the power plug out and restarting the NB9W would get it to work, but then once again the same thing would happen periodically.

I could not isolate the problem to anything in particular. I upgraded the firmware to no avail. I suspect it may be due to the fact that I daisy chained another network switch to it, and that somehow the NB9W was designed to work by itself. Of course, this is another one of my own theories that has no scientific merit.

Fortunately, I was able to return the NB9W for a full refund, even though I had to practically dance naked to get it.

At the moment, I’m running my connection with a NB5Plus4, on loan from friends who are also waiting to upgrade to ADSL2+. I’m in the market for a new modem router, but have no idea what to get. The DLinks and Netgears are pretty out-of-date and the Billions are looking good.

What are my speeds like with ADSL2+? A miserable 4000/512kbps. More on that another time… I’m trying to see what I can do to fix it and will blog about my experience when I’ve given up or gotten it to work.

I just built myself a new computer (more details next time) and the original motherboard I wanted to get was the Intel D975XBX. It had good reviews, and from my previous experience, Intel motherboards have been known for their rock solid stability.

The D975BX was very short in supply in Sydney as it was in high demand, but I was able to get one from Umart. My sources tell me only OEM versions of the board is available in Australia, hence all I got was a lousy brown box with boring red SATA cables, floppy and ide ribbon cables, a back panel, 2 cd-roms and 2 raid driver disks and one sticker detailing where to plug things in.

Once I installed the board and plugged everything in, I installed Windows 2003 Server (my OS choice) and attempted to install the LAN drivers from the cd-rom, so I could download updated ones from Intel later. I experienced the same problems reported by Toms Hardware. But I was able to download drivers from my existing computer and got everything installed.

After a couple of hours, I had a couple of blue-screen-of-death occurences. The system hanged at different times and eventually I could not boot into Windows. My attempts to reinstall proved to be futile as well, with Setup complaining files were corrupted etc. I then realised it was probably faulty ram, and when I removed one DIMM everything was fine. When I added it back in I got errors.

I had the ram replaced at Umart, and reinstalled everything and things were okay for a couple of hours with the new ram. All of a sudden I had the same problems. I realised it was the Intel board that was killing the RAM, the third slot to be exact.

By this stage, I had wasted too many hours and was really fed up. I went back to Umart and returned the board and ended up getting an ASUS P5WD2-E Premium. The ASUS came in retail packaging, complete with manuals, software and good quality cables, and was just slightly more expensive than the Intel board.

I’ve had the computer for 2 weeks and have no problems whatsoever. I still think Intel boards are good, and was just unlucky with this one. And the was a Desktop Control Panel app from Intel had stress testing and benchmarking software from this Australian company (forgot the name) which was pretty cool.

One thing to note for those who are planning to get an Intel D975XBX. You need to plug in not only the main cable from the power supply but also a secondary one that supplies additional power. Most newish motherboards are the same but get this… the D975BX has a 3 pin one as opposed to a normal 2 pin. This power adapter came with my new Antec Smart 2.0 500W power supply but if you’re reusing parts you probably won’t have it and won’t be able to power up the board. I have not seen these adapters available for sale anywhere. And I’ve gone through this lengthy explaination only because I don’t know what to call these cables.

My rear projector TV has been stuffed for 2 months. Fortunately, I got an extended warranty for 5 years when I bought the TV. Unfortunately, the extended warranty wasn’t with Panasonic but another insurance company. To keep a long story short, it’s been 2 months, and the repairer is only coming this Thursday to repair the TV. Wasn’t so much the fault of the extended warranty Oamps, but the repairer they sent took his time.

What do you do in situations like this? You could yell and give the repairer a hard time, and chances are he’ll bump you to the bottom of the list. He said he will come and repair the rear pro on-site this Thursday, so before I expose the repair shop on the internet for their poor service, let’s see how it’ll go. Apparently the picture tube is stuffed, and all he has to do is replace it. Why it would take this long to have the part ordered in is anyone’s guess.

But back to my recent Samsung LA32M61B LCD tv purchase. I bought an XBox 360 when it was launched in Australia. Since the rear pro was stuffed, I wasn’t able to play it properly and lost interest. I only played the XBox for 3 hours after I had it for 4 weeks.

Then I saw some games being demo-ed on an LCD screen and I knew I had to get one. The Panasonic is HDTV ready, but wasn’t able to display the games at 1080i, only 480p. Plus, since the rear pro was stuffed, and not wishing to use it to play video games anymore (apparently it’s not good for the tv) I decided to get an LCD screen.

I did my research for 2 weeks and it wasn’t easy making a decision. There are loads of options out there, and some have features that others don’t have. I narrowed the list down to a Sony Bravia KLVS26A10 and the Samsung LA32M61B. Why the Bravia “S” Series? The better “V” Series was far too expensive.

A 26 inch screen was big enough, but the Samsung was a new model and didn’t come in any size smaller than a 32 inch. It had HDMI, 5000:1 contrast ratio, 8ms response time, was HDTV ready and came with a 3 year manufacturer warranty. Basically, more future proof compared to the Sony, and boy did it look pretty sharp too!

Went to a couple of shops but eventually bought it at Bing Lees Moore Park for $2100, and that included a 5 year extended warranty. I didn’t have to pay with cash to get that price, so ended up earning a couple of Visa rewards points at the same time.

For your reference, best price I got for the Sony was at Retravision World Square. For just slightly less than $1600, they offered the tv with a 5 year extended warranty. As you can tell, I’m big on extended warranties.

Playing games on a non HD screen doesn’t do the XBox 360 any justice. You really need a high definition tv, else it’ll just be like playing the old XBox.

2 months ago a friend of mine was going to the US for a holiday and wanted to borrow my Navman GPS pda. Instead of buying the US maps from Navman at their ridiculously high prices, my friend bought a copy of TomTom Navigator 5 and installed it on my Navman instead. Of course, I did not object.

For those who are interested, TomTom doesn’t make their Australian maps available for purchase. The TomTom software sold here comes with US and EU maps only.

TomTom does work with my Navman PiN 300, which is actually a rebadged Mitac Mio 168. I found it used to crash whenever I left the software running, then powered the Navman off and on again. I had to do a hard reset on the pda to get things working again. There’s a 5.21 update that’s supposed to fix that. After installing it, it helped the problem slightly. The software still crashes, but doesn’t bring the whole PocketPc down with it.

So how does TomTom compare to Navman? The Navman software I’m using is Smartst v3.0, not the latest and greatest. TomTom’s cool because you can customise alot of things, including map colors and celebrity voices. However, my friend complained that it lags often, frequently giving directions a few seconds too late. SmartSt updates quicker, maps are a bit clearer, but it’s so B-O-R-I-N-G compared to the TomTom.

All in all, I’d say SmartSt’s better in terms of usability, and at least it doesn’t crash often on the Navman. TomTom’s way cooler and good for impressing your friends. TomTom also works with a wide array of hardware. Other people I know have got it working with cheapish Bluetooth and Irda (infra-red) units bought from eBay. What better way to add value to your PocketPc?

If you’re in the market for a GPS, should you get a PocketPC based unit or a standalone one? I have no experience with the standalone units, but I believe they should work better. However, if you buy a pda unit like the Navman PiN, and you live in Australia, you can also claim the unit as a tax deduction, so it’s worth considering.

Apologies for not posting anything new in ages, but thought I’d share this little gem. Last year, I bought myself a Navman 300 Pocketpc GPS unit. As I used it more and more, I found it extemely difficult to establish a satellite lock, which meant I couldn’t use the stupid thing. When it worked, it worked okay, but it was hard getting it to work to begin with.

Now there are several general tips I tried using to establish a lock and improve my reception. I made sure the car wasn’t moving when I switched the Navman on, stayed away from high buildings, made sure my car windscreen wasn’t electronically heated etc… but nothing worked.

Earlier on in the year, I attempted to load TomTom 5 onto the Navman (which worked!), but I’ll blog about that some other day. Anyway, it was almost impossible trying to test the unit since it was increasingly difficult to establish a satellite lock. In frustration, I decided to buy an external antenna to improve the reception. I blamed the hardware, thinking the little foldout antenna on the Navman 300 was the cause. There are lots of cheaper external antennas available on eBay for much less than Navman charges.

Anyway, just when I was about to throw in the towel, I stumbled onto this web page, that had a firmware that claimed to dramatically improve the reception. By this stage, I was ready to try anything, so I downloaded the firmware, followed the instructions and experienced no problems.

And I’m happy to say, my satellite reception takes less than 30 seconds on average to establish a lock. And when it’s locked on, it stays locked on, unless I’m inside the Sydney Harbor Tunnel of course.

I have heard cases of people stuffing up their Navman as a result of loading this firmware, so while it did work for me, exercise caution. No one’s going to be held responsible if your Navman becomes an ugly PocketPC only pda.

http://www.fiddaman.info/navmanpin/download.htm

I was very blessed this week. Not only did I get my replacement iPod yesterday, today my dear sister gave me her new Vodafone Sony Ericsson V600i 3G phone. Vodafone Australia’s trying to get everyone on to 3G, and are practically giving this phone away to any of their existing customers who ask for one.

My sister’s happy with her Motorola Razor, and seeing that I’ve had no luck with my mobile phone, she gave me hers. I’m currently using a Vodafone Sharp GX30i, but I’m on the Optus network. How I got stuck with that phone’s a very long story not worth repeating, but basically I’m stuck with Simplus, an Optus reseller, to November 2006 so it’ll be a while before I can kiss Optus goodbye.

Anyway, apart from the Vodafone branding, and how common the phone was, the V600i was pretty cool. I charged it up, then inserted my Optus sim card, and was greeted by “Insert correct sim card”. The V600i was locked to the Vodafone network, and could only be used by Vodafone sim cards.

Now this wouldn’t be new news to our friends in the US, who are used to having their phones locked to their carrier, but in Australia it’s unheard of. Already having the stupid Vodafone branding all over the phone and within the phone’s software is bad enough, but not being able to use it with another carrier just plain stinks.

Fortunately, there was a sticker on the box that said Vodafone would give you the unlock code for free simply by logging on to the web site. But the blasted Vodafone web site doesn’t make it easy to find a link to the page you need.

So here it is.
http://www.vodafone.com.au/unlock

My sister’s going to get the code and I’ll enter it once I get it. Stay tuned.

2 weeks ago, I had the sudden urge to backup all 28.5gb of music on my iPod. I use Anapod from Redchair, so it was a simple matter of copying and pasting to my hard drive.

So everything was dumped over without a hitch, but the next day, there was trouble! When I tried playing a song, the hard drive would spin furiously, the iPod would hang, and the song would not play. If I left it and didn’t touch anything, the song would play after a few minutes of hang time, but it would skip. Going from one track to the next also had the same long delay.

I did the resets a couple of time to no avail. When I tried hooking it up to Windows, it could not be detected. On my MacMini, I could see it in iTunes, but couldn’t do anything with it. Maybe the backing up of my music the night before gave the iPod a bit of a workout and stuffed it up.

So I gave up, and decided to send the iPod back to Apple for warranty service. When I first bought the iPod back in Aug 2004, I had the hindsight to get the Apple Protection Plan, that added another year to the iPod’s original one year warranty. But the guy at the Apple store told me he would register everything on my behalf and there was nothing I needed to do. To my horror, the Apple site said my iPod was out of warranty.

Fortunately, I was able to fax my proof of purchase over, and was able to print a prepaid shipping label. So I went to Australia Post and had it sent off, and didn’t hear anything from them for a week. But last Thursday, I got a call from Apple and they asked for my Apple Protection Plan Enrolment number, which I had handy.

Now I was a bit worried about Apple honoring the warranty, because when I just bought the iPod, I dropped it on my driveway. Which resulted in 3 visible dents, the case beint slightly bent and scratches all over. The iPod did work okay, and it was only after one and a half years of use did it start acting up.

I checked the Apple Service Status site everyday, but they didn’t have much information there. But yesterday, I got an email saying the a replacement iPod had been shipped out, and they gave me a tracking number that I could check on the Australia Post web site. The stupid site kept reporting that nothing by that number could be found.

Today, I got iPod! It was delivered to the office, and I’m happy to say Apple gave me a brand new unit. I was half hoping that they’d run out of 4th generation iPods and sent me a iPod video… but of course I was dreaming. Currently moving all the songs from my computer over to the iPod. Through iTunes. Stupid Redchair has this activation thing that binds it to the serial number, and their deactivation process isn’t instantaneous.