Category: IT

wbochar.com has moved!

Finally, I moved the site over to a new server. There was so much hassle with the old provider. It took a few hours — to get everything backed up and moved over. I get to pay half as much for 10 times the performance. I wish I had moved years ago.

I bought one; Acer’s X34P. There are people that love them and others that have RMA’d them multiple times.

There are a few caveats; not only did this work (not right away either) but it’s in a KVM config which really should be the kiss of death for this to work correctly.

Initially, the display was connected via DP to a KVM (GCS1934), to 4 machines (Win10/Nvidia670M, Win10/Nvidia980ti, Win10/Nvidia1060 and MacOSX). All of these connect at 60hz. All of these display full-screen native resolution.

On the 980ti machine, I ramped the display up to 100hz and random intervals I’d get the DP port resetting (brief blackout screen and DP Logo in the upper right corner). It was annoying. Running the overclock made it worse @ 120hz. Games or desktop. A lot of config fiddling led to slightly better results but still flickering. I turned off the audio (which was my plan from the start as I dislike monitor sound).

A lot of reading later, I unplugged the KVM from the mix. Surprise — worked. I need that KVM. So I pulled the segment of DP cables that that particular machine was using. I had the heavy duty (well made) and worked in my non-KVM test as the monitor. This cable was really long. I had a few 3 footers that were decent quality. Once I made the run smaller, the KVM and the display worked at 120hz.

There are a lot of thoughts about cable quality — but sometimes length throws things out of whack. I tested this with 10 cables. Only the short ones (except for one) worked.

Now that it works with everything — I love this monitor. The first thing I am doing is replacing the base stand with a desk arm.. man those feet are huge.

After a batch of upgrades software wise, my NAS was starting to gag a little. Then some hardware issues (one of the RAID members SMART status starting complaining) I decided to do some upgrades after disk replacement was successful.

The NAS had 1GB memory, which has been great for the last while — but after some media transcoding and mp3 sync software started bogging things down (their RAM caches). I checked the RAM type and the results of a few others who did the upgrade.

The ram itself is actually quite common if you have some older generation HP laptops around. DDR2 667 SO-DIMM’s were in a few machines that I’ve been keeping around for spare parts. Popped out 2 x 2GB DIMM’s and NAS is really happy. Boot times are faster and the management interface is really moving better. Most of the applications running on the server are JAVA based and it has taken a larger share of RAM than it had before. It’s happy, I’m happy.