On Sun, 2009-03-01 at 10:38 -0600, Jimmy Jones wrote: > It's very simple to have and keep an XP machine up and running. > I find it utterly amazing how many people can't make it happen.
So true...it's simple, but I think most people simply don't know how. There's been a lot of detailed discussion about how to pick appropriate hardware for PowerSDR, but I haven't seen much about "hints and kinks" for the software end of things. So maybe this message can start such a thread...? Hope this helps someone down the road... In my former life, I was involved in managing and operating a corporate network which included several tens of thousands of PCs - desktops, laptops, and servers mostly running Windows. The vast majority of the users were not computer geeks, or even if they were, they (or their managers) didn't want to spend time keeping their machine up and running. That task fell to the tech support group, which had a few handfuls of people to keep tens of thousands of PCs functioning. The result was the development of a set of rules for how to make a reliable software environment. I think these are applicable to the single-PC PowerSDR situation too. The "normal" treatment of a PC, such as a typical consumer (one of us with a Flex-radio to use) might do is to power up the PC, put in the CD, hook it to the Internet, and keep clicking OK to every incomprehensible question until it's satisfied and you can run your PowerSDR program. That's a recipe for problems down the road as the PC endures a storm of newly-discovered vulnerabilities, latent bugs, software upgrades, side-effects of automatic but invisible tasks that the vendor decided everyone should have, viruses and worms, bugs that corrupt something in the software (aka "software rot"). Sooner or later, this results in a frantic call to tech support, or, more commonly than you might think, a new PC to replace the "broken" one. So, we evolved some rules; here's a summary of how tech support made reliable PCs: 1) When you get a new PC, do *not* connect it to the Internet. Load the O/S and any other programs you want to have. Remove or disable all programs and features that you don't use and don't expect to need. Getting this right is harder than it would seem. 2) Do connect to the Internet and perform any needed upgrades. With the sad state of software stability, even brand new machines with preloaded software are full of bugs that were fixed before you opened the box. 3) Disconnect from the Internet (to make sure no "updates" happen behind your back), and test out your PC for a while, doing all the things you expect to do with it. Make sure you're happy with it. 4) Once you're satisfied with the software environment, make an archive copy of your entire disk drive. You can do this with programs like Norton Ghost, or you can temporarily cable the PC disk to a Linux box and use the tools there. AFAIK, you can't do this while the disk is running as the Windows main drive. The goal is to make an identical copy of your PC disk. 5) Put the copy-disk in a safe place. Write-protect if possible. We kept them in locked cabinets. To set up another physical machine, we would simply take the new PC, reformat its disk, and copy from the "copy-disk" to the new disk. The new PC (has to be same configuration of course) then is a clone of the master-PC, so it works just the same. This is how you get 10,000 PCs to work. Caveat, newer Windows anti-piracy mechanisms may have made this harder to do. I haven't tried in a while. 6) Users are told that they have to keep all of their files on a separate disk, or memory stick, or file server, or anywhere other than their PC's regular disk. Unfortunately you often have to tell them twice. (see later) Also tell them that if they load new programs, connect to the Internet, enable automatic stuff like Windows Update, etc., that their machine may have problems. It's like warning people that smoking may cause death. They do it anyway. 7) When a user has a problem, a tech support person looks at their machine (either physically or remotely). If the problem is simple enough to fix in 15 minutes (e.g., user error or misunderstanding), do it. 8) After 15 minutes of unsuccessful debugging.... Take a brand-new disk drive, and copy the contents of the "copy-disk" onto it. This can of course be done ahead of time. Swap the new disk into the dead PC, and bring the system up. If that doesn't work, the PC itself has a hardware problem - user needs a new machine. In practice, 99+% of problems were handled this way. The hardware is amazingly reliable, with the most common failure being a disk crash every 2-3 years, which is easily fixed by installing the new disk. Users also complain that their machines have gotten slower and slower. It appears to be true, part of the "software rot" phenomenom I guess. So, it can be a good policy to do the reformat/load-from-copy-disk process every year or so even if there are no problems. After doing it, the machine is like it was when new. I'm in the queue for a F3K, so I've started thinking about how I want to deal with the software/PC environment. As a "Linux guy" (Debian) I'm of course eagerly anticipating the "new architecture", but I decided that I could live with the Windows foundation for a while at least. I ordered an F3K. So, my plan is to take a Windows XP machine that I've had for a while and seems to work OK, get PowerSDR running on it, copy the disk as described above, disconnect it from the Internet and don't use it for anything other than PowerSDR (yes, I will update as needed for PowerSDR). Then if there's any problems down the road, I know that I can get back to "ground zero" with just a quick disk swap. If I load new PowerSDR versions, I'll make a new "copy-disk" as well. I'm not a "Windows guru", so one of the fuzzy areas for me is exactly how to "tweak" the XP environment to make it most friendly to PowerSDR. I'm thinking of things like turning off the automatic disk-indexing for speeding up searches, making the disks not spin down, keeping the critical SDR stuff from being swapped, etc. If there's a Windows-XP guru out there that could make up a "how-to" for "Tweaking XP for PowerSDR", it would really be appreciated! /Jack Haverty K3FIV Point Arena, CA _______________________________________________ FlexRadio Systems Mailing List FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ Knowledge Base: http://kc.flex-radio.com/ Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com/
