Hi Brian I don't disagree with you at all as we are both on the same page. I reviewed speedvista but I didn't get the success with it I wanted.
The problem that the lay person has is that some of the service descriptions are vague at best and it is difficult to understand their dependencies. Yes, there is LOTS of stuff we don't need. My HP XP box just worked. VAC and everything else (not a laptop). My laptop is Vista 64 and it took the latest drivers to get the digital signature to work. Other than that, I did nothing to it. It does seem the Bluetooth stack seems to consume lots of CPU (and this is a fast 4G laptop with an ATI radeon video card). I did lots of AV testing and settled on Bitdefender as it didn't consume as much cpu as most of the others. I even run it on my Netbook now (CA on my Netbook just killed it). As an example, you can turn off RPC, but what if your backup software needs it (mine does - NetWorker). Maybe we (us), should be building VMware images that just work for flex radios. That would certainly help with a debugging platform. Astaro has the same features (it seems) as m0n0wall. And, you can run it on your own box for free as well. It self installs with its own OS. As well, you get hourly updates to your threats, so you personal database is being updated in real time. Pretty cool. I will have to look at m0n0wall the next time I build a firewall for someone as an option. Short story that we have all figured out. It does just work on XP. Too bad it can be difficult to downgrade a new box to XP. I tried with an eMachine and it was a real pain to find all the drivers. eMachine (or Gateway) had removed all the xp drivers from their web site once they start shipping Vista computers. After a weeks worth of work, I got it to 90%, but continued to have sound problems which was too bad. The sad thing is that if Flex (and all of us as a support group) want to move this into the next level, the next group of appliance hams just don't have the skill or the time to devote to downgrading to xp. And, Win7 is a bit of a stretch in the future (not that much, put people are slow to adopt). There is no perfect answer here. However, it does look like a multi OS solution for the Flex is just around the corner as well. Many 73.. Mike VA3MW Blog: http://walkerphoto.blogspot.com -----Original Message----- From: Brian Lloyd [mailto:brian-wb6...@lloyd.com] Sent: Wednesday, September 23, 2009 09:00 To: Michael Walker (VA3MW) Cc: flexradio@flex-radio.biz Subject: Re: [Flexradio] CW Transmit Problem On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 2:50 PM, Michael Walker (VA3MW) <va...@portcredit.net> wrote: > Hi Brian > > I have a couple of concerns with this logic. The largest concern is that > Windows should never be used to run anything in production or anything to do > real time processing. It is just not designed that way from the ground up. No argument. But that doesn't matter. The basic fact is that PowerSDR runs on Windows so you have to run Windows. Period, end-of-report. > That being said, we, as a group, need to come up with a list of required > services. Those that need to be run when you are a single box, not > connected to the internet and known to work. If there is such a list that > is bullet proof and works, I would love to see it. Several people (including me) have posted lists of disabled services to "strip down" Windows XP to its minimum function. Start with one of the sites on the web that discuss windows services and which ones you can turn off. If you don't need it, turn it off. (It is absolutely amazing what is in there and running that you don't need.) > Another list of services would be those that would be for a box that is > internet connected, but behind a firewall (not run on the box) and that > firewall would also do stateful packet inspection (like Astaro > www.astaro.com). As a home user, you can get that for free. I prefer m0n0wall myself. It is a stateful firewall, an IPSEC tunnel termination box, a traffic shaper, a filtering bridge, DHCP server/forwarder, DNS server/forwarder, etc. It supports 802.1q VLAN tagging and will let you treat a given VLAN tag as an interface. It runs on any PC hardware and supports multiple interfaces. It is also free. It comes as a standalone bootable image so you don't even need to bother loading an OS on the target hardware. It will boot from CD, HD, or CF. > You can very safely run without AV as long as you don't connect/browse. If > you do, only to those few web sites you trust. Many Trojans are installed > as scripts that come with the web page, and only packet inspection will > reliably find them. Yup. > Once we get a solution that is linux based (a real time OS), then I think > you will see the ability to run much better on less hardware. Well, Linux is not a panacea either but it is certainly better than Windows. I would bet that the Mach kernel in Darwin is probably better but I think it will be a long, cold, lonely day in hell before someone chooses to use that as their preferred target OS for these kinds of things. > Lastly, we are headed to the point where the only way this will run reliably > is if you buy the box and rf deck from the vender and you are not allowed to > modify it at all (sort of like every other HF rig). :) Well, not quite. One of the nice things about these radios is that, should the software demands increase, we can swap out the processing unit for one that has more processing power. I don't know of any other radio you can do that with. Still, it make a lot of sense to dedicate a processing unit to the radio. FWIW, so far I have successfully made every system I have tried work reliably with PowerSDR. That includes six or seven Mac hardware machines (Mac Mini, MacBook Pro, iMac), a custom AMD-based server box I built to run the 64-bit version of Solaris x86, and several little A-Open media-player machines (similar to Mac Mini) that have built-in Firewire. (I have one of these left if anyone wants it. It looks great sitting on top of the Flex 5000 and even has a matching blue-light-of-death power indicator.) But every one of the working systems was tweaked to run PowerSDR and do nothing else. -- 73 de Brian, WB6RQN/J79BPL _______________________________________________ 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/ Message delivered to arch...@mail-archive.com
