So here’s to my $7.

(Of course the registration key didn’t work the first time, but let’s not get hung up on details!)

The first run is fairly straightforward: “Performance” settings, everything default, no Norton screening on — or even yet installed. (Okay, a little more about 3DMark: Their demos are pretty and certainly impressive still, but I do sort of miss the days when seeing a 3DMark demo meant you were about to see your PC do something of which you didn’t realize it was capable — even at 2 frames per second.)

Drumroll… P7811 (the “P” is for “Performance” mode), with a GPU score of 8595, which shouldn’t change while running Norton, but a CPU score of 6134, which might.

And with the Norton Internet Security 2009 package installed…7813, with a GPU score of 8588 and a CPU score of 6147.

What the hell! That doesn’t seem right, but I’m not unhappy to hear it. I’m going to disable Norton and run again.

Well, weird. It ran faster that time overall — P7839, GPU 8633, CPU 6144 — than the previous test.

Now for a little Fallout 3. Seems to run basically the same, although there are strange little hangs sometimes when bringing up the statistics in V.A.T.S. But they’re still there when I disable virus protection from Norton, so I’m going to blame the new patch and not Norton.

I wish I had more time to test the Internet Security package, but like I pathetically forecasted from my first post, me and homebuilt gaming PCs are nothing but drama.

AMD Athlon X2 5200+ - $60
Scythe Ninja Mini heatsink - $40
2GB DDR2-800 RAM - $21
MSI K912GM-FIH motherboard - $77
ATI Wonder 650 - $90
Antec Fusion V2 case - $170
LG GGC-H20L - $114
Western Digital Caviar 1TB hard drive - $104
7.1 surround pre-out card - $175
Windows Vista Home Premium - $90

TOTAL COST: $941

We’ve done it, and we even have some room left over to pay for shipping. The only way you are going to find good deals on the products we listed above is by shopping online.

After putting it all together, we installed Norton Internet Security 2009 on it, and were pleasantly surprised at how much Norton stays out of the way with the newest release. The footprint is small enough that it won’t give you any hiccups in any of your usage situations, even if recording a couple of shows in high definition at the same time - and seriously, if you are rolling with an HTPC, you are going to want to make sure you keep it protected. Nothing like losing access to a bunch of recorded content due to a virus or some other sort of malware. Just saying.

So we’ve got through this, and we’ve done it at just under budget. If you are a savvy shopper, you can do this for under $1000, just like we did. We had a lot of fun building the HTPC, as you may have noticed, and in the end we have a nice HTPC that can fit into our home theater setup. Give it a shot - we hope you get something out of this. Leave a comment and let us know.

So I ordered a new one, since my roommate has said he’ll pay for any broken parts. Here goes nothing.

Okay, it’s booting. It was doing that before, then shutting down after it got to the Vista chime.

We have a login prompt!

So far so good, although it appears that the card is recognized as different hardware than the old one, so it wants new drivers. I bet I can do that.

New drivers downloading. (Man, this upgraded Cablevision connection is faster. That was like a 60MB Catalyst driver download in under ten seconds.)

These drivers have a picture of a lady with a sword inside of them. I really wish they didn’t. It’s embarrassing. Almost as embarrassing as the ersatz Lara Croft on my Radeon box.

Uncheck the World of Warcraft free trial. I’d never get anything done if I did that.

Having a momentary bit of doubt that I actually bought an ATI card, not an Nvidia card. But nope, it’s a 4870.

I wonder if I should have deleted the old Catalyst drivers first. This is nerve-wracking waiting for it to complete!

The progress bar for the “Installing: ATI Display Driver” keeps moving towards the end of the bar, then doesn’t actually fill it up.

Shock! Horror! The screen flashed, then went totally screwy, spraying pixels all over. For a moment I thought something died. Then I realized that my HDTV (a Westinghouse) doesn’t handle signal resolution switches very well. I power cycled it and everything was dandy again. Whew!

Okay, Catalyst installation complete, which means it wants a reboot. I’m always so nervous to reboot, but I guess I should just man up.

Alright, I’ve rebooted, but something is amiss. Windows is still asking for drivers for the card. I have no idea why, but I’m going to let it take a crack at it without my assistance. Don’t fail me now, little spinning green ball!

Hrm, yes, something is amiss. It’s not recognizing the drivers as valid. I’m going to have to dig into this.

Looks like I’m going to try removing all the drivers, then reinstalling them. Don’t know why it wouldn’t have recognized that the new card was what I was trying to use — especially since it’s working, albeit in VGA mode — but I’ll give it a shot.

Hey, looking good! I can now move up to 1080p, which stands for “positive”.

Refreshing the Vista Assessment tool to see how I’m doing…5.7! Up from 5.6!

Let the gaming and testing begin!

At this point, the home media server is fully assembled, the operating system and drivers are installed, patched, and up to date, and the system’s hardware and BIOS have been tuned to my liking. The server has also been secured with Symantec Endpoint Protection 11, and it’s ready to daily use.

The server is only part of the equation, however. A server isn’t much use without client machines to access it. But the client machines must also be secured, otherwise you run the risk of passing malware from one machine to another, and potentially to the server.

I didn’t want my client machines to be bogged down with a bloated, overbearing security suite. Thankfully, Norton Internet Security 2009 proved to be just the opposite. Before I installed the suite, I recorded some performance data and found that with a “clean” OS installation on one of my client systems (one without any applications installed), it booted in about 38 seconds and had about 2.58GB (of 3GB total) available. Keep in mind, some of that memory is used for the system’s integrated GPU, so it’s not all being consumed by OS components and services.

To see what kind of effect installing the Norton Internet Security 2009 had on the system, I checked the same attributes and found that the system booted in only 41 seconds and had 2.49GB of memory available.b I should also note that my daily dealings with the server haven’t been adversely affected either–file copies to and from the client are just as speedy and there is no perceptible impact on performance with the client machine connecting to server.

This was a fun project to take on, and the ultimate result was a killer home media server. I hope you’ve all enjoyed seeing the system come to life as much as I have enjoyed detailing the entire process, and I hope that you all got something out of my posts. Until next time…

But what about the rest? The pieces that, although not major, are still required to have a - you know - functioning HTPC? Well, that’s where this article comes in. We are going to be giving you a quick rundown of the smaller components that you will need in order to get this thing built, before we do out wrap-up in our next article.

CASE: Antec Fusion Version 2 (V2)
the Antec Fusion offers two 3.5″ bays for hard drive, one 5.25″ exposed, a VFD, IR receiver, and potential for very low noise cooling via its side-mounted 120mm fans. The 120mm fans are very well positioned to pull air off of the CPU heatsink, which is something low-noise builders will want to take advantage of.

OPTICAL DRIVE: LG GGC-H20L
Since we are focused on cost, we are going to go with a Blu-ray reader, and we’ve chosen the LG GGC-H20L. You are gonna want Blu-ray capabilities with this computer.

MEMORY: 2GB DDR2-800
RAM is very inexpensive, but we are keeping the price down by only going with two 1GB sticks of RAM. This should only cost about $20, depending on where you end up.

VIDEO CARD: None
The motherboard that was chose in a previous article is more than adequate, since we are focusing exclusively on television and movies, along with other basic computing tasks. We aren’t doing any graphics intensive gaming, so we don’t need a separate video card.

PROCESSOR: AMD Athlon X2 5200+
We chose a chip that, again, is more than enough for the tasks that we are going to throw at it. The processor runs cool, which means your fans won’t be going at full speed (which means a quiter room) and it goes nicely with our chosen motherboard.

In our next piece, we price everything out, and see how close we came to the $1,000 target - think we made it?

Explaining how and what to tweak in a system BIOS using text can be somewhat dry; I think the video above will be more useful and informative.  I hope you’ve enjoyed my posts up to this point–in my final installment I’ll secure the media server using some slick Symantec software.  Stay Tuned!

It’s not that I don’t have other machines that I could play on. My new MacBook Pro is supposed to have a pretty hot video card. I could install Windows on that. And Asus just gave me a couple of new review laptops, both of which are supposed to be wicked fast for games. (Disclaimer: Asus is currently a sponsor of Boing Boing, but these are just review units. They may suck!)

But the thing that’s killing me is Fallout 3. I absolutely adored playing it, but I’ve already put several hours into it — probably a couple of dozen. And I could restart with a new character on these new machines, but I don’t wanna. I hate replaying games.

Getting my save game off the broken gaming machine may be possible, but if you can believe it I don’t have another working PCI-E videocard around the house, so I can’t even get the machine to start running
long enough to get it on the network.

So it looks like my only option may be…evil. If I install XP or Vista on my MacBook Pro — the one machine I’m taking with me as I go out of town for the next three weeks — I could install Fallout 3. And since I played a good character the first time, the best chance I have of not playing the same game over is
being a real bastard. A child-killing, junk-stealing, mutant-loving bastard.

Maybe this won’t be so bad.

For those of you who don’t want to read the earlier article, you should know that I measured seven different variables, all of which Norton claims have dramatically improved. They are:

- Memory footprint
- Download size
- CPU usage
- Scan time
- Update time
- Installation time and size

I have already run the test for AVG, the results of which are in the earlier article. Below, we’ll see how Norton did. Now, keep in mind that the results are being compared to AVG 8.0, and not to previous version of Norton.

So, how did it do? Eh, I’d have to give it mixed results, though I am impressed by even that much from Norton.

Download Size: 61.5MB (AVG is 50MB)
Norton Internet Security 2009 is a 62MB download. That’s not huge, by any means, but it is larger than AVG’s by about 12MB.

Installation Time: 59.6s (AVG is 2:46)
This is very impressive. Norton promises an installation under one minute. For those of you who’ve ever installed Norton before, you can see why this claim would have a comical element to it. Yet, there you have it. Under one minute. Just so… but still under one minute.

Installation Size: 72.8MB (AVG is 63.7MB)
This figure is a result of a 62MB Norton folder, as well as a 10MB Installation Folder which remains on the disc. Combined, you have used us about 11MB more space than if you had installed AVG. When average drives are topping half a terabyte, this is not a whole bunch. But still, it’s more than AVG.

Memory Footprint: Incremental between 3MB, 8MB and 9MB (AVG was Between 3MB and 20MB)
Norton uses a surprisingly small amount of RAM, particularly when running a full system scan. While AVG was comparable when either sitting in the tray, or displaying it’s security options… running a full scan would use up 25MB, compared to Norton’s 9MB. This is great.

CPU Usage: Between 0.3% and 37% (AVG was between 1.3% and 25%)
It’s sad to say, but it looks like while running a full system scan on AVG used up more RAM, it was more taxing to the CPU with Norton. AVG rarely topped 27% and averaged 25%, while Norton did spike up to 45%, while running an average 37% when scanning.

Scan Time: 11:54 (AVG was 24:13)
Norton pretty much halves AVG’s scan time. This is really impressive and a clear advantage to Norton.

Update Time: 24s (AVG was 47s)
Once again, Norton’s time is half that of AVG’s. These updates are also seamless, while AVG did require some user interaction the first time it updated.

So, what does this mean? Norton beats AVG in:
• Update time
• Scan time
• Memory Footprint
• Installation Time

It loses in:
• CPU usage
• Installation size
• Download size

My thoughts and conclusion in the next article.

It’s time to put that Home Office PC to the test.  So far, I’ve assembled it from scratch, and managed to set up a RAID 1 array.  This has given me redundancy: if one drive fails, at least the other one keeps going, hopefully making my data safer.  It’s now time to install software and compare two popular anti-virus solutions:  AVG Internet Security Vs. Norton Internet Security 2009. Norton used to have a relatively bad rep as being somewhat of a bloated resource-hog nagware.  The new version of Norton however has been redesigned with speed and ease of use in mind.  So, let’s see if they did a decent job.

But, how should we go about this?  I decided to put the machines through a series of simple tests, and measured their performance.  I’ll do this once with AVG and once with Norton and we’ll compare.  Specifically, I wanted to look at the things Norton has allegedly improved:

-       Memory footprint

-       Download size

-       CPU usage

-       Scan time

-       Update time

-       Installation time and size

I wanted to perform these tests in a fairly typical office environment.  So here’s a list of the software I put on the machine before installing:

-       Microsoft Office

-       Firefox

-       SnagIt9 (for screen captures)

Then, I downloaded AVG 8.0 and started testing.

Download Size: 50MB

AVG’s download file was decently sized.  Anything above 100MB would have been stretching it, so this is ok.

Installation Time: 2:46

Two minutes and 46 seconds.  It’s almost three times as much as Norton claims their installation time to be.  But this will vary from PC to PC, depending on your system.  We’ll see how Norton stacks up.

Installation Size: 63.7 MB

Not bad.  But again, we’re doing a comparison with Norton, so more than absolute size, what matters is how this stacks up next to Norton.

Memory Footprint: Between 3MB and 20MB

When the system is idle and AVG is doing nothing but sitting in the tray, it uses 3MB.  As soon as you start up the application, that’s another 7MB.  If you launch the anti-virus feature and start scanning, then you get another 10MB.

CPU Usage: Between 1.3% and 25%

Again, the difference between idle and active-scanning resource usage is drastic.  When the system is idle, each AVG process takes up less than 1%.  But when the scan is launched, it averages 25%.

 Scan Time: 24:13

That’s pretty horrible if you ask me.  Almost half an hour to scan an entire system, and there’s barely anything installed on it.

Update Time: 47 seconds

Not bad, but not too great.  Between the time it takes to check for an update, download it, install it… almost a minute has gone by.  By no means is this a lot, but I’ve seen better.

So that’s it for AVG.  These results don’t mean much by themselves.  We’ll see what happens next week.

1) The process of selecting the hardware for the HTPC
2) A closer look at our chosen motherboard, the MSI MS-7411
3) A look at how we will drive 7.1 sound from the HTPC
4) The smart way that we will move content to the HTPC so it’s displayed on our television

We’ve come a long way to far. In this article, though, I wanted to talk about the TV card that we’ve chosen. Since we are doing this on a budget, we are hoping for a nice balance of good performance at an inexpensive price. This is why we’ve chosen the AMD TV Wonder 650. Amazon has it for 43% off of the retail price. This card supports both over the air HD broadcasts, as well as ClearQAM cable TV.

The TV Wonder 650 series of HD PVRs are loaded with the very latest in digital TV technologies. Features such as advanced 3D comb filter, noise reduction, automatic color control, and edge enhancement produce brilliant, sharp video that rivals high-end consumer television sets. Loaded with abilities, schedule, watch and record analog TV, “free-to-air” HDTV, unencrypted digital ClearQAM cable TV and FM stations, making the TV Wonder 650 the ultimate media upgrade for your PC. These complete solutions even allow you to watch the latest DVD titles, author your own DVD, or convert your recorded TV shows to take with you on your Portable Media Player. The entire experience is then elegantly packaged within the attractive, easy-to-use 3D interface of ATI Catalyst Media Center software.

The card is new enough that Windows Vista will easily recognize it and pull in the drivers, and Windows Media Center will happily move along using this card to bring in all the channels that you have available.