Still tinkering

 It's been, oh, 5 years since I've posted anything. I'm getting back to it, even if only for a short time.

Soon it'll be a little dry, talking about running linux under windows 10 and doing (what geeks think) is cool stuff with it.

End.

Medion P6624 on Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial -- Ground loop audio issue?

After playing around with Windows 10 in various forms on the Medion P6624, I encountered an issue during one update that caused a blue screen loop. I couldn't resolve it quickly, so gave up and flipped to Ubuntu Xenial v16.04.

I really like it actually, and for most of my use it has everything I need.

I have discovered one thing though, that is again Medion P6624 related.

Put on some headphones, turn up the volume, and you'll hear a buzz that sounds a lot like a ground loop issue.

Not good.

If you touch the metal lining on the key pad buttons, it disappears like magic. So along with the BIOS issue that causes problems with Windows 8 and 10 installation and updating, it appears there are also grounding issues between the notebook motherboard and the analog audio out!

I'll have a think about how I can fix this, but at the moment, I'm happy with just reporting it here in case anybody else has a BUZZ when they plug some headphones in, and have sensitive enough hearing to detect it.

Medion P6624 in 2016, latest Nvidia drivers (361.43 WHQL) are working.

A quick update:
Windows 10 updates that require reboots which will notiously hang a Medion P6624 can, I can confirm, be assisted with the battery-out, pull the power cable trick as described previously (just do Step1, Step3, Step4 in the link, and it works).

Also, Filipe Lima da Cunha let me know that the latest NVidia drivers (finally) are working!

I can promise you all, hooray != goodbye in Australia. Not sure what's up there, Google. 

Get the 361.43 WHQL drivers directly from nvidia here (direct download link).
Install as Custom, install everything, and tick "Perform a clean installation".

Finally, in 2016, the Medion P6624 has the latest drivers. If only there was a fix for the USB3/bios thing that's nerfing the reboots during updates!

Hard Drive Failure Rates, ST3000DM001

Backblaze is a company that offers cloud storage/backup. To reduce costs, they use pods of drives stacked with consumer hard drives (generally) - and in a 24/7 (mainly data writing) business, that is extremely taxing on the disks. Backblaze publish all of their failure rates every 3 months, which offers a wealth of information about how well the drives that they are using are performing.

I've been the unlucky user of two Seagate ST3000DM001 3TB hard drives, both which failed last year, within 6-8 months of each other. The last one was so damaged, that no data could be retrieved from the platters after transplantation into a new drive; the head crash was that severe.

Backblaze also experienced a huge failure rate of these drives.

Of 4247 drives of these drives in service,

• 10.45% failed in 2013
• 43.08% failed in 2014
• 30.94% failed in 2015. 

That is an extraordinary failure rate, and is largely responsible for this graph that Seagate should be particularly embarrassed about:

Statistics Based on 49,056 Hard Drives

With the death of many of the ST3000DM001 drives by 2015 (as well as a few other poorly performing Seagate drives, check the Backblaze 2015 Q3 failure rate blog post for details), Seagate's failure performance rapidly improved.

For me? I was probably unlucky to lose two drives so quickly, but I've been bitten hard.
So now I've switched over to HGST.

Of important note, the 4TB drives (from all manufacturers), seem to be very good, with even 20,921 Seagate ST4000DM000 drives having a cumulative failure rate of just 3.06%. It just goes to show how much variability there is in the quality of drives even from a single manufacturer. But what it really highlights, for me, is the value of blogs like this to do mass unbiased testing for us chumps who would otherwise blindly buy pieces of crap like the Seagate ST3000DM001.

Medion P6624 and Windows 10 - Updates are causing headaches..

Medion P6624 users:

I recently received a Windows 10 update, which caused the never ending loop/hang saga that we've all experienced before during a default Windows 8.1 or Windows 10 installation. I aborted it as it happened in the middle of an R training workshop :/ (ripping out battery and power, until it reinstalled the previous Windows 10 updates, whatever they were) and then turned off auto updates.

BUT if you follow the battery-out, unplug, plug method from:
http://tinkeringoracle.blogspot.com.au/2015/08/medion-p6624-windows-10-install-guide.html

I reckon it'll work fine. Yet to test it myself though, but I'll edit this blog when I do and let you know.

Sony Playstation 3 (PS3) and Samsung 55" Series 6 Smart TV UA55J6200AWXXY aka J6200 Problems. Turn off Deep Color Output (HDMI)!!

I've had a Sony PS3 now for about 7 years, and it's always been pretty idiot proof to get working. It's been working fine in my house for that entire time on an old 40" Samsung Series 6 LA40A650, no problems.

Anyway, it seems the PS3 outlasted my LA40A650 which died a little while ago. So off we trotted and managed to snag a new 55" Samsung Series 6 Smart TV (non 4K), model UA55J6200 for $1380 at Harvey Norman at Knox City, Melbourne. The Samsung 55" J6200 is an amazing piece of tech, and we really love it, the LED is so much better than the old LCD we had and the SmartTV features are really neat (it's handy to be able to watch Netflix directly from the TV).

So the UA55J6200 Samsung is all good.....

except it doesn't work by default with a PS3.

Lets define "doesn't work". In my setup, the PS3 runs through an Onkyo NR515AE amp, and having the HDMI out from the AVR running to the HDMI 1 port of the Samsung 55" Series J6200 results in no signal being picked up by the TV (but sound coming from the AVR). I knew the PS3 was still working because of the audio output via the AVR and the HDMI display was working because I plugged the AVR HDMI out into an HDMI-enabled DELL monitor, and the display worked too. But, no matter of swapping HDMI cables got it working on the UA55J6200, no joy at all. 

So I went trawling the far reaches of the internet looking for help. Apparently people have been having this problem with various TVs for at least 5 years. There are plenty of people wanting to help, but generally none of the answers helped me (and many others).

Amongst the things I diligently tried but didn't work included resetting my PS3 to factory defaults, but it didn't work. I got a non 1080p signal, and when the system switched back to 1080p the TV lost signal. Clearly, whatever that did wasn't the problem. So avoid doing that if you can help it (I lost a lot of game saves, etc. doing that).

Anyway, today I came across this post on the Tom's Hardware forums. It involves the HDMI output signal from the PS3. Definately something that could be causing my problem, if the HDMI signal from the PS3 is malformed or dirty/out of spec in some way which might trip up the sensitive new-age UA55J6200.
Anyway,  this post on the Tom's Hardware forums by Sarahqt was on the money.
I'm going to be lazy and quote the post here, verbatim:

To fix it you need to head to Display Settings where in you can find an option called "Deep color Output (HDMI)". Turn this option from automatic to OFF and viola! the 1080p output from the PS3 works just fine again! I think the problem definitely lies with the PS3- software/hardware I cant tell.

So, on the PS3 do:
SETTINGS>DISPLAY SETTINGS >DEEP COLOR OUTPUT (HDMI) > OFF
(default is Auto, which doesn't work on the Samsung 55" Series 6 6200).

I hope this helps someone else. I found this as frustrating as hell, but now it's working just fine.

Medion P6624 - Windows 10 Install Guide

Here is a definitive upgrade guide for the Medion P6624 for going from Windows 7 or Windows 8 to Windows 10. This step-by-step guide gets you through all the hoops of the actual Windows 10 upgrade installation, and then fixes driver issues once Windows 10 is installed.

Step 1.
Remove the battery, but keep the power cable in.

Step 2.
Start the Windows 10 upgrade. This image shows the upgrade that starts with the Windows 10 Media Creation Tool. The same information here goes for the Windows Update/GWX update method.

Let it go through the all the inital stages. The Medion P6624 will restart, let it go. This sequence events will happen:

Step3.
When the first stage, Copying Files, has finished and the Upgrading Windows percentage hits 30%, the Medion P6624 will restart.
When it restarts and the BIOS screen is presented, pull out the power cable.

Step 4.

Reconnect the power cable, and power up the computer.

Then the second stage of the installation will kick off (without this plug trick, it will hang).

Step 5.
At the end of the "Installing features and drivers" stage, at around 75%, the Medion P6624 will restart again.
When it restarts and the BIOS screen is presented, pull out the power cable.

Step 6.
Reconnect the power cable, and power up the computer.

The third and final stage will now continue.

Installation of Windows 10 complete.

With Windows 10 installed, there are two more things to do.

1. Replace the default USB3 driver, it causes a hang on restart. The default Windows 10 driver has the same issues as the Windows 8 driver on the Medion P6624. It's fine from a cold start, but system restarts cause lockups.
2. Replace the default nVidia driver, it crashes Direct X on the Medion P6624. The default 353.62 nVidia Windows 10 driver has the same issues as the Windows 8 driver on the Medion P6624 - DirectX applications hang instantly.

Step 7.
Install this USB3 Reneasas driver from Intel.
Install the Nvidia Geforce 344.65 drivers from NVidia.

Done! Enjoy.

not that sort of N-Joi

Conclusions.
With these installed, your Medion P6624 running Windows 10 should restart without hanging, and the Geforce GT425M in it should run DirectX applications without crashing.

I have to thank user DS_POS from this thread (warning, it's in German) for making the logical extension of my previous findings with Windows 8. I think the BIOS in the Medion P6624 needs work. My very strong suspicion is that it has something to do with the RESTART state, and the USB3 controller. I saw someone say they could Disable Legacy USB in the BIOS and get the same result, but when I did that, I couldn't boot at all.
As for the NVidia Geforce GT425M problem, I'm at a loss to explain that. I think that is simply a driver issue with NVidia, but using the very latest NVidia drivers still does not work so stick with 344.65 and IGNORE all advice to upgrade for now.

Happy upgrading!