Last week I installed my Sirius receiver in my BMW, it is a credit to BMW's I-Bus architecture that I can have factory integrated Bluetooth, Sirius and a DVD based navigation in a vehicle built in 2002. Off course BMW won't admit it or support it since they want to sell new vehicles with these capabilities. I can thank the folks on the x5forum and Tom at European Auto Source for the parts and support. The Sirius Terk antenna is tucked away in the X5's spoiler, no external antenna which keeps the clean exterior look. I have had no issues with reception, although I am missing channels 185 - 197 which is were the majority of the Canadian channels are. Even though I probably won't listen to those channels much, I am paying for them so I should receive them. Sirius has tried to send out a new activation/programming signal several times to no avail. I have read some forum posts that you need the latest Sirius chip set to get these channels. Since I bought the latest generation receiver (3rd) from BMW, I would expect those channels would work. I have emails out on this issue, but I will try to send the re-activation signal from the Sirius web site today to see if that works...
This weekend one my desktop Seagate hard drives failed (the system no longer sees the drive) and I did something stupid, I reset the BIOS (to see if the system would see the drive) and forgot the turn on the RAID option. Since my Intel D865 PERL RAID chipset does not officially support Vista, the RAID driver needs to load before Vista, which means it has to be part of the Master Boot Record (MBR) and is tied to the BIOS setting. Unfortunately when Vista boots, if it does not see the BIOS setting, it will automatically rebuilds the MBR and you loose any ability to boot the RAID driver which means you loose all RAID capabilities associated with the disks. The Vista repair function does not work. I had to reinstall Vista and restore from my Acronis backup. What a pain but everything is finally up and running this morning.
This week:
- Finish and post part 2 and 3 of my video review of the SCH-i760.
- My review of the iqua BHS-303 Bluetooth headset should post on pocketnow.com this week. This is a very good headset for $35 (Internet price)
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