2004 was definitely the year of the iPod. I bought one, my brother bought one, my sister brought one, and even my Dad bought one.

Unfortunately, though, iPods sold in Europe have their maximum volume capped compared to similar US models – in fact, the maximum level is about 30% lower on the EU models.

This is apparently to comply with EU legislation. Unfortunately, because it affects line-level output as well as headphone output, it causes all sorts of problems when you use something like an iTrip or connect the iPod to your hi-fi or car radio’s line-in – the iPod volume is significantly lower than that of the other equipment, so you spend a lot of time adjusting volume as you switch between your iPod and radio or CD.

There have been several hacks that attempt to overcome this by tweaking a volume compensation tag in each MP3 file you download to your iPod. However, these are not ideal – you have to remember to do it whenever you update your play list.

I finally found a utility that did what I really wanted: just remove the cap entirely. The utility is goPod and it simply adjusts a field in the firmware to indicate that capping is no longer required.

It works really well. If you have an iPod in Europe, you need this.

The big news this week was that Smart Telecom (the largest independent Irish telecomms company) announced a new residential DSL product with some very attractive features:

• 2 Mb/s download (128 Kb/s upload)
• No download limit
• No fixed contention ratio – bandwidth will be increased to match demand
• Free line rental to the first 100,000 subscribers (the total installed base of broadband in Ireland at the moment is about 100K users)
• Voice service included (free calls to other Smart Telecom users, cheaper rates than Eircom to elsewhere).

As usual, there has been plenty of discussion at boards.ie about this. Most people are impressed by the high bandwidth / low cost ratio, but concerned about the miserly 128 Kb/s upstream bandwidth.

Still, at €35, I expect they’ll make a killing. It will be interesting to see if and how the other ISPs beef up their offerings to make them more competitive.

Shortly before Christmas, one of my media drives (a 300 GB Maxtor) started to give warning signs that it was about to die — a number of files mysteriously developed CRC errors for no apparent reason.

I downloaded Maxtor’s PowerMax utility which gives the drive a once-over. PowerMax can run a 90 second test to give a quick estimate of the drive’s condition, or a more thorough test that lasts several hours. In the event, it took only 10 seconds to figure out my drive was quite sick and should be sent back to Maxtor for replacement. (The drive was just over 12 months old, but to my relief, it turned out to have a three year warranty. Exactly the same drive sold in the USA comes with only a one year warranty. Go figure.)

I bought a replacement 300 GB drive to back up the data (luckily, I only lost a few files), and then kicked off Maxtor’s RMA process. Conveniently, if you give them your credit card number, they will ship you the replacement drive first — you can then use that drive’s Maxtor-approved packaging to return the defective unit.

Three weeks later, Maxtor Support emailed me to say that it would be February before an exact replacement for my unit would be available, but that they’d be happy to ship me one of their new DiamondMax 10 6B300R0 models instead if that was acceptable. While RAID users might have preferred an exact replacement, I just wanted a new drive (and this one was better specced) so I told them to go ahead.

The new drive duly arrived about two weeks ago, and I decided to install it as the boot drive in my main PC; I partitioned it as a 30 GB C drive for Windows with the remaining 250 GB for my D: drive. (Yep, that’s only 280 GB, but that works out as 300,647,710,720 bytes — got to hand it to those hard drive marketing guys…)

After installation, it slowly became apparent that something wasn’t quite right with my system. Simple file copies from one partition to another (and especially from firewire drives to my D: drive) seemed much slower than they should be. Worse, while this was going on, Windows would slow to a crawl – in some cases, I could see individual window elements rendering a few pixels at a time.

It took me a while to figure out the drive was the issue – for normal use, things worked fast enough. I checked the DMA settings on the drive (Windows XP has a tendency to disable DMA without telling you, if it detects errors) but it was fine. Eventually though, I noticed that HDTach 3 showed rather erratic performance – instead of the usual smooth graph, it was very choppy.

That got me thinking, and I finally decided that the culprit might be the removable drive caddies that I use in all my systems. These are only rated to ATA66, yet the new Maxtor is an ATA133 drive. A few minutes later, I’d whipped out the caddy and connected the drive directly and — everything back to normal! I also replace my ATA66 cable with a newer ATA133 cable, which improved the HDTach results by another 10% or so.

I can only presume Windows must have been retrying like crazy before, hence the heavy CPU usage — or possibly switching briefly to PIO mode to recover from a corrupt DMA transfer? In any case, it’s good to have a system at 100% again!

Lesson learnt: adding any new hardware to a working system should always be done very carefully!