Picked up a new computer today–another HP system as the last couple have really worked out for us and it’s just a whole lot easier than building my own (i.e., figuring out what to buy).

Given how I’ve ended up referring to my past posts about new machines countless times, I figured I’d continue that tradition to write a post about the new machine along with the relevant links I used to get drivers, etc. It’s also kind of interesting to see how much things have changed over the years. Anyway, here goes:

• HP Pavilion Elite PC m9360f (drivers)
• Intel Core2 Quad Processor Q9300 2.50GHz, 6MB L2 cache, 1333MHz FSB
• 8GB RAM
• 1TB Hard Drive
• Bluray Player & SuperMulti DVD Burner (w/Lightscribe)
• NVidia GeForce 9800GT (driver)
• Hauppage TV Tuner
• Realtek LAN Adapter (driver)
• Ralink/Lite-On Wireless Network Adapter (driver)
  • The one labeled “PCI/mPCI/CB(RT2760/RT2790/RT2860/RT2890)” worked for me.
• 15-in-1 Memory Card Reader
• Firewire/USB 2.0

The first thing I always do is format the box and reinstall a clean version of the OS–in this case I installed Vista Ultimate 64-bit. This turned out to be a much better experience than I had last time when trying to find all the necessary drivers that don’t already come with the OS. Unfortunately, the LAN adapter is one that doesn’t work automatically following a vanilla install of Vista. I downloaded (link is above) on a separate computer, put it on a USB key, and installed it. Once that was working, downloading the other few drivers was pretty quick.

I’ll update this post as I find anything else that may be relevant and/or helpful for folks (including myself) trying to install Vista on this box from scratch.

I’ve just released a new version that you can download from the ccDismiss page. Here are the changes:

• Consistent naming (everything’s ccDismiss now instead of how some parts would show up as ChargeCompleteDisabler in the task window, etc.).
• Fixed a memory leak I had that would happen whenever the Charge Complete was closed. It was tiny but a leak is a leak.
• I’ve shared the source code out as well now (available through the same link above).

This is making me grumpy so I’m going to share and see if this eventually (assuming I find a solution) serves as a place where others don’t run into what I’ve been struggling with. It would seem to be a simple problem but I haven’t been able to figure it out in a way that feels right (i.e., I have it “working” but just not convinced it’s done “right.”).

Problem:

Detect whether or not there are any characters in the input stream to a console application when it starts up. I.e., has some data been piped to it or not.

My current solution:

bool IsThereSomethingThere()
{
    try
    {
        return Console.KeyAvailable;
    }
    catch (InvalidOperationException)
    {
        // There is something in the input stream
    }

    return true;
}

How does it work?

Console.KeyAvailable throws an InvalidOperationException if the standard input is redirected to something other than the keyboard. In the cases where output from another command/application is piped to the console app it will throw the exception. If nothing has been piped to it, it happily returns false and moves on just fine.

My dilemma

I’m having a hard time believing the only way to do this is by expecting an exception–that never sounds good to me. Problem is I’ve tried a few other ways that would seem to have had a good chance at working (such as the various other Console methods available like Peek(), Read*(), etc.) but none work. Peek, for example, should return a -1 when there are no more characters in the buffer but it’s actually blocking for me (i.e., it’s waiting for input instead of just coming back to me with a -1).

I’m sure I’m missing something simple so I ended up doing a few searches and found a few that were having similar problems but no answers. At this point, I guess I’ll sleep on it and see how it goes tomorrow but if anyone knows better I’d certainly appreciate a clue.