Windows 7 Upgrade with a Clean Installation

Posted in Computers on July 5th, 2009 by chris – Be the first to comment

Directing your attention to the current promotion Microsoft has in place for people to purchase an upgrade to windows 7, I had a few questions and began to search around. After much reading I along many others, from my findings on the internet, still have one question left answered. It on the surface a simple question but people can’t find a clear answer because of ambiguous meanings of terms that have come up previously when upgrading to Vista. The question at hand is…

Can the upgrade version that is currently half off, for either version for x32 or x64 bit, be able to install Windows 7 without having to complete a full installation of our previously purchased OS?

I have seen several answers including:

  • The previous OS must be installed, and then that is upgraded to Windows 7 with all applications and settings being left in tact
  • The previous OS must be installed, and then when Windows 7 is installed the drive is formatted and a clean install then takes place.
  • You can boot from the Windows 7 disk and during the installation it will prompt to put the previous OS disk in and key entered for verification.
  • Depending on what a person’s intentions are, or preference, one or several of these are good solutions. My personal preference would be the third listed for when you want to install on a new hard drive, so there isn’t anything lingering or “brought over” from a previous OS. With only a week left in the promotion I sure hope this is clarified by an official source before it is up. If a person were to use the ‘Full’ installation and not an ‘Upgrade’ then there would be no question that this would be possible. But for either a $50 or $100 upgrade to the OS is a great deal and even better if it will install how you prefer.

    LSISAS3442E-R BIOS and Firmware v1.28.02.00 and ESXi 3.5u5

    Posted in Computers on June 27th, 2009 by chris – Be the first to comment

    This is partly a continuation of a previous post which I described my Esxi 3.5u5 I/O problems. Since that post I’ve searched google and read in the vmware community forums for any known performance issues with Raid 1E in a four drive configuration compared to Raid 10, checked if there was a known problem with the controller card itself I’m using (LSI SAS3442E), and also proper disk alignment with virtualization which is something I’ll probably revisit once other matters are taken care of.

    A point I didn’t mention in my previous post is that when I first purchased the raid card I checked the firmware and updated it as people should. This was around the first of the year and was version 1.26 of the firmware and version 6.24 of the bios, LSI Logic packages them together for ease of upgrade for the user. Good job to LSI on that one. A couple days ago I went back to their site to check for any updates and I happily saw there was, firmware v1.28.02. I’m not sure of what the new bios version is since I didn’t write it down from the screen after flashing and it’s not readily available from LSI’s support site, but since as I mentioned packaged together it’s in with the firmware download. Anyhow, v1.28.02 came out May 5th and scrapping bottom as to what to do I wasted no time in downloading it and prepared for the update.

    I created a standard dos boot disk from windows on one floppy and put the firmware files on another. I don’t have a floppy drive in the server but I do use a handy usb based floppy drive. I plugged it in, updated the boot options in the motherboard bios and it was up and running. It did error a couple times on not finding the ‘command.com’ file on the firmware disk but I negated that by copying the one on the dos boot disk to the c:\ drive that gets created in memory. Then when the error came up I could leave the firmware disk in the drive and reference the file on c:\ drive. A couple adapter/chip selections and confirmations later and the new firmware is loaded.

    Upon the server booting I find the nearest file on my windows home server virtual machine that’s somewhat sizable to copy to my local machine just to see if there is any noticeable gain. I find a 1GB file and see the MB/sec in the windows transfer window be about 25-35MB/sec. A smile instantly comes to my face. Checking the network utilization that’s hovering around 45% on a gigE adapter. About half way through the file the speed drops to a piddly 2-3MB/sec. I think it has something to do with my local machine since the hard drive light was still ticking pretty steadily. I cancel the transfer and move onto something a little more scientific.

    I booted up a separate vm I use for software testing, which is an XP SP3 x32 build set to use an LSI Logic controller type within the vm settings. I re-run the same tests (again referencing my previous post) and for ease of reference below is the before results, taken from the previous post, and after results which are currently the latest.

    Before

    Test Name Total I/O/sec Total MB/sec Avg IO Resp ms Max IO Resp ms % CPU
    Max Throughput 100% Read 12,392.23 387.26 4.598 291.9839 36.33
    Real Life – 60% Rand, 65% Read 358.07 2.8 162.0115 1,115.5989 9.73
    Max Throughput – 50% Read 243.33 7.60 240.3390 2,361.3908 8.71
    Random 8k – 70% Read 390.20 3.05 147.6751 927.4924 9.53

    After

    Test Name Total I/O/sec Total MB/sec Avg IO Resp ms Max IO Resp ms % CPU
    Max Throughput 100% Read 3,119.41 97.48 1.0043 150.996 23.23
    Real Life – 60% Rand, 65% Read 347.95 2.72 162.15 394.88 9.51
    Max Throughput – 50% Read 240.38 7.51 240.24 628.91 9.61
    Random 8k – 70% Read 387.74 3.03 146.42 442.96 12.66

    The first thing the jumps out at me is the ‘Max Throughput 100% Read’ test with how much it dipped. The others are about equal and since I did only run these once (I don’t have time to average out 3 5min tests on each) it could be within the margin of error for these. I do know one thing, and so far within the real world test of transferring files the difference is as clear as day in the direction of being a great improvement.

    I’ll give it a little more time and general usage before I fully make up my mind on this but I am very hopeful. I think the next change would be upgrading to ESXi vSphere 4 (aka ESXi 4.0), I think the LSI Logic drivers have used have been updated.

    Do you want BusLogic or LSI Logic? Choose wisely.

    Posted in Computers on April 20th, 2009 by chris – 2 Comments

    I’ve been setting up a new home server to host a few vm’s and noticed along the way the poor performance I was seeing from the server.  For an initial rundown of the specs:

    Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L
    CPU: Penryn E8200 2.6GHz
    Memory: A-DATA 8GB DDR2 800
    Storage: LSI SAS3442E
    Network: gigE

    At this time the RAID configuration I was running was RAID 1E with three WD 750 WD7500AACS hard drives.  The mentioned “poor performance” was a combination of the following.  Transfer speed from another computer on the network of about 3.5 MB/s from a Vista (64bit) physical machine to Windows XP sp3 32 bit virtual machine, downloading updates for another windows xp virtual machine, while trying to listen to mp3′s from a virtual machine to a physical machine the song’s buffer would cut out and sometimes end the song altogether and move to the next, and sometimes data transfers would stop mid-transfer and simply “complete” without an error but that data did copy or move.

    Having spend a fair amount of time troubleshooting hardware and performance issues before for desktops and servers I turned to the usual suspects of CPU, memory, network, hard drives (aka I/O).  I cut all activities (moving files, listening to MP3′s, etc) testing one at a time and adding one systematically to see if it was a particular one causing the trouble.  I used the very handy ESXi Performance tab within the ‘Infrastructure Client’ to gauge system performance.  I/O stood out as the culprit and I chalked it up hard drives I was running, which you may have noticed are Western Digital’s “Green” line.  This means that rather than running at a full 7200rpm it stayed mostly at 5200rpm increasing as needed.  The benefit here is that it draws a lot less electricity, and I already had them on hand when I built the server and were hoping they would be sufficient.

    Having it narrowed down to I/O I turned to the knowledgable VMWare Communities I came across the a thread (a newer thread was made since it was getting so long, accessible here) of people posting specific I/O performance using IOMeter and based on the IOMeter configuration file found there I ran some tests of my own.  (These test’s were all performed in Windows XP sp3 32bit, as well as the other IOMeter results later shown)

    Test Name Total I/O/sec Total MB/sec Avg IO Resp ms Max IO Resp ms % CPU
    Max Throughput 100% Read 1392.61 43.52 43.99 808.31 19.51
    Real Life – 60% Rand, 65% Read 113.25 0.88 528.28 1594.38 14.10
    Max Throughput – 50% Read 94.96 2.97 628.82 2266.18 14.57
    Random 8k – 70% Read 75.55 0.59 788.23 5399.25 13.85

    The numbers above caused my jaw to drop and over the following couple days from then pondering what to do I saw a sale Dell was having on Western Digital “Black” hard drives model WD1001FALS.  Unlike the Green drives these were made with performance in mind.  So I ordered up four of them in 1TB with the intention of configuring them up in RAID 10.

    Days pass, I get them in, install them, and set them up in RAID 10.  In short order I move the same virtual machines to the new datastore and re-run the same IOMeter test to see the results.

    Test Name Total I/O/sec Total MB/sec Avg IO Resp ms Max IO Resp ms % CPU
    Max Throughput 100% Read 743.40 23.23 81.7536 495.4186 15.03
    Real Life – 60% Rand, 65% Read 148.70 1.16 401.6210 2453.4196 13.60
    Max Throughput – 50% Read 125.92 3.94 475.4601 1919.5262 13.35
    Random 8k – 70% Read 139.83 1.09 426.9836 2789.4462 14.05

    I was astounded, and rather frustrated at this point.

    I turned again to the VMWare Community and saw a couple scattered posts about choosing different ‘SCSI Controller Type’ based on the SCSI/RAID card that’s being used.  Checking the type in use I see it’s ‘BusLogic’, which I thought was odd since I’m most certainly using an LSI card.  The BusLogic setting is what ESXi created for me when setting up a new virtual machine and not something I was prompted to choose.  I proceed to change the SCSI Controller Type from ‘BusLogic’ to ‘LSI Logic’ for the previous configured vm but that resulted in nothing but blue screens with instantaneous rebooting once the blue screen was reached.  I conceded to creating a new vm and reinstalling Windows XP sp3, with changing the SCSI Controller Type after the wizard of creating a new virtual machine and the results were…

    Test Name Total I/O/sec Total MB/sec Avg IO Resp ms Max IO Resp ms % CPU
    Max Throughput 100% Read 12392.23 387.26 4.598 291.9839 36.33
    Real Life – 60% Rand, 65% Read 358.07 2.8 162.0115 1115.5989 9.73
    Max Throughput – 50% Read 243.33 7.60 240.3390 2361.3908 8.71
    Random 8k – 70% Read 390.20 3.05 147.6751 927.4924 9.53

    Certainly better than what I was getting previously and I don’t have the same issue’s mentioned previously.  I am not thrilled by any stretch about the write performance and the read transfer doesn’t hit that high outside of the test.  I don’t have a number offhand but its not even close to that, its under 10MB/s.  At this point I’m not sure right now what the next step may be.  Is it a limitation in ESXi since it is the free version?  Is it the RAID card?  Physical to Virtual data transfers (Vista to XP) cap’s out at about 6 MB/s with a more consistent speed of about 4.35.  Certainly nothing to get excited over but it is stable and I’m not having the same issues.

    The point of this is if you are deciding between BusLogic vs LSI Logic there is most certainly a difference and one should test prior to adding virtual machine’s to make sure the best is chosen.

    Looking Back at Today’s Black Friday

    Posted in Life and Philosophy on November 23rd, 2007 by chris – 1 Comment

    I’ve ventured out in the past on previous black friday’s fighting the traffic, parking, and crowds and certainly know what it’s like.  Today I didn’t.  Sure I get aggravated from the hassle and waiting in line but I didn’t see anything out there that made me think “wow, thats way too good to pass up”.  From asking people I’ve talked with during the past view days and some input from various websites it doesn’t seem like many people were going out today.  That’s not to say the stores were empty, I’m sure retailers such as BestBuy, CircuitCity, and many others were packed.  I would be willing to guess that the number of people have declined this year.

    Some of the retailers limited their deals to “in store only” which isn’t a half bad idea on their part.  The deals themselves seemed a bit average with some short-windowed exceptions. For me it wasn’t enough to venture out. I also heard from someone first hand that needed to work today that a local mall (not a small strip mall but a two floor multi-anchor store type) received about an average weekend kind of traffic.

    So what does this boil down to? People shopping more? Less? Getting their shopping done earlier in the year ad planned around the frenzy? Not as many as attractive deals? Increased online shopping?  There could be many things that would influence the answer.  For this blogger it comes down to two things – 1) Deals weren’t there 2) Online shopping is far more up my alley for the type of shopper I am.  Thanks for the various sites that are available I was able to keep close tabs on the various sales without having to venture out.  These are – techbargains, blackfridayhome, and slickdeals.

    Something that was brought to my attention last week is a term called ‘Cyber Monday’ for which  online shopping is suppose to be what Black Friday is for local retailers. I’ll be keeping an eye out for this to see what comes of it and more than likely any such deals will be mentioned in one, if not all, of the sites above.

    As a parting question to those to visit – if you went shopping (local or online) what would you consider you best ‘Black Friday’ bargain?

    Next year I’ll be Santa Clause for my Halloween costume

    Posted in Life and Philosophy on November 15th, 2007 by chris – 2 Comments

    During the past month or so, roughly a week before Halloween, I along with countless others began to see Christmas decorations, ornaments, lights, and the general decorations that go with Christmas. pop up a more and more each day in many retail stores and malls. The key problem to this being it was still October. I couldn’t help but notice since then from coworkers, friends, and hearing comments of those in the stores that “it’s too early for Christmas decorations, it’s not even November.”

    I for one agree with them and though I haven’t been keeping track from previous years if I were to guess the holiday season is coming sooner each year. There is something odd when on two adjacent shelves/racks that one would be Halloween and the other Christmas. In fact about two weeks ago I saw candy canes in CVS and while I admit to getting a box (they are good) part of me also thinks its taking something away from that “special time of year” if it becomes too common. I am completely for the spirit people speak of during the holidays to be year round but don’t think this is the best way to accomplish that. I also wonder on maybe this is the result of companies wanting to get a leg up on their competitors by being in front of the customer first. I would bet that if this trend continues it will reach a tipping point and more of the public will be heard. I’ll take a bet that it would have to be late September for that to occur, not long after the fall school shopping bonanza is finished. I also recall seeing back to school advertisements in late May early June this past year, but I won’t get into that now.

    Final words – leave the holiday and Christmas season where it belongs on the calendar year.

    Installing a New Keyboard – Part 2

    Posted in Computers on November 12th, 2007 by chris – 1 Comment

    To continue on from an earlier installment, Installing a new keyboard – Part 1, I had time to look into this further and every turn I took it became more and more bleak until I succumbed to what I was ultimately hoping to avoid.

    I made a complete backup and formated the laptop with a clean, crisp reinstallation of Windows XP Pro. From the initial screens of going through the setup I was using the keyboard but was waiting until it booted into windows and was still recognized. I was very pleased that it was and upon looking at the driver it decided on I found that it was the generic HID driver that I tried oh so many times before. I left the laptop in the docking station during the whole process and to my surprise detected that find too now, which is great since I have about eight or so usb devices and only had two ports available before on the side of the laptop. It can get tricky syncing an ipod without a mouse but I’m very familiar with keyboard shortcuts so it wasn’t too bad. To even more of my surprise the internal bluetooth card was also detected which is great so I can now setup my phone to be recognized by it.

    As to almost anyone I talk with computers with can tell you, I dread formating because of the numerous programs I use and amount of little customizations I like. I think this time around was one of my smoothest formats yet. From time of format to almost a complete reinstallation of applications and setting was about four hours.

    This story ends with a happy ending of getting the keyboard to work but not without its heartache. To anyone else out there that may have problems on a Dell Latitude D620 installing a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 keyboard to it and it’s not being detected. If possible save yourself time and frustration and if you can’t get it to work right away keep in mind you very well may need to format. As to why I’m not sure and doubt I’ll look into the root of the problem of this, the docking station, or bluetooth since they’re all now working but if anyone can offer any insight please speak up.

    Using VMWare ESX 3.0 in a SATA drive environment

    Posted in Computers on November 4th, 2007 by chris – 1 Comment

    About a year ago I wanted to setup a VMWare ESX 3.0 server to test out their new (at the time) release, unfortunately, I didn’t have the funds needed to setup a true production environment with it. I was able to find a fantastic alternative that is great to learn off of at a much more cost effective price point. It seems that the LSI Logic driver included is compatible with scsi and sata controllers, which is great news for us small folks wanting to check out this virtualization environment.

    I won’t get into the details of a step by step setup installation but will jump ahead to the post installation changes needed. I’m probably going to miss or incorrectly state a technical term here or there but if there are any corrections needed or questions let me know.

    The hardware (least the parts that matter for this writeup) I ended up using is as follows:
    Motherboard: Tyan Transport GX28 (B2881)
    Controller: LSI MegaRaid
    Hard Drives: Seagate 320GB SATA 2

    Keep in mind that the installation of ESX can be on any drive, including IDE, the datastores are what need to be on a supported device such as SAN, iSCSI, etc, or in this case a budget SATA setup. After the initial installation is complete you’ll need to check on and modify a file. It took some rummaging around at the time and after some good old trial and error along with a couple installations I was able to narrow it down to the following steps.

    #cat /etc/modules.conf

    alias eth0 e100
    alias eth1 tg3
    alias eth2 tg3
    alias scsi_hostadapter megaraid2
    alias usb-controller usb-ohci

    From the above lines I think I did this to either check that “alias scsi_hostadapter megaraid2″ was there or I added it in.

    #lspci | grep LSI

    020:0e.0 RAID bus controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic: Unknown device 0409 (rev 0a)

    This is to find out what the device number is for the controller, in this case it is “0409″.

    #cat /etc/vmware/vmware-devices.map | grep LSI

    vendor ,0x1000,Symbios,LSI Logic / Symbios Logic
    device 0x1000,0x0050,scsi,LSI1064,mptscsi_2xx.o
    device 0x1000,0x0054,scsi,LSI1068,mptscsi_2xx.o
    device 0x1000,0x0056,scsi,LSI1064E,mptscsi_2xx.o
    device 0x1000,0x0058,scsi,LSI1068E,mptscsi_2xx.o
    device 0x1000,0x005a,scsi,LSI1066E,mptscsi_2xx.o
    device 0x1000,0x005c,scsi,LSI1064A,mptscsi_2xx.o
    device 0x1000,0x005e,scsi,LSI1066,mptscsi_2xx.o
    device 0x1000,0x0060,scsi,LSI1078,mptscsi_2xx.o
    device 0x1000,0x0407,scsi,LSI Logic MegaRAID,megaraid2.o
    device 0x1000,0x0408,scsi,LSI Logic MegaRAID,megaraid2.o
    device 0x1000,0x0411,scsi,LSI Logic MegaRAID SAS1064R,megaraid_sas.o
    device 0x1000,0x1960,scsi,LSI Logic MegaRAID,megaraid2.o
    device 0x1000,0x9010,scsi,LSI Logic MegaRAID ,megaraid2.o
    device 0x1000,0x9060,scsi,LSI Logic MegaRAID ,megaraid2.o

    The spacing in there is exactly how it was returned, without the word wrapping. I’m generally pretty organized with files and code so seeing this I needed to keep myself from fixing it :) Take note of the device line with 0×0408 in it, this will be changed to 0×0409 which we found out from the previous command.

    From: device 0x1000,0x0408,scsi,LSI Logic MegaRAID,megaraid2.o
    To: device 0x1000,0x0409,scsi,LSI Logic MegaRAID,megaraid2.o

    Now that the updated the vmware-devices.map file to see the controller card we’ll need to update ESX and reboot. I’m not fully sure if each of these are needed, I would think that at least the first is, but I have done in before for safe practice to make sure the system is up to date.

    #esxcfg-boot -p (reloads PCI data)
    #esxcfg-boot -i (reloads initrd information)
    #esxcfg-boot -b (sets up boot information)
    #reboot

    Upon rebooting and logging into the VMware Virtual Infrastructure Client you should be able to access that datastore and begin to create virtual machines. Watch out with keeping snapshots around too long, I talked about this some in a previous post. I now also recall watching the various services starting on boot and that it would begin to fail on a particular one until this was fixed. I didn’t write that down but I’ll try and find out what it is and add it here.

    Everyday is exactly the same, except for tomorrow

    Posted in Life and Philosophy on October 28th, 2007 by chris – 1 Comment

    Some time ago it gradually came to my attention that I’ve fallen into a routine, like many others, and that I would get up, head to work, come home, do my things in the evening and eventually head to bed. After all, humans are creatures of habit and seeing that I’ve fallen into one isn’t a surprise. After making this realization it became more apparent to me and frustrated me more each time I thought about it and wanting to do something and for one reason or another didn’t initiate a change. A day came that a little change was made, then another, followed by another, and so on. The changes I’ve made and new experiences I’ve tried during that time were good but now I’m looking to do more.

    So much so that some days I’m ready to accomplish or try out another idea quicker than the last time, and also think that it’s time to bring more of a variety to that routine. In a way it’s similar to getting “a fix” I suppose but much more healthy. One of these included having this blog and chronicling my thoughts, various reviews, and bits of knowledge. I am also making a push to contribute more to sites I visit frequently and to offer some insight and opinion back.

    Currently I have a list with a wide assortment of items that I want to either do or accomplish. I’m not about to go down that list but odds are I will mention some somehow after my experience with them. This also includes traveling and will probably plan a trip somewhere for the spring. In my eyes, gone are the days wishing I’ve done something different, didn’t go anywhere, or spent every minute working. It is time to do something different and though it may not seem to be much after the particular moment, it will certainly come to mean a lot after a few years time. When I look back on what I’ve done over a period I can think of numerous times that I would have made a different decision now. There is a lot out there to do and, after all, the only difference between a rut and a grave are their dimentions.

    VitalStream/InterNap the brand you can’t trust

    Posted in Computers on October 26th, 2007 by chris – 4 Comments

    I wanted to write up a short and sweet review of an experience we had with VitalStream (www.vitalstream.com), now part of InterNap (www.internap.com), in case someone is doing searching about their CDN (Content Delivery Network) and streaming services before they sign up.

    During the spring of ’07 a company I’m affiliated with began to offer flash streaming services for their clients.  We looked at a few companies and in the end choose VitalStream because the quality, service, and products were right up our alley.  They sounded great and and we were off and running with their service in just a couple days.  Responses from the sales rep were always friendly and timely with a thorough answer.  When we received our invoice there was a mistake and made a call to him to get it worked out.  One call turned into two, then three, as well as emails.  We were given the contact information of someone in accounting to help us out and after numerous calls and emails there was not response.  We then in turn contacted our representative again and was given another person.  We promptly received the same treatment when we contacted the first person in accounting.  By this point the problem has turned to be quite annoying for us and unfortunately it was the tip of the iceberg.

    Skipping forward to late summer/early fall and the transition to InterNap began and we started to experience random outages, and while the technical support dept was good to talk with on the phone I got the distinct impression they were over burdened and when an email was sent with a question or status update more often than not they never responded to it.  This was even after they asked us to send an email for them to follow up with from a conversation.  At one point the outages became really bad and did receive some great support at that time with phone calls back on status updates.  After some digging with questions the problem had to do with the content not making to all of their delivery servers. The transition as a whole between the two companies for their flash streaming and CDN network was chaotic and were becoming very nervous with them.  At one point while calling about one outage we were told the problem was related to various typo’s on the server which took down part of their service, and was given quick and vague excuses to what we felt was to get us off the phone.  From that point we began to sought out alternate providers we know can maintain a quality service.

    Jumping forward again to present day, we’re about to switch providers and still trying to resolve numerous billing issues which we’ve been blown off, passed around, and many ignored emails and voice mails in addition to what was previously mentioned.  It is to the point that we will only get some form of direct answer or progress if they happen to pick up the phone when we call and spell out precisely what they should do while on the call.  The whole relationship has been a nightmare and is the worst experience I have encountered with a company both professionally from another business and personally with a service provider (comcast, verizon, etc).

    To be fair to InterNap these dealings have been with VitalStream and their CDN network in particular. InterNap is only mentioned because of the acquisition that occurred.  As far as InterNap’s other services and network I have no comment or opinion on them since they were not used.

    Entertainment is not News

    Posted in Life and Philosophy on October 24th, 2007 by chris – 3 Comments

    I was flipping through some RSS headlines and am disgusted with how celebrities and their antics make it to headline level news. There is a section for that under entertainment with music and movie releases and it belongs in the little square under those, not with key issues with the top headlines. When I check the news I’m looking for progress or changes on subject matters that pertain to subjects including my local area, economies, countries, and people and not mere water cooler headlines for people to gossip and talk about these music stars, actors, and actresses as if they talk with them regularly. Sadly it is to a point that some know what is happening more about them than within their own town.

    I’m not going to name any specific examples because they, and there are many, don’t deserve any additional publicity or commentary on the internet than what currently exists. I’m sure you can think of several with ease, and I would contribute that to be from the amount of exposure in numerous forms from websites to magazines and even local news broadcasts. This isn’t a rant about how television is poisoning our minds and we should get our pitchforks and torches and march down to our local broadcast station. In my point of view television, magazines, and news broadcasts exist based on the feedback from its viewers and readers. It’s quite simple really and there are examples of it daily and is something most of us know about from school or work – supply and demand. I know of numerous people that agree and disagree with this and have thought about to understand the opposing view and I can see how they enjoy reading about it and that it is a source of entertainment. It is only entertainment, news is good and bad and we must take one with the other like it or not because it is reporting on facts that effect people and society as a whole. The entertainment aspect seems to have over saturated its column and time block into those around it.

    Only until the majority or readers and viewers speak up, or Nielsen ratings go down, enough that the shift will begin. I was happy to read back in July that there is a local news station in Boston (need to find the reference and station) which agreed not to air such material and hope others agree to do the same. In the end I suppose if that is what people enjoy to read, so be it, I’m not here to dictate others just as they won’t to me, but let’s leave the news casts and columns free of entertainment and left to clever writing and research to make a story meaningful.