Review: Samsung LN-T3735H

About a month ago my girlfriend and I decided to buy a new television. We had been thinking about his for a while.

I researched different sizes and models. I liked the price of the ViewSonic LCD televisions, but there seemed to be quite a few bad reviews on NewEgg.com. We decided to go with Samsung. According to Best Buy employees and Consumer Reports, Samsung has a good reputation for LCD televisions.

We looked at different size televisions and we decided that a 37 inch diagonal was good enough. More on that a little later. The Samsung T3735H was exactly what we wanted. It has 3 HDMI inputs, which will be handy to plug in a new DVD player or media center. One of the HDMI inputs is on the side not the back. The screen is 720p. 1080p would be nice, but we probably wouldn't be able to see the difference on a 37 inch screen.

This Samsung model isn't sold in many places. There were only a couple sites online that sold the model and when you considered shipping and handling all the prices were about the same. We decided to buy the TV from BestBuy.com*. After some trouble, we were able to schedule delivery for the TV and we got a free wall mounting bracket, which is nice. The price for the TV was around $1050 on sale. After shipping and taxes the price came to right around $1200.

We also bought a new component audio/video cable to connect the DVD player to the TV. We bought the cable from monoprice.com and I am very happy with it. Cables and accessories tend to be high markup items at retailers like Best Buy. The cable I got from monoprice was very cheap and seems to be very high quality.

The television was delivered. We moved our old 27 inch TV out of the way and put in the new shiny LCD. Both of us had the same initial reaction: Oh no, this TV is way too big. At the store the 37 inches TVs seems a little small. It seems like 40 inches is the middle of the road. Now that the TV is in my living room, I can't imagine getting a TV any larger than 37 inches.

I am not a TV expert, but I think this TV is great. HD shows look fantastic. Standard TV looks fine to me -- it seems to be a common complaint that standard tv looks horrible on LCDs. Using an antenna made from a coat hanger (really) I was able to pick up several local HD channels -- all the major broadcast networks. I live in an urban area and the antennas are only about 5 miles away according to antennaweb.org.

The on screen menus and controls for the TV are quite easy to use. There are 3 presets for viewing, each tuned for different environments. Dynamic for brightly lit rooms, standard, and movie for watching TV or movies in low light. I think the remote control is decent, if a bit big. I have an Samsung DVD player that came with 2 remotes. One remote had every button, the second remote just had the commonly used buttons. I wish they had provided a smaller remote for the television.

There are 2 features which are purely cosmetic. There is a sound that plays when you turn the TV on and off. There is also a blue glowing light on the bottom of the TV. The sound is cute at first, but quickly becomes annoying, espeically late at night when you don't want to wake your neighbors. Luckily, both features can be turned off using the menu system.

The one thing that is a little odd about this TV is that seems to be not well known. There aren't many places selling it and it isn't even really listed on the Samsung website. I'm not sure if the model is being discontinued or if there is something else going on. With the experience I have had so far, I highly recommend this television.

* The fun part is that many years ago I work as a consultant on the BestBuy.com website. Also, one of my friends worked on the system that was used to schedule the delivery of the TV to my apartment.

WCF error: The socket connection was aborted.

I got this error when I called my WCF service:

The socket connection was aborted. This could be caused by an error processing your message or a receive timeout being exceeded by the remote host, or an underlying network resource issue. Local socket timeout was '00:00:59.9921880'.

One of the things I've noticed with WCF is that some of the error messages are not very helpful.

The actual problem here was that the message was too large and it was exceeding the settings for the binding. I updated my bindings and everything is working fine now. In the MSDN docs, it says these settings are to limit denial of service exposure, so maybe that's why the error message isn't very helpful.

Here are the settings I updated:

• maxReceivedMessageSize
• maxBufferSize
• maxBufferPoolSize

I updated these settings on the client and server.

Warning: I have not done any research into these settings to see exactly what they are. It is quite possible that changing only one of these settings will work and it is also possible that changing these settings may have an adverse impact to your system.

So, here is the section from my new config file:

<binding name="MyCoolBinding" maxreceivedmessagesize="10000000" maxbuffersize="10000000" maxbufferpoolsize="10000000">

Good luck!

Samsung - Not supported mode with DVD player

I was trying to connect my DVD player to my new Samsung TV last night and I kept getting a "Not Supported Mode" error. Nothing I found in the user manual or on Google helped me. Well, after a little trial and error I figured out the problem. I had accidentally connected the cables incorrectly. I am using component video cables and I had switched the red and green cables. I swear I'm not color blind.

I this helps anyone else that has a similar problem.

makecert.exe error: Can't create the key of the subject

I hit a snag while trying to create a certificate for WCF work today. I was following directions on another blog, but every time I tried to create the certificate I would get this error:

Can't create the key of the subject ('<some guid>')

Each time I tried, the GUID would change.

I'm not sure why it is happening, but I did find a workaround. The directions I was following were to create the certificate in the "LocalMachine" certificate store using the following command:

makecert.exe -sr LocalMachine -ss MY -a sha1 -n CN=Client -sky exchange -pe

After some trial and error I discovered I was able to create the certificate in the current user store instead using the following command:

makecert.exe -sr CurrentUser -ss MY -a sha1 -n CN=Client -sky exchange -pe

I thought I would post this message to hopefully save others the effort.
Note to the makecert developers: Please provide more useful error messages.

UPDATE:
I discovered the source of the problem! For some reason, I did not have the appropriate permissions to the directory where the certificates are stored. If you are getting the same error that I was getting, try granting your account (or the admin group, etc.) full control permission to the following directory:

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\MachineKeys

For more information, see Microsoft KB article Q278381