Tribute to the Asus SP97-V

In need of an obsolete but reliable PC for a project, I searched a dark corner of my basement, a last stop for castoff PCs before being sent off for recycling. I found one. Predictably, it had an Asus motherboard in it. Specifically, it had an Asus SP97-V in it, a budget Socket 7 board from the late 1990s sporting a SiS chipset with integrated video that worked well with Cyrix and AMD CPUs.

Read more

A real world example of TEMPEST

In studying for my CISSP, the topic of TEMPEST came up. TEMPEST is, essentially, interpreting the electromagnetic waves given off by electrical devices to recover the data they contain. This can happen accidentally, or on purpose.

An accidental example of this happened to my neighbors in college.Darren lived directly below me. Scott lived across the hall. Darren had a cheap, no-name 486SX clone, and he lived on it. Problem was, it interfered with Scott’s TV.

One night, Scott got fed up with it and called Darren on the phone. "Get off your computer," he said.

"Can’t. I’m doing my homework."

"No you’re not, you’re playing Solitaire. Cut it out so I can watch TV."

Not only was Darren’s computer interfering with Scott’s TV, but Scott could see what Darren was doing. Not plain as day, but close enough.

The next semester, Darren traded his PC in for a slightly faster Dell, and Darren’s Dell got along just fine with Scott’s TV.

Extreme examples like this are rare, but possible. Even today.

How to buy a laser printer

I had to buy a laser printer in a hurry over the weekend. I bought a Samsung ML-2525, which I believe to be a reasonable choice, but not necessarily the best choice I could have made. It’s tiny, whisper quiet, and very fast, and it was on sale for 70 bucks, though sometimes you can get one for as little as $59. At that price, it’s hard for buying it to be a terrible decision.

Please note that this advice is for home and light small-business use. For business use, scroll to the end.

Read more

The joy of monitors

One of my monitors died this week. It doesn’t happen nearly as often as it used to, which is a good thing. Flat panel LCDs are more reliable than CRTs were. The dead monitor is an LCD, but it was a cheap and nasty Dell 15-inch made in 2001. I bought it used, and for much less than it was worth (even if it was made for the modern-day equivalent of Packard Bell), so I got my money’s worth out of it.

This weekend I went monitor shopping, with a budget of one hundred bucks.When buying new or semi-new, $100 is pretty much the lower limit. Nobody wants to sell a monitor for any less than that. Historically that’s usually been the case anyway. What’s amazing is what $100 will buy. 19 inches is pretty standard, although you’ll have to shop around a bit, and what you’ll buy will probably be a closeout.

Still, that’s remarkable. I remember paying more than $400 for a 19-inch CRT that dominated a desk. This would have been in 2001 or 2002.

And I remember talking with a champion Black Friday shopper several years ago bragging about how many LCDs he was able to scoop up for $200 apiece. These would have been 15-inch models, at best.

My timing turned out to be good though, as woot.com was selling a refurbished, debranded HP 20-inch LCD for $99 yesterday. I picked one up. I would have been satisfied with a 19-inch model, but the local stores had sold out of their 19-inch HP monitors. I’m not terribly picky about monitors, but I’ve really come to like the current generation of HP displays.

Will this monitor still work in 2017? I don’t know. But I have two other LCDs from 2001, both of which work fine. So it might.

Back in the CRT days, I wouldn’t buy anything but an NEC, because I’d never seen any other brand consistently last 8 years. It’s nice to be able to buy any old brand and expect that kind of lifespan today.

First impressions: HP Mini 110

I spent a few hours last night with an HP Mini 110 1012NR. It’s a model with a 16 GB solid state drive (no spinning mechanical hard drive) and Windows XP.

My biggest beef is the keyboard. It’s undersized, and I can’t touch type on it. Try it out before you buy one.

The rest of the system isn’t bad, but there are some things you’ll want to do with it.The system acted weird until I removed Norton Antivirus 2009. By weird, I’m talking not staying on the network, filesystem errors, chkdsk running on reboot, and enough other goofiness that I was ready to take the thing back as defective. The system stabilized as soon as I removed Norton Antivirus, and stayed stable after I installed ESET NOD32.

The system also ran a lot faster.

Don’t believe the hype about Norton Antivirus 2009. Use ESET NOD32. This is the second HP laptop in a month that’s given me Norton Antivirus-related problems.

McAfee is better, but only sufficiently better to use if your ISP is giving it to you for free. I still think NOD32 is worth the $40 it costs. The Atom CPU in the Mini 110 feels like a Pentium 4 with NOD32 installed. It feels like a Pentium II or 3 with something else installed.

The SSD isn’t a barn burner. I have OCZ Vertex drives in my other PCs, and this one doesn’t measure up the Vertex. Reads are pretty quick, but writes can be a bit slow. Windows boots in about 30 seconds. Firefox loads in about five. Word and Excel 2000 load in about a second.

So it’s not bad. But an OCZ Vertex would be a nice upgrade. Drop it in, use it for the OS and applications, and use the stock 16 GB drive for data.

A memory upgrade would also be worthwhile. With the stock 1 GB, it’s hitting the pagefile to the tune of 400 MB.

Unfortunately, to really make the computer sing, you’re looking at spending $200 in upgrades ($40 for NOD32, $40 for 2 GB of RAM, and $120 for an OCZ Vertex). Spread it out over the life of the machine and it wouldn’t be so bad though. And you’ll be paying $40 a year for antivirus no matter what you use.

The build quality is typical HP. I have lots of aged HP and Compaq equipment that’s still going strong. I don’t get rid of HP stuff because it breaks, I get rid of it because it’s so hopelessly obsolete as to be useless. I hesitate to buy from anyone else, except Asus. And Asus, of course, is HP’s main motherboard supplier.

If you can get used to the keyboard, I think the Mini 110 is a good machine. It weighs 2 pounds and is scarcely larger than a standard hardcover book, so it fits almost anywhere. And having an SSD, there isn’t much that can fail. The battery will eventually fail, and probably the AC adapter will too, but I think other than that, one of these computers could last 20 years, assuming it would still be useful for anything then.

Saying goodbye to my Lexmark 4039

Today we hauled my trusty Lexmark 4039 off to recycling. Unfortunately its paper handling was shot, and parts and documentation for that model are nearly impossible to find. I found the alleged service manual, but couldn’t make sense enough of the documentation to fix it.

Read more

A serious case of one-downmanship

While researching nLite (I’m thinking about rebuilding a PC), I found a page about two Germans exploring the true minimum system requirements of Windows XP.

I won’t spoil the ending, but one of them managed to accidentally discover the world’s slowest Pentium.I used to enjoy that kind of tinkering but really don’t have time for it anymore, especially when you’re talking boot times of 30 minutes.

At any rate, it was very interesting to see what these two tinkerers could do, even if I’m not too keen on running XP on anything less than about 1.5 GHz these days. I run a Pentium D system at work, which probably runs around 2.6 GHz, and it’s a slug. But that’s probably mostly because they insist on foisting Office 2007 on us.

But sometimes that work PC feels like one of the PCs on that web site must.

Review: D-Link DSL-2640B

I’ve had DSL for right around 10 years. I would have ordered it sooner, except it wasn’t available in my area any earlier than that.

Over the years I’ve owned several modems. I started out with an Alcatel, then after I moved a mile down the street I owned a couple of different Speedstream modems. Each would drop connections every so often, and each had a different (and undocumented, of course) ritual to get it back online.

The highest praise I can give to the D-Link DSL-2640B is that I haven’t discovered such a ritual yet. If the phone line and electricity are working, it finds a way to stay online.

There’s nothing especially flashy about the 2640B. It’s an unassuming black and silver box, similar in styling to modern PCs, with jacks in the back. It’s a combination modem, gateway, and switch in one package, so in my case, it replaced two boxes–my Speedstream modem, and my Linksys WRT54G. Many ISPs have been distributing all-in-one units made by companies like 2wire in recent years; the D-Link is similar to those, but a bit smaller than many of them.

Setup is trivial for someone who’s set up devices like my old Linksys. Those who’ve never done such a thing may need assistance. I can’t vouch for the quality of D-Link’s customer service because I didn’t need it. Before I plugged the unit into my phone line, I plugged a laptop into the D-Link, brought the two units over to my desktop PC where I brought up my Linksys configuration, and I checked all my settings against the Linksys. About 10 minutes later, I plugged the D-Link into my phone line, it connected to my ISP, and it’s been online ever since.

The nicest feature is its ADSL information screen. It tells me the modem speed (downstream and upstream), number of errors, and other diagnostic information. I’ve seen my speed range from 1.5 megabit to as low as 256K (upstream stays steady at 384K), but it’s never dropped. I’ll take speed fluctuations over dropped connections any day. If the quality of my phone line deteriorates any further (or maybe I should say, “when”)–I’ll be armed with some good information. Southwestern Bell/SBC/AT&T have always been able to dismiss my complaints in the past. I imagine that’ll be harder to do when I can tell them exactly how many tens of millions of downstream errors I have, versus 96 upstream errors.

Despite those connections, the modem keeps on trucking. I’m impressed.

My sole complaint is that the DynDNS client doesn’t pass my domain name to my internal network. I had to put an entry for my DynDNS name into my hosts file. This won’t be an issue for anyone who isn’t running their own web server, but it’s a little aggravating for those who do. Less aggravating than a dropped connection though.

So if you need a new DSL modem for whatever reason, I recommend the D-Link DSL-2640B. It isn’t flashy, but it works and keeps working.

Update 10 October 2010: I’ve been using this unit for about 15 months, and it’s still going strong. So I can recommend it even more strongly than when I wrote this. It’s out of warranty now, and I didn’t even notice.

Modem madness

Well, the 2wire modem experiment is officially over. I broke down and ordered a D-Link combo router/modem/WAP today. I rely heavily enough on my Internet connection to justify having something with a warranty and at the beginning of his lifecycle.After a bad experience with a D-Link switch a few years ago I would have preferred a Netgear unit, but the Netgear equivalent is getting hard to find. There’s a draft-N version of the Netgear out there, but I don’t need that capability, and prefer to buy mature technology anyway.

So we’ll see how the D-Link goes. I’ll post a full review after a few days with it. Decent reviews of that kind of equipment are very hard to come by.

The 2wire 1701HG and its dodgy power supply

I picked up a 2wire 1701HG DSL modem/router/WAP this weekend cheap. The power supply (or AC adapter) was missing. Google indicates the factory power supply is really dodgy. A replacement 2wire 1701HG power supply costs anywhere from $13 to $25.

But it turns out the Sony PSP’s AC adapter works fine with the 2wire. Sony’s power supply is common and dirt cheap. Normally I prefer to get higher amperage when buying replacement power supplies, but the connector is a little weird. The PSP box is readily available, so I’ll go with that, at least for a while.

Now I just have to configure the 2wire in such a way that I don’t have to redesign my whole home network… That’s a project for another day. The main thing is getting a quality replacement 2wire 1701HG power supply, so the unit itself will be reliable.