Hardware

New wiring

Dave Farquhar Hardware , ,

Gatermann and I spent most of the day pulling CAT5e through the house. It’s long overdue. The guy who wired the phones in the house broke every single rule I could find about running voice/data cable, and it wasn’t good stuff to begin with. Plus, I was really tired of the lack of reliability of 802.11g in this house. Why I can see all of my neighbors’ networks but not my own is beyond me.Running a single CAT5e line from where the phone network comes in over to the center of the house made a huge difference. The phones sound clearer, the DSL is much faster (consistently 630K now–it used to dip to 300K frequently) and running lines is much easier when you’re away from the circuit breaker box and not surrounded by power cables everywhere.

At present I only have two rooms networked, but it’ll be easy enough to add to that as needed now.

Wireless is convenient, but 100-meg is very nice. It’s reliable and fast. Gigabit is even nicer. Now it would actually be practical to upgrade to gigabit. At gigabit, network resources run nearly as fast as local ones.

I wish I’d done this years ago.

Like father, like son. Plus, a tribute to Quantum

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

This weekend, I tried to put together a PC from secondhand parts. For the missing parts, I went into the basement, swept the floor, and used what I found.

My one-year-old helped.

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Wiring the house

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , ,

My trusty Linksys WRT54G started dying yesterday. I think I’ve had it 3-4 years, so it’s had a decent run.

I have some temporary wiring in place until I decide what I want to do, but I really think I want some wired Ethernet.For one thing, my phone wiring is really bad, and I think that’s affecting my DSL speed and reliability. Modern CAT5 wiring would solve that problem neatly. And if I ran a dedicated unfiltered line straight to the modem and filtered lines everywhere else, I could get by with just a single line filter, instead of a half dozen. That should improve reliability too.

And while I’m running CAT5, I might as well run two wires, so I’ll have convenient network jacks in several places in the house. And if I’m running wire, I might as well run CAT5e and get gigabit capability. That should give me faster and more reliable networking, both locally and online.

The project would take about $100 worth of cable and jacks, I estimate. I already have plenty of jacks, so I’d just have to buy a spool of CAT5e. That, and find the time to run it.

I may keep wireless around for ultimate convenience (a combo DSL modem/router/access point costs about $70, which isn’t much more than another WRT54G, and my modem is getting old too), but I like the idea of having my desktop PCs connected via gigabit. It’ll make sharing drives more practical, and potentially much more secure if I get fancy with network segmenting and firewalling.

I think I’m going to be asking the network wizard at work a lot of questions… Good thing he sits right next to me.

And now mostly I need a free weekend to do all this.

The "good enough" PC

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , , , , , ,

PC World has a treatise on “good enough” computing. This isn’t actually a new trend but it’s never stood still for as long as it has now.Jerry Pournelle used to describe cheap CPUs from Cyrix and IDT in the late 1990s as “good enough.” Running at 166 and 200 MHz, they ran Windows 95 and NT4 and Office 97 just fine. They weren’t good gaming CPUs, but for everything else, they were great, and you could build a computer with one of those and save $100 or more over using a comparable Intel CPU.

Trouble was, the mainstream moved. Intel knocked off all the upstarts by starting a megahertz war, and AMD came back from a near-death experience to compete. The requirements to run Windows increased nearly as rapidly, and it wasn’t all that long before 900 MHz was pretty much the bare minimum to run Windows comfortably.

But chips kept getting cheaper, and today you can buy a 2 GHz CPU for pretty close to what a Cyrix or WinChip CPU cost. But you get more than 10 times the power for that money. And Windows XP runs perfectly comfortably on a 2 GHz CPU, whether it’s a new Intel Atom or Celeron or a 5-year-old corporate discard. So does Office 2003, which is the very last version of Office that any sane person would want to use.*

*Besides being the evil spawn of Windows Vista and Microsoft Bob, Office 2007 also crashes more often than Windows 3.0 did. The only way I can go a week without losing work from Office 2007 crashing is to go on vacation.

The PC World author claims that Linux and Open Office running on Intel Atom CPUs will be the undoing of Microsoft. I think that’s a bit of a stretch. Netbooks running Linux got returned to the vendor a lot. I suspect the biggest reason is because they probably couldn’t figure out how to get their USB mobile broadband cards–I’m talking the stuff that cellphone vendors offer for 50 bucks a month–working in Linux. That, and they probably couldn’t get Flash working so they couldn’t see Facebook and other popular sites the way they could on their regular PCs.

Frankly, the two things that keep me from buying a $200 Dell Vostro netbook this weekend are the price of mobile broadband ($50 a month), and my concerns about the reliability of anything sold by Dell in the last 5-6 years. I work with a lot of Dell equipment, and once the warranty goes, their machines do not age gracefully at all. But I think Dell will sell a lot of these units, because the price is absurdly low, they weigh two pounds, and they run anything but 3D games and intensive graphics apps nice and fast. Sure, a dual-core system with its memory maxed out and a solid state disk will outrun it, sometimes even running circles around it, but that system will also cost 10 times as much.

I do think Office 2007 is the best thing that ever happened to Open Office. Open Office’s interface is a lot more familiar and doesn’t hide anything, and while it may not be as fast as Office 2003, it’s certainly faster at most things than Office 2007 is.

Linux has been usable for basic computing for a very long time, but getting it installed and configured remains a challenge at times. A netbook that connects painlessly to the wireless networks in restaurants and to cellphone makers’ mobile broadband cards while running Linux probably stands a chance. Giving some automated, easy means to synchronize application data and web bookmarks between the netbook and a desktop PC would probably help a lot too–something that does the same thing that Activesync does for moving data between Windows PCs and Windows Mobile PDAs. Will these things happen?

But I do think an era of “good enough” is upon us. There was a time when the top-of-the-line PC would be entry level within a year or two, and that’s not really true anymore. The entry-level PC of today is comparable to the mid-range PC of five years ago. For most of my lifetime, basic computing on a five-year-old PC was always painful, no matter how good that PC was when it was new. That’s not the case today.

Graphic designers, video producers, and scientists will always need ever-more powerful systems for their work, so they’ll continue to drive the cutting edge. But everyday computing is stabilizing. I don’t think Intel wants the future of everyday computing to be the cheap Atom CPU, but at this point it may be impossible to avoid it. If Intel decides to quit playing in this space, AMD can design something comparable to replace it in the marketplace. The Geode won’t cut it, but something based on the Athlon XP architecture and built using a modern process certainly would.

And frankly I’m glad about this development. It’s been nice not having to buy a new computer every three years or so.

How to make a really nice $500 computer

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , ,

Steve Jobs: “We don’t
know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk.”

Steve Jobs is either lying or lazy. I’m guessing he just doesn’t want to play in that space. Of course, you probably
already knew that.

Here’s how to make a really, really nice $500 computer. All prices are
from Newegg.Intel Atom 330 motherboard/CPU combo: $82
Kingston or Crucial 2 GB DIMM: $20
OCZ Vertex 30 GB SSD: $129
2.5″-3.5″ HDD adapter: $19
Lite-on 22X SATA DVD burner: $23
Foxconn MicroATX case with 300W power supply: $40
Windows XP Home OEM $90

So there you have it. $403 before shipping. You still need a keyboard
and mouse, but there should be enough after shipping to get something,
assuming you don’t already have one. While this system won’t burn the
house down, the dual-core Atoms are surprisingly quick and more than
adequate unless you’re heavily into gaming or media production. But if
you’re into those things you aren’t in the market for a $500 computer
anyway.

The Intel board is unglamorous but very dependable. It also draws very
little power and runs very quietly. It’s great for word processing and
e-mail, adequate for multimedia, and it’ll play non-3D games just
fine. Other companies are making Atom boards, but I’d stick with Intel this time. ECS doesn’t have a history of producing top-quality boards, and I’ve never heard of the outfit making the other Atom boards Newegg sells. Plus, I think the non-Intel boards have Atom 230 (single-core) CPUs in them. It’s worth paying the extra $15-$20 to get that second core.

The SSD will make this computer outperform many more expensive
computers. But more importantly, it won’t crash. Anyone who’s gotten an
untimely phone call from a relative wondering why the computer won’t
start up and where all those digital pictures went will appreciate that.
A conventional hard drive would cost as little as $40 and gives more
space, but 30 gigs will last a while with a casual user. And the lack of
disk crashes is probably worth the extra money. Between the SSD and the
Intel board, the system will be very quiet, which is probably worth
something. In this era of PCs that sound like wind tunnels, you don’t
really appreciate whisper-quiet PCs until you have one.

The memory probably isn’t totally critical, but when you can get Kingston or Crucial for 20 bucks, it makes sense to do it. They’ve both been around forever and have a long history of making quality memory. There’s no reason to put anything other than a 2-gig stick in this board’s single DIMM slot. The system will take 2 gigs, and 2 gigs is cheap.

The rest of the parts are nothing special. Lite-on makes reasonably good
optical drives and has been for some time now, but if something else happens to be on sale for under $20,
or something else happens to be available with free shipping, that’s fine. You
won’t lose anything by using it. Foxconn cases look reasonably
professional without costing a lot of money, and their power supplies
are decent enough. An Atom board with an SSD won’t tax any power supply very hard anyway. You can buy a
cheaper case if you want, but be sure to read the reviews. Some cheap
cases are made of really light-gauge metal and are prone to cut you.
I’ve never had that problem with Foxconns.

The other trick with cases is to watch shipping prices. For whatever
reason, Newegg charges more to ship some cases than others, so it could
very well be worth your while to look at cases that cost $5-$10 more.
Shipping could actually make them cheaper.

You can get the proper mini-ITX case for boards like this, but you’ll pay more for it. Unless you need the really small form factor, it makes sense to just use a cheap and common micro-ATX case. The bonus is that you get some expansion space if you want to add another optical drive, card readers for your digital camera memory, or stuff like that.

And XP Home is XP Home. Vista may run on this system with 2 GB of RAM
and an SSD, but seriously, does Vista do anything that XP doesn’t?
Especially Vista Home vs. XP Home? I’ll stick with the old reliable. I
happen to know from experience that XP Home runs very nicely on a system
with 2 GB of RAM and an SSD.

This particular system will perform nicely, will be extremely reliable
(it wouldn’t surprise me if it still functioned perfectly fine 5 or 10
years from now), and depending on the case, can be easy on the eyes. And
if you want to get swanky, you can skip the cheap case, get an $80
Lian-Li and a separate sale power supply, and have a great-looking PC
while still staying south of $600.

Any way you do it, this system will cost more than a $399 mass-market PC. But I think it’s more than worth the $50-$70 premium.

Who needs an SSD anyway?

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

So one of my coworkers asked about my SSD today, and two others followed up with questions after I talked about how fast it is.

Any time a new technology comes out, there are objectors, of course. Unless it’s something they’re used to seeing. SSDs aren’t. I believe SSDs will go down in history as a disruptive technology, and as such, they’ll be misunderstood for a while.One person asked what I do that I need that kind of speed. Well, the same things everyone else does with a computer. What does he do that he needs anything faster than a Rage 128 video card, or a dual-core CPU? Truth is, I’m sure he has a faster video card than me and its capabilities sit there unused all the time.

Finally I answered. Once you’ve used it and gotten used to the speed, it’s very hard to live without it. In a way, it’s a cop out, but it’s true. Back in the early 1990s when people would ask Amiga owners what they do that they need multitasking, they got the same answer. Eventually the rest of the world figured out those Amiga guys were right, and PCs and Macintoshes got pre-emptive multitasking.

The other guy asked what it cost. I said around $130 for 30 gig. "That’s an expensive 30 gig drive," he said. Well, he’s right. But consider this. The drive consumes perhaps 20% of the power that a conventional drive does. That cuts your electric bill. It generates minimal heat, so it’s not heating up the inside of your computer. That extends the life expectancy of the other components, and therefore the computer. The drive has no movable parts, so there are no disk heads to crash and lose your data at some unexpected time. Put an SSD in a computer, and barring a really bad power surge or filesystem corruption, there’s every reason to believe your data will stay intact, not just for three or four years, but more likely a decade or more.

To me, all of that’s worth something. Not to mention that some people think absolutely nothing of spending $300 extra for a faster CPU or video card.

In a way, an SSD is a luxury. But let’s think about it rationally. People who need $100 1 TB drives need them because they have boatloads of multimedia files. Whether it’s pictures, movies, or music doesn’t matter. None of them need fast access, so putting them on an SSD is fairly pointless. So buy that $100 1 TB drive to hold that stuff. Then spend $130 for a 30 GB SSD, or $160 for a $60 SSD, and store the stuff that does need speed–namely the operating system and applications–on the fast drive. Then you’ve paid $160 extra for what was an impossibly fast drive just two years ago, and spent less than the difference in price between a mainline video card or CPU and an enthusiast model.

And you do notice the difference, even in routine things. Beyond the computer booting in 20 seconds and applications loading in 1-2 seconds, routine stuff goes faster. Web browsing is noticeably quicker, because writes to the browser cache happen quickly and they don’t interrupt the task of actually displaying the pages. Reads from the cache happen several times faster, so when you visit sites that you frequent, the static, unchanging elements of the page pop up immediately while the browser downloads the day’s new content. The difference isn’t quite like the difference between a fast, modern web browser and Internet Explorer 6.0, but that’s the closest thing I can think of to describe it.

And on those insane days when there’s a ton of stuff going on, and you have 14 browser tabs open, 12 documents open in Word, a couple of worksheets open in Excel, and a couple of other applications running, each with multiple documents open? Well, maybe only I have those days, but I doubt it. You know what normally happens when you get into that situation. You may have a couple of gigs of RAM, but the disk just keeps grinding away under that load anyway, and any time you switch applications, the disk light flashes and you get that noticeable pause while you wait for the application to switch? That doesn’t happen with an SSD. Whatever data the system feels the need to swap out to disk happens in an instant. Sure, there’s still a delay, but if you blink, you’ll miss it.

I already want another one. Two, actually. One for the other desktop computer my wife and I use, and one for my server. The question isn’t whether I get another one or two. The question is whether I wait for a sale.

Yeah, I’m obsessed.

Letting go

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , ,

I took a monitor to Best Buy today. They offer free recycling of most consumer electronics, with a $10 charge for things like monitors and TVs. In exchange, they give you a $10 gift card. So in essence, they’ll take a monitor or TV for free if you buy something.It seems like a lot of computer enthusiasts have a large collection of computer dinosaurs. Friends and relatives give us their cast-off parts in exchange for doing upgrades for them, and we put those parts to use for a while, and give some away, but ultimately an awful lot of them just pile up in storage–too good to throw away, but not good enough that we want to use it on a daily basis anymore.

In this case, it was a 15-inch monitor that had lost its red gun. Unlike a lot of stuff in the pile, I never intended to use it again except in case of emergency. I just didn’t throw it in the trash because you’re not supposed to do that.

I have more stuff, but since you’re technically limited to turning in two items per day, it’ll take a few trips. Somewhere I have a box of old motherboards taking up space. Those will have to go. Ten years ago, I could argue that a Pentium-75 was still useful to me. Not today. If I find myself in desperate need of a low-end motherboard, I can rest assured I can find something capable of running Windows XP at a garage sale for less than 20 bucks, even on a slow week like this week. So there’s no point in keeping Windows 95-era stuff around anymore.

But it’s hard to let go. I know what all this stuff cost originally. I remember paying $199 for 16 megs of RAM and thinking I robbed the place. In those days, it was extremely difficult to build a decent computer for less than $1,000. That was without a monitor. So in the mid 1990s, the pile of junk in my basement was probably worth $8,000.

And in those days, I was making $6-$8 an hour, so it took me more than a month to make a thousand dollars.

Now I’m happy that I can give it all away as long as I buy a couple of gift cards.

I’ll turn around and use those gift cards to buy a prepaid cellular phone. I need a new one, and those phones fit my usage pattern well. And that phone will have as much computing power, if not more, than any one of those old computers.

How to use compression to help life with an SSD

Dave Farquhar Hardware, Software, Windows , ,

Since pretty much everyone thinks my love of SSDs is insane, I’ll throw another insane idea on top of it: using data compression. It makes sense. Doing it selectively, you help performance, while saving space. At a much higher cost per gig, that saved space is very nice to have.

Here’s why compression makes sense. Under many circumstances, an SSD can saturate your IDE bus. Then you run into the 56K modem problem. The bus is saturated, but you want more speed, so what do you do? Compress the data. Although data compression makes people nervous (shades of DoubleSpace I’m sure), modems have been doing this for two decades. Why? Because it works.

So while your drive is happily shoving 200 megs per second through your IDE bus, if you can compress that file by 20 percent, guess what? You’ll get 20% better throughput.

CPU usage is the main objection to this. But in my experience, NTFS compression uses 20-40% of a recent (P4-class or newer) CPU when compressing. That’s the hard part. When decompressing, overhead is a lot less. The objections to NTFS compression really date to the days when 200 MHz was a fast CPU.

I don’t recommend just compressing your whole disk. Selective compression is a lot better. There’s no use trying to compress data that’s already compressed, and a lot of our data is.

Use the command COMPACT to do the job for you. Here’s my sequence of commands:

CD \
COMPACT /S /C *.doc *.xls *.rtf *.txt *.1st *.log readme* *.bmp *.wav *.wmf *.bat *.cmd *.htm *.html *.xml *.css *.hlp *.chm *.inf *.pnf *.cat

If you have other compressible files, of course you can add those.

This is a one-time event, but you can schedule it to happen daily or weekly if you want. Just put the two lines in a batch file and create a scheduled task to run it. The command will skip any files that are already compressed. While the compression itself doesn’t take a lot of CPU time, scanning the drive does, so you might want to run it while you’re away if you’re going to schedule it.

Don’t bother trying to compress your My Music or My Pictures directories; that data is all highly compressed already, so all you do is tax your CPU for no reason when you compress that kind of data. Of course the main reason people buy 1 TB drives is because they have hundreds of gigabytes of music and movie files. It’ll be a while before storing that kind of data on SSD is practical. In that case, buy an SSD to hold the operating system and apps, and a conventional drive to hold all that data.

Some people compress their C:\Program Files directory. This can work, but some programs are already compressed. I would be more inclined to experiment with subdirectories on a case-by-case basis. Try compressing one program directory, see if it packs down any, and if it does, great. If not, uncompress it and move on.

UPX does an outstanding job of packing down program files but it’s not completely transparent. I found enough programs didn’t run afterward that I gave up on it. NTFS compression is a lot less effective, but a lot more transparent. As long as you don’t compress your swap file or hibernation file (and Windows will warn you incessantly if you even try to do that), you won’t break anything with it.

If you enjoy tinkering with things, by all means feel free to experiment with UPX. There was a time when I would have probably done it, but given a choice today between playing with data compression or playing with metalworking tools, I’d rather play with my metalworking tools.

But I do really like this SSD. For the first time in a very long time, I can sit down at a computer running modern software and it still feels fast.

Sitting in the lap of luxury with an SSD

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , ,

OK, it finally works. I have my OCZ Vertex running in my Compaq Evo D510 using a Rosewill RC-203 IDE-SATA bridge adapter.

It’s fast and quiet. I haven’t had it working for long but I really wouldn’t want to give it up. I’m not looking forward to that clunker with spinning disks on my desk at work tomorrow.Windows boots in well under 30 seconds. You barely see the Windows XP splash screen. And once you get to the desktop, you can start loading programs even though the disk light is still blinking a little. The system doesn’t care.

Firefox loads in about three seconds. I could probably reduce that some if I cut down on the amount of history I made it remember. But since I keep it loaded all the time, I probably won’t bother.

Excel loads in a second. I think it spends as long displaying its stupid splash screen as it does actual work now. You can disable that, and it might be worthwhile to. There’s no perceptible difference between loading it the first time or loading it the second time.

Word loads in about a second too. Like Excel, the first launch is about the same speed as launching it from cache.

Photoshop Elements is still a slow pig. It loads about five seconds faster than off my old Seagate drive, but takes about 20 seconds to load. That’s not bad, but it’s about as long as Windows itself.

It’s quiet and cool. The system fans on this Compaq adjust themselves as necessary, and they’re spinning very slow. A bird singing outside your window drowns it out. The drive isn’t completely silent, but without putting my ear right up to it, I can’t hear it.

With no more worries about physical wear, shutting the computer off at night (or at least hibernating it) becomes more feasible. And while it’s on, the system’s power usage will drop a few watts.

I had problems cloning to my new drive with Ghost. If you want to clone rather than rebuild, Drive Image XML looks like a better bet. The downside with it, as I found out, is that your new drive has to be the same size, or larger, than your old one. Even though I had 18 GB free on my 40 GB drive, it wouldn’t let me clone to a 30 GB drive.

Why did I buy a 30 GB drive? Because I expect prices to continue to drop. 30 gigs is enough to be useful, so if I decide to buy a larger drive this year or next, I can move this 30 GB drive into another system.

This is a big deal. If you can’t afford an Intel SSD, buy the OCZ Vertex. You won’t regret it.

Very brief first SSD impressions

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , ,

My OCZ Vertex SSD arrived yesterday. I don’t have it working yet–not completely. In retrospect, I should have just installed the drive and rebuilt the system from scratch. I’d be time ahead by now. But I can tell you a few things.It’s fast. I booted Windows XP in 20 seconds off the Vertex. Not a fresh install either–this was my existing installation I’ve been using for 18 months. Granted, off my factory Seagate Barracuda 7200.7, it booted in about a minute. (I’m still pretty good at optimizing a PC.)

It’s eerily quiet. You see the disk activity light but you don’t hear anything. On those rare occasions when the disk does grind, it’s weird to see the disk light going crazy without hearing anything.

The OCZ Vertex will work with an IDE-SATA bridge, such as the Rosewill RC-203. I think a better option is to put a new SATA card in the system, even if all your system will take is a SATA-150 card rather than SATA-300, and rebuild. You’ll get ever-so-slightly better performance, both from the SATA interface’s greater bandwidth, and from the fresh installation.

An older system like my Compaq Evo D510 can’t take full advantage of a Vertex’s capabilities. But the drive will keep the IDE bus saturated much of the time, longer than any conventional drive, including a 10,000 RPM drive like the legendary (in some circles) Western Digital Raptor.

I still haven’t figured out what went wrong with my installation, but I have an idea. The first time I booted with the new drive after cloning the system to it, I still had the old drive in the system and it decided to load my user profile off the old drive for some reason. Now it doesn’t seem to know to look for the profile on the new drive.

Maybe copying my profile over to the new drive will do the trick. Maybe I need to re-image and not boot until I’ve removed the old drive. I’m not sure. Copying the profile is fastest and easiest. Imaging takes about an hour, plus the time it takes to route cables and move things around in this small form factor case.

I’d hoped this upgrade would be a two-hour project, and back when I routinely did disk swaps, I probably could have done it that quickly. But I think it’s been six years since I’ve done one of these, and I found myself second-guessing things I used to just fly through.

But I’ll get it. I always do.

So I can’t verify yet that a six-year-old Compaq Evo with an OCZ Vertex can launch multiple memory-hogging apps simultaneously in less than a minute. But once I have the system running on that drive, and only that drive, it’s a test I intend to undertake. I believe it will, but of course I want the proof to back it up.