Hardware

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 OCZ Vertex SSD

Dave Farquhar Hardware
Sitting in the lap of luxury with an OCZ Vertex SSD

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

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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.)

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This could be the one… SSD for the masses

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , ,
This could be the one… SSD for the masses

Anandtech released the most thorough article on SSDs I’ve ever seen. I’m not sure exactly what it set out to be. It’s a review of the new OCZ Vertex SSD, but it also explains virtually every SSD technology on the market today, and the strengths and weaknesses of each–over the course of a 30-page odyssey.

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Samsung printer says paper jam but there is none? Here’s the fix.

Dave Farquhar Hardware , ,
Samsung printer says paper jam but there is none? Here’s the fix.

I had a phantom paper jam in a Samsung CLP-300 laser printer. It was strange. I tried to print yesterday and got nothing but a paper jam message after the click that usually precedes the paper feeding through. So I looked inside all the covers, even flipping the printer over multiple times, looking for that stray bit of paper munging up the works. If your Samsung printer says paper jam but there is none, here’s what to do.

It’s a good thing I fixed it, because I needed to print some resumes. I got the job, too.

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Second impressions: Intel D945GCLF2, aka the dual-core Atom desktop board

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , ,

I finally got Windows XP installed on what’s going to be my mother in law’s dual-core Intel Atom computer. I’ve spent some more time with it, and it’s a good board, as long as you’re willing to live with its limitations.First of all, if your Windows CD doesn’t include SP3 (or possibly SP2), slipstream it. SP1 or earlier won’t boot on this board. I used nlite to slipstream SP3 and all the updates. A good way to download all the updates easily is to use CTupdate. Since installing updates can take nearly as long as installing the OS itself, it’s nice to have a CD that’s completely up to date. And while you’re at it, you can remove some useless Windows components like Windows Messenger and MSN Explorer.

Intel's dual-core Atom boardSince I don’t play 3D games and my mother in law doesn’t either, I have no idea what the gaming performance of this machine is, but I doubt it’s very good. That’s fine; it’s not what this board is designed for.

For productivity apps, it’s a perfectly reasonable PC. I can switch back and forth between my 2 GHz P4 and this Atom and not feel like I’m missing anything.

Due to the D945CLF2‘s size, it has some limitations. It only has two SATA and one PATA connectors. Hooking up her PATA hard drive and CD-RW got interesting. I managed to do it, but it isn’t pretty. If I’d known this was going to turn into a system rebuild, I would have bought a SATA hard drive instead of the PATA drive I got. If you’re thinking of one of these boards to upgrade an old PC, keep that in mind, especially if the 3.5″ bays aren’t very close to the 5.25″ bays.

There’s only one PCI slot. That’s less of a problem than it sounds like, as it has onboard video, audio, gigabit Ethernet, and lots of USB ports. But if you want to add a TV tuner or Firewire ports, you can only choose one or the other.

There’s also only one memory slot, and it can only take 2 GB. So there’s no dual-channel memory, although the chipset and BIOS support it. The CPU is AMD64 compatible, but the main reason people go 64-bit is to be able to run 4 GB of memory or more. It would have been nice if Intel could have crammed one more memory slot in there somehow.

Nvidia is talking about releasing a chipset for the Atom that will give better performance than Intel’s. Intel pairs the Atom with a very old chipset, and Nvidia says they can make it perform better. Intel doesn’t want the Atom to compete with the Celeron, so they’re not making performance a top priority. Even still, it’s not bad. I would imagine Nvidia could make it an even nicer setup.

But at any rate, this is a nice board. It’s reliable, cheap, and fast enough. If I decide to modernize any of my computers in the next year, I would consider one of these. They run cool and quiet and consume very little power. Lately I’ve been a big proponent of buying off-lease 2 GHz P4s, but I think an Atom rig is also worth considering. It’ll cost a little more, but its power usage is so low, it’s likely to more than make up the difference over the course of its lifetime.

First impressions: Intel D945GCLF2, aka the dual-core Atom desktop board

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , ,

I was never able to get my mother in law’s computer to misbehave, but my son was. He’d crawl up to it, press whatever buttons he could find, and invariably it would reboot and give beep codes.

Intel's dual-core Atom boardSo I decided the best bet would be to drop in a new system board. I went against all my usual practices and bought an Intel. Further research showed the stock board was made by MSI. I’ve never had good luck with MSI boards, although I know they’re popular. This one lasted five years, which is five years longer than the other two MSI boards I’ve seen. I was able to find an exact replacement, but the $70 price scared me off. Especially without knowing whether it was the board or CPU that was bad. With an Award BIOS, beep codes generally mean bad memory (a memory tester vindicated that), a bad CPU, or bad motherboard. Not very specific.

I wanted something reliable, cheap, and no slower than what she had. With an unlimited budget, I’d buy an Asus board, since I have a 6-year-old Asus board in the basement that’s still humming like new. Gatermann ran an Asus P55T2P4 for 10 years before it died, and I’ve seen lots of other Asus boards reach old age. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find an Asus motherboard/CPU combo for less than $100.

So I went with Intel’s desktop dual-core Atom board by default. Intel motherboards are as unexciting as they come, and I hate monopolies, but the board has a 3-year warranty and I know from my experience supporting Micron desktop PCs with Intel boards in them that it’ll last at least that long.

I had to change the ATX backplate, but I was glad to find the Compaq front-panel connector had the same pinout as this Intel board. Removing the old backplate was the hardest part of the installation, as the board mounts with just four screws.

I entered the BIOS on powerup and was disappointed to see I couldn’t disable the onboard video. I really wanted to plug a video card into the lone PCI slot and disable the onboard video to save some memory and bandwidth. I also found enabling USB boot was clunky, but other than that, the BIOS was predictable.

The board itself runs extremely cool. The power supply fan doesn’t blow out hot air or even warm air–it’s cool.

You have to slipstream SP2 or SP3 to install Windows XP on this board. I haven’t done that yet, so I don’t know yet how well it runs XP. But being a dual-core, 1.6 GHz CPU, it should be OK. When XP was introduced, 1.6 GHz single-core CPUs were mainstream. It may not keep up with the old 2.1 GHz AMD Athlon XP the system came with, but without all the crapware Compaq loads at the factory, I’ll bet the system will be faster than it ever was even if the new CPU isn’t quite as fast as the old one.

New life for a Compaq Presario S5140WM

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , ,

I’m fixing up my mother in law’s Compaq Presario S5140WM. She bought it about five years ago, a few weeks after her daughter and I started dating. It’s been a pretty good computer for her, but lately it’s been showing signs it might be overheating.

I took the shotgun approach, replacing pretty much everything that I would expect to be at or near the end of its life at five years.Since we seemed to have a heat problem, I picked up a better copper heatsink/fan for the CPU. The copper heatsink promised to lower the temperature by 5-10 degrees on its own. Since I rarely get more than 3-4 years out of a CPU fan, this was pretty much a no-brainer.

I also picked up a Seasonic 300W 80-plus power supply. I doubt the machine will put enough load on the power supply to actually get it to run at peak efficiency, but I also figured an 80-plus power supply would probably be better built and more reliable than a more traditional power supply. Seasonic is hardly a no-name, acting as an OEM for a number of big names, including Antec and PC Power & Cooling.

Finally, of course I replaced the hard drive. Being a parallel ATA model, I was limited in choices. I bought a Seagate rather than a Western Digital, because I’ve had better luck with Seagate through the years, and Seagate has also absorbed Quantum through its purchase of Maxtor. Maxtor admittedly had a couple of rough periods, so say what you will about Maxtor, but every Quantum drive I ever bought still works. I have a Quantum drive I bought back in 2000 still working in my computer downstairs. Yeah, it’s slow and loud, but it’s been ticking away like a Swiss watch for 8 years, in almost constant use! Maybe some of those Quantum engineers worked on this Seagate. To Seagate’s advantage, they do offer a 5-year warranty on their drives, which is really good, considering the conventional wisdom on hard drives used to be that you should replace them every three years because they’d fail soon afterward. Unless the drive was a Quantum, that is.

The question is whether I just clone the old drive onto the new drive, or install Windows fresh on it. I know if I do a fresh installation, the thing will run like a cheetah, free of all the useless crud HP installed at the factory. The question is how lazy I am.

After buying a new hard drive, power supply and CPU fan, I’ve sunk nearly $120 into this old computer. But it’s an Athlon, faster than 2 GHz, so it can hold its own with a low-end computer of today. The onboard video is terrible, but I solved that with a plug-in AGP card. It has 768 MB of RAM in it and tops out at a gig, but since she mainly just uses it for web browsing, 768 megs ought to be enough. I’ll keep my eye out for a 512MB PC3200 DIMM to swap in just in case.

And besides all that, since this Compaq has a standard micro ATX case, if 1 GB starts to feel too cramped, I can swap in a new motherboard/CPU that can take however much memory I want. And the power supply is already ready for it.

But as-is, I think this computer has at least another three years in it.

Dead computer? Check the CPU fan.

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , ,

My wife came upstairs last night. “The mouse froze,” she said. I walked downstairs to the computer. Sure enough: Frozen mouse, no caps lock light, no vital signs to speak of. Ctrl-Alt-Del didn’t do anything either. I shut down, powered back up, and got the black screen of death.I pulled the power plug and waited a minute, then plugged back in. It powered on, but crashed while Windows tried to boot. So I repeated the sequence and went into the BIOS hoping to find some health status in there.

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