Hardware

The Compaq DL320 and Ghost

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , ,

We got another Compaq Proliant DL320 in at work. This one’s a Windows 2000 print server (grumble grumble–we’ve been playing with HP’s Linux-based print appliances and so far I really like them).

But anyway, since rebuilding a Windows server is a much bigger deal than rebuilding a Linux server (all our other DL320s run Debian Linux), we tried building a recovery image with Ghost.

Only one problem: Ghost 7.5 doesn’t see the DL320’s IDE drives. DOS sees them just fine. But Ghost 7.5 doesn’t see them, and neither did MBRWork, a freeware partition-recovery tool that’s saved my bacon a few times. There’s something odd going on here.

In desperation, I dug out an old copy of Ghost 5.1c I found on our network. It’s from mid-1999. Oddly enough, 5.1c sees the Proliant’s CMD 649-based UDMA controller just fine. The only problem is, Ghost 5.1c doesn’t handle the changes Windows 2000 made to NTFS. It’ll make the image just fine, but when I went to try to restore it, Ghost crashed.

So I pulled out an unused copy of PowerQuest Drive Image. Drive Image worked fine. Mostly. It made the image at least. One thing I noticed was that Drive Image’s compression was a whole lot less effective than Ghost’s. The other thing I noticed was that Drive Image’s partition resizing didn’t work right. I’d re-size the partitions so they’d fit on another drive I had (I wanted to test the backup to make sure it worked, but not on the live, production drive) but no matter what I did, it reported there wasn’t enough room on the drive.

“Ghost would be so much better in every way, if it worked,” I said in frustration.

“Isn’t that true of everything?” Charlie asked. I guess he didn’t think that was the most brilliant observation I ever made. Not that I did either.

We’ve got support with both Symantec and HP, so we really ought to call them and see if they have a resolution. HP talks out of both sides of its mouth; on the one hand, I found statements on its Web site that Ghost is unsupported on Proliant hardware, and on the other I found some tools that claim to help with system deployment using Ghost.

But since this DL320 is being used to drive a printer that costs about as much as any of us make in a year, and it’s being set up by a guy who’s being flown in early this week at $2,000 a day, I’m not positive that we’re going to get a good resolution to this. I suspect we’ll just end up using Drive Image and keeping an identical drive on hand in case Windows 2000 gets suicidal on us. The price of an IDE drive is pocket change on top of all this.

But when you’re running Linux and GNU tar is a legitimate option as a backup and recovery tool, I love the DL320. It’s small, fast, and cheap. It’s funny when tools allegedly written by college students as a hobby work better and more consistently than commercial tools you have to pay for.

Well, I guess I should say it’s funny when that happens and it’s someone else who has to deal with it.

Cheap laptops from Sotec

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , ,

David Huff e-mailed me this morning about a Sotec 3120X laptop that sells at Office Depot, Wal-Mart, Sam’s, Bestbuy.com, and possibly other places, for around $900 and asked if I knew anything about it.
It would appear not many people do. I found a handful of discussions on Usenet, including a couple of people who claim to have bought one. They described it as quiet, cool-running, and fast. One user said it was faster than his Dell 1.4 GHz P4 at work. (Which I don’t doubt, because the P4 is a horribly inefficient chip–the Tualatin-based Celeron is the better processor, and with its 100 MHz FSB and 256K onboard cache, it’s very nearly a P3. Its specs aren’t far off from the last P3s, the chip Intel didn’t want to sell because it made the P4 look so bad.)

One user complained about the keyboard. The itty-bitty spacebar would drive me nuts. But the only laptop keyboards I’ve ever used and halfway liked were Thinkpads. You definitely pay for the privelige–the keyboards had better be good, considering the price.

Back to the Sotec. One user reported it’s less than an inch and a half thick. It has a mobile Celeron 1.2 GHz, a SiS 630T chipset (with integrated video), a 20 GB HD, 256 MB of SDRAM, 12.1″ LCD screen, LAN and modem built in, a combo DVD/CD-RW drive, and a PCMCIA slot for expansion. It weighs 4.4 pounds, and its lithium ion battery specifies a life expectancy of about 2.5 hours. It runs Windows XP Home.

What it doesn’t have: serial or parallel ports, floppy drive, or PS/2 ports. Definitely legacy-free here. Depending on your intentions, that may or may not matter to you. (I find myself dealing with floppies a lot more often than I’d like, but part of that is because of my job.) No Firewire either, so this isn’t an instant portable video-editing machine. One user reports its memory maxes out at 384 megs. Apparently there’s 128 megs non-replaceable, and another 128-meg stick you can replace with a 256 to get to 384.

So what about Sotec? A Usenet suggests they’re not a newcomer. A post from 1995 asked for parts for a 386sx notebook manufactured by the company. There are suggestions that Sotec has made notebooks for Gateway, Dell, and Winbook in the past.

The price is definitely right, and the feature set is definitely right. It’s not a performance laptop, but most people don’t need performance laptops. It’ll read e-mail and run a word processor and presentation graphics and browse the Web just fine.

Is it a risk? Absolutely. Any laptop is. But having all the stuff integrated minimizes compatibility concerns. One of my biggest gripes about laptops has always been getting them onto networks. Usually it’s easy. When it’s not, you can just about forget it. Or you can count on networking breaking something else.

That leaves reliability. The part that most often fails is the hard drive. That’s luck of the draw. I’ve seen a lot more dead Hitachi laptop drives than IBMs. Some of my readers agree with me. At least one tells me he sees lots of dead IBMs and never sees a dead Hitachi. But I know you can’t count on getting an IBM laptop drive even in an IBM Thinkpad–occasionally those ship with Hitachi drives.

All I can say is, keep a backup of any important data you’ll keep on this or any laptop. And be ready to buy a replacement hard drive in a year or two. At least they’re not terribly expensive.

Can I recommend it? Not without seeing it and spending some time with it. From looking at the picture, I think they tried to cram way too many keys into too small of a space and they’d have been much better off without some of them.

But the price is definitely right. It’s powerful enough to be useful until it dies. With 1.2 GHz of CPU muscle and 256 megs of RAM, it’ll always run Windows XP well, and if some future version of Windows manages to outgrow it, there’ll always be a Linux that’ll run very nicely on it. It’ll give much better battery life than a P4, and it’ll outrun any low-end P4 as well. (P4-based laptops aren’t a good buy right now.)

And it’s small and light, which I know matters a lot to some people. (I’m old enough to have serviced one of the old Compaq luggables. I never had to carry one with me, but since I know and remember those, I have a hard time listening to anyone complain about the size and weight of any modern laptop.) Don’t buy one sight unseen. But don’t write it off sight unseen either.

Upgrade diary: Gateway G6-400

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , ,

I recently had the displeasure of working on a Gateway G6-400. I’ll relate some of the experiences here, in case you ever have the same misfortune.

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Got tech skills? Here’s a Christmas idea

Dave Farquhar Hardware

One of my coworkers ran out of ideas for Christmas presents for his sisters one year.
So instead of buying them jewelry they probably wouldn’t want, or clothes that wouldn’t fit or they just wouldn’t like so they’d have to take them back, he bought a bunch of computer parts. Then he upgraded their systems. The next year, he did the same thing. And again the next. Within a couple of years, they had really nice systems. And the systems stayed nice, since most people can stay really happy with a computer that gets $100 worth of hardware upgrades every year.

This year, he got married. And his wife didn’t like that idea. They needed to buy something, well, gift-y for his family. So she made her intentions known.

His sisters wasn’t very happy with the idea. It turns out they like it when he upgrades their computers for them.

So there’s an idea to float. Not everyone will love it, but probably a lot of people will. And you can get a lot of nice upgrades for not a lot of money, especially if you know where to shop. Some hints: It’s hard to beat Newegg.com for new stuff. And it’s hard to beat Compgeeks.com for closeout stuff. And let’s face it, unless someone’s ripping DVD movies, there’s little noticeable difference between a 12X DVD-ROM on closeout and a 16X DVD-ROM from a retail joint. And while an enthusiast will look down on a 20X or 24X CD-RW drive, they cost half as much (or less) than the current state-of-the-art, they’re more than half as fast, and to someone used to dubbing from CD to cassette, burning a 74-minute music CD in less than 10 minutes seems really fast.

For me, the magic number is somewhere around $100. For you it might be more like $50. Even if it is $50, there’s a fair bit you can do. You’ll never run out of ideas.

CD-RW drives. I recently paid $30something for a Yamaha 20/10/40 drive. With Nero software. I love it. CD-RW drives are commodities now; look for a drive with some kind of buffer underrun protection and Nero software. Other than that, buy on price.

DVD drives. A bare DVD drive can cost as little as $30. I believe you can even get by without buying a drive with bundled decoder software–n.player ought to do the job for them. I need to build up a bare Windows box, pop in my DVD drive, and try n.player out to know for sure. If you want to be safe, you can get a decent drive with WinDVD bundled for $40.

Memory. Memory’s cheap. It doesn’t seem like anybody ever has enough. No-brainer.

Video card. My sister doesn’t need a fire-breathing video card and yours probably doesn’t either. But a lot of systems have really underpowered cards, way worse than the $25 specials you’ll find on Newegg. If you get one with TV-outs, you gain the option to take the PC into the living room to show slideshows on the TV’s bigger screen, or watch movies on DVD.

Motherboard. A motherboard swap can be hairier, but if the computer already has lots of cool gadgets, that would make a nice upgrade. You could grab something like a Shuttle AK32L that can take a cheap Duron CPU and works with either SDRAM or DDR memory. That would allow you to re-use the existing memory, and slide in under the $100 mark. Then next year’s upgrade could be DDR memory and a really fast Athlon XP CPU, which will be dirt cheap by then.

Scanners. Everyone wants a scanner, and it’s easy to find a decent scanner for $50. Look for color depth over resolution–what’s the point in having a scanner with higher resolution than your printer? Besides, a lot of scans will be e-mailed. The resolution of your monitor is 75 dpi. High color depth gives you better color accuracy, and thus, better scans.

Digital cameras. Cheap sub-megapixel, fixed-focus digital cameras–the Polaroids of the early aughts–start in the $50 price range too. They’re no good for serious shots, but they’re fun, and for family snapshots you’ll be e-mailing around, they’re fine.

And if you’re really careful, you can get a decent digital camera–one with more than a megapixel of resolution and a zoom–for a little over $100. Next year for $100-$125, you may be able to get a 3-megapixel digital camera.

DVD burners. They’re way too expensive now, but at some point DVD burners will hit the $100 mark. Work on stuff lower on this list. Within two years, the confusion over formats will most likely have worked itself out, and pricing should be along the lines of what CD-RW drives cost now. Remember, two years ago a $50 CD-RW was unimaginable. Today it makes you yawn.

Hard drives. There’s always the potential hard drive upgrade. Today, $100 buys what was an unbelievable amount of disk space a year ago. Next year, $100 will buy what’s an unbelievable amount of disk space today. Keep your relatives on a three-year upgrade cycle on their hard drives to minimize the probability of data loss, and to keep the computer running briskly. Mark my words: Changing hard drives will soon become the computerized equivalent of an oil change.

I told you you wouldn’t run out of ideas. You’ll have to repeat some steps earlier in the cycle long before you complete it.

Building with the Antec SLK2600AMB

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

The Antec SLK2600AMB is the nicest case for the money I think I’ve ever seen.

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Don’t try this at home

Dave Farquhar Hardware

“What you got in that system?”
“An 850.”

“Oh. 850 MHz isn’t too bad these days.”

“No, the CPU’s a 750. The hard drive’s an 850.”

“Where’d you get an 850-gig drive?”

“Who said anything about gigs?”

Yeah, I put a computer together this week. I had problems with the hard drive. Bad problems. Like Windows won’t load anymore and it coughs up a hairball when I try to reformat the disk. Yeah. Bad news. So I sent in a clunky old Seagate 850-meg drive off the bench. Hey, I wanted to play Railroad Tycoon, alright?

Along the way I recalled a few tricks.

FORMAT C: /Q /U /AUTOTEST formats a hard drive as quickly as possible, no questions asked and none of that aggravating “saving unformat information” that takes a week and doesn’t work when you want to unformat the drive anyway.

FORMAT C: /U /AUTOTEST does an unconditional, no-questions-asked long format, but still faster than plain old format without switches.

But if you want to get a drive up and running really fast, use the GDISK utility that comes with Ghost (if you don’t have Ghost, you may be able to find an old version of GDISK online if you look hard enough, because at one time it was freely distributable):

GDISK 1 /MBR /WIPE will quickly delete all the partitions on a disk.
GDISK 1 /CRE /PRI /FOR /Q will create and format a single FAT32 partition so fast you’ll wonder what’s wrong with Microsoft. Reboot and you’re ready to rock’n’roll.

Well, as much as an 850 will let you rock’n’roll, that is. Which ain’t much. But I know I’ve got a decent hard drive around here somewhere. So I think I’ll go find it. I’ve had enough of this insanity.

And I still haven’t gotten in my game of Railtycoon.

The Sapphire Radeon 7000

Dave Farquhar Hardware ,

The last bit of hardware from my recent shopping spree that I’ll look at is the Sapphire Radeon 7000. This card is manufactured by Sapphire using an ATI chip.
Newegg sells several versions of this card and the prices start at $31. The most basic card is just that, basic: 32 megs of SDRAM and plain old VGA out. I stepped up to a higher-end version of the card, which offers 64 megs of DDR and S-video and composite out. I think that’s worth the extra five bucks I paid.

What can I say? It’s a budget card at a budget price. But when I bought my STB Velocity 128 card with the nVidia Riva128 chipset, it was a performance card. The gap in performance between this Radeon and the Riva128 feels as big as the gap between the Riva and the first Trident-based PCI video card I ever bought, back in 1995.

I tried one in a Celeron-366 and in a 1.3 GHz Duron. Its performance in the Duron was higher. Clearly the CPU was the bottleneck in the Celeron system.

The 7000 lacks some features that high-end gaming cards have. It has fewer pipelines than the higher-end Radeons, and half the memory bandwidth. It also lacks some of the hardware texture and lighting features you expect to find in a performance card of today.

But not everybody cares about those things. It plays Civilization 3 and Railroad Tycoon II just fine, thank you very much, and for word processing and e-mail and Web browsing the memory bandwidth isn’t terribly critical and the rendering pipelines and T&L are completely irrelevant. If you’re into productivity software and strategy games, a Radeon 7000 will treat you right and leave money in your pocket for other things.

Radeon support under Linux is good, mostly because a lot of new Macs have been shipping with Radeons for the past couple of years. Support under Windows, of course, is a non-issue.

The TV out support is nice if your system sports a DVD drive; in a pinch your computer can fill in for your DVD player. The card offers MPEG-2 acceleration, which is nice if your system has an aging CPU in it. Armed with a Radeon 7000 and a DVD drive, my Celeron-366 still dropped frames occasionally, but fewer than it did with an older card.

This card is overmatched in a monster gaming rig, but if you’re looking to put a little more punch in a two-year-old PC, this is a cheap way to get it. If you’re building a new PC and don’t care about 3D gaming performance, one of these $36 Radeon 7000s is all the card you need. Probably more. It’ll allow you to sink some money into something that’ll help your overall performance out more, like a faster hard drive or more memory. Or SCSI. 🙂 As far as I’m concerned, this card is a superstar for the price of a wanna-be. Go get it.

A nice upgrader’s motherboard and a cheap fan

Dave Farquhar Hardware , ,

I already talked about the $35 Foxconn 3400ATX case, so I might as well start talking about the other parts I used to build a very nice $200 upgrade last week.
Shuttle AK32L. It’s a very basic Socket A motherboard, using the VIA KT266 chipset. It plays both kinds of music, country and western–I mean, it supports both kinds of memory, PC133 SDRAM and DDR266, and CPU-wise it’ll work with everything from a 500 MHz Duron, if you happen to have one around, to the fastest Athlon XP you can get your hands on at the moment.

By today’s standards it’s a very basic motherboard. Aside from AC97 audio, there’s nothing built in besides the obligatory parallel, serial, USB, and PS/2 ports on the outside and a floppy and a pair of ATA100 connectors on the inside. It sports an AGP slot and six PCI slots (the last is shared with an AMR slot you won’t use). This plus its ability to use either DDR or PC133 (or even PC100) makes it an ideal upgrade board. But if you’re looking for serial ATA or IDE RAID or Firewire, then you’d best move along, there’s nothing to see here.

Performance-wise, I didn’t run any benchmarks on it. But let’s say this: I booted up Win98 in safe mode on this board with a Duron 1.3 in it, and it felt fast. That says something when a board will run Win98 safe mode fast.

Being more concerned with stability than with speed, I loaded up the BIOS with relatively conservative settings, but noted that there are plenty of features to keep a tweaker happy–memory timing, FSB and voltage adjusting, etc.

The lack of an AGP Pro slot and presence of only two DDR slots will keep this from being a performance freak’s board, however.

But if you’d like to goose the performance of a tired K6-2 or Pentium II system, you should be able to pick up an AK32L with a 1.3 GHz Duron and a decent fan for around $100. That’s what I paid at Newegg for a Duron 1.3 ($41), the AK32L ($55), and a Cooler Master DP5-6I11A fan ($3!).

Cooler Master DP5-6I11A fan. It’s a big heat sink. It’s got a fan on it. It keeps your CPU cool. It works. What else do you want to know?

The amount of noise it makes isn’t obnoxious. I didn’t do any tests on it to find out its heat dissipation capabilities — leave that to Dan Rutter, but he’s never tested this model.

It cost me three bucks. What I got was an aluminum heat sink with a decent-sized fan on it that doesn’t make a huge amount of noise. It had a nice thin layer of heat-sink grease applied to it already, a fact I found out accidentally when I looked down at my thumb after handling it. That’s a nice touch though–it saves you from having to buy a tube of the stuff and fumble around with it.

It’s marketed as an AMD Socket A fan, but it’ll work on Socket 370 and Socket 7 systems as well. It’s serious overkill for all but the very last Socket 7 CPUs, but for $3, I doubt many people will complain. It’s been a really long time since I last opened the case of a Pentium-133 or similar and found a working fan, so if you’ve still got something of that ilk hanging around, this would be a good pickup.

This case feels like a contender

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

I’m building computers again.
This one’s going into a Foxconn 3400ATX, which is available for 35 smackers from Newegg.com.

So how is it, you ask? Oh, you didn’t ask? Well, I’ll tell you anyway.

You can find a lot worse cases for the money. Its looks are along the lines of a current Compaq or HP case without the translucent smoke-colored accents. Picture a plain-beige box that looks like a Compaq at your favorite retailer, and you’ll have a nice picture of the 3400. I like its looks a little better than most Antec or Inwin cases, actually. And no funky-colored buttons or obnoxious colored trim, like a lot of cases in this price range.

It has three detachable panels like most good cases and unlike most $35 specials. The panels aren’t as heavy as a premium brand but they’re not flimsy. And the panels come off and go back on easily, which is nice. It’s always disconcerting to have to manhandle a case with expensive components and your precious data inside whenever you need to get it open.

The case feet push into the bottom of the case and are secured with plastic pins, rather than being the stick-on kind that tend to fall off and run away.

Now the bad. You don’t get nice, screw-out slot covers like you would with a premium case. You get cutouts that you bust out with a pair of pliers. The inside of the case is light-gauge steel with that cheap Far East look. Those of you who’ve worked inside a lot of inexpensive cases know what I’m talking about. Working inside it isn’t going to be as nice as working inside an Inwin or an Antec. The motherboard tray is pop-riveted and not detachable.

The power supply is nothing to get excited about. It’s rated at 300 watts, it’s AMD approved, but it looks and feels cheap. It ought to be fine for a Duron or a low-end Athlon XP. Don’t try to build a 3-GHz computer around this. (If you’ve got the money for a 3-GHz machine, you need to be looking at something other than a $35 case.)

Now, the upside. While the interior finish is very pedestrian at best, the fit is fine. Stuff lines up, which doesn’t always happen at this price point. There’s a case fan mounted in the back. There’s a place for a second one up front. You get three external 5.25″ bays, two external 3.5″ bays, and one more 3.5″ bay. Fill all those up and you’ll be taxing the limits of this power supply.

The verdict? Newegg sells Codegen cases that will get to you a little bit cheaper because they’re lighter. I’ve heard mixed reviews about Codegens. I can tell you this Foxconn is worth what you pay for it (most $35 cases aren’t), and it comes in white or solid black. If you’re building a fairly low-end system, this Foxconn will serve you well.

But if you’re building something that you expect to work on a lot (adding drives and memory and changing out the motherboard fairly frequently), pony up the extra $20-$25 to get an Inwin or Antec case.

More wireless networking

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , ,

Well, I took the plunge. What good is credit when you don’t use it, right? I didn’t want to run CAT5 Ethernet cable everywhere and I didn’t want to spend hours playing with Linux drivers for phone-line networks that have been in beta for a year. Especially not with what few Usenet posts mention those drivers also mentioning kernel panics. No thanks.
Dan Bowman pointed out that JustDeals had good prices available on wireless gear. So I picked up a plain-old access point for $70 (I don’t want a combo access point/router/switch because I want something I can turn off when I’m not using it–can’t beat that for security) and a PCMCIA NIC for $29 and a pair of USB NICs for $29. That’ll let me put a computer in the front room and a computer in the spare room and it’ll let me wander around with my work laptop.

Dirt-cheap prices, no rebate hassles. Gotta love it. CompUSA’s prices on Netgear kit are good, but there are rebates involved, which is always a pain.

My plan for security, besides powering off the access point when I’m not using it, is to turn off DHCP, hard-code it to my NICs, turn on 128-bit WEP, use obnoxious passphrases, and place the access point as far from the outside wall as possible. That should give me acceptable security, especially considering the physical location of my house. Neither of my next-door neighbors has a wireless LAN, and I seriously doubt the neighbors behind me do either, and they’re pretty far back and might even be out of range anyway. I’m at the end of a street deep in a residential area, so most wardrivers probably won’t bother. And if they do, I’ll be home and I’ll probably see them.

One thing I learned today, which reveals my ignorance yesterday, is that most wireless NICs accept the “Any” parameter that we used to get a Linksys NIC talking with a 3Com access point so we could configure it. But your documentation may or may not mention it.