Building an inexpensive PC

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , ,

Building an inexpensive PC. An old out-of-town friend I don’t hear from often called the other day. He wants to buy a computer and dabble in audio production. Some local guy quoted him $2,500 to build a system. He read me the specs, and all I can say is this guy had better be using Lian-Li cases and PC Power and Cooling power supplies (or I guess I’d settle for high-end Enermax), but I doubt it. I do know he’s using a top-end Athlon XP processor and an Abit motherboard, but he wasn’t pairing it with DDR, so he was totally killing the chip’s performance anyway. For two and a half grand, you’d better be getting DDR, and lots of it.
“You need a 32-meg video card because when the computer is drawing the waveforms, it has to be dead-on. You can’t afford for it to lag,” he said.

I got news for this idiot. When it comes to drawing simple line graphics like a waveform, the ancient ET4000 chipset in my 486 will have no problem keeping up with it. Even if you use a fill to make the waveform look pretty. And that video “card” (it was integrated into my motherboard) had 512K (K, as in kilobytes) of memory. Although anyone who wasn’t born yesterday knows that the amount of memory on a video card has nothing to do with its speed, outside of the realm of 3D gaming. Knowing kids these days, some of them may even know that at birth.

In other words, the guy’s a moron. Either he knows nothing about computers, or he knows how to skimp but he’s not a convincing salesman.

I know for a fact that audio editing doesn’t need a supercomputer. If I can do video editing on a 700 MHz Duron, I know a Duron CPU, paired with a decent supporting cast, is going to be adequate for multitrack audio recording and editing as well.

I asked him how much he could spend. He told me $800, not counting a monitor and the editing card/package. I squirmed. I spent way too much time shopping around. Here’s what I came up with (not counting the operating system):

1 GHz AMD Duron
FIC AZ11 motherboard (on closeout, so it was cheap)
ATI Xpert 2000 Pro AGP video card (with a blazing 32 megs–ahem)
Maxtor D740 20-gig 7200 RPM IDE hard drive
Maxtor D740 60-gig 7200 RPM IDE hard drive
512 MB Crucial PC133 SDRAM
Mitsumi 3.5″ floppy drive
Sony 52X ATAPI CD-ROM
Plextor Plexwriter 12/10/32A CD-RW
Enermax A1QX-6 mid-tower case with Enermax 300W power supply
US Robotics 2977 controller-based PCI modem
Closeout Dell-branded Logitech mouse and Dell-branded keyboard

I told him there are two brands of CD-RW I trust, especially for audio work: re-labeled Plextor, and Plextor. In all honesty, I would have much prefered to build an all-SCSI system, but for this kind of budget, that’s impossible. All-SCSI would have given much better disk performance, and it would have given access to the Plextor UltraPlex 40max CD-ROM, which is the only drive I trust for extracting digital audio. I imagine he’ll be doing a little of that. The Sony drive will do a decent job, but I’ve seen the Plextor work miracles. But the Plextor is $100, while the Sony cost around $25. I’ll definitely take a Sony over a Cyberdrive or Lite-On (which probably would have run $19).

I couldn’t get PC Power and Cooling on this budget. The price on the Enermax combo was good (less than a PCP&C 300W power supply alone) and the quality is respectable. The Japanese steel is a little lighter gauge than I prefer, but I didn’t cut myself on it. The fit is good, and it’s a good-looking case. Not show-off good like Lian-Li, but better-looking than most of the stuff in its price range. The cobalt blue trim compliments the lettering on the Plextor drive.

Finding a place to put the hard drives is a bit of a challenge. Modern 7200-rpm drives don’t run very hot, but I still don’t want them running directly above one another. I finally settled on putting a drive in the lowest 3.5″ bay and the other in the lowest 5.25″ bay.

The USR 2977 is the secret weapon here. A $20 no-name Winmodem would be a royal pain to set up, and chew up lots of CPU cycles. The 2977 was under $50 and won’t be a load on the system. That’s a speed trick I’m sure that local guy doesn’t know.

The 1 GHz Duron is still overkill, but that’s the slowest chip I could talk him into. I was starting to get annoyed with him. I don’t just know about computer speed, I literally wrote the book on computer speed, and my friend didn’t know what I was talking about when I said something about a boot floppy. And this year’s hot chip is next year’s budget chip, so if the budget chip is enough to get the job done this year, you can go buy more CPU next year. Besides, there was no way to cram any more CPU power into this tiny budget, other than sacrificing disk speed, which is more important unless he’s running Windows XP, which he won’t be. (I’ll drive 200 miles and take his computer away from him if he does.)

As for the two drives, any time you do multimedia work, you want to make sure your application and swap file are located on one drive, and the audio you’re working with is on a second drive. I probably could have gotten by with a 5400-rpm drive to hold the OS, but there isn’t much price difference between a 5400 RPM 20-gig drive and a 7200.

As for how the system runs, I’m sure it’ll smoke. The motherboard isn’t here yet. In all fairness, I ordered it Monday and it was shipped UPS Ground from California on Tuesday.

I ordered the motherboard from Just Deals and the memory came from Crucial. The rest of the stuff came from Directron and New Egg, who as always gave me great prices and fast delivery.

Utility infielder

Dave Farquhar General , ,

My phone rang early Thursday morning. It was my boss again.
“Can you take a look at the RAS server? I’m tied up in meetings all day so I won’t have a chance to fix it myself.”

The RAS server is a small beige Lucent box. I’d dealt with it on the client side far too many times. I don’t understand the appeal of 28.8 dialup with only five lines, but I guess if you don’t want to pay for Internet dialup, it must just be the greatest thing since Linux.

So he e-mailed me the configuration of the machine, told me the root password, and I was off. It seems to run some kind of embedded Unix, but the command set is extremely limited. Since people were having problems dialing in, I didn’t want to find it was a hardware problem. Using US Robotics Sportster modems, I wasn’t going to rule that out. The Sportster was the best consumer-grade modem out there, but the Courier was professional. Nothing compares to a Courier.

I knew of a couple of US Robotics Courier v.32 modems in the back room. So I plundered them, brought them back to my desk, and started configuring. Then I realized why those modems were in the back room. The v.32 standard was 14.4. It didn’t matter if those old Couriers connected every single time–nobody was going to be happy with 14.4 dialup. So I piled the Couriers–each about the size of a modern laptop, along with a good-sized external power brick–on a corner of my desk and started looking at what I had.

After playing around for an hour or so, I was able to figure out how to get the status and configuration of the modems. And I almost immediately found the problem. The first person to dial in always had problems. Well, the modem on port 0 wouldn’t hold its configuration. I plugged my laptop into an analog phone line. It connected, first try. My modem just didn’t seem to care. I disconnected, and went into the back room. I checked to make sure all the modems were identical and had identical DIP switch settings. Indeed they did. I traced the cables. Nothing looked bad. The modem lights looked fine too.

I played with it all day. It was a true misadventure. Eventually I figued out the modem on port 0 wasn’t responding because there was no modem on port 0. I dialed in and stayed dialed in for a couple of hours. Catching up on e-mail and going to random Web sites at 28.8 wasn’t exactly a delight. Eventually I figured out that we were using an init string for USR v.32 (14.4) and not v.34 (28.8/33.6) modems. The difference was slight: the 14.4 string set register S0 to 1. The 28.8 string didn’t. I had someone who’d been having problems dial in. No problems. And she got better speed than ever before. I couldn’t believe it. Over the S0 register? Why would that make a difference? But if anyone knows modems inside and out, it’s Lucent. Not only do they make tons and tons of modem chipsets, they also make the equipment that all of them have to use to communicate, so while no one’s seen everything, they’ve probably seen more than everyone else. And init strings have always been a black art.

So I left, satisfied. I played out of position, but I found the problem. At least I found a problem, and my solution sounded plausible. My first day troubleshooting a piece of networking infrastructure looked successful.

It’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times…

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , ,

I hate arguing with women. When guys fight, they fight hard, and they don’t always fight fair, but when the fight’s over, it’s pretty much over. You settle it. Maybe you seethe for a little bit. But eventually, assuming you both still can walk, you can go to hockey games together almost like it never happened.
I’ve found myself in an argument. It’s not like an argument with a guy. Every time I think it’s over, it flares back up. It’s like fighting the hydra. (I don’t know if this is characteristic of arguments with women in general; I generally don’t seek out that experience.)

I found one solution though: Don’t open my inbox.

That worked for me once. After 8 months, she finally quit e-mailing me.

Found on a mailing list. I’m assuming this guy mistyped this:

“I need hell with my installation.”

Some smart aleck responded before I did. “Usually you get that with installation whether you want it or not. Now someone’s demanding it. Newbies, these days.”

I was going to say that if you ran Windows, you’d get that free of charge. (That’s the only thing Microsoft gives you for free!)

A cool phone call. My phone rings at work. Outside call. Don’t tell me she somehow got my number at work… I pick up. “This is Dave.”

“Dave, it’s Todd.”

Ah, my boss. Good thing I picked up, eh?

“You busy?”

When it’s your boss, there is absolutely no right answer to that question. One of my classmates in college told me something worth remembering, though: The truth’s always a lot easier to remember than a lie.

“We can’t come to the phone right now. Please leave a message at the beep.”

Nope. Too late for that.

“Not really,” I say, hoping I won’t regret it. Either he’s gathering data for my personal review, or he’s about to ask me to install Mac OS X on a Blue Dalmation iMac with 32 megs of RAM (speaking of wanting hell with installation…)

Actually he asks me for something pretty cool. He asks if I was up to learning some firewalling software. (No, I won’t tell you which one. And no, I won’t tell you who I work for. That’s like saying, “Hey, l337 h4xx0r5! You can’t get me!)

But I will tell you the IP address. It’s 127.0.0.1. If you can crack that address, you deserve whatever you can get. (No comments from the Peanut Gallery.)

So I hit the books. Thanks to this duty, I get another Linux box. I’ve got a Power Mac running Debian already, which runs scripts that are impossible on NT. It monitors the LAN and reformats some reports and e-mails them to my boss and co-workers at 6 every morning. But the management software runs under NT 4, Red Hat Linux, or Solaris. None of that’ll run on a PowerPC-based machine. So I lay claim to an old system that I happen to know has an Asus motherboard in it, along with 72 megs of RAM. I’ll have fun tweaking that system out. An Asus mobo, a Pentium-class CPU, and a Tulip network card. That’s not the makings of a rockin’ good weekend, but it’ll make for a reliable light-use workstation.

While the management software runs under Red Hat, some of the infrastructure is BSD-based. So I get to learn some BSD while I’m at it. As long as BSD is sane about /proc and /var/log, I’ll be in good shape. But I heard LSD was invented at Berkeley, so I may have a little learning to do… Maybe listening to some Beatles records while administering those systems would help.

Much ado about nothing and other stuff

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , , , ,

Much ado about nothing. The most recent report I read indicates that AOL/Time Warner and Red Hat are talking, but not about an acquisition. Sanity has entered the building…
Good thing User Friendly got a chance to get its two cents’ worth in. I got a couple bucks’ worth of laughter from it.
Much ado about something. On Sunday, Gentoo Linux developer Daniel Robbins announced that an obscure AMD Athlon bug slipped past Linux kernel developers, resulting in serious problems with Athlon- and Duron-based systems with AGP cards. This confirms some suspicions I’ve heard–one of the Linux mailing lists I subscribe to occasionally has rumblings about obscure and difficult-to-track-down Athlon problems.

The result was that Gentoo’s site was slashdotted into oblivion for a while, but hopefully it also resulted in some extra exposure for the distribution. Gentoo is another source-based distro. Lately I’ve been resigned to just using Debian to build my Linux boxes, but I’m still awfully fond of the idea of compiling your own stuff. As CPUs get faster and faster, I expect that to become more commonplace.

But I digress. The bug involves the CPU’s paging function. Older x86 CPUs used 4K pages. Starting with the Pentium, CPUs started allowing 4MB pages. But a bug in the Athlon’s implementation of this extended paging causes memory corruption when used in conjunction with an AGP cards.
Alan Cox is working on a workaround. I’m a bit surprised a patch isn’t already out there.

CPU bugs are discovered all the time, but it’s fairly rare for them to be serious. If you ever run across a Pentium-60 or Pentium-66 system, boot up Linux on it sometime and run the command dmesg. You’ll find workarounds for at least two serious bugs. A TI engineer named Robert Collins gained a fair bit of notoriety in the last decade by researching, collecting, and investigating CPU bugs. Part of it was probably due to his irreverant attitude towards Intel. (As you can see from this Wayback machine entry.) Sadly, I can’t find the story on the site anymore, since he was bought out by Dr. Dobb’s.
Catching up. I haven’t been making my rounds lately. The reason why is fairly obvious. I used my day off yesterday to have lunch with someone from my small group, then when I got home I read the e-mail I absolutely had to read, responded to those that absolutely had to get responses, answered a couple of voice messages, wrote and sent out a couple of other messages, looked up, and it was 5 p.m.

“Alright God,” I muttered. “I just gave the day to Your people. Time to go spend some time with You.” So I whipped out my handy-dandy Today’s Light Bible and read about Moses. Seemed appropriate. The inadequacy and jumping the gun and making excuses, that is. The Biblical “superheroes” were human just like us, and the book doesn’t gloss over that. Today’s Light is designed to divide the Bible into pieces so you can read the whole thing in two years. I can’t decide if I want to get through it in a year or in six months. A few years ago I read it in its entirety in four months, but that pace is a bit much. If you’re willing to spend as much time reading the Bible every day as the average person does watching TV, you can make it through in a few months. But it’s not exactly light reading, and I’m not sure I recommend that pace. If you’re willing to dedicate that kind of time to Bible study you’re probably better served by learning Greek so you can read the New Testament in the original. Then if you’ve still got your sanity you can think about tackling Hebrew.

I finally got around to reading Charlie Sebold’s entries for the last few days. One especially poignant observation: “I continue to be surprised at how much I remember about computers, and how much I forget about everything else (including far more important things).”

I sure can relate. I wish I could trade everything I remember about IBM PS/2s and Microchannel for something more useful. But I remember goofy baseball statistics too–I can recite the starting lineup and pitching rotation of the 1980 Kansas City Royals (I’ll spare you). But I can’t tell you the names of all seven people I met Sunday night.

Who put me in charge?

Dave Farquhar General

I just had to say no to someone. I didn’t want to say no. But the timing wasn’t right for everyone else. I’ve got someone here with some leadership ability but we’re going to have to sit on it for a little while longer. I don’t like that much. The other person doing the waiting really doesn’t like that much.
I think I liked things better when I had a mentor, and my mentor was the one who made the decisions and delivered the bad news. Now I don’t have a mentor, I still don’t make the decisions (because I refuse to unilaterally make decisions that affect dozens of people just because some outsider decided it would be a good idea to make me a de facto leader), and I deliver the bad news.

I like my Washington-style approach of getting tons of conflicting opinions, sorting through them, and then trusting that I have more wisdom than a garden-variety guinea pig and calling it a decision. It empowers people and it minimizes my lunkhead moves. It’s not the best approach for everyone but it works well for me. So I won’t change that.

I think I need a mentor, and the first thing I want to learn from that mentor is how to deliver bad news.

What on earth is going on?

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , ,

AOL-Time Warner in talks to buy Red Hat? I found this this morning. It’s intriguing, but I can’t decide if a buyout would be a good thing or a bad thing. After all, Netscape was in decline when AOL bought it. It nosedived afterward. Obviously, the problem was twofold. When AOL acquired Netscape, they didn’t acquire all of its mindshare. Some of the most talented people got fed up and left. You can take Jim Barksdale or you can leave him. The loss of Marc Andreesen and Jamie Zawinski, though, was substantial.
The second problem was that AOL wasn’t serious about competing. They bought a browser technology and basically sat on it. Netscape 4.x was fundamentally flawed, as even Zawinski acknowledges, although I would argue it was no more fundamentally flawed than IE 4.x. The Gecko engine, on which Netscape 6.x is based, is solid technology, even though it took longer to get to market than anyone had hoped. Although Netscape 6.x won’t bowl anyone over, other browsers based on the technology, such as Galeon, are absolutely fantastic. But AOL chose to release a half-hearted browser with the Netscape name on it and continued to use the IE engine in its flagship product even after the favorable agreement with Microsoft that prompted AOL to do so in the first place expired.

That begs the question of what AOL would do with Red Hat if it owned it. Red Hat is still the big-name player in the Linux field, but Red Hat is concentrating on the server market. You can still buy Red Hat at retail, but on the desktop, Red Hat is arguably #3 in popularity now behind France’s Mandrake and Germany’s SuSE. Red Hat is the only Linux company that’s making money, but that’s largely by selling consulting. That’s not AOL’s core business. At this point, AOL is more of a media company than a technology company. Software just gives AOL more outlets to sell its media content. Consulting doesn’t do that.

The best possible scenario for a Red Hat buyout would be for AOL to, as Microsoft puts it, “eat its own dog food,” that is, rip out the infrastructure it bought from other companies and replace it with the technology it just developed or acquired. Since AOL is largely powered by Sun servers, it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to migrate the infrastructure to Red Hat running on Intel. Then AOL could give a big boost to its newly-acquired services division by saying, “We did it and we can help you do it too.” They can also cite Amazon’s recent successes in moving its infrastructure to Red Hat Linux. There is precedence for that; after AOL bought Time Warner, the entire company started using AOL for e-mail, a move widely questioned by anyone who’s used anything other than AOL for mail.

Of course, it would be expected that AOL would port its online service to Linux, which would create the truly odd couple of the computing field. AOL, meet sed and awk. Red Hat would certainly lose its purity and much of its credibility among the Linux die-hards. AOL would bank on making up the loss by gaining users closer to the mainstream. AOL could potentially put some Linux on its corporate desktops, but being a media company, an all-out migration to Linux everywhere within is very far-fetched.

To really make this work, AOL would either have to enter the hardware business and sell PCs at retail using its newly acquired Red Hat distribution and newly ported AOL for Linux and possibly an AOL-branded office suite based on OpenOffice, or it would have to partner with a hardware company. Partnering with a big name seems unlikely–a Compaq or an HP or an IBM wouldn’t do it for fear of retaliation from Microsoft. Sun has never expressed any interest in entering the retail computer business, and even though Sun loves to take opportunities to harm Microsoft, Sun probably wouldn’t cooperate with AOL if AOL replaced its Sun infrastructure with Red Hat Linux. Struggling eMachines might be the best bet, since it’s strictly a consumer brand, has a large presence, but hasn’t consistently turned a profit. But AOL could just as easily follow eMachines’ example, buying and re-branding low-end Far East clones and selling them at retail as loss-leaders, taking advantage of its lack of need for Windows (which accounts for roughly $75 of the cost of a retail PC) and making its profit off new subscribers to its dialup and broadband customers. A $349 PC sold at retail with a flashy GUI, decent productivity software and AOL is all the computer many consumers need.

The advantage to this scenario for everyone else is that AOL would probably dump more development into either the KDE or GNOME projects in order to give itself more and higher-quality software to offer. The official trees can either take these changes or leave them. Undoubtedly, some of the changes would be awful, and the official trees would opt to leave them. But with its 18 years’ worth of experience developing GUIs, some of the changes would likely be a good thing as well.

The more likely scenario: AOL will buy out Red Hat, not have a clue what to do with it, and Red Hat Linux will languish just like Netscape.

The even more likely scenario: AOL will come to its senses, realize that Red Hat Linux has nothing to do with its core business, and the two companies will go their separate ways.

I’m fried.

Dave Farquhar General , ,

I spent the day trying to make an old PC get on the network, and I failed valiently. The machine connects to the network just fine in DOS. Load NT4 or 2000 though, and it shuts up fast. I didn’t try Linux, though I was threatening. I tried another 3Com 3c905. Nothing. I tried it in every possible PCI slot. Nothing. I swapped in an Intel EEPro/100. Nothing. I found an old ISA 3Com 3c509 card in a rehabbed Gateway2K box. Nope. All it did was sing to me. “I have no need for friendship, friendship causes pain. It’s laughter and loving I disdain. I am a rock. I am an island.”
Actually it didn’t even do that. It just stared back at me defiantly. Even when I told it I’d throw it in the pond. That just made me madder.

Stupid Intel motherboards. Too bad when you order a brand-name PC you can’t tell them you want an Asus or a Gigabyte. I swear by Asus. Lately I’ve been swearing at Intel. Wait, who am I kidding? I’ve always trusted Intel as much as I trust Microsoft. Which is about the same as I’d trust Slick Willie Clinton with my 17-year-old daughter, if I had a 17-year-old daughter.

And the system’s not even a month out of warranty either.

I’m frustrated because I’m the third guy to take a stab at this, and I’m the guy they turn to to take the impossible situation and manage to work it out. This one beat me, and I can’t stand losing.

Good thing I get a long weekend. I’m gonna go hang out with some of my Bible-thumpin’ buddies.

Katelyn update. Katelyn didn’t have surgery today. She’s in good enough shape to not need immediate surgery, but not in good enough shape to go home. They’re going to give her as much time as they can to build up strength, then it looks like they’ll go back in, unless something really changes quickly and she’s able to go home for a month.

Another Katelyn update.

Dave Farquhar General

I talked to Brad earlier today. They tried to remove Katelyn’s breathing tube today. The goal is that if she can breathe on her own, they’ll send her home for a month to gain strength, then they’ll go in and fix the heart. The damage to the sutres evidently isn’t as extensive as originally feared. Obviously this is the best option. She’s been through more this month than most of us go through in a lifetime. And obviously the home is a better place to heal, from a psychological standpoint, than a hospital.
If she can’t breathe on her own, they’ll go in much sooner, probably within days.

John and Karin are struggling. The possibility that Katelyn may die has always been there, but it didn’t hit until the infection.