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.

It’s election day.

Dave Farquhar General

Ah, election day. Vote early and often.
A longtime reader pointed out to me today that a certain Daynoter whose site I never read anymore advocates having 1% or even 0.5% of the populace vote. He actively goes out of his way to discourage people from voting.

This is precisely one of the reasons I never read that particular site anymore.

I remember an unscientific poll/experiment conducted at the same site several years ago. He named an obscure country and invited readers to write in with guesses as to its size, or population, or some other statistic. He asserted that, given a large enough sample size, the average guess would be very close to being correct. He waited a few days, then presented his results, which were indeed pretty close to the actual statistic.

How you account for whether people went and looked up the answer before “guessing,” I’m not sure. I don’t know if he did, and short of just making sure you ask a much larger number of people than are likely to bother looking it up, I don’t know the proper way to go about doing that. (I’m a journalist, so my education in the art of statistics ended at the 100 level.)

But, if you assume that a large enough number of uninformed people can make the right decision just by guessing, then it follows that the way to ensure the right person is elected is to poll every man, woman and child in the country. Therefore, voting should be made mandatory and the voting age should be reduced to age 2.

That’s nonsense too.

Is it a problem that so few people vote? It’s certainly a sign of larger problems, namely apathy and laziness. I don’t really care if it’s a problem in and of itself, because if we manage to solve the root problems of apathy and laziness, all sorts of great things happen.

So what about the other problem? That’s easy. Do I want my leaders chosen by an elite few? Absolutely not. That’s what we got in Missouri in the Senate race in 2000, and that elitism got us Jean Carnahan.

Go vote. If only to cancel out the vote of an elitist snob.

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.

New Freesco

Dave Farquhar Linux

Freesco 0.3 is out. It now has working PPPoE support, I understand. I don’t know what else it does just yet. But I intend to find out.
Freesco is easily my favorite single-floppy Linux distro, because once you get the hardware going, it’s easy to get running. Anyone familiar with computer networking can do it, without knowing a thing about Unix. And once it’s working, you can move it to the hard drive, which is good, since tiny hard drives are common as dirt and cheap and reliable (Freesco spins the drive down after it’s done booting, so a hard drive should work pretty much indefinitely, seeing as you’ll only reboot the thing when there’s a power failure), whereas floppy disks are anything but reliable.

That’s not to say that getting the hardware going isn’t a pain sometimes, but that’s not Freesco’s fault. Resolving a bunch of IRQ and I/O conflicts to get a 486 with a pile of ISA cards in it working perfectly is a pain no matter what OS you intend to run on it.

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.

The worm that’s not a worm

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , ,

I got mail at work today. The subject:
David you have an e-card from Alex.

Well, about the only person I know who calls me David is my mom. And I don’t know anybody named Alex. And why would a guy be sending me an e-card? Not wanting to explore that possibility any further, I disregarded it.

Then I remembered reading about something like that somewhere, so I went back and looked at it.

Short story: A really sleazy e-card company is sending out e-mail containing nothing but an URL at friendgreetings.com, which sends down ActiveX controls and installs some spyware that, among other things, sends bogus cards to everyone in your Outlook address book. That’s where I got that e-card message from. I was in this guy’s address book, for whatever reason. (Turns out he’s the webmaster at work. Funny how the webmaster and the hostmaster can go for long periods of time and never meet, eh?)

Officially, this isn’t a virus or a worm because it’s a company doing this crap, rather than a bored loser who lives in his parents’ basement and you have to click on an EULA (which most people do blindly anyway) for it to activate. I fail to see the difference, but I guess I’m weird that way.

I originally wrote that the anti-virus makers didn’t consider this a worm, but Symantec seems to have relented. You can get a removal tool at Symantec’s site.

If you want to protect yourself pre-emptively, locate your hosts file (in C:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc on NT/2000/XP; I’m wanting to say it’s in C:\Windows\System on Win9x; on most Unix systems it’s in /etc, not that it matters since this not-a-worm runs on Windows) and add the following entry:

127.0.0.1 www.friendgreetings.com

More cleanly, you can ask your network admins really nicely if they can block friendgreetings.com at the firewall or DNS level.

If you have inadvertently unleashed this monster, first, close Outlook immediately. Normally, I’d advise getting right with everyone else before cleaning things up, but since there’s the risk of making things worse if you do it that way, clean house, then start apologizing.

Next, download the removal tool.

If you want to be really safe, go into the control panel and remove anything that appears to have anything to do with friendgreetings.com. Next, I’d go to www.cognitronix.com and download Active Xcavator and remove anything having to do with friendgreetings.com. Next, I’d head over to LavaSoft and download Ad-Aware and let it shoot anything that moves.

Next, apologize profusely to the guy who runs your mail server (ours got clogged up for hours processing all the mail from not-our-friendgreetings.com) and to everyone in your address book. I can’t offer you any advice on the best way to do that. Except I’d use something other than Outlook to do it. Head over to TinyApps.org to find yourself a small freeware mail client. Assuming you’re not on an Exchange server, I’d suggest pulling the network plug before firing up Outlook again to get those e-mail addresses.

Meanwhile, it would do no good whatsoever if everyone who’s gotten one of these annoying e-cards (whether they opened it or not) opened a command prompt and typed ping -t www.friendgreetings.com and left it running indefinitely. No good whatsoever. It’s still a distributed denial of service attack if all of the participants participate voluntarily and independently. Right?

An emergency POP client

Dave Farquhar Windows

I went looking for a lightweight POP3 client last week for Windows so I could do some testing. I found Popcorn. I like it a lot.
For one thing, it’s a self-contained 216K executable that keeps its info in an .ini file in the same directory. Simple and elegant. Its user interface is certainly adequate. It’s not as fancy as Outlook or some other clients maybe, but it’s fine. Best yet, it’ll grab the headers and let you see them before you download your mail, which is a real boon on a dialup connection. Flag the spam, hit delete, then only download the stuff you want to read then and there.

Memory usage starts at about 2 megs, which makes it even more ideal for that 486 laptop with 8 megs of RAM running Win95 that you take with you on the road.

It’s a simple program for simple needs, with a couple of compelling features thrown in. Even if you’ve got a multi-gigahertz P4 with a gig or two of RAM, there’s probably something to like about it. Check it out.

Linux network diagnostics

Dave Farquhar Linux , ,

I was doing a little research for Gatermann about Linux networking. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I found something interesting: a pair of tools co-written by Donald Becker called mii-tool and mii-diag.
The source code for it is available at scyld.com but Debian includes a package for it (mii-diag). It allows you to force your network card to re-negotiate its speed with your hub or switch, which is useful if it’s constantly negotiating the wrong speed. In Windows you can usually open the network control panel and force duplex operation and speed. In Linux, that requires playing around with module options, which aren’t always consistent across drivers (because they’re not all written by the same people) or, if you compiled your driver into the kernel, passing boot parameters. Either way, you’re forced to reboot.

Run mii-diag to find out the status of your card (and commentary on the situation from the authors, in some cases). You can run mii-tool -r to force a renegotiation nicely, or run with the -f parameter to force it to a certain speed (if you’re interested in forcing a speed, you’re probably chasing 100 megabit, full duplex).

If your system is mysteriously not connecting, like my Web server was yesterday after I moved it, this tool can be useful in fixing it. I wish I’d known about it yesterday. I eventually solved the problem by rebooting until it worked right. (I don’t think my server’s 3Com NIC likes my Linksys router/switch much.)

So if you want to change your network’s speed for any reason without rebooting, this is the tool to do it (and it doesn’t make you hunt the Web and Usenet for the module parameters).

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.