compaq

First impressions: HP Mini 110

Dave Farquhar Hardware, Viruses, Windows , , , , , , , , ,

I spent a few hours last night with an HP Mini 110 1012NR. It’s a model with a 16 GB solid state drive (no spinning mechanical hard drive) and Windows XP.

My biggest beef is the keyboard. It’s undersized, and I can’t touch type on it. Try it out before you buy one.

The rest of the system isn’t bad, but there are some things you’ll want to do with it.The system acted weird until I removed Norton Antivirus 2009. By weird, I’m talking not staying on the network, filesystem errors, chkdsk running on reboot, and enough other goofiness that I was ready to take the thing back as defective. The system stabilized as soon as I removed Norton Antivirus, and stayed stable after I installed ESET NOD32.

The system also ran a lot faster.

Don’t believe the hype about Norton Antivirus 2009. Use ESET NOD32. This is the second HP laptop in a month that’s given me Norton Antivirus-related problems.

McAfee is better, but only sufficiently better to use if your ISP is giving it to you for free. I still think NOD32 is worth the $40 it costs. The Atom CPU in the Mini 110 feels like a Pentium 4 with NOD32 installed. It feels like a Pentium II or 3 with something else installed.

The SSD isn’t a barn burner. I have OCZ Vertex drives in my other PCs, and this one doesn’t measure up the Vertex. Reads are pretty quick, but writes can be a bit slow. Windows boots in about 30 seconds. Firefox loads in about five. Word and Excel 2000 load in about a second.

So it’s not bad. But an OCZ Vertex would be a nice upgrade. Drop it in, use it for the OS and applications, and use the stock 16 GB drive for data.

A memory upgrade would also be worthwhile. With the stock 1 GB, it’s hitting the pagefile to the tune of 400 MB.

Unfortunately, to really make the computer sing, you’re looking at spending $200 in upgrades ($40 for NOD32, $40 for 2 GB of RAM, and $120 for an OCZ Vertex). Spread it out over the life of the machine and it wouldn’t be so bad though. And you’ll be paying $40 a year for antivirus no matter what you use.

The build quality is typical HP. I have lots of aged HP and Compaq equipment that’s still going strong. I don’t get rid of HP stuff because it breaks, I get rid of it because it’s so hopelessly obsolete as to be useless. I hesitate to buy from anyone else, except Asus. And Asus, of course, is HP’s main motherboard supplier.

If you can get used to the keyboard, I think the Mini 110 is a good machine. It weighs 2 pounds and is scarcely larger than a standard hardcover book, so it fits almost anywhere. And having an SSD, there isn’t much that can fail. The battery will eventually fail, and probably the AC adapter will too, but I think other than that, one of these computers could last 20 years, assuming it would still be useful for anything then.

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.

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.

The effect of registry optimizers on a run-of-the-mill PC

Dave Farquhar Windows , ,

So I had a chance to try a registry optimizer out on a typical PC. It’s a 2.7 GHz Celeron, made by HP, restored with the factory restore discs. So it was as pristine as any consumer HP PC ships from the factory.

It helped. You’d think the opposite, of course.I used NTregopt. There’s no point in paying for a registry optimizer.

It ran for what seemed like a very long time, and it trimmed about 11% off the size of the registry. Not a lot, but this was a fresh PC (supposedly). More importantly, after running it, boot time decreased by a good 20 seconds, and once it booted, I had a wee bit more memory available.

I also ran JK-Defrag on it. What it found wasn’t horrible, and it only took about 15 minutes to clean it up.

So the stock HP computer runs more nicely now. And if one were to remove all the HP crapware that comes with it (remember, it’s only crapware if you won’t use it), that will help, but doing a registry optimization and a quality defrag will help even more. Not quite as much as a fresh Windows install slipstreamed with the current service pack and all patches, but for most people, close enough.

Utility programs are no substitute for adequate system memory and a respectable graphics subsystem. That’s probably why people who build new PCs twice a year don’t think much of them. But for the rest of us, utility programs in skilled hands can squeeze more life out of an aging PC. I’d be willing to submit the six-year-old Compaq I’m using to type this as Exhibit A.

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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Escape from Windows 98

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , ,

There’ve been a few times that I’ve met someone who was stuck in an old Windows 98 PC because it had all their software and data on it, it was set up the way they liked it, they may or may not have all the installation media, and it would take several days’ worth of labor to set up a new one like the old one.

So usually in that situation I just bubblegum and duct tape the system together as best I can.

No longer. Not now that I’ve discovered PC Mover.PC Mover is a Laplink product. It’s really pretty simple. Set up the old PC and new PC on the same network (ideally the new PC should be as pristine as possible), install and run PC Mover on the new PC and follow the prompts. Eventually it will tell you to install and run it on the old PC. Follow the prompts there, and it will do its very best to move all of the programs and data to the new PC.

I literally set up Mom’s old Windows 98 PC and her new(er) Compaq Evo D51C (running Windows XP), set the options, watched for 30 minutes, then went out and spent an hour mowing the lawn. About 15 minutes after I came back inside, it was finished. Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure her Windows 98 PC only has a 10-megabit NIC in it, so under what I would consider reasonable conditions, the migration would have been faster.

Now I wish I’d thought to change the NIC out.

But at any rate, at the end of the process, I rebooted the new computer and it came up looking just like her old PC. Her desktop looked the same, all her data was in the right place, and her old programs ran.

System-level stuff like antivirus and CD burning software won’t transfer, but that’s not PC Mover’s fault. Utility software is usually very OS-specific, and if I manually tried to install the Windows 98 version of Norton Antivirus in Windows XP, it would tell me to get lost. She can install her scanner, and XP will detect her printer and take care of setting that up for her.

When I ran PC Mover, I selected the advanced options and deliberately de-selected stuff I knew she wouldn’t need, in order to speed up the transfer and lessen the likelihood of something going wrong. But I’d be reasonably comfortable just letting it run on autopilot.

The resulting system does have some unneeded cruft on it, but I can live with that. Windows XP is worlds better than Windows 98 ever was, and this Compaq is newer and probably better than her old computer too. Maybe running CCleaner would help with the junk, but for now I’m just going to leave well enough alone.

PC Mover costs about 40 bucks, but I think it’s worth it. The last time I worked on someone else’s PC, I charged $50 an hour (which is probably too little, considering what a lawnmower mechanic or plumber charges). It would probably have taken me 4-6 hours to do what PC Mover did in two, and that’s assuming I would have been able to locate all of the old installation media.

Whether you need to move data and programs to a new PC running XP or Vista for yourself or for someone else, I think PC Mover can make the job a lot easier for you. It worked so well for Mom’s PCs, I’m thinking I ought to use it to migrate a couple of old PCs I’ve been keeping around to newer hardware.

One solution to the family IT man problem: Standardize

Dave Farquhar Hardware ,

This weekend was Mother’s Day, which meant a family get-together, which inevitably led to some computer questions. A few months ago I found a PC for my mom that’s for all intents and purposes identical to my main PC. Now that my sister and brother in law are due for a computer upgrade, I suggested they get the same model.Companies standardize because it makes support easier. Running the same operating system is supposed to minimize differences, but if I’ve learned anything since 1996 when I took my first part-time computer support gig, it’s that it doesn’t. Every system has its quirks, but if you’re used to them, are they really quirks?

The advantage is that when I inevitably get that phone call with a weird computer question, I can take a look at mine and probably find the answer. If a computer gets trashed too far, I can make an image on mine and mail out a CD to reload the system to a known-good configuration.

The cost isn’t outlandish. In our case, we’re standardizing on 2-ish GHz Compaq Evo PCs. They’re quiet, very well built and dependable, and they’re inexpensive. All the usual computer closeout places are selling secondhand Evos for $75-$125 depending on the configuration, but in the last two cases, I just searched the local Craigslist for an Evo. In both cases, I found people who buy and refurbish business PCs either for a living or as a side gig for some extra cash. They buy the machines, format the hard drive and reinstall Windows, and flip them for profit. In both cases, I avoided shipping charges and got PCs with more memory in them than mine originally had.

The downside to the Evo is that it doesn’t have a lot of drive bays or expansion slots. But in reality, none of us use a lot of drive bays or expansion slots anymore. Practically anything we’d want to plug into the system plugs into a USB socket. Back when a CD burner cost $400, of course I would install a regular CD-ROM drive for routine use so I didn’t wear out an expensive drive, but now a DVD burner costs $30, which isn’t significantly more than a read-only drive. So I really only need a single 5.25-inch bay anyway.

If you need more space than an Evo has to offer, buy something like a Dell Dimension that comes in a minitower case. The Dimensions I use at work have two external 5.25" and 3.5" bays, plus another internal 3.5" bay, and seven available expansion slots. Going the other way, if your family craves laptops, pick up identical Thinkpads. Thinkpads tend to be very reliable; Dell would probably be my second choice.

Another possible way to pick up inexpensive business PCs is to ask your workplace’s IT department. Most companies replace their PCs every 3-4 years by policy, and dispose of their PCs one way or another. You may be able to talk them into selling you a small quantity, provided you’re willing to sign a release saying you won’t receive or expect any support for the system from the company. The nice thing about this method is that you know what you’re getting because it might be just like the machine that was on your desk. It should go without saying that if it’s served you well, buy it, but if it’s a piece of junk, buy something else.

Over the years I’ve spent a significant amount of time fixing family computer problems. At one time I didn’t mind, but I don’t have a lot of time anymore. By the same token, I don’t want my family to be at the mercy of repair shops that will keep the machine longer than necessary, then overcharge for shoddy repair work. Standardizing on a quality, known-quantity machine seems like a good solution to the problem. It means any software problem is a 20-minute fix: Back up the data, re-image the machine, then restore the data. Hardware problems are minimal, since business PCs tend to be very reliable.

Basically, the same practices that made it possible for me to support hundreds of computers in a 40-hour workweek will scale down to 3 computers too.

The practice works fine for those who build PCs as well. Just buy the same motherboard and video card (or at least a video card that uses the same drivers) when you build PCs for family members. If you’re someone who changes PCs couple of years, keep that family PC around as your secondary PC until everyone else decides to upgrade. But for these purposes, I think buying secondhand business PCs saves a lot of time and money. I can build a PC in 30-60 minutes, but it takes at least that long to spec out and order all of the parts (and perhaps longer than that). It would have been difficult for me to build a better computer than those Evos for $100, and that wouldn’t have included the copy of Windows.

I think this is going to save us all a lot of grief over the years.

So if you find yourself doing a lot of tech support for family and friends, try getting all of them to buy the same system and get one yourself. (For that matter I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask them to chip in towards your system–split three or four ways, the cost would be $25-$35 per person.) The system will probably cost less than one trip to a repair shop would, and your lives will be a lot easier.

No reason for brand wars

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

On one of the train forums I frequent, a legitimate question quickly degenerated into brand wars. And brand wars are one thing, but when people hold their preferred company to a different standard than the other company–in other words, one company is evil because it does something, but their preferred company does the same thing, it isn’t productive.

Actually, I see very little reason for brand loyalty as it is. I drive a Honda and I use a Compaq computer. Do either of those companies have any loyalty to me? No. To them, I’m just a source of income from yesterday.I don’t like the categorization of companies as "good" and "evil." Companies don’t exist to be good or evil. Companies exist for one reason: Make money. And one thing to remember is that companies will always do exactly what they think they can get away with.

In the case of the toy train wars, the two antagonists are Lionel and MTH. MTH is a scrappy underdog that got its start building trains as a subcontractor for Lionel. A business deal went bad–in short, Lionel left MTH high and dry on a multimillion dollar project, so MTH decided to go on its own and sell the product Lionel decided it didn’t want, but Lionel didn’t like the idea of one of its subcontractors competing with it while also making product for them, and understandably so.

MTH and Lionel have been mortal enemies ever since.

A few years ago, MTH accused Lionel of stealing trade secrets. The specifics are difficult to sort out, but someone with intimate knowledge of some of MTH’s products started designing equivalent products for Lionel. MTH sued and won, to the tune of $40 million. The case is now in appeal.

There’s no question that Lionel benefited from this contractor’s knowledge of the competing product. The question is who knew this was going on, who authorized it, and what an appropriate punishment would be. The only people who are questioning guilt have blinders on. There is no innocence here–just possible degrees of guilt. The other question is appropriateness. Lionel doesn’t have $40 million in the bank. Arguably the company isn’t worth a lot more than $40 million. So that $40 million judgment is essentially the corporate death penalty.

MTH is anything but perfect and holy, however. The thing that bothers me most about MTH is its attempt to patent elements of DCC (Digital Command Control), a method for automating train layouts. It’s an open industry standard, widely used by HO and N scale hobbyists. So MTH was seeking to collect royalties on something that’s supposed to be free for everyone to use. That’s a particular pet peeve of mine, and it’s the reason I haven’t bought any MTH products since 2003.

I came close to relenting this weekend though, when I saw some people bashing MTH while holding Lionel up as some kind of perfect, holy standard. It made me want to go buy a bunch of MTH gear, photograph myself with it, and post it on some forums so I could watch these guys have a stroke about it. Fortunately for them, I have better things to do with $200 right now. I also looked on my layout, and I don’t know where I could put the things I would have considered buying.

I’m more familiar with the computer industry than I am with anything else, and if you mention any computer company, I can probably think of something they did that would fit most people’s definition of evil. HP? Print cartridges that lie about being empty. Lexmark? Same thing, plus using the DMCA to keep you from refilling them. Dell? Nonstandard pinouts on power supplies that look standard, but blow up your motherboard if you try to use non-Dell equipment. IBM? Microchannel. Microsoft? Don’t get me started. Apple? Lying in ads.

As far as I’m concerned though, the most evil company of all is Disney. Disney, of all people? Yes. Disney is the main reason for the many complicated rewrites of copyright law that we’ve had in recent decades. Whenever something Disney values might fall into the public domain, Disney buys enough congressmen to get the laws changed. Never mind that early in its history, Disney exploited the public domain for its gain as much as anyone (which was its legal right), even to the point of waiting for The Jungle Book to fall into the public domain before making the movie, in order to avoid paying royalties to Rudyard Kipling. The problem is that now that Disney is the biggest kid on the block, it’s changing the rules it used to get there, so that nobody else can do it.

Unfortunately I’ve even seen not-for-profit corporations, companies that exist mostly to give away money, do dishonest things and essentially steal. If a charity can and will do these things, you can be certain that a for-profit corporation will.

So I don’t see any reason for brand loyalty, aside from liking a product. If you buy a company’s products and you like them, fine. Keep buying them. But that doesn’t make the people who prefer a competitor’s product evil. They didn’t sign off on the decisions, and your favorite company has done its own share of underhanded things too, whether you know it or not.

And there’s certainly no reason to go to war for your company of choice. It wouldn’t do the same for you.