compaq

Thinking on Compaq Presario upgrades

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , ,

I’m going to be upgrading a Compaq Presario 7360 here pretty soon. It should be fun to shatter some of the myths surrounding recent Compaqs. It’s a standard microATX PC, nothing more, nothing less. With a $20 replacement power supply (Newegg.com calls the form factor used by low-end eMachines, Compaq, HP, and Gateway PCs “mini ATX”), it’ll handle any modern microATX motherboard.

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My brief experience with a Proliant ML570 server

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , ,

Last week, I built a Compaq HP Proliant ML570. Quad-CPU, 1.9 GHz Xeon, 2 gigs of RAM, and about 200 gigs’ worth of 10K RPM SCSI storage in two RAID arrays.
Yes, being one of the first people to see a $20,000 computer and being the one who gets to take it apart to install the optional add-ins is my idea of fun.

Opening it up shows this is a real, honest-to-goodness server, not just any old commodity motherboard slapped into a rack-mount chasis or a case with big casters on it. The memory is on a riser card. There are standby slots on the card, so that if as many as two DIMMs fail, the backups take over. The riser cards are hot-pluggable, but of course how the computer handles you hot-plugging the memory depends on the operating system.

Most of the PCI-X slots are also hot-pluggable. They’re 64-bit and run at 100 MHz.

Of course, the hard drives are hot-pluggable as well. Which brings up the RAID stuff. The drives are Ultra320 SCSI. There are two drive cages. The only Ultra320 RAID controller HP is currently offering (remember, this is May 2003 as I write) was a single-bus. Well, there’s a second bus, but it’s external.

If you put in two of these controllers, you get the full bandwidth of the bus but you can’t stripe across the buses, which you will probably want to do for performance, and almost certainly will have to do in the future for expansion. The only two-bus RAID controller HP was offering was an Ultra160. So we bought that. Under the best-possible circumstances, a single 15K RPM drive can’t quite deliver 80 MB per second. So with two of the newest 15K drives on an Ultra160 bus accessing the very front of the disk, you’d still have a little bandwidth to spare.

These particular Fujitsu 10K RPM disks deliver between 40 and 70 MB per second under optimal conditions. So the Ultra160 controller isn’t a huge liability. But we’ll be ordering more of these, and if HP delivers an Ultra320 controller that meets our needs, we’ll get one.

It runs Linux really, really fast. I compiled a kernel in about 4 minutes, without doing anything special to it. Linux was only on it for a few hours though, while I waited for its RAID controller to come in. Then I installed Windows 2000 and SQL Server 2000.

It’s nice. But with nearly 8 GHz worth of CPU power onboard, it had better be.

A tribute to Adam Osborne

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , , , , ,
A tribute to Adam Osborne

One of my Wikipedia entries has been doing some time on the front page. Computer pioneer Adam Osborne (the “Osborne” in Osborne/McGraw-Hill and in the Osborne 1 portable computer) died last week after an 11-year illness. Read more

The low-end server

Dave Farquhar Servers and Networking , , , , , , , ,

Here’s a good question: What should a small operation do when it gets fed up with its network and is tempted to just chuck it all and start over?
Well, my advice is to start over. But I don’t agree that starting over requires one to chuck everything.

We’ll start with the server. Chances are, these days, you need one. If you’re doing Web and e-mail, you absolutely need one. But to a lot of people, servers are a mystical black box that costs more money than a desktop PC but runs a similar operating system. And that’s all they know.

Here’s what you need to know: A corporate server is built to stricter tolerances than a desktop PC and sometimes uses higher-quality parts (common examples are ServerWorks chipsets instead of Intel chipsets, SCSI instead of IDE, and error-correcting memory instead of the cheap nonparity stuff). You also often get niceties like hot-swap drive cages, which allow you to add or replace hard drives without powering down or opening the case.

They’re generally also better tested, and you can get a support contract on them. If you’re running an enterprise with hundreds or thousands of people relying on your server, you should buy server-grade stuff, and building your own server or repurposing a desktop PC as a server ought to be grounds for dismissal. The money you save isn’t worth it–you’ll pay more in downtime.

But a dozen people won’t hit a server very hard. This Web site runs on a Dell OptiPlex Pentium II/450 workstation. A workstation is a notch above a desktop PC but a notch below a server, in the pecking order. The biggest difference between my Optiplex and the PC that was probably sitting on your desk at work a year or two ago is that my Optiplex has a SCSI hard drive in it and it has a 3Com NIC onboard.

A small office can very safely and comfortably take a reasonably powerful name-brand PC that’s no longer optimal for someone’s desk (due to an aging CPU) and turn it into a server. A Pentium II-350 or faster, outfitted with 256 MB of RAM, a SCSI host adapter and a nice SCSI hard drive, and a 3Com or Intel 100-megabit Ethernet card will make a fine server for a couple of dozen people. (My employer still has a handful of 200 MHz Pentium Pro servers on its network, serving a couple hundred people in some cases.)

This server gets hit about as hard as a typical small business or church office server would. So far this month I’ve been getting between 500 and 550 visitors per day. I’ve served about 600 megabytes’ worth of data. My average CPU usage over that time period is in the single digits. The biggest bottleneck in this server is its 7200-rpm SCSI disk. A second disk dedicated to its database could potentially speed it up. But it’s tolerable.

Hot swappable hard drives are nice to have, but with an office of a dozen people, the 5-10 minutes it takes to power down, open the case, swap drives, and close the case back up and boot again probably doesn’t justify the cost.

A business or church office that wanted to be overly cautious could buy the very least expensive sever it can find from a reputable manufacturer (HP/Compaq, Dell, IBM). But when you do that, you’re paying for a lot of power that’s going to sit there unused most of the time. The 450 MHz CPU in this box is really more than I need.

Jeremy Hendrickson e-mailed me asking about whether his church should buy a new server, and whether it really needed two or three servers, since he was talking about setting up a Samba server for file serving, Apache for Web serving, and a mail server. Running file and Web services on the same box won’t be much of a problem. A dozen people just won’t hit the server that hard. You just make sure you buy a lot of disk space, but most of that disk space will go to file serving. The database that holds all of the content on this site is only a few megabytes in size. Compressed, it fits on a floppy disk with lots of room to spare. Yes, I could realistically do nightly backups of my Web server on floppies. If floppies were at all reliable, that is.

I flip-flop on whether e-mail belongs on the same server. The security vulnerabilities of Web servers and mail servers are a bit different and it would be nice to isolate them. But I’m a lot more comfortable about a Linux box running both being exposed on the ‘Net than I am a Windows box running one or the other. If I had two boxes, and could afford to be paranoid, I’d use two.

Jeremy said his church had a P3-733 and a P2-450, both Dells, due for retirement. I’d make the P3 into a file/print/Web server and the P2 into a mail server and spend the money budgeted for a new server or servers to buy lots of disk space and a nice tape backup drive, since they’d get lots of use out of both of those. A new $1200 server would just buy lots of CPU power that’ll sit idle most of the time and you’d still have to buy disks.

As far as concern about the reliability of reusing older systems, the things that tend to wear out on older PCs are the hard drive and the operating system. Windows deterriorates over time. Server operating systems tend not to have this problem, and Linux is even more immune to it than Microsoft server operating systems. So that’s not really a concern.

Hard disks do wear out. I read a suggestion not long ago that IDE hard disks should be replaced every 3 years whether they seem to need it or not. That’s a little extreme, but I’ve found it’s hard to coax much more than four years out of an IDE disk. Dropping a new SCSI disk or two or three into an old workstation before turning it into a server should be considered mandatory. SCSI disks give better performance in multiuser situations, and are generally designed to run for five years. In most cases, the rest of the PC also has several years left in it.

Later this week, we’ll talk about Internet connectivity and workstations.

Power supply secrets

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , ,

A good question came up here yesterday: How do you know when your power supply is causing problems? There may be many power supply secrets, but that’s the one most important to know.

There are lots of symptoms of an under-rated power supply: frequent BSODs, spontaneous reboots for no reason, and the screen going black and the system crashing. A failing power supply can also cause other components in the system to fail much more frequently than they should. But generally you’ll see those other symptoms earlier.

Have you ever heard those horror stories about a lemon PC that’s had virtually every component inside it replaced at least once and it still doesn’t work right? Usually you can head off those kinds of problems. The trick is to replace the power supply after seeing two components fail.

In the previous story here, reader Glaurung asked if his IBM Aptiva’s 100-watt power supply might be causing him problems. He observed that two CD-ROM drives died in the system. I think it is.

IBM had a bad habit of skimping too much on the power supplies in its Aptiva and PS/1 lines. The business-class IBM PC line, in my experience, is good quality.

I don’t want to claim to know more about building a PC than IBM. But in that case I’d be replacing that power supply with something bigger. First check to make sure factory power supply doesn’t have any funky auxiliary connectors on it. A small few, especially those that mount their expansion slots on riser boards, do. Assuming yours doesn’t, a 400W unit from a reputable maker like Antec or Sparkle should only run $35 and prevent future peripheral death.

Usually, a low-power power supply becomes a problem when you start expanding. If you start with a system from a reputable maker (particularly a business-class system), the power supply ought to have enough juice to power everything they put in the box. You’re more likely to run into problems once you add a second hard drive and a CD burner. Some clone shops skimp on the power supply to save costs. The consumer machines you see in retail stores (like Compaq Presarios) typically have skimpier power supplies than business desktops (like Compaq Deskpros).

Whitebox systems built by your friendly neighborhood local clone shop vary. A lot of clone shops pride themselves on quality and build better computers than any of the big name brands. Other clone shops pride themselves on being cheap and cut every corner imaginable. The power supply is usually first.

While there are some really nasty motherboards out they aren’t as bad as they were in the past. Most causes of poor reliability in recent systems are due to cheap, commodity power supplies or cheap, commodity memory. PC Chips is notorious for making bottom-feeder motherboards. But given the choice between a computer with a PC Chips board and a quality power supply and quality memory or a computer with an Asus board with a no-name power supply and memory, I’d take my chances with the PC Chips.

Fare thee well, goodnight, and goodbye to my friend, OS/2

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , , ,

The Register: IBM has finally brought the Great Rebellion [OS/2] to a close.
The Register was the only online obituary that mentioned eComStation, a third-party OS/2 derivative that everyone forgets about. Interestingly, the product literature never mentions OS/2 by name, only bragging about its technology licensed from IBM.

The Reg also talked about OS/2 version 3 being positioned as a gamer’s OS. Maybe that’s ironic, coming from the suits at IBM, and that wasn’t how I saw it–I switched from Windows 3.1 to OS/2 because, coming from an Amiga, I was used to being able to multitask freely without a lot of crashes. Windows 3.1 crashed pretty much every day if I tried to do that. OS/2 knocked that number down to about once a year, and usually those lockups happened when I was running Windows apps.

Even though I never really thought of it that way, OS/2 was great for games. Since it used virtual DOS machines, each environment had its own memory management, so you could fine-tune it and avoid shuffling around boot disks or struggling to master the DOS 6.0 boot menus. Pretty much no matter what you did, you got 600K or more of conventional memory to work with, and with some fine-tuning, you could bring that total much higher than you could usually attain with DOS. Since 600K was almost always adequate, most games just ran, no sweat.

The other thing I remember is the speed at which DOS games ran. Generally, running it under OS/2 gained you a speed grade. A game running under OS/2 on a DX2/50 felt like a DX2/66 running under DOS would feel. An OS/2 wizard could usually squeeze yet more performance out of the game with some tweaking.

I have fond memories of playing Railroad Tycoon, Civilization, and Tony LaRussa Baseball 2 on my Compaq 486 running OS/2 v3.

And there was another really nice thing about OS/2. When I bought a shiny new Pentium-75 motherboard and CPU and a new case, I pulled the hard drive out of the Compaq and dropped it into the Pentium. It just worked. All I had to do was load drivers for my new video card, since it used a different chipset than my 486.

And the cult of OS/2 won’t go away just yet. The talk over at os2voice.org has me almost ready to install OS/2 again.

Straight talk on cheap laptops

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’ve been getting lots of traffic ever since we started talking about the Sotec 3120x laptop here last week. It looks like an era of inexpensive laptops is about to arrive, because the Sotec isn’t your only choice.
Sam’s Club sells a variant of the 3120x for about the same price as Wal-Mart, but it comes with a 30GB drive in place of the 20.

Steve DeLassus tells me a number of places have been hawking Toshiba Satellite 1115-S103 laptops in the sub-$1000 price range after coupons and rebates and other marketing gyrations. Suggested retail price on it is $1099. Street price should be $1049 or lower, as that’s Toshiba’s price if you buy direct. Toshiba’s offering a $200 mail-in rebate. So at the very worst, you can get a Satellite 1115-S103 for $849 if you buy it direct from Toshiba.

And then I did some checking on a hunch. Dell’s offering its Inspiron 2650C for $899 ($849 through 12/11). HP is offering its Compaq Presario 905us notebook with an Athlon XP 1400, 256 MB RAM, DVD, 14.1″ LCD for $999 with a $100 rebate. The HP Pavilion ze4101 has a faster processor but less memory, for the same price. There are some variants on the HPs and Compaqs out there–you might not find in stores exactly what HP’s selling direct, but you’ll find something awfully close.

The Toshiba and Dell offer a bigger screen (14.1 inches), DVD drives, 256 MB RAM (the Dell has 128), and the other expected gizmos like modem and networking, along with a seemingly faster 1.5 GHz Celeron processor.

Which brings up a point.

The 1.5 GHz Celeron is based on the P4 architecture. Remember, at 1.5 GHz, the P4 is a dog. The Celeron is a castrated P4. The P4-based Celeron doesn’t start to give decent speeds until it hits 2 GHz. Even though the Celeron 1.5 has a 300 MHz advantage over the older P3-based Celeron 1.2, the “slower” Celeron will actually be faster. And less expensive.

The HP/Compaq models offer truly faster AMD Athlon XP CPUs and ATI Radeon mobility video chipsets.

I know people are going to ask me which one to buy. So let’s agonize together.

Durability: Toshiba, Dell, HP and Compaq all had decent service records in the past and there are lots of places that will work on them. Sotec is more of an unknown in the United States at this point.

Dell has traditionally had the best reputation, but their laptops didn’t fare well this year in PC World’s service and reliability roundup. HP and Toshiba were the best of this bunch. Now that HP and Compaq are the same company, the Compaq should fare well too.

Frankly, I’d buy an extended warranty with any of them, and count on it breaking at least once. That’s par for the course with a laptop, especially if you use it for what it’s intended, which is carrying it around a lot.

Performance: The 1.5 GHz Celeron in the Toshiba and Dell models is a notoriously bad performer. The 1.2 GHz Celeron in the Sotec is a good performer but the integrated video will hurt. The HPQ models use AMD Athlon XP CPUs and ATI Radeon Mobility video chipsets. Performance on the latest 3D games will disappoint (but LCD screens in general are bad for 3D gaming). But for light gaming and everything else someone might want to do, the HP and Compaq models will be great.

Input: The Sotec offers a slightly reduced keyboard with an at-times quirky layout. The others offer full-sized keyboards. All use touchpads; they’ll be decent but you’ll probably want to pick up a USB mouse with any of them to use at least part of the time. Touch-typists will prefer anyone but Sotec. Hunt-and-peck types probably won’t care much one way or the other.

Portability: The Sotec weighs 4.4 pounds. The others weigh in at 6.5 or 6.9 pounds. None are hogs, but some people will really like the svelte Sotec. The Sotec has a longer battery life. Advantage: Sotec.

Expandability/extras: The Toshiba, HP and Compaq models offer TV-out, which isn’t something everybody needs, but when you want it, you want it. It allows you to use a big-screen TV for presentations in a pinch. You can connect up a TV to the laptop and do digital slideshows for a bigger audience than can crowd around a laptop screen, which is nice if you’re into that kind of thing. And when hooked up to a TV, it can serve as an emergency DVD player.

The Toshiba offers two PCMCIA slots. Everyone else offers one. HP and Compaq memory maxes out at 1024 MB, while memory on the Toshiba and Dell max out at 512 MB to the Sotec’s 384 MB. HP, Compaq, and Sotec are all using shared video memory, so they’ll steal a little system memory to give to the video chip. Toshiba and Dell aren’t doing this. All have built-in USB 1.1 and networking; none offer built-in Firewire.

HP offers the fastest CPU of the bunch, and CPU upgrades in laptops are always questionable.

Advantage: HP.

Serviceability: The Sotec’s DVD/CD-RW drive and hard drive are bolted in, rather than being plug-in modules. It’ll be a lot harder to fix yourself if need be. On most other companys’ models (I don’t know about any of these for certain), the drives slide out easily for replacement. Replacement CD/DVD drives are a pain to track down after the fact for any laptop more than a year or two old, but the big name brands will almost certainly be easier. If you buy an extended warranty, fixing it is someone else’s problem, at least for a couple of years. Advantage: Everyone but Sotec.

Overall winner: Hard to say. The Sotec is designed to be a subnotebook; the others are entry-level full notebooks. If portability and versatility are important to you, get the Sotec. It’s the only one of the bunch that’ll burn CDs for you at this price point. Keep in mind that the Sotec’s combo DVD/CD-RW drive will wear out quickly if you use it to watch a lot of movies, and that replacing it won’t be terribly easy, as it’s not a slide-in module like costlier notebooks use. If you intend to watch a lot of movies on the Sotec, make sure you buy an extended warranty on it.

The Sotec has a couple of question marks, but it also has an awful lot going for it.

The HP and Compaq models have the best combination of serviceability, expandability, speed, and reliability. I don’t think I’d mess with the Toshiba or Dell unless their prices dropped considerably. Between Compaq and HP, HP gives you the faster CPU, while Compaq gives you the bigger hard drive and more memory. It’s easier to add memory and replace the hard drive than it is to upgrade a laptop CPU; I’d get the HP and add memory to it pretty quickly and plan on replacing its hard drive with a large 5400 RPM model in a couple of years. With its best-of-class CPU and video and upgraded someday with a faster hard drive, the HP ought to be a good performer for many years. If the Sotec’s question marks scare you, the HP offers a compelling alternative.

Future outlook: When a system reaches a magical price point (notables were the $899 all-in-one Compaq Presarios in 1996, the $399 eMachine in 1998, the $199 Microtel Linux PCs from Wal-Mart this year, and this year’s sub-$900 laptops) it’s extremely tempting to run out and buy one. Especially the Sotec, which offers not only a great price, but almost every possible extra.

But remember what happened in the past. Compaq invaded Packard Bell’s territory in 1996 and released an underpowered but reliable and capable PC for $899, complete. Almost immediately, everybody was selling PCs for under $1,000. Then along came eMachines, deciding that even $499 wasn’t cheap enough and offering a unit, again underpowered, for $399. Few matched eMachines’ price point, but most companies were soon offering something for $499.

Laptops aren’t going to bottom out at $849. There’s no point in putting a smaller screen or hard drive in that Sotec. But if Wal-Mart decides it wants a bottom-feeder laptop, it could have Sotec substitute a VIA C3 chip for the Celeron (the Celeron’s being phased out anyway, and Wal-Mart already sells C3-based machines and their sales have proven you don’t have to have Intel Inside in order for people to buy them), and replace the combo DVD/CD-RW drive for a straight DVD drive or even a straight CD-ROM drive. A Sotec 3120x variant with an 800 MHz C3 and a plain old CD-ROM drive could probably sell for $749 or even $699. If Wal-Mart decides to thumb its nose at Microsoft and offer a Linux-based variant, it could chop another $100 off the price. (The big question there is whether it’s possible to support the Sotec’s modem under Linux.)

How soon will it happen? Hard to say. But think about it. Wal-Mart undercut everybody. Everybody reacted quickly. Dell wants to own the laptop market, because it’s part of the PC market. Wal-Mart wants to own every market. They’ll both strike back. HP and Toshiba won’t throw in the towel right away either, because they’re both big in retail laptops.

Right now the Sotecs are selling like crazy. Wal-Mart and Office Depot can’t keep them in stock. They won’t lower prices any further unless Dell and HPQ and Toshiba react again and seriously cut into sales. That’ll depend on whether they’re satisfied with their current sales figures. With 14 shopping days until Christmas (and realistically, the clock running out on shipping something to arrive before Christmas), I don’t expect pricing or inventory conditions to change much in the next two weeks.

But remember, this is Christmas boom time. People always cut prices after Christmas to spur sales. Chipmakers cut their prices too, meaning these laptops will be cheaper to make a month from now.

So if you’ve been wanting a laptop for a while and the sudden appearance of $849 laptops got you thinking but you’re willing to wait a while longer, this is a good time to wait.

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.

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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