dell

I rebuilt a Dell Dimension 4100 last night

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , , , , ,

So, I rebuilt a Dell Dimension 4100 last night. I didn’t make any hardware changes other than replacing the Western Digital hard drive inside, which was on its last legs.

Along the way, I learned a few things.I won’t say much about the WD drive except to say it’s the most recent in a long line of bad experiences I’ve had with the brand. I don’t know anything about current WD drives. But this one was loud and shrill, Windows bluescreened when I tried to install to it, and when I tried to run SpinRite on it, it said it would take 140 hours to test. A drive that size (20GB) should take 8-10.

In its defense, that drive was five years old. But I replaced it with a Maxtor drive that’s almost eight years old. SpinRite processed that Maxtor in 3 hours and found nothing worth commenting about. (Just because SpinRite didn’t say anything doesn’t necessarily mean it didn’t do anything.)

The Dell Dimension 4100 does have a proprietary power supply (although it looks like an ATX). If you work on Dells, I suggest bookmarking PC Power and Cooling’s Dell cheatsheet. PCP&C power supplies are expensive, but they are reliable, and their prices are comparable to what Dell would charge for a replacement and they are higher quality than what you would get from Dell–assuming Dell will even sell you the part (they’re in the business of selling computers, not parts). I believe newer Dells use standard power supplies.

If you buy a Micron, you can punch in a serial number and get drivers for the machine. With a Dell, you just get guesses based on the options that were available for the machine.

Download the chipset drivers and other low-level stuff from Dell’s support site. Windows 2000 didn’t completely recognize the system’s Intel i815 chipset and I get better performance afterward.

Nlite offers a lot of promise–automating the Windows install, removing components, etc.–but I had trouble getting it to work with the OS recovery CDs I had. I didn’t have enough time (or blank CDs) to figure out how to get it to work for me. I’m sure it works better with a plain old Windows 2000 Workstation CD, but of course I can’t find mine. But if you have a CD that works with it, it’s nice even if you don’t remove the stuff Microsoft doesn’t let you remove, since it provides a nice interface for slipstreaming service packs and hotfixes and removing all of the prompts during installation.

The tricks in Windows 2000 with 32MB of RAM work pretty nicely, even when you have more than 32 megs. Of course, if you’re ruthless with Nlite and can get it to work for you, you probably don’t need that bag of tricks.

I didn’t try to install it without Internet Explorer. I’d love to try that sometime but I didn’t have time for that. At least disabling Active Desktop (see the link in the paragraph above) gives most of the benefit you would get from smiting IE.

The quality of the Dell hardware is reasonable. It didn’t floor me, but I didn’t see anything that made me cry either.

The tipping point of obsolesence

Dave Farquhar Hardware , ,

Gatermann just sent me a link to a $33 Dell P3-500 at Surplus Computers. It got both of us feeling old, because the day when that was a hot machine doesn’t seem long ago at all to either of us.

My initial reaction: That’s a lot of computer for 33 bucks. You get a 500 MHz CPU, 128 megs of RAM, and a 6 gig hard drive.

And then I got to thinking about it some more. I can think of people who could get by with that machine, but there’s a good reason why the P3-500’s star has fallen and you can get one for $33 without feeling like you’re at a Who concert.I guess first and foremost, you don’t get an operating system. That’s fine; OEM copies of XP home are cheap enough. Older versions of Windows are even cheaper because nobody wants them.

But even if you’re running 2000, you really want a minimum of 256 megs of RAM. For XP you want more than that; my mother-in-law’s PC, which is a Compaq with some flavor of Athlon in it, really drags these days because it only has 256 megs.

So I bopped on over to Crucial to see what I’d need to make that old Dell Optiplex GX1 rev its engine. And the price of a 256-meg DIMM was (sit down): $77.

So to max out the memory on this $33 machine, you’d need to spend another $231.

Gatermann just bought a gig of PC3200 DDR memory for $98.

So rather than spend $231 on 768 megs of PC133 SDRAM, you’d literally be better off buying the PC3200 and getting a $50 motherboard and a $60 CPU to put on it.

Trouble is, this is a Dell. You can’t swap off-the-shelf motherboards into a Dell. Some Dell cases will take a standard board, but you’ll have to replace the power supply. But the GX1 doesn’t use an ATX board.

That’s why this system costs 33 bucks. It’s pretty much at a dead end, and the memory it uses is no longer a mass-market item, so its price is inflated. It’s the same thing that happened to the 72-pin EDO SIMMs we used to put in our original Pentiums–you know, the ones that topped out at 233 MHz.

It’s a great machine for a tinkerer who happens to have a lot of PC100 or PC133 memory around, or for the Ebay addict. Obsolescent memory always sells more cheaply on Ebay.

I’ve always been in favor of upgrading a computer until it no longer makes economic sense to do so. If you’ve ever wondered when that is, this is a classic example.

Intel inside the Mac–no more question mark

Dave Farquhar Macintosh , , , , , , , , , , ,

OK, it’s official. Intel has conquered one of the last holdouts: Soon you’ll be able to buy a Pentium-powered Mac.

Of course there are lots of questions now.First of all, Apple having problems with its CPU suppliers is nothing new. Apple’s first CPU supplier was a small firm called MOS Technology. You’ve probably never heard of it, but MOS was a subsidiary of a company you may have heard of: Commodore. Commodore, of course, was one of two other companies to release a ready-built home computer about the same time Apple did. The problem was that the Commodore and Apple computers had the same CPU. Commodore, of course, could undercut Apple’s price. And it did. Commodore president Jack Tramiel was an Auschwitz survivor, and Tramiel pretty much assumed his competitors were going to treat him the same way the Nazis did, so he never cut them any breaks either. At least not intentionally.

When other companies released licensed versions of MOS’ 6502 processor, Apple was the biggest customer. Rumor had it that Commodore was hoarding 6502s.

When Motorola released its legendary 68000 CPU, Apple was one of the first companies to sign up, and the first two commercially successful computers to use the m68K were made by Apple. And life was good. Apple wasn’t Motorola’s only customer but it was one of the biggest. Life was good for the better part of a decade, when Intel finally managed to out-muscle the performance of the Motorola 68040. So Apple conspired with Motorola and IBM to come up with something better, and the result was the PowerPC. And life was good again. The PowerPC wasn’t the best chip on the market, but of the two architectures that you could buy at every strip mall on the continent, it was clearly the better of the two.

Over time Apple’s relationship with Motorola cooled, and the relationship with IBM was off again and on again. Intel meanwhile kept trotting out bigger and bigger sledgehammers, and by brute force alone was able to out-muscle the PowerPC. Steve Jobs got creative, but eventually he just ran out of tricks. Switching to Intel in 2006 may or may not be the best option, but it’s just as easy to do now as it’s ever going to be.

So, now there’s the question of whether this will hurt Microsoft or Linux or both. The answer is yes. The real question isn’t whether it will hurt, but how much. As soon as Microsoft loses one sale, it’s hurt. The same goes for Red Hat.

To me, the question hinges on how attached Apple is to its hardware business. Steve Jobs has only said that OS X has been running on Intel in the labs for years. I have never heard him mention whether the hardware was a standard PC clone motherboard, or something of Apple’s design. I suspect he’s avoiding the question.

It would be possible to make OS X run on Apple hardware and only Apple hardware, even if the CPU is a standard Pentium 4 just like Dell uses. And at least at the outset, I expect Apple will do that. Apple may only have 3-5 percent of the market, but it’s 3-5 percent of a really big pie. The company is profitable.

It would also be possible to let Windows run on this hardware. That may be a good idea. Apple still has something to offer that nobody else does: The slick, easy to use and stable OS X, but on top of that, you can boot into Windows to play games or whatever. It makes Apple hardware worth paying a premium to get.

If Apple chooses to let OS X run on anything and everything, it hurts Linux and Windows more, but it probably hurts Apple too. There’s a lot of hardware out there, and a lot of it isn’t any good. Apple probably doesn’t want that support nightmare.

I think this will narrow the gigahertz gap and, consequently, the speed gap. I think it will help Apple’s marketshare, especially if they allow Windows to run on the hardware. I don’t see it having a devestating effect on any other operating system though. It will hurt marginal PC manufacturers before it hurts software companies.

Intel inside a Mac?

Dave Farquhar Macintosh , , , , , , , , , , ,

File this under rumors, even if it comes from the Wall Street Journal: Apple is supposedly considering using Intel processors.

Apple’s probably pulling a Dell.It’s technically feasible for Mac OS X to be recompiled and run on Intel; Nextstep ran on Intel processors after Next abandoned the Motorola 68K family. Mac OS X is based on Nextstep.

Of course the x86 is nowhere near binary-compatible with the PowerPC CPU family. But Apple has overcome that before; the PowerPC wasn’t compatible with the m68K either. Existing applications won’t run as fast under emulation, but it can be done.

Keeping people from running OS X on their whitebox PCs and even keeping people from running Windows on their Macs is doable too. Apple already knows how. Try installing Mac OS 9 on a brand-new Apple. You can’t. Would Apple allow Windows to run on their hardware but not the other way? Who knows. It would put them in an interesting marketing position.

But I suspect this is just Apple trying to gain negotiating power with IBM Microelectronics. Dell famously invites AMD over to talk and makes sure Intel knows AMD’s been paying a visit. What better way is there for Apple to get new features, better clock rates, and/or better prices from IBM than by flirting with Intel and making sure IBM knows about it?

I won’t rule out a switch, but I wouldn’t count on it either. Apple is selling 3 million computers a year, which sounds puny today, but that’s as many or more computers as they sold in their glory days. Plus Apple has sources of revenue that it didn’t have 15 years ago. If it could be profitable selling 3 million computers a year in 1990, it’s profitable today, especially considering all of the revenue it can bring in from software (both OS upgrades and applications), Ipods and music.

Selling untested memory is new? Whatever.

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , ,

An article on the “new” practice of low-tier manufacturers selling untested memory got attention on Slashdot this week.

This isn’t a new practice. I’ve known about it for about eight years.There’s a pretty good reason why all name-brand memory is priced pretty much the same. You can occasionally catch a break in pricing, but on average, a Kingston module is going to cost about the same as a Crucial module, and so will any other top-tier brand. Memory from a computer manufacturer like HP or Sun may cost a bit more still, ostensibly because the manufacturer tests for compatibility. They may or may not actually test the module you buy, but at least they’ll guarantee it not only works but works in the machine you put it in.

If you’re building your own PC, by all means buy Crucial or Kingston memory or go to a specialty high-performance memory like Mushkin. The same holds true for upgrading a name-brand PC. But pay the extra money for server memory from the company who made your server. An hour of downtime will obliterate the $100 you might save.

But there’s another tier of memory. I first became aware of it back in the days when a typical issue of Computer Shopper was as thick as the Greater St. Louis White Pages. Tucked away in the back, there was always someone who beat the typical memory prices and he usually beat it by a long shot–at least 30%. For several years, that was how I bought my memory, and for a long time I got away with it.

Then along came Slot 1 and Super 7. Once CPU rates broke the 233 MHz barrier, the systems became a whole lot harder on their memory. I don’t know what was special about 233 MHz, but that cheap commodity memory just didn’t cut it anymore. Suddenly, I started noticing that commodity memory often didn’t pass the rudimentary memory test that computers perform before they load the operating system. That’s akin to flunking grade-school recess, so I started looking into it.

What I found was that commodity memory generally isn’t tested, or it’s tested very loosely. What’s worse yet is that the chips on some commodity memory were tested, and failed. They were certified for use in things like pagers and other consumer devices, but not up to the higher demands of computers.

So, having known this for about 8 years, you can imagine what I thought when I read the headline “Why untested DRAMs are getting into more and more products.” I was thinking hey, an upgrade! Since it didn’t test bad, at least there’s a chance it’ll work!

Maybe this practice has evolved in the past few months, as the author of the article in question alleges. But it’s hardly a new trick. In the highly competitive no-name clone market, this has been going on since at least the days of the 486. What was going on in the days of the 386 is even scarier.

Will Dell and the boys follow suit, like the author fears? I doubt it. PCs are problematic enough as it is, and it only takes a few months to lose a reputation that was built over the course of a decade. Shipping commodity memory isn’t like outsourcing technical support to India–there’s a fair percentage of your customer base who will never use your tech support. All of your customers will use your memory.

I can’t imagine commodity memory ending up in any name-brand PC, unless it’s a name brand whose ship is sinking fast.

But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that this old trick is showing back up again. The business is competitive, PC sales are down, the economy isn’t what it was 10 years ago, and profit margins are impossibly thin. If todays untested and/or defective memory is better than 1997’s, someone’s going to use it.

But part of the story never changes: Always buy your memory from a reputable manufacturer and distributor, so you know what you’re getting and whence it came. You’ll save a lot of frustration over the life of the PC that receives the upgrade.

IBM dumping its PC business?

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

John C. Dvorak comes full circle in his column about IBM possibly dumping its PC business. He starts off saying it makes little sense, but by the end of the editorial, he has his mind made up that IBM should have done it years ago.

Of course, this was probably written before word got out that its talks are more of a joint venture or spinoff than a complete sellout.

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Cheap hardware won’t stop software piracy

Dave Farquhar Software , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Who’s to blame for rampant software piracy? According to Steve Ballmer, AMD and Intel. Oh, and Dell. Charge less for the computer, and there’ll be more money to pay for Windows and Office.

Steve Ballmer doesn’t know his history.

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Hard drive upgrade tips for older PCs

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , ,

A hard drive upgrade is one of the best ways to extend the usable lifespan of a computer.

A lot of people come to this site looking for hard drive upgrade advice, but I realized that it’s been a long time since I’ve written anything about that. Since there are some gotchas, I need to address them.

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Is this Apple a surprise to anyone?

Dave Farquhar Macintosh , , , , , , , ,

So, Apple unveiled its new Imac today. (I’m sick of improper capitalization. We speak English, not C++.) To no one’s surprise, I’m sure, it has a bigger screen. And I’m sure it’s not too surprising that they crammed everything into the unit next to the screen. It’s the next logical step, after the lamp-shaped Imac.

So how’s it gonna do?I think it has potential. Do people really want laptops because they can carry them everywhere they go, or do they want laptops because they can move them about the house freely and don’t have to have a dedicated “computer room”?

I suspect to most people, the latter is more important. Most people have better things to do with their lives than surf the ‘net at Starbucks or Panera Bread.

This new Imac can go on a small desk in a study or spare bedroom and not take over an entire wall the way computers have been doing since the late 1970s. As long as there’s a way to add some memory, and there are ports for people to plug in their digital cameras and their portable MP3 players and a printer, they’ll be happy.

Who knows, maybe demand for wireless printers will increase too.

Some analysts have said they don’t think all-in-one is the slam dunk it was in 1998. I agree it isn’t, but small is a slam dunk. Witness the explosive popularity of cube PCs. Yes, it flopped for Apple, but Apple’s cubes lacked the flexibility, there was too much confusion about their expandability and what exactly they were compatibile with–I designed a Mac network for a client right around the time the Cube was released, but the rumor was it would only work with Apple monitors. That alone killed the deal. They bought G4 towers instead, which would work with NEC and Viewsonic monitors.

But the other problem with the Cube was the price. Yes, it was cheaper than a G4 tower. But the price difference wasn’t enough to make people willing to take a chance on it. And besides, if it was cheapness you wanted, there were at least four companies willing to sell you a PC for half the price of a Cube. Emachines would even sell you a PC for half the price of an Imac.

And that’s the biggest problem I see with this new Imac: price. $1299 gets you in the game. Ten years ago, that was cheap. But this isn’t 1994. Emachines didn’t exist in 1994, and while a Mac would cost you more than a Packard Bell, there wasn’t much price difference between a Mac and a Compaq or an IBM. Compaq or IBM usually had one model that sold for a hundred or two less than the cheapest Apple, and Apple usually wouldn’t give you quite as much CPU speed or quite as much disk space, but if you walked into the store with $1500 in your pocket, which was pretty much the selling price of an average PC, you could walk out with a Mac just as easily as you could walk out with something that ran Windows.

What will Dell give you today for $800? 2.8 GHz, 256 MB RAM, 40 GB hard drive, CD burner, printer, 17-inch monitor, and some software.

For the same money, Apple gives you 1.25 GHz, 256 MB RAM, 40 GB HD, CD burner, and a 17-inch display. No printer.

For $1,299, the price of the new Imac, Dell gives you twice the CPU power and twice the memory. Just not as much wow factor.

Yes, I know the Pentium 4 is a horribly inefficient processor but the design does scale surprisingly well, and efficiency alone won’t make up a 1.6 GHz speed deficit. Besides, if you’re willing to spend four figures, you can get an AMD Opteron. Just not from Dell.

Will this Imac sell? Yes. Will it do much to increase Apple’s 2.2 percent market share? I doubt it. The main audience is going to be people with aging CRT-based Imacs who’ve been holding out for something with a G5 in it. They’ll buy it, find it’s a lot faster than their old one and takes up less space. Of course they’ll like it. But it’s still the Amiga problem. The Amiga didn’t take over the market because it it only sold 6 million units. The Amiga was a commercial failure because those 6 million units sold to 1.5 million people.

People will ooh and ah over how little space this new Imac takes and how convenient its wireless keyboards are. But most of them will buy a Dell because it’s faster. Or cheaper. Or both. Maybe they’ll complain about how much less convenient it is, but it’s just as likely they’ll forget about it.

It happened with the first Imac and it happened with the Cube and it happened with the dual G4 and it happened with the G5. Who are we kidding? To some extent, it’s been happening since 1983 when the Lisa came out. People see the machine and it knocks their socks off until they see the price tag. The classes buy it anyway, while the masses figure out how to get by with something cheaper.

History is going to repeat itself one other way too. Somewhere in the Far East, I guarantee you a no-name maker of whitebox PCs is designing a box that puts the brains of the outfit behind the LCD, just like this Imac. Maybe the thought didn’t occur to the designer until this week. Maybe the designer has been working on it for months already.

It will look a lot like this new Imac, only it will have an AMD or Intel processor in it, and it will run Windows. It might be three months before we see it. It might even be six. But it will appear, and it will be priced under $1,000.

It will sell. And within another six months, everyone will be doing it. This new form factor may not come to dominate the market, but it won’t take much for it to outsell this new Imac. A small percentage of 97.8 percent is likely to be a lot bigger than even a large percentage of 2.2 percent. Compared to the new Imac, these clones will look like a runaway success.

And Mac fanatics will be screaming about another Apple innovation stolen by someone else.

No surprises in the PC Magazine reliability/service survey

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , ,

It’s that time of year again. Time for PC Magazine’s annual reliability and service survey. I’ve been reading it for almost half my life, and half a lifetime ago, it really meant something.

Today, the subtitle ought to be “What happens when you outsource.”So what does happen when you outsource? All the PCs are basically the same these days. It makes sense. We’re down to three or four suppliers for almost all of the chips on the motherboard, and everyone, including the big vendors, buy their motherboards from one of a half dozen or so companies now. Some contract manufacturer in the Far East puts them all together and puts some other company’s name on it.

The good news is that if there’s a secret to building good, reliable PCs, it’s really poorly kept. The basic hardware is much more reliable today than a decade ago. Back when I sold computers at retail, I remember a Compaq sales rep complaining bitterly that Intel’s “Intel Inside” campaign was hurting them by making everyone think all computers were the same inside. At the time they weren’t. Compaq’s engineering and rigorous testing didn’t always produce the fastest PCs, but they were always near the top, and it did produce some really reliable stuff.

Would that same philosophy applied to today’s technology yield something better? It’s impossible to know. Compaq PCs are exactly the same as everyone else’s these days. The good news is the hardware is about as problem-free as it was back then. And so is everyone else’s. The only difference is the software the manufacturer loads on them.

You may be surprised, but even the bargain-basement eMachines scored high on reliability ratings. It turns out it’s cheaper to get things right the first time than it is to cut corners on quality and have to accept lots of returns. Their machines were dirt cheap, the company was profitable, and the reliability was good. That’s why Gateway bought them and then turned management of the combined company over to the eMachines management.

Speaking of Gateway, support is almost uniformly lousy across the board. People have always complained to me that the support people don’t know what they’re doing. Now it’s hard to know how much the phone techs know because you can’t understand them.

Someone has got to realize this makes poor business sense and make a change. IBM knows, but IBM doesn’t sell PCs at retail anymore. In the early ’90s, Gateway had tremendous brand loyalty. Their PCs were terrible, but the tech support was friendly and determined. When Dell and others started undercutting Gateway’s prices, they cut costs by decimating their tech support. The result was lousy computers and no help getting the problem fixed. The only thing left to do was to buy eMachines, whose management had walked into a similarly bad situation in 2001 and righted it.

It’s pretty obvious to me that the way to break this logjam of sameness is to offer first-rate technical support. I want to believe that the first company that moves its technical support back to the United States and advertises the fact would even be able to get by with charging a premium price.

In the meantime, you stand to get slightly better support by buying from a retail store rather than over the phone or web, if only because the store will be able to help you with basic questions. The quality of in-store help varies widely, but if you find good help in the store, find out that person’s name and ask for that person if you have to call again. Most people who are really good don’t stay in retail for long–at least one company here in St. Louis scouts the retail stores’ computer help and tries to hire away anyone over the age of 21 or 22 who seems to be any good–but you may get some good help in the meantime. Use the manufacturer’s support as a backup, if the store will let you.