Upgrade diary: Gateway G6-400

I recently had the displeasure of working on a Gateway G6-400. I’ll relate some of the experiences here, in case you ever have the same misfortune.
The G6-400 looks good on paper. This particular configuration had a P2-400 in it on an Intel mobo (BX chipset), a 16-meg 3dfx video card (hot for the time), and a DVD drive. The owner complained it was slow and unstable. The usual cure for that is to remove the extra crap Gateway installs on all their PCs.

Unfortunately, this one wouldn’t boot to let me do that. Not even in safe mode. Nice, eh?

Memory problem? I tried several known-good DIMMs. Same results.

Power supply? I tried a known-good, brand-name power supply. Same results.

At some point, the hard drive made an ominous noise. I replaced the hard drive and attempted a clean install of Win98SE. It bombed out at random points during installation. Just in case it was the DVD drive, I tried several different CD-ROM drives. (Hey, I was desperate.) Same result.

Out of curiosity, I put the suspect hard drive in another computer and tried to boot it in safe mode (I didn’t want Windows to mess up the configuration). It worked fine. Rats.

So by now I’d replaced everything in the box–everything important, at least–except the mobo and the processor. I spied an FIC P2 mobo with a BX chipset at Software and Stuff for 30 bucks. I bought it. I was playing the odds. Mobos go bad more often than CPUs do, especially when you’re not overclocking. And if I was wrong, I have other Slot 1 processors. The only other Slot 1 mobo I have is one of the really old LX-based boards that only has a 66 MHz bus.

Why pay $30 for an obsolete mobo when you can get a modern board for $50 or $60 and put a nice Duron or Athlon CPU on it? I doubted the power supply would handle it well. Spend $30 more on a mobo, and $30 more on a new CPU, then you have to replace the power supply as well. Suddenly $30 more has become $100.

The FIC is a much nicer board, even though the specs are very similar. It has one more DIMM slot than the Intel board had. It has no onboard sound, but it has one more available PCI slot. Expandability comes out a draw (you’ll use the extra PCI slot to hold a sound card), but you get your choice. You can put in something equivalent to the midrange Yamaha sound built into the Intel board. Or you can put in a high-end card. The board itself has a lot more configuration options, and even with the default options it boots a lot faster.

This G6-400 has a microATX power supply in it. At least it looks like a microATX power supply, and a lot of people who sell eMachines-compatible microATX boxes claim they’ll also fit a G6. Why Gateway put a small-form factor, low-power power supply in what was at the time of manufacture the second-fastest PC on the market, I have no idea. Unless the idea was to make lots of money selling replacement power supplies. The plus side is, at least it really is ATX, unlike Dell, who uses something that looks like ATX but isn’t. (You’ll blow up the mobo if you plug an ATX power supply into a Dell mobo or a Dell power supply into a standard ATX mobo.)

Fortunately, this case has screw holes in the standard ATX places as well. Unfortunately, the opening in the back isn’t big enough to accomodate any standard ATX power supply I’ve ever seen (the opening blocks the power plug). Someone willing to resort to violence with a hacksaw, Dremel (or similar tool), or tin snips could hack an opening big enough to accomodate a replacement box. More on that in a bit.

I pulled the Intel mobo and dropped in the FIC replacement. Unfortunately, the case used one big block for all the case switches. Since nobody’s ever standardized the header block for the and reset switches and lights, that’s a problem unless you’re replacing boards with a board from the same manufacturer (assuming manufacturers never change their header block pinouts, which isn’t exactly a safe assumption). But that wasn’t the only problem I ran into with this motherboard swap.

Remember that power supply I told you about? Turns out the power lead on it is just long enough to reach the power connector on the Intel mobo the machine came with, in front of the memory slots. FIC put its power connector on the other side of the CPU, and the cable is about half an inch too short to reach. Good luck finding an ATX power extender cable. Directron.com has one for $5, but the minimum order is $10 and that’s before shipping. A search on Pricewatch.com only listed a couple of places having them. Pricing was under $10, but then there’s shipping. I found one computer store in south St. Louis County that had ONE in stock. “They’re not cheap,” the salesperson warned me. I asked how much. $16.95. “You’re not kidding,” I said. That’s half the price of a new 300W power supply. Of course, by the time you pay $5 online and $10 to ship it, $16.95 looks a lot more reasonable, doesn’t it? And if your case won’t accomodate a standard ATX power supply, either buying one of these or buying a similarly overpriced microATX power supply may be your only choice.

To get things up and going, I just jerry-rigged it. I ran the power cables and found a place to rest the power supply where it wouldn’t short out anything. Then I shorted the power leads on the mobo with a screwdriver, and booted Windows 98 in safe mode. It booted up just fine, after insisting on running Scandisk. I booted into regular mode, which insisted on running Scandisk again. It worked beautifully. I did some very minor optimizations (Network server in filesystem settings, turning off Active Desktop, etc.) and rebooted a few times. No problems. No weirdness. Everything was smooth and fluid.

The chances of me ever buying a Gateway (new at least) already approached zero before this adventure. The few Gateways I dealt with in my years doing desktop support always had goofy problems that I usually had to reinstall the OS to resolve. Meanwhile, the Micron or Dell in the next cubicle over kept on chugging away, never needing anything more than basic maintenance.

This motherboard swap is easily the most painful swap I’ve ever done. It worked in the end, but the power supply was an annoyance and an unplanned expense. The header block was an annoyance.

So if you’re thinking about a motherboard swap in a Gateway, particularly a G6 series, don’t plan on it being a walk in the park.

From the truly absurd dept.

Dell’s announcement of a line of business PCs bundled with FreeDOS (to get around MS’s prohibition of OS-less PCs) got me thinking about DOS again.
I vaguely remember some time ago someone asking me if it would be possible to set up an MS LAN Manager server in DOS on a 286 that would be accessible from Windows boxes. Not very likely, I said.

Well, I was wrong. At least mostly wrong. Yes, you can set up an MS LAN Manager server and share drives and printers from DOS. What I don’t know is whether it’d run on a 286 or if a 386 would be required.

I also don’t know exactly why you would want to do it, other than to show off, because the PCs you’ll be connecting from have more RAM than most 286s had disk space.

Before anyone asks: Yes, I have a 286 motherboard laying around somewhere, so I could put together a 286 system to try this. No, I am not willing to try it.

If you want to try it, instructions for setting up this crazy thing are here.

And I’m sure someone is asking if there might be a legitimate use for something like this. I suppose the answer might be yes. You could make a bootable CD-ROM with this stuff on it to use to quickly bring up an emergency file/print server for disaster recovery. Of course it’s just as easy to keep a hard drive stored somewhere with a configured Linux distro on it and Samba, and that’ll perform a whole lot better.

But if DOS intrigues you and you want to find all sorts of odd uses for it, you can find a linkfest over here.

Dude… I put a CD-RW drive in a Dell!

Dude… Putting an aftermarket CD-RW drive in a Dell is a bigger deal than it should be.
I tried to put a Plextor 40X CD-RW in the Dell workstation at church we use for video editing like a month ago, and it scarred me for life. I can put a CD-RW in a Micron in five minutes in my sleep with one hand tied behind my back. And it’ll work.

I can do the same thing in an IBM or any whitebox PC.

As for my sleeping habits, don’t put it past me. I’ve done stranger things. One night at my aunt and uncle’s house, I woke up standing in the corner. And one morning this summer I woke up in my hallway. I’d gone to the closet, gotten out clean sheets and a pillow, and made myself a nice bed there. For me, that’s harder than installing a CD-RW drive.

But that Dell drove me sane. I think it’s an Optiplex 530, but I’m not sure. I’d say Dells are all the same, but they’re not, which makes for even bigger adventure sometimes.

This week, I revisited the revolting thing. And I conquered. It now has a working, living, breathing CD-RW drive.

Anyway, the first thing I did was remove the factory CD-ROM drive and look at its jumper settings. It was set to Cable Select, not master, not slave. I think Dell’s the only manufacturer who does that. OK, fine. I set the Plextor to Cable Select, plugged it into the other IDE connector on the chain, fired it up, hit F2 to go into Setup (and mutterred about why they can’t use F1 or delete like normal people), set the secondary slave drive to Auto, and… Unknown device. I let the system boot. Secondary slave failure. Oh bippity boppity.

So I ripped out the Plextor, set the settings to master, and connected the cable up to the empty, unused, primary IDE controller. I fired it back up, hit F2, set secondary slave to none, set primary master to auto, and… Unknown device.

Double plus ungood, and they weren’t even nice enough to put ice cream on top. But whatever it was they did put on top smelled rank.

Then I got an idea, and it didn’t involve a roof, or a pond, heavy blunt objects, explosives, or even any obscene words.

I powered the machine down. I waited 10 seconds. Then I powered back up. I hit F2 to go into Setup, and, boom-shakalaka, there it was! Primary master: CD-ROM Reader! I cursored over to it and hit Enter. Indeed, it was a Plextor 40-something device!

Theoretically, I could have switched the drive back to cable select, put it on the other chain, done that power-down-and-back-up thang, and it would have worked. I decided to just hang on to that theory and let it remain a theory. I had something that worked and I wasn’t gonna mess with it any more. So I made it all look pretty, put the system back together, and installed Easy CD Creator. And it worked.

Dude.

The pundits are wrong about Apple’s defection

Remember the days when knowing something about computers was a prerequisite for writing about them?
ZDNet’s David Coursey continues to astound me. Yesterday he wondered aloud what Apple could do to keep OS X from running on standard PCs if Apple were to ditch the PowerPC line for an x86-based CPU, or to keep Windows from running on Apple Macs if they became x86-based.

I’d link to the editorial but it’s really not worth the minimal effort it would take.

First, there’s the question of whether it’s even necessary for Apple to migrate. Charlie pointed out that Apple remains profitable. It has 5% of the market, but that’s beside the point. They’re making money. People use Apple Macs for a variety of reasons, and those reasons seem to vary, but speed rarely seems to be the clinching factor. A decade ago, the fastest Mac money could buy was an Amiga with Mac emulation hardware–an Amiga clocked at the same speed would run Mac OS and related software about 10% faster than the real thing. And in 1993, Intel pulled ahead of Motorola in the speed race. Intel had 486s running as fast as 66 MHz, while Motorola’s 68040 topped out at 40 MHz. Apple jumped to the PowerPC line, whose clock rate pretty much kept up with the Pentium line until the last couple of years. While the PowerPCs would occasionally beat an x86 at some benchmark or another, the speed was more a point of advocacy than anything else. When a Mac user quoted one benchmark only to be countered by another benchmark that made the PowerPC look bad, the Mac user just shrugged and moved on to some other advocacy point.

Now that the megahertz gap has become the gigahertz gap, the Mac doesn’t look especially good on paper next to an equivalently priced PC. Apple could close the gigahertz gap and shave a hundred bucks or two off the price of the Mac by leaving Motorola at the altar and shacking up with Intel or AMD. And that’s why every pundit seems to expect the change to happen.

But Steve Jobs won’t do anything unless he thinks it’ll get him something. And Apple offers a highly styled, high-priced, anti-establishment machine. Hippie computers, yuppie price. Well, that was especially true of the now-defunct Flower Power and Blue Dalmation iMacs.

But if Apple puts Intel Inside, some of that anti-establishment lustre goes away. That’s not enough to make or break the deal.

But breaking compatibility with the few million G3- and G4-based Macs already out there might be. The software vendors aren’t going to appreciate the change. Now Apple’s been jerking the software vendors around for years, but a computer is worthless without software. Foisting an instruction set change on them isn’t something Apple can do lightly. And Steve Jobs knows that.

I’m not saying a change won’t happen. But it’s not the sure deal most pundits seem to think it is. More likely, Apple is just pulling a Dell. You know the Dell maneuver. Dell is the only PC vendor that uses Intel CPUs exclusively. But Dell holds routine talks with AMD and shows the guest book signatures to Intel occasionally. Being the last dance partner gives Dell leverage in negotiating with Intel.

I think Apple’s doing the same thing. Apple’s in a stronger negotiating position with Motorola if Steve Jobs can casually mention he’s been playing around with Pentium 4s and Athlon XPs in the labs and really likes what he sees.

But eventually Motorola might decide the CPU business isn’t profitable enough to be worth messing with, or it might decide that it’s a lot easier and more profitable to market the PowerPC as a set of brains for things like printers and routers. Or Apple might decide the gigahertz gap is getting too wide and defect. I’d put the odds of a divorce somewhere below 50 percent. I think I’ll see an AMD CPU in a Mac before I’ll see it in a Dell, but I don’t think either event will happen next year.

But what if it does? Will Apple have to go to AMD and have them design a custom, slightly incompatible CPU as David Coursey hypothesizes?

Worm sweat. Remember the early 1980s, when there were dozens of machines that had Intel CPUs and even ran MS-DOS, yet were, at best, only slightly IBM compatible? OK, David Coursey doesn’t, so I can’t hold it against you if you don’t. But trust me. They existed, and they infuriated a lot of people. There were subtle differences that kept IBM-compatible software from running unmodified. Sometimes the end user could work around those differences, but more often than not, they couldn’t.

All Apple has to do is continue designing their motherboards the way they always have. The Mac ROM bears very little resemblance to the standard PC BIOS. The Mac’s boot block and partition table are all different. If Mac OS X continues to look for those things, it’ll never boot on a standard PC, even if the CPU is the same.

The same differences that keep Mac OS X off of Dells will also keep Windows off Macs. Windows could be modified to compensate for those differences, and there’s a precedent for that–Windows NT 4.0 originally ran on Intel, MIPS, PowerPC, and Alpha CPUs. I used to know someone who swore he ran the PowerPC versions of Windows NT 3.51 and even Windows NT 4.0 natively on a PowerPC-based Mac. NT 3.51 would install on a Mac of comparable vintage, he said. And while NT 4.0 wouldn’t, he said you could upgrade from 3.51 to 4.0 and it would work.

I’m not sure I believe either claim, but you can search Usenet on Google and find plenty of people who ran the PowerPC version of NT on IBM and Motorola workstations. And guess what? Even though those workstations had PowerPC CPUs, they didn’t have a prayer of running Mac OS, for lack of a Mac ROM.

Windows 2000 and XP were exclusively x86-based (although there were beta versions of 2000 for the Alpha), but adjusting to accomodate an x86-based Mac would be much easier than adjusting to another CPU architecture. Would Microsoft go to the trouble just to get at the remaining 5% of the market? Probably. But it’s not guaranteed. And Apple could turn it into a game of leapfrog by modifying its ROM with every machine release. It already does that anyway.

The problem’s a whole lot easier than Coursey thinks.

Dude! I’m getting a… Packard Bell!

Oh wait. No, I’m thinking of Steve. Although he and I did just get identical Dell Optiplex GX1 P2-450 workstations to use as Web servers. We learned a little bit about them too.
Read more

I know better

I went to polish up my video last night–it needed a soundtrack and some title screens, and a couple of scenes flickered so I needed to fix that–and I found a nice black Plextor 40X CD burner sitting on the Darth Vader-colored Dell workstation we use to edit tape.
I’ll bet you already know how this story ends. Read more

Another All-Star Flub

I remember when the All-Star Game actually mattered.
Well, it didn’t matter–it was still a game that didn’t count, but the guys who showed up, they showed up to play. There was a lot of pride at stake. My first All-Star memory was the 1983 game. The American League hadn’t won a game in years. Then the California Angels’ Fred Lynn came up with the bases loaded, smacked one out of the park for the first-ever All-Star grand slam, and carried the AL to victory.

These days, the only purpose the All-Star Game serves is to give Baseball Commissionerwannabe Bud Selig another opportunity to make a fool of himself. Read more

Analysis of the Apple Mac Xserver

Given my positive reaction to the Compaq Proliant DL320, Svenson e-mailed and asked me what I thought of Apple’s Xserver.
In truest Slashdot fashion, I’m going to present strong opinions about something I’ve never seen. Well, not necessarily the strong opinions compared to some of what you’re used to seeing from my direction. But still…

Short answer: I like the idea. The PPC is a fine chip, and I’ve got a couple of old Macs at work (a 7300 and a 7500) running Debian. One of them keeps an eye on the DHCP servers and mails out daily reports (DHCP on Windows NT is really awful; I didn’t think it was possible to mess it up but Microsoft found a way) and acts as a backup listserver (we make changes on it and see if it breaks before we break the production server). The other one is currently acting as an IMAP/Webmail server that served as an outstanding proof of concept for our next big project. I don’t know that the machines are really any faster than a comparable Pentium-class CPU would be, but they’re robust and solid machines. I wouldn’t hesitate to press them into mission-critical duty if the need arose. For example, if the door opened, I’d be falling all over myself to make those two machines handle DHCP, WINS, and caching DNS for our two remote sites.

So… Apples running Linux are a fine thing. A 1U rack-mount unit with a pair of fast PPC chips in it and capable of running Linux is certainly a fine thing. It’ll suck down less CPU power than an equivalent Intel-based system would, which is an important consideration for densely-packed data centers. I wouldn’t run Mac OS X Server on it because I’d want all of its CPU power to go towards real work, rather than putting pretty pictures on a non-existent screen. Real servers are administered via telnet or dumb terminal.

What I don’t like about the Xserver is the price. As usual, you get more bang for the buck from an x86-based product. The entry-level Xserver has a single 1 GHz PowerPC, 256 megs of RAM, and a 60-gig IDE disk. It’ll set you back a cool 3 grand. We just paid just over $1300 for a Proliant DL320 with a 1.13 GHz P3 CPU, 128 megs of RAM, and a 40-gig IDE disk. Adding 256 megs of RAM is a hundred bucks, and the price difference between a 40- and a 60-gig drive is trivial. Now, granted, Apple’s price includes a server license, and I’m assuming you’ll run Linux or FreeBSD or OpenBSD on the Intel-based system. But Linux and BSD are hardly unproven; you can easily expect them to give you the same reliability as OS X Server and possibly better performance.

But the other thing that makes me uncomfortable is Apple’s experience making and selling and supporting servers, or rather its lack thereof. Compaq is used to making servers that sit in the datacenter and run 24/7. Big businesses have been running their businesses on Compaq servers for more than a decade. Compaq knows how to give businesses what they need. (So does HP, which is a good thing considering HP now owns Compaq.) If anything ever goes wrong with an Apple product, don’t bother calling Apple customer service. If you want to hear a more pleasant, helpful, and unsuspicious voice on the other end, call the IRS. You might even get better advice on how to fix your Mac from the IRS. (Apple will just tell you to remove the third-party memory in the machine. You’ll respond that you have no third-party memory, and they’ll repeat the demand. There. I just saved you a phone call. You don’t have to thank me.)

I know Apple makes good iron that’s capable of running a long time, assuming it has a quality OS on it. I’ve also been around long enough to know that hardware failures happen, regardless of how good the iron is, so you want someone to stand behind it. Compaq knows that IBM and Dell are constantly sitting on the fence like vultures, wanting to grab its business if it messes up, and it acts accordingly. That’s the beauty of competition.

So, what of the Xserver? It’ll be very interesting to see how much less electricity it uses than a comparable Intel-based system. It’ll be very interesting to see whether Apple’s experiment with IDE disks in the enterprise works out. It’ll be even more interesting to see how Apple adjusts to meeting the demands of the enterprise.

It sounds like a great job for Somebody Else.

I’ll be watching that guy’s experience closely.

Dell and Gateway upgrade caveats

I sent this message to Mike Magee of The Inquirer this morning:
Hi Mike,

I’m a freelance author, with one book published by O’Reilly to my credit and a few appearances in Computer Shopper UK.

I visited the Scott Mueller link you referenced at http://www.theinquirer.net/15040206.htm, and just to alert you, I’m not certain that Scott Mueller’s dates on the Dell systems are correct. In late 1998, I attempted to upgrade a Dell P133-based system with an AOpen AX59Pro motherboard, in order to get around the nasty memory limitations in Intel’s 430VX chipset. I knew the motherboard worked because I pulled it out of another working system. The board didn’t work in the Dell. Then, when I reinstalled it in the system I pulled it from, it didn’t work there either.

Fortunately I didn’t kill the power supply so I was able to get the system up and running again by replacing the factory board.

This leads me to believe that Dell has engaged in the practice of nonstandard wiring since 1996.

My recommendation to my readers has always been to replace the power supply when replacing a motherboard in a Dell, since standard ATX power supplies easily bolt into the Dell cases. Any brand-name power supply purchased at retail (Sparkle, Antec, Enermax, etc.) is likely to be of higher quality than the stock Dell power supply anyway, but that’s an additional upgrade expense people may not consider.

I suspect the reason this hasn’t been more widely known is that Dell mostly sells to corporations and has only recently gone after the consumer market in aggressive fashion, and corporations rarely replace motherboards. The labor involved in making the swap, then reinstalling the operating system and applications, costs too much. There’s less labor involved in replacing the system, and then you have a system covered under warranty.

Incidentally, while Gateway does use the standard ATX pinout, many Gateway cases use an odd-shaped power supply. So while an aftermarket power supply will function electrically, it’ll take some cutting and drilling on the case to allow you to bolt it in. Most people will prefer to just buy a new case if the power supply in their Gateway dies–and the power supply is usually the first component to go in a Gateway, in my experience.

Planes, trains, and computers

Planes. I’m not as big of an airplane fanatic as my dad was, but no one is. It’s too bad he didn’t live to see the Web come of age, because I found some sites that would have made him want to use a computer. Aviationarchaeology documents military crash sites in the United States. It’s not complete (I know of an F-86 Sabre crash site in a remote site in the Southwest that it doesn’t document) but cool. I found another similar page.
And then there’s Urban’s military aviation weblog, which is a links collection that just has to be seen to believe.

Trains. Gatermann sent this link to a streetcar, built in 1910, for sale on eBay. I asked him if he thought Metrolink would mind if we used it on their tracks. He said he didn’t think so.

Having a restored streetcar would be almost as cool as having a private Tu-144… And a whole lot safer.

Automobiles Computers. The P2 shell I ordered last week arrived yesterday. It was surprisingly well constructed. The motherboard and floppy drive were installed, and all cables were present, making it really easy to construct a complete system from it. I plugged in a 128-meg stick, attached a CPU fan to a Celeron-366 in a slotket and plugged it in, then I raided an old 486 for a video card, NIC, hard drive, and CD-ROM drive. The HD in the 486 had Debian 2.2 installed, so no further work was necessary. I plugged it in, turned it on, Debian booted, and it was fast.

This is the first time I’ve ever seen a P2-class machine with ISA video and network cards, but this thing’s going to be a low-volume Intranet server. Why waste a decent video card on it when the only thing it’s ever going to display is a logon prompt? Back before Microsoft brainwashed the world into putting GUIs on their servers, it was common practice to put ISA video cards in servers to conserve PCI slots for important things, like network cards and SCSI cards.

A Pentium-75 would do this job nicely, but I had a slotket, a CPU, and a 128-meg stick, and the barebones system cost $40 delivered. I’d have needed 32 megs of 72-pin memory to bring up a Pentium-75 to do this job, and it would have cost more than that.

At any rate, if you want to build your own dirt-cheap P2, you can get the case/ps/mobo/floppy combo for $20 and a P2-233 for $17 at Compgeeks.com. As for hard drives, a 2.5-gig job will run you $26 and it goes on up from there. They don’t have any dirt-cheap video cards there, unfortunately. You can go to Computer Surplus Outlet for that. I wouldn’t trust either place’s memory, so go to Crucial for that. If you have some parts laying around from upgrades past, you can have a complete system cheap. If you don’t have parts, you’re better off just buying a complete P2. You can get a Dell P2-233/32MB for $79, including CD-ROM and NIC.

I’m really curious how a lab full of P2-233s running Linux as one big OpenMosix cluster would perform…

And baseball. Can’t leave that out. I just read that Cookie Rojas is coaching for the Toronto Blue Jays. So when are the Royals going to get rid of Tony Loser and put Cookie at the helm?

As for Stinky the Frenchman’s comments the other day comparing rooting for the Royals to rooting for the cars at a monster truck rally, does anyone else find it ironic that a supposed French nobleman would talk with an air of superiority about “American Cricket,” then go compare my favorite team to a monster truck rally? How does he know about monster truck rallies?