IBM

Stand by your SCSI.

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

The Storage Review recently ran a feature on the Seagate Barracuda 36 series, Seagate’s current economy-class SCSI drive. Like many low-end Seagate SCSI drives of the past, it is a converted ATA/IDE design. And Storage Review eats these kinds of units up, because theoretically they provide a nice way to demonstrate the difference between IDE and SCSI.
The result? The SCSI unit was actually slower than its IDE brethren in some of the tests.

The conclusion? SCSI isn’t necessarily faster than IDE.

That’s partially right. Taking the same drive mechanism and replacing the IDE circuitry with SCSI circuitry won’t result in a rockin’-fast drive. SCSI does have more overhead than IDE, so without some other changes, the drive won’t be an impressive performer.

The thing is, people don’t buy expensive SCSI controllers and then put retreaded IDE drives on them. Or at least they shouldn’t. The Barracuda 36 series is intended for people replacing SCSI drives in older equipment. Since the drive will frequently be replacing a five-year-old drive (or older), it doesn’t have to be a screamer. Anything made today will be faster than anything you can find from the mid-90s.

SCSI gives other advantages over IDE. First, with a modern host adapter (don’t call it a controller; you’ll get dirty looks) you can connect 14 devices and only use one interrupt. On today’s crowded PCs that try to be everything to everyone, that can be a real boon. Second, you have far fewer limitations over cable length. Don’t buy an IDE cable longer than 18 inches; you’re just asking for trouble. I know, I know, some of you have 36-inch IDE cables and they work fine. Trust me: Replace it with a shorty, and you’ll get fewer data errors, which means a more reliable system at the very least, and possibly a faster system as well due to fewer retransmissions. With SCSI, you can actually use the top bays in that five-foot-tall megatower you bought. Third, you can get external SCSI devices, in the event that you made the mistake of not buying that five-foot-tall megatower, or if you just like portability. This is less of a factor in these days of Firewire and USB 2.0, but it’s still a nicety you don’t get with IDE. Fourth and most importantly, SCSI devices sharing the same bus can talk at the same time. When you put two IDE drives on the same channel, one drive has to wait for the other to shut up before it can speak its peace. This limits the advantage of having multiple drives. With multiple SCSI drives, you can actually saturate all that bandwidth you paid for.

The fifth advantage of may soon fade: command queuing. SCSI drives don’t have to perform requests in the order received. If you’re constantly accessing two files at once, reading one, then writing to the other, in alternating fashion, the IDE drive will be jumping all over the place. The SCSI drive will figure out how to reorder those requests so it doesn’t have to jump around as much. IBM’s recent Deskstar drives can do command queuing as well, provided the operating system supports that mode of operation. But it’s not a common feature in IDE drives yet. This advantage usually won’t show up in benchmarks, but it’s significant. SCSI drives, to use a popular middle-management buzzword, work smarter. If you’ve got a Windows 2000 or XP system with a SCSI drive in it, try using the system while defragmenting the drive. The system will be slower, but not unusable. That’s never true of an IDE drive.

And the sixth advantage of SCSI doesn’t really have much to do with SCSI. With SCSI, you get cutting-edge technologies first. You can’t buy a 15K RPM IDE drive. You can’t even buy a 10K RPM IDE drive. There’s only one IDE drive on the market with an 8-meg cache on it. Caches that size are commonplace on contemporary SCSI drives, and the gargantuan Seagate Barracuda 180 has a 16-meg cache. It also costs as much as a nice computer all by itself, so it’s not exactly a consumer-class drive, but it’s available if you’ve got more money than patience.

Benchmarks are deceiving. Some changes will double the benchmark scores, but a user won’t tell much difference. Other changes barely register, but the user notices them. SCSI is one of those, especially if you multitask a lot.

It’s true that there’s no point in spending $400-$500 for a disk subsystem in a PC you use for word processing and e-mail. You’ll notice a difference, but it’s not worth the extra cost. Although if you’re buying a used system and have a choice between a system with IDE disks and SCSI disks, you should get the SCSI system, even if it means ponying up another 50 bucks. You’ll thank yourself for it.

As for me, I love my SCSI systems with 10K RPM drives in them. They’re wicked fast, and no louder than the IDE drives of four or five years ago. (I don’t have a current IDE drive to compare them to.) I can let my e-mail inbox fill up with thousands of messages without it dragging beyond belief, and my non-Adobe applications load in less than three seconds. Most of them load in less than a second. The drives themselves are small and expensive, but you’re buying performance, not capacity. I can’t fill up a 9-gig drive with applications anyway. Neither can most people.

So no, SCSI isn’t a magic silver bullet. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth having.

Another ordinary Monday…

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , ,

Seen on a sign. God calls us to play the game, not to keep the score.
I like that.

Seen at a book sale. The Coming War with Japan. The book was written in 1992 and asserted that the conditions that pre-dated World War II exist today and that war is inevitable. Then I spotted another book: The Japanese Conspiracy. I didn’t bother picking that one up. I could have bought them for entertainment value, but I picked up a couple of books by Dave Barry and P.J. O’Rourke for that.

The idea seems ridiculous to me.

I was glad I went over to the section on war though. In addition to those, I also found A Practical Guide to the Unix System, Third Edition, by Mark G. Sobell. Had it been in the computer section where it belonged, it would have been snapped up long before I got there. It comes from a BSD perspective, but I have to work with a BSD derivative at work sometimes, so it’s good to have. At the very least, it can serve as a status book (books you keep on your shelf in your office to make it look like you know something, even if you never read them).

Speaking of humor value… I picked up a book on typography, written in 1980. Some of my classmates had a knack for making type look really good–they could literally turn a headline into art. I never got that knack. This book tries to teach it. It also talks about computerized typography. Needless to say, the couple of pages that illustrate that are just a wee bit out of date.

But I’m not worried about the key points of the book being out of date. The basic elements of good design were old news when Gutenberg built his first printing press.

Retro computing. I was inventorying my old stuff and I ended up building a computer. I have an original IBM PC/AT case, but the last of the AT motherboards don’t fit in it well. The screws line up, I’m in trouble if I need any memory, because the drive cage blocks the memory slots on a lot of boards, including my supercheap closeout Soyo Socket 370 boards I picked up a year or so ago. I used the motherboard that had been in that case for something else long ago, and it’s been sitting ever since.

In my stash, I found a Socket 7 board that fits and lets me put the memory in it. It even has 2 DIMM and 4 SIMM sockets in it. Unfortunately it has the Intel 430VX chipset in it, which didn’t cache any memory above 64 MB, limited the density of SDRAM it would recognize, and its SDRAM performance was so lousy you didn’t really see much difference between SDRAM and EDO. But if I run across a 32-meg DIMM or two it’ll fit, and a relatively slow CPU with adequate memory still makes a good Linux server, especially if you give it a decent SCSI card.

I did some investigation using the tools at www.motherboards.org, and found out the board was a Spacewalker Shuttle. So I went to www.spacewalker.com, where I found out there were only three Shuttle boards ever made with the 430VX chipset. There were pictures of each board, so I quickly figured out which one I had–a HOT-557/2 v1.32. It tops out at a Pentium 200 or a Pentium MMX 166, so I’ve got some options if I decide the AMD K5-100 in there isn’t enough horsepower. And, most importantly to me at least, it looks like a computer. A machine from a time when computers were computers, not boomboxes and fax machines and toaster ovens and television sets. A machine that looks rugged enough to survive a tumble down a flight of stairs. A hot-rodded classic. A man’s machine, ar ar ar!

Back to the grind. The weekend’s over, and it’s time to think about work. Have a wonderful week, check the news sources I cited Saturday if you want, and check back in here a few times while you’re at it, won’t you?

News analysis

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , ,

Short takes. Yesterday was a newsworthy day in technology, and I’m sure there’s going to be a ton of misinformation about it eminating from both coasts, so we might as well set the record straight.
Poor quality control drives IBM from the hard drive business! Yeah, whatever. IBM makes one questionable model (and many GXP failures sounded more like power supply failures than hard drive failures), and suddenly everything they’ve ever made is crap. Guess what? Seven years ago you couldn’t give me a Seagate drive, because the drives they were making back then were so slow and unreliable. Maxtors were worse–and my boss at the time, who has a very long memory, nearly disciplined me a couple of years ago for specifying a Maxtor drive in an upgrade. But he’s a reasonable man and saw that the drive held up and performed well. Western Digital has been so hit and miss I still don’t want to buy any of their drives. Though their drives started to look better after they licensed some technology from… Old Big Black and Blue.

And the truth about GXPs: Regardless of how true the quality control allegations are, the drives themselves are the most innovative and advanced IDE devices ever commercially marketed. The platters are made using different materials and processes than conventional discs, which was supposed to make them more reliable. Expect that technology to come of age in a generation or two. The drives even include SCSI-like command queueing (the newest version of Linux’s hdparm allows you to turn this feature on; I have no idea if Windows switches it on by default). The successor to the 60GXP is going to be worth a second and a third look.

Wanna know what’s really going on? Hard drives aren’t very profitable. IBM has a history of spinning off questionable divisions to see if they can survive as smaller, more independent entities. The most famous recent example of this is Lexmark. That’s what’s going on here. IBM and Hitachi spin off and merge their storage divisions, and each company takes a stake in it. If the company mops up the floor with the competition, IBM and Hitachi make lots of money. If the company continues to bleed cash, IBM and Hitachi get nice tax write-offs. Either way, the shareholders are happy.

A number of years ago, IBM was a large producer of memory chips as well. In fact, you can open up a Mac manufactured in the mid-1990s, and chances are you’ll find an IBM-manufactured PowerPC CPU, one or more IBM-manufactured DIMMs, and an IBM SCSI hard drive. Making memory had its ups and downs, and during one of the many downturns in the 90s, IBM got out of the business. There was a time when Intel and AMD were in that business too (I have some old AMD DRAM chips on an expansion card somewhere, and I’ve seen Intel DRAMs but I don’t know if I’ve ever owned any).

This news is a little bit surprising, but hardly shocking. IBM’s making tons of money selling software and services, they’re not making money selling hard drives, and they’ve got a new CEO and nervous investors. This is a way for them to hedge their bets.

And you can expect them to possibly start getting more aggressive about marketing their technologies to other drive manufacturers as well now. Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital, Fujitsu and Samsung have just changed from competitors into potential customers. Expect disk performance to increase and price to continue to decrease as a result.

How to gauge hard drive reliability. This isn’t exactly news but it seems very relevant. Professional writers don’t see a lot of drives. They can recommend based on their own experience, but their recent experience is going to be limited to a few dozen drives. Message boards are very hit and miss. You have no way of knowing whether it’s a book author hiding behind that handle or a clueless 12-year-old kid. Find an experienced technician who’s still practicing as a technician (I’m not a very good example; at this stage of my career I no longer deal with large numbers of desktop systems–I deal with a handful of servers and my own desktop machine and that’s it) and ask what hard drives they’ve seen fail. When I was doing desktop support regularly, I could tell you almost the exact number of drives I’d seen fail in the past year, and I could tell you the brands. I’d prefer to talk to someone who fixes computers for a large company rather than a computer store tech (since his employer is in the business of selling things, he’s under pressure to recommend what’s in stock), but I’ll still trust a computer store tech over some anonymous user on Usenet or a message board, as well as over a published author. Myself included.

AMD withdraws from the consumer market! AMD mentioned in a conference call yesterday that it plans to discontinue the Duron processor line this year. It makes sense. Fab 25 in Austin is being re-tooled to make flash memory, leaving the Duron without a home. But beyond that, AMD’s new 64-bit Hammer chip is going to hit the market later this year. So they can sell a slightly crippled K7 core as their low-end chip, or they can make their high-end K7 core into the low-end chip and sell the Hammer as a high-end chip. This strategy makes more sense. Clock for clock, the Athlon is still a better chip than the P4. Hammer scales better and performs better. So AMD can pit the Athlon against the Celeron and give P4 performance at a Celeron price, and the Hammer against the P4, which will give P4 clock rates and deliver better performance for 32-bit apps, along with a 64-bit future. There’s not much room in that strategy for the Duron. AMD would rather cede the $35 CPU business to VIA.

Look for the Hammer to gain widespread use in the Linux server market, especially among smaller companies. The Athlon already has an audience there (in spite of some pundits calling AMD-based systems “toys,” you see far more ads for AMD-based servers in Linux Journal than you see for Intel boxes), but the Hammer will become the poor man’s Alpha.

How to get my job

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , ,

I’ve had a couple of people ask me in the past couple of weeks how to break into the computer field. It was a tough question. I literally got into fixing these things because I couldn’t find a repair shop in St. Louis that I felt I could trust. So I started trying to fix them myself. I might break it beyond repair, but one time we had a repair done that cost more than replacing the unit outright would have cost. So what did I have to lose, right?
I took my Commodore 128 apart a few times. Usually it was for an upgrade, but once it was to clean the keyboard because keys weren’t working anymore. It was an adventure, and I had to learn how to solder first. My dad’s friend Norb taught me how. He was a building inspector. No wonder I still solder like a plumber, even to this day. So I de-soldered the 6 connections I had to in order to get into the keyboard, removed the dozens of tiny screws, cleaned up the printed circuit board, put it back together, re-soldered those connections, reassembled the computer, and held my breath. It worked. Cool. It didn’t impress the girls, but it saved me at least 50 bucks.

It was my uncle’s approach. I remember riding with him to an auto parts store once, then watching him work on his truck. “I don’t know what I’m doing when it comes to cars,” I said.

“I don’t let that stop me,” he said. “I just have to do it.”

His truck cost more than any computer I’ve ever owned.

Later on, I got an upgrade ROM for my Amiga 2000. So my dad came home one day to find me hovering above my Amiga, which was sprawled across his OMT table. The cover was off, the power supply was out, and the drive cage was out, and there I was, slowly prying out a chip with a screwdriver. Dad gave me a nervous look. “You gonna be able to get that thing back together?” he asked me. “Sure,” I said. I didn’t tell him how many times I’d had it apart before. So he stood there and watched me as I finished extracting the chip, popped the new one into place, and re-installed the power supply and drive cage.

Eventually I got smart and realized I shouldn’t be experimenting on computers that I cared about. XT clones cost about 20 bucks when people wouldn’t just give them to you, so I got a couple. I ripped them apart, figured out how a computer was really put together, and reassembled them. And yes, I even took parts from one and put them in the other to see what would happen. I was pretty sure it would work. It did. Eventually I did something stupid (I don’t remember what anymore) and I killed at least one of those XT clones, but it wasn’t important. I’d learned a lot from them, and I was only out 20 bucks. That’s assuming I wasn’t given the thing outright–I don’t remember that detail anymore either.

I needed that skill the next year. I was living in a fraternity house, and the power supply died in the house computer. I knew enough by then to diagnose it, and I headed off to the local computer shop for parts. They didn’t have any power supplies that would fit, and the motherboard was nonstandard. But they had a lineup of barebones systems sprawled across the floor. A bare 386 cost about $200. I knew the rest of the system worked. So I talked it over with the treasurer, then came back with a house check and bought a 25 MHz 386DX. I took it home, popped the case on the house computer, pulled out the video card and all the I/O cards, installed them in the 386, and found the computer wouldn’t recognize the hard drive. We eventually worked through that one (it turned out we had one of the very few 8-bit IDE drives ever made, and that 8-bit controller did not get along with our 386 one bit) and we got a working system up and going.

By the time I graduated there were at least half a dozen guys in that house capable of doing that job. Times changed (swapping a motherboard was much more of an endeavor in 1993 than it was in 1997, because by then so many components that had once been discrete and configured by jumpers were integrated and configurable through the BIOS Setup), and I’d like to think most of them learned at least a little something from me.

That summer, I got a job selling computers. An opportunity arose when the store technician developed a difficulty showing up for work. They never fired the guy, but since he was only there half the time, I got to be the tech the other half. When he was there, I learned a lot from him.

The next school year, I got wind of a job opportunity on campus. The journalism department had a batch of 300 new IBM PC 330s and 350s. Every last one of them needed to be unboxed and upgraded with extra memory and a NIC, then plugged into the network, where one of the more experienced techs could do a push install of OS/2. I got the job, and I learned a ton from those guys. These are guys who had seen prototypes of the IBM PS/2 Model 80, and who occasionally had to whip out a soldering gun and make a change to the motherboard with an engineer from IBM on the phone. You bet they had a lot to teach me.

That part-time job eventually grew into a full-time job when those guys recognized that I was willing to work hard and willing and able to learn.

That approach worked really well for me. But I had the advantage of being young and being able to wait for opportunities and take them as they came. I also had the advantage of growing up with the things (the schools I went to had computers and taught computer classes, all the way back to when I was in the second grade) and messing with them for the majority of my life.

Realistically, I don’t think that approach would work for an adult with minimal computer skills and a family to support. Or at least it wouldn’t work on a quick timeframe. I’ve tried to teach 24-year-olds starting from ground zero how to do this. It didn’t work very well.

It’s a lot easier to teach someone how to write.

Technobabble

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , ,

Grisoft AVG works as advertised. If you don’t want to pay for virus protection, do yourself and your friends a favor and head over to Grisoft and download the free edition of AVG. I used it Monday night to disinfect a friend’s PC that had become infected by the infamous KAK virus.
Free-for-personal-use anti-virus tools have a nasty habit of becoming un-free within a year or two of their release, but look at it this way: AVG at least saves you a year or two of paying for virus update subscriptions.

It’s not as whiz-bang as the tools from Norton or McAfee but it works. You can’t get as fine-grained about scheduling stuff but that doesn’t matter so much. You can schedule things like scans and updates, and it does find and isolate the viruses, and you can’t beat the price. Go get it.

Linux on vintage P2s. I helped Gatermann get Debian up and running on his vintage HP Kayak workstation last night. This is an early P2-266 workstation. Gatermann marveled at how it was put together, and with the calibre of components in it. It had a high-end (for its time) Matrox AGP card in it, plus onboard Adaptec Wide SCSI, 128 MB of ECC SDRAM, and a 10,000-RPM IBM Wide SCSI hard drive. It arrived stripped of its original network card; Gatermann installed an Intel EtherExpress Pro.

In its day, this was the best Intel-based workstation money could buy, and you needed a lot of it. Of course, back in that day I was working on the copydesk of a weekly magazine in Columbia, Mo. and chasing a girl named Rachel (who I would catch, then lose, about a year later). And I probably hadn’t turned 22 yet either. Needless to say, that was a while ago. It seems like 100 years ago now.

Today, the most impressive thing about the system is its original price tag, but it remains a solidly built system that’s very useful and very upgradable. He can add another CPU, and depending on what variation his particular model is, he can possibly upgrade to as much as a P2-450. A pair of 450s is nothing to turn your nose up at. And of course he can add a variety of SCSI hard drives to it.

Debian runs fine on the system; its inability to boot doesn’t bother me too much. I occasionally run across systems that just won’t boot a Linux CD, but once I manage to get them running (either by putting the drive in another PC for the installation process or by using a pair of boot floppies to get started) they run fine.

The system didn’t want to boot Debian on CD, or any other Linux for that matter. So we made a set of boot floppies, then all was well.

The batch that this computer came from is long gone, but I expect more to continue to appear on the used market as they trickle out of the firms that bought them. They are, after all, long since obsolete for their original purpose. But they’re a bargain. These systems will remain useful for several years, and are built well enough that they probably will be totally obsolete before they break.

Some video editing tips from the school of hard knocks

Dave Farquhar Video , , , , ,

Hi. My name is Dave. I attended the best journalism school there is for broadcasting.
I paid almost zero attention in the television units, because, well, I hate TV. So I learned nothing that would be of use to me at this stage of life. Aside from how to go get a story and ask questions and gather footage, which is pretty much the same no matter what your medium is, whether it’s a newspaper, a magazine, a video documentary, a Web page, or a research paper. We all have a sense for what’s interesting and relevant. Develop that, and you can tell a story in any medium.

OK, that’s all I know about video editing theory. That was easy, wasn’t it? Aren’t you glad you didn’t pay $200 per credit hour for it?

Now let’s get practical. This is going to be most practical if you have equipment similar to mine. If you don’t, hopefully it’ll tell you something useful.

Here’s what I use to make magic happen on the boob tube:

IBM-compatible PC

  • AMD Duron 700 MHz CPU

  • 384 MB PC133 memory

  • Adaptec 19160 Ultra160 SCSI card

  • Maxtor Atlas III 10,000 RPM 18GB Ultra160 SCSI hard drive

  • Quantum Fireball 15 GB UDMA66 hard drive

  • Plextor UltraPlex 40max SCSI CD-ROM for audio capture

    • Pinnacle DV500 Plus editing/capture card
    JVC GR-DVL100 miniDV camcorder

    You can capture video with Adobe Premiere, but there’s a lot of overhead involved. It’s better to use the bundled Pinnacle DVTools app. I was in the habit of capturing with DVTools, then using the freeware VirtualDub (do a Google search) to convert those files to Indeo 5.1 format to save space. I saved a lot of disk space, but I wasted a lot of time. A PC equipped with a DV500 can do most things to DV-formatted files in realtime, whereas my setup has to render other file formats. You’re looking at 2-4 frames per second to do the initial conversion, and then Premiere renders them at a similar rate. Get monster hard drives so you can hold those larger DV files, and you’ll save lots of render time. You’ll also completely eliminate generation loss, which is the whole point of digital video in the first place, although the generation loss from rendering DV to Indeo back to DV isn’t something anyone’s likely to notice. Realistically, you’ll lose more as the signal is being transmitted from the camera to your screen than you will from three generations of conversion.

    I find playback off my UDMA drive less than adequate. It doesn’t drop frames but the video has too many artifacts. It’s fine as a holding bin for clips I might use, or for editing, but before I do my final output to tape, I move the files over to my high-speed SCSI drive.

    On some platforms, you really want to have your OS and apps on one drive, your video on another, and your audio on yet another. I find the Atlas III is more than fast enough to hold all three and get away with it. If I had to do it all again though, I’d probably still get the Atlas, and I’d get another very large but slower SCSI drive.

    When you’re editing with Premiere, you may find your hard drives fill up at an alarming rate. Before starting a project, search for directories called Adobe Premiere Preview Files and clear their contents. I found a missing 4 gigs that way. Also defragment your drives before starting on a project. You want big, contiguous blocks to hold your huge video files.

    You can’t just plug a camcorder into your firewire port and go to File, Export Timeline, Print to Tape and expect it to work. You have to put your camcorder into VTR mode first, an operation that isn’t always obvious from looking at the camera. Check your manual. On my DVL100, turning the mode knob to Play does the trick.

    Also, you can’t plug a camcorder in hot. At least not any of the JVC cameras I’ve tried. The computer will see them, but it won’t be able to control them. Shut down the computer and turn off the camera, plug in, then power both up, and they’re happy.

    Although Pinnacle’s DVTools can export DV to tape, it’s faster to do it from Premiere. It takes Premiere forever to export a video to disk in DV format, and then of course the export to tape happens in real-time. Doing it from Premiere in the first place cuts the time required by 3/4.

    And here’s a principle I learned at a seminar earlier this year at Ginghamsburg United Methodist Church in Dayton, OH: There’s no such thing as junk video. Ginghamsburg’s video director actually advocates leaving your camera on at all times, even when you’re moving the camera, because a lot of times you’ll shoot good video unintentionally. I don’t have the battery life to be able to leave it on all the time, but I leave it on more than I normally would. I found in my last project, where I was filming fire, that the smoke and heat waves coming off the fire confused my camera’s autofocus, so the camera was trying to find what it was supposed to focus on, which futher accentuated the heat waves and produced a really haunting effect. People asked me how I did it, what it was, where I shot it. It was pretty anticlimatic, I’m sure, to hear it was just a tree off in the distance. And I got the shot strictly because I wasn’t paying attention. The fire had died down and I hadn’t noticed.

    All cameras have particular nuances. That scene probably would have looked different with another camera. I discovered later how to confuse my autofocus when I was trying to set the camera up for playback. The only way you’ll learn your camera’s nuances is to play with it. And be sure to try things with it you wouldn’t normally try. I discovered the autofocus thing when the camera was pointed at my desk at extremely close range. Believe me, there’s absolutely nothing compelling about that desk. It’s 18-year-old particle board.

    And a principle I learned myself: There are a couple of ways I find my best footage. One way is just to fast-forward through it and watch. If it’s compelling at 20x normal speed with fuzzy detail, it’s likely to be compelling when played the way it was shot. The other thing I’ll do is play the footage in my monitor, and watch out of my peripheral vision while I do something else. If it’s good enough to grab my attention, chances are it’s worth using. It’s a brutal way to edit, but if you have to condense several hours’ worth of footage into three minutes, it’s the fastest way I’ve found.

    Dave installs Windows XP

    Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , ,

    We needed an XP box at work for testing. Duty to do the dirty deed fell to me. So after ghosting the Windows 2000 station several of us share, I pulled out an XP CD. It installed surprisingly quickly–less than half an hour. The system is a P3-667 with 128 MB RAM and an IBM hard drive (I don’t know the model).
    It found the network and had drivers for all the hardware in the box. That doesn’t happen very often with Microsoft OSs, so it was nice.

    I booted into XP, to be greeted by a hillside that was just begging to be overrun by tanks, but instead of tanks, there was this humongo start menu. I right-clicked on the Start button, hit Properties, and picked Classic view. There. I had a Win95-like Start menu. While I was at it, I went back and picked small icons. I don’t like humongous Start menus.

    I also don’t like training wheels and big, bubbly title bars. The system was dog slow, so I right-clicked on the desktop to see what I could find to turn off. I replaced the Windows XP theme with the Classic theme. Then I turned off that annoying fade effect.

    Still, the system dragged. I went into Control Panel, System, Performance. Bingo. I could pick settings for best appearance (whose choices are certainly debatable–I guess they look good if you like bright colors and have a huge monitor) or best performance. Guess which I picked? Much better.

    Next, I went into Networking. I saw some QoS thing. I did a search. It’s intended to improve the quality of your network, at the price of 20% of your bandwidth. Forget that. I killed it.

    After I did all that stuff, XP was reasonably peppy. It logs on and off quickly. I installed Office 2000 and it worked fine. The apps loaded quickly–just a couple of seconds. That’s how it should be. If I went in and edited the shortcuts in the Start menu to turn off the splash screens, they’d load instantly.

    WinXP brings up a bunch of popups that I don’t like. If I wanted unexpected popup windows, I’d run a Web browser. I couldn’t quickly figure out how to disable those.

    I couldn’t run Windows Update. It froze every time I tried.

    I found a Windows XP tuning guide at ExtremeTech. I suspect turning off the eye candy will help more than most of the suggestions in that article. I suspect if I dug around I’d find other things. We’ll see if I get some time.

    XP isn’t as bad as I expected, I guess. But I’m still not going to buy it.

    This, on the other hand, is worth a second look. And a third. You can now run MS Office on Linux. No need to wait for Lindows, no need to abandon your current fave distro (at least if your fave distro is Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, Debian, or Caldera).

    It’s 55 bucks. It’s available today. It brings Office 97/2000 and Lotus Notes r5 to your Linux desktop. Other Windows apps work, but their functionality isn’t guaranteed.

    You can get some screenshots at CodeWeavers. It even makes the apps look like native Linux apps.

    How to build a reliable PC.

    Dave Farquhar General , , , ,

    We touched on the topic of reliability last week. I figure I might as well give a more thorough discussion of what makes a PC reliable.
    1. Power supply. I see more power supply failures than any other single component. Good power supplies fail without a whimper and don’t damage the rest of your equipment. Bad power supplies take other stuff with ’em when they die. Antec and Sparkle are examples of good basic power supplies. The power supplies that come in InWin and other brand-name cases tend to be fine as well. A notch above that is Enermax, maker of the ultimate in show-off power supplies, with plated finger guards and odd colors. Top-tier is PC Power and Cooling. If I wanted to build a computer and have absolute assurance it would still work in five years, I’d start with a PCP&C or at the very least, an Enermax.

    Buy more wattage than you think you need. The power supply will run cooler and last longer if you do. Besides, you never know what you’ll want to stick in the case down the road.

    2. Memory. Last time I checked, you could get 64-meg PC133 sticks for under $5. I wouldn’t trust ’em with my archenemy’s work though. Cheap memory may be untested, the PCB may not be a good design, or even worse, it may have chips that were tested and deemed unsuitable for use in PCs (but fine in other less-demanding devices). Unscrupulous makers sometimes buy up these chips and take their chances. It may seem foolhardy to pay $100 for a 256-meg stick from Crucial, but I haven’t just heard horror stories about commodity memory. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I’ve had more than 1,000 brand-name modules cross my desk. Three were defective. I’ve had fewer than 50 commodity modules cross my desk. More than half proved defective. Some wouldn’t even work–the system would just beep at you. The worse ones appeared to work for a while, but the system was always crashing. Don’t take chances on your memory. I tend to buy my memory over-spec as well. Even if a motherboard takes PC100 memory, I go ahead and buy PC133 CAS2 memory. The chips will run just fine at a lower speed, so I have an overengineered system for a while, and if I ever upgrade I’m more likely to be able to take the memory with me.

    3. Motherboards. Buy brand-name boards. I’ve never had an Asus board fail. (Watch one fail next week now that I’ve said that. But I’m happy with the reliability and longevity of Asus boards.) I’ve done well with other brands too, like AOpen, Abit, FIC, and Tyan. I know MSI boards are popular but I don’t have any personal experience with them. Asus has impressed me with their farsighted engineering–in my experience, you’re more likely to be able to upgrade an Asus board in three or four years than others.

    Most people know to check the hardware enthusiast sites when researching a board. I urge you to also check the Usenet newsgroups. You’ll find some good advice. Finding very little on a board can be a good sign too-it’s an indication that a board doesn’t have many problems. Years ago, I was researching the Asus SP97V motherboard, because it was dirt cheap, but it was an Asus. I searched on Usenet and found very little about it–maybe a half-dozen messages. Most of it was just idle chatter. One message was talking about various boards, including the offhanded comment, “The SP97V is a good board for the money, BTW. I’ve used three of them.” That clinched it. Nobody was talking bad about the thing. I had one positive, and very little talk overall, which generally indicates satisfaction. Satisfied people rarely talk about stuff unless its quality blows them away.

    4. CPU fans. Never go cheap on CPU fans. There’s a humongous roundup of currently available fans. Get a heavy-duty fan, even if you don’t overclock. Remember, the CPU you’re protecting is a lot more valuable than the fan. A good fan will keep your CPU well within its specified operating temperature range, and I’d like to think that the pricier fans will have a longer life. Get a ball-bearing fan rather than a sleeve-bearing fan; a cheap sleeve-bearing fan is quieter but it’s also likely to conk out on you in a couple of years if you leave your systems on 24/7.

    Bookmark that site, by the way. Dan’s one of the better technology writers out there today, and he doesn’t take himself too seriously. He’s an entertaining read, explains things well, knows what he’s doing (and he’s pretty open about his methodology), and he’s probably a certifiable genius, but he’s not pretentious. In fact, he seems to enjoy making people think he’s not quite sane. I make sure I pay that site a visit at least twice a week.

    5. Case fans. It’s a good idea to put a supplemental fan in the machine. Two is usually overkill unless you’ve got some really hot hard drives, and it’ll make your computer louder. You can quiet them by manipulating the voltage. Dan’s Data talks a lot about them too, including how to slow them down. For typical users, a simple ball-bearing case fan is sufficient.

    6. Hard drives. IBM currently recommends you not run their drives more than 8 hours a day. So that eliminates IBM from the running. That’s a shame, because they used to make spectacular drives. (I still like their laptop drives better than any others I’ve seen though, and I’m not the only one.) I’ve seen fewer dead Quantum and Maxtor drives than any other brand, although Samsung really has surprised me with their reliability, and the drives are cheap. Seagate has a good reputation but I have very limited experience with their recent drives. Maxtor’s a safe choice at the mid range and high end, while Samsung is tough to beat for the low end.

    7. Cabling. The cables that come with brand-name PC motherboards seem to be of good quality, as are the cables I’ve seen bundled in Maxtor retail kits. If an IDE cable looks flimsy, don’t buy it. Problematic cables slow you down due to the need to retransmit data. Also never buy an IDE cable that’s longer than 18 inches. Longer cables are available, but IDE specs state 18 inches as the maximum. Longer cables may work, but it’s questionable. If you have to reach the top bays in a tall tower case, you’ll have to go SCSI. Sorry.

    Rounded cables will improve airflow, but be careful. Rounding shortens cables, so the wires inside a long rounded cable are even longer than stated. While a relatively new practice on the desktop, I saw rounded SCSI cables in IBM servers and workstations as long ago as 1995.

    Full disclosure and integrity

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

    I feel like I owe it to my readers to disclose a few things, due to the events of recent weeks raising a few questions in some people’s minds.

    Read more

    The penguins are coming!

    Dave Farquhar Linux , , , , , , ,

    The penguins are coming! Word came down from the corner office (the really big corner office) that he wants us to get really serious about Linux. He sees Linux as a cheap and reliable solution to some of the problems some outside clients are having. This is good. Really good.
    My boss asked if it would be a capable answer to our needs, namely, for ISP-style e-mail and for Web caching. But of course. Then he asked if I was interested in pursuing it. Now that’s a silly question.

    Now it could be that FreeBSD would be even better, but I know Linux. I don’t know FreeBSD all that well. I’ve installed it once and I was able to find my way around it, but I can fix Linux much more quickly. The two of us who are likely to be asked to administer this stuff both have much more Linux experience than we have BSD experience. Plus you can buy Linux support; I don’t know if you can buy FreeBSD support. I doubt we will, but in my experience, clients want to know (or at least think) that some big company is standing behind us. They’re more comfortable if we can buy support from IBM.

    So maybe my days of Linux being a skunkworks project are over. The skunkworks Linux boxes were really cleverly disguised too–they were Macintoshes. They’re still useful for something I’m sure. I expect I’ll draft one of them for proof-of-concept duty, which will save us from having to pull a Compaq server from other duty.

    I spent a good portion of the day installing Debian 3.0 on an old Micron Trek 2 laptop. It’s a Pentium II-300 with 64 megs of RAM. It boots fast, but current pigware apps tend to chew up the available memory pretty fast. I recompiled the kernel for the hardware actually in the machine and it helped some. It’s definitely useful for learning Linux, which is its intended use.

    I’ve noticed a lot of people interested in Linux lately. One of our NT admins has been browsing my bookshelf, asking about books, and he borrowed one the other day. Our other NT admin wants to borrow it when he’s done with it. The Trek 2 I installed today is for our senior VMS admin, who wants a machine to learn with. My boss, who’s been experimenting with Linux for a couple of years, has been pushing it aggressively of late.

    I don’t know if this situation is unique, but it means something.

    —

    I spent a good part of the evening at the batting cages. I messed my timing up something fierce. I hit the first few pitches to the opposite field, some of them weakly, but soon I was hitting everything–and I mean everything–to the third-base side. So my bat speed came back pretty fast, and I was getting way out in front of a lot of the pitches. So I started waiting on the ball longer, hoping to start hitting the ball where it’s pitched. The end result was missing about a quarter of the time, slashing it foul to the third-base side a quarter of the time, hitting it weakly where it was pitched a quarter of the time, and hitting it solidly where it was pitched a quarter of the time. Good thing the season doesn’t start until June–I’ve got some work to do.

    Afterward, I drove to my old high school, hoping to be able to run a lap or two around the track. I was hoping for two; realistically I knew I’d probably be doing well to manage one. There was something going on there, and I couldn’t tell if the track was in use or not, so I kept driving. Eventually I ended up at a park near my apartment. I parked my car, found a bit of straightaway, and ran back and forth until I was winded. It didn’t take long.

    I can still run about as fast as I could when I was a teenager, but my endurance is gone. I’m hoping I can pick that back up a little bit. I was a catcher last season, filling in occasionally at first base and in left field. In the league I play in, we usually play girls at second and third base, and we’ve got a couple of guys who can really play shortstop, so I’ll probably never play short. When I was young I played mostly left field and second. I’d like to roam left field again. Not that I mind catching, but there’s a certain nostalgia about going back to my old position.