intel

Thirteen hours! Woo hoo!

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , ,

It’s a beautiful day in the virushood, it’s a beautiful day for a virus, would you be my, could you be my…
Yes, today we hunted down and killed a couple of live Nimda specimens. I actually didn’t find any viruses whatsoever, but I found a number of PCs that I really liked. I kept trying to bet one of my coworkers they would float. Of course, that’s just my diabolical scheme, usually reserved for cantankerous Macintoshes. You get someone to bet you 10 bucks the thing doesn’t float, then throw it in the pond and see what happens. If it sinks, you’re out a problem. And if it floats? Well, that’s just proof that it’s a witch. And what do we do with witches? We build a bridge out of them! No, wait. That’s something else. Burn them!

Victim #1 was a P166 built by a local outfit called Intek. Intek is one of those clone shops that builds PCs out of the cheapest parts you can buy (including stuff even Packard Bell wouldn’t have touched) then sells for the price of a Dell or a Micron. But since it has an Intel processor in it and the place promises same-day service (which doesn’t always happen), CIOs fall for it. Anyway, I’ve seen 486DX2-66s that outperform this P166. And when I put the current version of Norton AntiVirus on it, it quit booting.

Personally, I think it’s time to just take the machine, slap a second NIC in it, and install a minimal Linux on it and make it a network bridge to keep a chatty Mac segment from killing the rest of the network, because that’s about all that PC is ever going to be good for in this day and age. But it’s not my decision.

We had one PC infected with PrettyPark. Of course, NAV deleted Files32.vxd but left all the registry entries behind, so the PC would no longer run any .exe files. I downloaded Symantec’s PrettyPark fix, but it looked, found no Files32.vxd, and pronounced the system clean. But thanks to the registry entries pointing to files32.vxd, no executable would run. So I faked it out. copy con: c:winntsystemfiles32.vxd, type some gobbledygook, then hit ctrl-z. Then, copy con: c:winntsystem32files32.vxd, type more gobbledygook, then hit ctrl-z. Run the fix again. Aha! We’re infected. Shall I clean you up? Why, thank you for asking, please do, kind sir.

Seeing as this PC sits on the desk of the head of the accounting department, I figured it’d be best to have it in working order for him this morning.

So. I’ve now worked something like 51 hours this week. And it’s Thursday. I have no social life. But once that paycheck comes in, I’ll be able to afford to have a very nice social life for a little while…

So I came home about 10:15, after stopping off at a gas station for a tank of gas (I was on E) and a beer. I very rarely drink, but I’ve been so tightly wound this week I figured I could use a little help unwinding. I threw in a microwave pizza, popped a beer, sat down, and wrote this. Now the pizza’s gone and the beer’s empty, and I’m not just tired, I’m also a little drowsy. That’s good. Hopefully that means I’m in for a good night, for the first time this week since Sunday.

And that was the last building that needed scanning. So now I can concentrate on my job. Currently I have about 25 trouble tickets open. Normally I have about four open at once. On any given day, four new ones should come in. On a good day I can close between five and eight. So now that the virus scanning’s done, I think the tickets will stop coming in faster than I can close them, but I’ve got a long road ahead to get caught up. Next week won’t be a 60-hour week, but it won’t be a 40 either.

Let the revolution begin…

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , ,

I was called in to an emergency meeting yesterday morning. I was up to my eyebrows in alligators, but my boss was insistent. I had to be there. So I went. When we sat down, the tone was somber and slightly meandering. The guy who called the meeting just didn’t want to get to the point. Finally it hit me: Layoffs. That’s what this has to be about. So… Who’s gone? I’m not the highest-paid guy in my group, I’m probably the most versatile, and I’m not the most recent hire, so I’m probably safe. I was right about layoffs, or, more accurately, one layoff, followed by a restructuring. And the layoff wasn’t me.
I think we’re a better fit in our new structure (under our old organization we were married to a group that really didn’t like my group, or at least they didn’t like me, and now we’re married to a group that does, for the most part, like my group), and my boss’ new boss is so busy we shouldn’t have to worry about him messing with much. But I don’t like change, and my Scottish clan’s motto, “Fide et Fortitudine” loosely translates into “loyalty and guts” today. The loyalty side of me has some problems with what happened yesterday, but looking at it strictly from a business standpoint, I sure can’t argue with it.

Meanwhile, I needed about three minutes’ worth of quality time with that indignant hard drive to get the data I so desperately wanted. I got it. Next struggle: Getting Windows NT to work properly with eighth-rate hardware. This PC has a generic RealTek 8139-based card (so we’re talking a generic clone of a Linksys or D-Link card here… A clone of a clone), Trident Blade 3D video, ESS 1868 sound, and an AOpen 56K modem (at least it wasn’t a Winmodem). The AOpen modem is, by a longshot, the best component in the machine outside of the Gigabyte motherboard and Pentium II-450 CPU. I’ll say one thing for brand-name hardware. Drivers are easy to come by and they generally install correctly the first time, every time. It took me an hour to track down Blade 3D drivers that work, then it took me a good 30-45 minutes to get those working. The Realtek drivers at least worked the first time. I never did get the ESS drivers working. The AOpen modem driver went off without a hitch, mostly because it’s actually a controller-based modem. I stand by my assertion that you can buy $10 components and spend $100 worth of time trying to get each of them working right, or you can buy $50-$75 components from a reputable maker and make them work the first time. Seeing as the more expensive components will probably work well together too and give better performance, it’s a no-brainer for me. Gimme Creative or Guillemot video and sound cards and pair that up with a 3Com or Intel NIC and I’ll be a happy camper.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about my bookstore adventures. I want to go read for a while.

OK, I’m back for a second. I can’t resist. Not quite four years ago, I had a conversation with another Journalism major/history minor (one who, unlike me, actually finished his history minor, if I recall correctly). Over dinner with my then-significant other, he told me all about his theory of generations, as she looked on, entranced. The nasty breakup that soon followed that conversation overshadowed it, and I didn’t think of it again until last night, when I spotted the book Generations, by William Strauss and Neil Howe, on the shelf of a used bookstore. Curious, I looked at it, and sure enough, this was where that guy got his ideas. It was marked six bucks. I bought it, started reading, and gained some insight on myself. Why do I go ga-ga over the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and get chills whenever I read about his personal life because it all feels so familiar? He and I are from parallel generational cycles. His generation thought like mine does, so we grew up in similar peer environments. Why do I understand people 10 years older than me so much better than people 10 years younger than me? I was born 7 years before the end of my generational cycle.

Weekend adventures and Low-profile PCs

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

Saturday. I finally managed to drag my sorry butt to work about 11 or so. I went to pay my rent at 10; the office was closed even though it was supposed to be open. The manager called me yesterday about 10, wondering where I was (gee, could it be I was at work, and that sometimes I have things to do other than sit by the phone waiting for her to call?) complaining that they needed to get into my apartment to fix a leak. I called and left a message saying go on in. She called back a couple of hours later and bawled me out for having a busted hose (I didn’t bust it) and for having stuff in the closet with the hot water heater, in violation of fire code. “The maintenance guy said you had a bunch of stuff in there, and that busted the hose, and that’s a violation of code so you have to clean it out.”
I checked when I got home. Apparently a snow shovel (necessary because they never clear the parking lot) and a kitchen mop sitting in the corner opposite everything constitutes “a bunch of stuff.” I put the check in an envelope, and since there was no one there to complain to, I scribled a note on the envelope. “I moved my mop and my snow shovel out of the closet. Apparently that constitutes ‘a bunch of stuff.'”

And Friday night I got out my lease and looked at it. I’d never read it thoroughly and I was shocked. For one thing, playing a musical instrument is strictly prohibited. Even with headphones. That’s a load of bull. If you can play a guitar on the Metro in Washington D.C. as long as you use headphones, then if I feel like strumming my bass inside the four walls of my apartment and no one can hear it, that’s my business. But I found what I was looking for. Since I’ve been here two years, the penalty for breaking the lease is one month’s rent. Losing me for the remainder of the lease hurts them more than the month’s rent hurts me, so I started looking for houses.

One of the girls at church (her name is Wendy) had mentioned earlier in the week that houses in Lemay are inexpensive, and Lemay, despite what Gatermann says, isn’t a bad place. For one, there’s a great pizza joint in Lemay. There’s reasonably easy access to I-255 to get around St. Louis. Plus two grocery stores and a department store. And if Wendy’s comfortable walking to her car at night in Lemay, my black trenchcoat and I will be just fine.

At work, an unexpected but totally welcome distraction happened. My phone rang. I was hoping it was the girl from church, but it was an inside ring. I picked up. “This is Dave,” I said.

“Hi! It’s Heather.”

That’s the name of my best friend from college, and it sure sounded like her voice. But she lives in Florida and she’s been bouncing from dot-com to dot-com since college.

“I saw your car outside so I thought I’d give you a call. I’m here with Olivia and we’re just checking on houses with my computer. I thought you might like to meet her.”

Oh. That Heather. She’s a twentysomething Kentucky native who’s lived in St. Louis for about three years. Olivia is her four-year-old daughter. She’s been looking for a house for about the past six months. Extremely nice girl, easy to talk to. Pretty too.

Talking to Heather and meeting Olivia promised to be a whole lot more intersesting than watching SpinRite run on that failing hard drive that forced me into the office on my day off, so I walked over to her area. Olivia saw me first. She hid behind a chair. I recognized her immediately, because Heather’s cubicle is practically wallpapered with pictures of her. I knocked on the side of the cube wall. Heather looked up. “Hi!” she said. She looked around and saw Olivia behind the chair. “Come out, Olivia.” Olivia shyly emerged. “Say Hi.” Olivia waved shyly and said hi. Yep, she’s just like her mom: way tall, and very shy at first. Olivia crawled up into Heather’s lap and started playing with her adding machine. She whispered something to her mom. She looked at her, puzzled. Olivia whispered it again. “You tell him,” she said.

“I like to dig through the trash,” Olivia said.

“Why do you like to dig in the trash?” I asked her. Heather laughed and explained. Olivia keeps everything. When she throws something away, Olivia usually goes digging for it. I told Olivia I used to dig through the trash when my mom would throw my stuff away too.

“Oh! I haven’t told you. We made an offer on a house!” Heather said, visibly excited. I asked her about it. Two-bedroom, nice heated garage, small yard but within walking distance of a park… in Lemay. I smiled.

I told her congratulations, and told her I started looking last night. She said there was a lot of stuff in Lemay. Meanwhile, Olivia and I played catch with beanbags. She has a lively arm on her, not that that should be too surprising. When you’ve got long arms like hers and get them extended, you’ll have some pop. Her first throw hit me below the belt, if you know what I mean. I saw it coming, couldn’t get my arm down there fast enough, and grimaced. Olivia laughed. I don’t think Heather saw. I picked the beanbag off the ground and tossed it back to her. No lasting effects–it was a beanbag, after all. But guys instinctively grimace whenever anything heads that direction, even a Nerf ball. It’s instinctual. Olivia’s next throw sailed past my outstretched hand and plunked the back of Heather’s chair.

“I’m glad you weren’t the second baseman the last softball game I played,” I said to Olivia.

So Heather and I talked houses while Olivia and I tossed beanbags around. I’m like her, I like South County and don’t really want to live anywhere else. She’s been looking long enough to have a pretty good idea what’s available. She printed off a couple of houses for me, and told me a couple of places in Lemay where several houses were available.

Eventually, I thanked her and left. I told Olivia it was nice to meet her.

Then last night, after none of my Saturday plans panned out, I wandered out in search of a haircut and the new Echo and the Bunnymen album. I found neither. I bought some used stuff: Echo and the Bunnymen’s self-titled 1987 release which I’d never gotten around to buying, Peter Gabriel’s fourth album, Peter Murphy’s surprise 1989 hit Deep, and a New Wave compilation that contained a couple of good songs from bands who only recorded one good song, plus a bunch of stuff I didn’t remember ever hearing. The sales clerk reacted to my selections. “Uh oh. Echo and the Bunnymen. Hmm. Peter Murphy. Who was he with?”

“Bauhaus,” I said.

“Was he in Love and Rockets too, or was that the other guys from Bauhaus?”

“Love and Rockets was Bauhaus without Peter Murphy.”

Yep, I was earning the right to wear a black trenchcoat last night. Too bad it’s August. I was impressed that the clerk recognized Murphy, seeing as he was probably born the same year Bauhaus broke up and Murphy’s only had one solo hit, though his post-Bauhaus stuff is really good.

So I hopped in my car, popped in the compilation CD, and went exploring. I found the area Heather told me about. But mostly I explored Lemay–what kind of stuff could I find? Being fairly close to a park would be nice. I found the pizza joint my dad and I used to go to, many years ago. Just about everything I need is pretty close together, and not terribly far from the big commercial district. The houses are older, which can be good and bad, and like Heather warned me, there are some areas that are a little bit redneck, but you’ll find that in a lot of parts of St. Louis. And like Wendy said, Lemay’s not a ritzy place and the people who live there know it, so the pretension you see in a lot of parts of St. Louis isn’t present there. That’s nice.

Low-profile. Dan Bowman sent me a couple of links yesterday to low-profile cases that would be suitable as low-end servers or routers. Over at CSO they’re selling Dell low-profile Pentium Pro-200 systems for $99, with 64 MB RAM, 2.1 gig HD, and a NIC. A Pentium II-266 runs $129. Specs vary on the PII.

That got me thinking and looking around some more. Over at www.compgeeks.com, I found a couple of other things. An ultra low-profile LPX case (sans power supply) is running $10.50. It only has three bays, but that’s plenty for a floppy, CD-ROM, and single HD. An Intel HX-based LPX mobo (with built-in video) runs $19. It’ll take up to a P200, non-MMX though. The LPX riser card is $4.95. CPU availability is limited there; a P90 runs five bucks. Back at CSO, a P166 runs $15.

If you’re really cramped for space, building an LPX-based system is your best bet. But the CSO deal on the Dell is tough to beat. You won’t build an LPX system that even comes close for $99.

Friday hodgepodge.

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

Now are we going to take viruses seriously? Top-secret Ukranian documents leaked out to the Ukranian press, courtesy of SirCam, including the president’s movements during the upcoming independence celebration. An assassin’s delight, to be sure.
Lessons learned:

1. Macro viruses can do damage without trashing your computer. Sometimes they can do more damage if they don’t trash your computer.
2. Don’t count on anti-virus software to save you. SirCam hides out in places McAfee Anti-Virus doesn’t look, and Norton Anti-Virus is reportedly not 100% effective against it either, especially if a document was already infected with another virus.

What can save you? Download your software from reputable sources only, and don’t open strange attachments. I used to say it’s much better to miss the joke than to wipe out your computer. Now we can amend that. It’s much better to miss the joke than to wipe out your computer or get the president of the Ukraine killed.

Motherboards. The Good Dr. Crider e-mailed me (among others) earlier this week asking for motherboard advice. He wanted respectable power for under $200. Interestingly, just the day before I went looking at mwave.com for motherboards for no particular reason. I spied the ultra-basic Gigabyte GA-7IXe4 motherboard (AMD 750-based) for 66 bucks. It won’t win any glamour contests, but it’s a fine meat-and-potato board at a fabulous price, and it’s not made in China so you’re not supporting an immoral government with your purchase either. You can pair that up with a $36 Duron-750 and a $10 fan and have a great start on a fantabulous bang-for-the-buck system. Of course, with a budget of $200, it’s possible to step up to a Duron-950 and still have a little left over.

Speaking of bang for the buck, here’s a review of the first commercially available SiS 735-based board. Put simply, right now it’s the fastest DDR motherboard you can buy. Pretty impressive, especially considering it’s coming from budget-minded ECS. I can’t wait to see what Asus or Abit will be able to do with it. But I know I’ll be waiting. ECS has manufacturing facilities in China.

Why the big deal about China? I’m not exactly in favor of slave labor–we freed our slaves about 135 years ago and we should be ashamed it took us that long. But slave labor exists in China today. I’m tired of China provoking the United States every chance it gets. I’m tired of China persecuting people who believe in Christianity and/or democracy. Need more reasons? OK. Fair warning: Some of the atrocities on this site will make you sick.

Completely boycotting China when buying computer products is tough. Really tough. For example, Intel’s Craig Barrett publicly advocates Chinese manufacturing. Does that mean Intel’s next fab will sit on Chinese soil? Fortunately, a Web search with a manufacturer’s name, plus the words “manufacturing” and “China” will almost always tell you conclusively if a company produces any of its stuff in China. If you want American-made stuff, good luck. Supermicro and AMI make motherboards in the States, but neither has a very diverse product line.

Need a dictionary? OK. Visit www.wordweb.co.uk.

Fare thee well, Alpha…

Dave Farquhar General , ,

Fare thee well, Alpha, if Intel will allow it… I’m not holding my breath. The greatest CPU of all time, by a long shot, looks to be no more. Compaq pulled the plug on Alpha, essentially selling it out to Intel. Another case of far superior technology dying because its owner had no idea what to do with it.
But Intel, with its terminal case of NIH syndrome, isn’t about to let some other company’s technology thrive if history is any indicator.

One story in The Register likened replacing Alpha with Intel’s Itanium as replacing a Ferrari with a Yugo.

In my ill-fated Integrating Linux Servers with Windows Networks, I stated that we’ll miss NT on Alpha, and I presented Linux as a way to preserve a shop’s investment in Alpha-based servers. Indeed, an Alpha running Linux ought to be useful for many, many years, with or without Compaq’s blessing.

I guess I should be happy to see that IBM isn’t the only company that comes up with great ideas and great technology and then has no idea what to do with it. But I’m not. I hate seeing good engineering go to waste, especially when the beneficiaries of that waste are perpetual underachievers like Microsoft and Intel.

Building a Win95 box

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , , , ,

Building a Windows 95 box? Why? You nuts?
Why not? You’ve got old hardware, you’ve got a ton of licenses to run an obsolete operating system… It’s a good match. Remember, a Pentium-120 was a titan of a PC in 1995. You couldn’t get anything faster. Running Windows 95 on a Pentium-120 with 24 MB RAM, 1.2 GB HD, and 8X CD-ROM in 1995 seemed like running Windows 2000 on a decked-out 1.4 GHz Athlon today. Maybe it seemed even more extreme than that; I remember selling a good number of 486DX2/66s and DX4/100s in the summer of 1995. They were low-end, yes, but they were at that $1,000 sweet spot. You’d pick up a DX2/66 for $800 and a 14″ monitor for $200, and sometimes as a weekend special we’d bundle the two together with a printer for $1,099 or something.

We had a Pentium-120 to rebuild at work, and we had its Win95 license, so it made sense to just rebuild it with the stuff it had. I know Jerry Pournelle had a really hard time building a Win95 box a few months back. I didn’t have much trouble at all, so I might as well document the pitfalls.

First of all, I used vintage hardware. That helps. Win95 was designed for 1995-era hardware. This PC probably dates from 1996 or so; it has the strange pairing of an Intel 430HX chipset and a Pentium-120. The 120 was more frequently bundled with the earlier 430FX chipset; by the time of the HX, the 133 was considered low-end, the 200 high-end, and the 166 was mainstream. The video card was a plain old Cirrus Logic-based PCI card; no issues there. AGP sometimes threw Win95 for a loop. None of that here. While DMA drivers certainly improved the 430HX, they weren’t necessary for stable performance. In other words, a 430HX-based board with a Cirrus video card works acceptably straight out of the box, with no additional drivers.

Other hardware: A Mitsumi 8X CD-ROM. I don’t remember exactly when 8X came out, but for the most part an IDE CD-ROM is an IDE CD-ROM, from a driver standpoint. A Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16. That was a very common, very well-supported sound card. A DEC 450 network card. Those DEC cards can be a real pain to get working sometimes, but Win95 surprised me and detected it straight up.

But Setup wouldn’t run initially. It took some figuring, but I solved that problem. My colleague had booted with a Win98 boot disk I made over a year ago. He did an FDISK and format to wipe the drive, but he formatted the drive FAT32. The original Win95 didn’t know about FAT32, so Setup was throwing a hissy fit when it saw it. I did another FDISK and format, switched to plain old FAT16, and Setup installed very happily.

Once I got Setup to run, it installed, and quickly at that. And with absolutely no issues. Remember, Win95’s footprint was only about 35 megs. It doesn’t take long for an 8X drive to deliver 35 megs. And the system booted quickly. I didn’t sit down and time it, but I’m used to calling a minute a reasonably fast boot time, and this thing didn’t seem slow to me at all. A little optimization would help, of course. A little logo=0 in c:msdos.sys goes a long way.

Running Win95 on newer hardware is possible, but remember, it’s been nearly four years since it was the mainstream OS. And you can have a lot of headaches trying to do it. Windows 3.1 is in the same boat–it’s downright hard to find device drivers for modern video cards. Then again, I can think of circumstances under which I’d want to run Win95. I can’t think of any compelling reason whatsoever to run Win3.1 at this point in time. (And there wasn’t any compelling reason to run it in 1994 either.)

If I had to build up a Win95 box today and could have whatever components I wanted, I’d probably look for an Asus P55T2P4, easily the best Socket 7 motherboard ever manufactured. (In 1997 when I was in the market, I opted for an Abit IT5H instead and I’m still kicking myself.) That board is most naturally paired with a Pentium-MMX/233, but with unsupported–but widely-documented online–voltage settings, you can run more recent K6-2 CPUs on it. The P55T2P4 allows an FSB of up to 83 MHz, but for stability’s sake, I’d keep it at 66 MHz, or possibly 68 MHz if the board supports it (I don’t remember anymore). You can run a K6-2/400 with a 6x multiplier at either of those settings and be very close to its rated speed. Then I’d use an ATI Xpert 98 video card. Yes, it’s a bit old, but it’s probably the best all-around PCI card that’s still reasonably easy to find. Win95 won’t recognize it without manufacturer-supplied drivers, of course, but that’s not so bad. This combination would give you surprisingly good performance, stability, and minimal difficulty of installation.

Anyway, that adventure reminded me that a Pentium-120 can still be a viable computer. Vintage software like Win95 runs well on it. Office 95 has more features than most of us use, and it’s faster and more stable than the recent incarnations. It also has fewer strings attached. IE 5.01, although recent, would run decently on a P120, as long as you left out Active Desktop. Acrobat Reader 3.0 will still read the majority of PDF files on the Web, and it’s smaller and faster-loading than more recent versions. Do a Web search; you can still find it online.

Don’t get carried away with what you install, and a P120 can certainly surprise you.

Two chipsets from the AMD front

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

Yesterday AMD formally unveiled and shipped the AMD-760MP chipset. Right now there is one and only one motherboard using it, the ritzy Tyan Thunder K7, which runs about $550 minimum. (Wholesale cost on it is rumored to be $500.) Considering its 64-bit PCI slots, two built-in 3Com NICs, onboard ATI video, onboard Adaptec SCSI, and four available DIMMs, that’s not a half-bad price. It’s obviously not a hobbyist board. This dude’s intended to go in servers.

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Building up a new Linux server

Dave Farquhar General , , , ,

I built a simple PC yesterday. The server that hosts this site is just too overloaded, and I was getting ready to order some parts when I spied a Celeron-366 board and CPU sitting in a case under my desk. I had trouble getting it working reliably, but I figured I’d give it one more shot. I’d used Hyundai memory in it previously; I slipped in a stick of Crucial, and it fired right up. Interesting.
I watched the temperature monitor in the BIOS and wasn’t too happy to see the Celeron-366 running at a nearly constant 60 degrees Centigrade. Modern CPUs typically run about 40-50, and each 10 degrees halves life expectancy. So I put a beefier CPU cooler on it, but the chip continued to run at around 60. So I looked up the Celeron at Intel’s site, and found the maximum temperature for Celerons is 85 degrees. So I was running a good 25 degrees below max, and it looked like I wouldn’t get below 60 degrees without active cooling, so I put the cheaper CPU cooler back on. Out of curiosity I overclocked the chip to 550 MHz for a while to see what would happen. The temperature rose to 65 degrees within seconds but stayed fairly constant. So it would appear that running at 550 would be safe, but I stepped back down to 366. I don’t want to overclock a system that I’m depending on for anything. For a few minutes I stepped it down to 330 MHz (using a 60 MHz bus) but it didn’t cool down any more after doing that, and running on a 60 MHz bus would give me a serious performance hit, so I stepped it back up to 366.

I scrounged around looking for parts and found enough to assemble a computer, but not a very good one. Being this close, I didn’t really want to do mail order and wait for parts to come in. So I checked CompUSA’s web site to see if they had anything competitive. Indeed they did–a 50X Delta-brand CD-ROM drive for $20 after rebate. Seeing as CompUSA always has some hard drive for $99-$109, I figured I’d make a trip over there. Sure, I could order a hard drive for $82 online, but a CD-ROM drive would cost me $40, so I’d make up the difference and have something that day.

When I got there I found another special–a 20-gig CompUSA by Maxtor hard drive for $99 with a $50 mail-in rebate. A lady was there examining the drive’s packaging. I picked one up. “4500 rpm, 128K buffer,” I read. “Where’s the speed?” she asked me. I pointed to a sticker on the side. “Wow. And I thought 5400 was slow enough.” She set the drive down and went looking at the drives on the shelf.

I was impressed. That was the first time I’ve ever met someone in person who was concerned about hard drive speed.

Now, about that speed… Yeah, it’s slow (I suspected the package actually contained a Quantum Fireball lct–Maxtor and Quantum have completed their merger) but it’s a cheap way to store a mountain of data and in an emergency it can boot an OS. At $2.50/gig, why not? So I grabbed one. I also grabbed the cheap 50X CD-ROM. I poked around the store a while, didn’t find anything else that caught my fancy, so I checked out. The cashier offered a replacement plan on the two parts. I declined–on stuff this cheap, I’ll just bank that money and take my chances.

The Fireball lct is indeed a poor performer. It would have been a middling performer in 1997, but this isn’t 1997 anymore. But I can live with it. It has one distinct advantage: It’s whisper-quiet. This PC makes very little noise. A fanless microATX box with a VIA C3 processor and a Fireball lct would be nearly silent and still fast enough to be useful. My other PCs sound like wind tunnel fans in comparison to this. And this drive will do for a testbed, if not as a production server–it’ll still be far faster than the P120 I’m using. I’d say there’s a 75 percent chance that system will end up hosting this site. The hard drive isn’t the bottleneck here–my DSL connection and CPU power are. The Celeron will solve the CPU problem, and hopefully with enough power to spare to run Mod_Gzip so that Apache can send compressed data to recent Web browsers, and thus solve the bandwidth issues too.

Anyway, I went ahead and put the 50X CD and Fireball lct in an old AT case, along with the Celeron-366 motherboard and 128 MB of RAM, a Cirrus Logic-based AGP card only a server could love, and a D-Link PCI 10/100 NIC to give myself a very basic meat-and-potatoes system. I noted the CD-ROM drive doesn’t fit as snugly as a Toshiba or an NEC and it definitely looks cheaper (but I’ve seen cheaper-looking drives still), and for 20 bucks I won’t complain. Mandrake 7.2 installed in about 15 minutes, but I found I was too aggressive–Mandrake’s hard disk optimizations and this motherboard’s chipset don’t get along. So I reinstalled with less aggressive settings. I made the mistake of doing a kitchen-sink install so it doesn’t run as well as it should. Basically at this point I need to tear it down and install, I dunno, BIND, Apache, Samba, and the kernel. That’s enough for what I want this machine to be able to do. I should probably look into building a kickstart script to do the job so I don’t have to answer any questions.

But that’s a project for another day.

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SiS rises from the ashes, and tries to bring AMD and DDR with it

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

Well, I’m back from Bible study (I was teaching on one of those things that can change your life, so I put all kinds of pressure on myself, and I have no idea whether I delivered), but we won’t talk about that right now. No surprises on the Daynotes circuit today; the Weblogs circuit is mostly talking about Kaycee still. I think I’m done with that. I haven’t had time (or will) to go do the cable re-routing necessary to get my new Duron-700 working perfectly.
So, what to talk about…?

How about DDR chipsets?

VIA makes more DDR chipsets than anyone else, and they’ve surprised everyone during the past 18 months, producing chipsets that were much better than anyone expected while Intel produced chipset after chipset that was, for the most part, far worse than anyone’s come to expect of them. Current Intel chipsets work, but they’ve yet to deliver a truly worthy successor to the classic BX chipset. But so far, VIA’s DDR chipsets so far have been disappointing, which makes me wonder if inability to follow up is contagious.

AMD makes a pretty good DDR chipset–at least it gives better performance than PC133 SDRAM, unlike ALi’s DDR chipset and VIA’s DDR chipsets most of the time, and, to be fair, unlike Rambus chipsets–but finding a motherboard based on it can be difficult. AMD’s not very interested in producing the 760, and it shows.

So what’s the DDR chipset to get for AMD CPUs?

Right now, it’s the AMD 760. But very soon, it looks like it’ll be the SiS 735.

Yes, I know, it sounds like I’ve been smoking crack. SiS has a well-deserved reputation for making underachieving chipsets. Just ask Steve DeLassus what he thinks of his SiS 530 integrated video. He’ll throw an Okidata 180 printer at you (ouch) and then tell you it’s almost as bad as the service you get from GPS Computer Services, that’s what.

And the SiS 735 probably isn’t ready for release just yet, as the problems discussed in this review seem to indicate–though whether the problem is with the chipset, the prototype board, or the BIOS, who knows. But the benchmarks indicate the SiS 735 is about 5 percent faster than the AMD 760-based FIC AD11 while costing much less.

Yes, the AD11 isn’t the best-performing 760 board out there, but then again, prototypes aren’t known for stellar performance either. So this sounds promising. Based on these results, it would seem that an Asus or an Abit could produce a very nice-performing board with the SiS735. And as for SiS’s ability to produce a good chipset? Well, these are strange times. Two years ago, AMD bet the company on the Athlon. They had a new, expensive fab they couldn’t afford, dwindling market share and reputation, and a history of botching product releases. If they did everything right and Intel did everything wrong, they had a chance of surviving. Well, AMD executed while Intel fumbled and fumbled. And VIA executed. Intel got caught off guard, and while they’re still king of the hill, they’re embarrassed.

And there was a time, about five or six years ago, when SiS chipsets were actually very sought after. SiS was the first company to produce a chipset that truly brought out the best in Cyrix CPUs, and people who were concerned with raw applications performance sought them out, because the SiS/Cyrix combination outperformed anything Intel was making at the time.

Can SiS rise again? Maybe. It looks like we’re about to find out.

Dual AMD processors, coming soon definitely maybe

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

The latest on AMD. I read yesterday that dual motherboards supporting Palominos (the next rev of the Athlon core) will be released June 4. These will be server-oriented boards, and thus very pricey. It’s an interesting strategy, because I would think Dual-AMD configurations would be more popular in the enthusiast market and the pointy-haired bosses are leery of putting anything but Intel CPUs in their server closets (better not tell ’em their Sun, SGI, and IBM RS/6000 servers ain’t Intel-powered, huh?). More on that in a second. The rumor I heard (and most of this should probably only be counted as rumor) said the boards will require 450W power supplies with a special supplemental connector, similar to the P4’s extra connector. No idea if it’s the same as the P4’s supplemental connector, but that would have made a lot of sense.
Obviously, if the boards will be out and use Palominos, that means the Palomino will have to be out on or before that date if there’s to be any hope of selling these boards.

The only part of this that I would bet my life on is the 450W power supply requirement. AMD probably could release it in that time frame, but they’re selling every CPU they can make, in spite of the slowdown in the PC market. So why the server play? Easy. AMD owns the enthusiast market and can pretty much count on owning that for a while yet. But AMD wants a piece of the server market, because that’s a slower-moving, higher-margin market. To get that, they have to have industrial-strength boards from top-tier makers and a solid chipset. AMD doesn’t have a lot of chipset experience, let alone SMP experience, so they want to make sure they get this right. That, I think, is the reason this has been so long in coming. They’d rather miss some target dates and deliver a solid product than come in right on time with something that’s still buggy.

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