Building up a new Linux server

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.

More Like This: Hardware Linux

04/04/2001

A great hardware site. I found this yesterday when I was searching in hopes of remembering a long-departed name of a hard drive manufacturer. The name I couldn’t put my finger on was Miniscribe. The great site, http://www.redhill.net.au, is a hardware guide, written by an experienced Australian clone shop, that’s unusually straight-shooting. It’s the only mention I’ve seen on a hardware site of the Gigabyte 7IXE4, a low-end Duron/Athlon board that sells for about 80 bucks.

Especially interesting to me is the history. They discuss drives in detail, and though it’s hardly a complete memoir of every drive that was ever on the market, it hits the common ones. Want to know where Western Digital got its sterling (and not very deserved) reputation? Read on. I’m not so sure of their statement that Maxtor was bought out by Hyundai (Maxtor certainly never mentions that), but their history seems about as complete and accurate as any other I’ve seen, and it’s interesting to read the reviews of ancient hard drives. At least to me.

Motherboards and CPUs get a similar treatment. Good stuff.

Monitors. My NEC FE950 finally came in yesterday. It’s gorgeous, and takes up the same amount of desk space that early 17-inchers took. Mine looks like it got pretty banged up either in manufacturing or shipping though, so I’ll have to arrange an RMA. I hate to be picky, but after spending $400 on a monitor, I don’t want something with a beat-up case. It could be a cosmetic flaw, or it could be an indication that this monitor had an incident with a forklift. I’m not taking that chance.

The vendor will advance me a replacement, which is good. I’ll probably opt for that. I hope I don’t get nailed for shipping, but I suspect I probably will. Lesson learned: Order from Staples.

As for the monitor, I can’t tell much difference between it and a Trinitron. I’m not sure if it’s using a Mitsubishi DiamondTron tube or something of NEC’s design (NEC and Mitsubishi merged their monitor operations last year), but whatever it is, I like it. Fabulous monitor, and great value for the money. As far as I can tell, it’s indistinguishable from the FP series other than the FP’s higher maximum resolution, which isn’t comfortable for the monitor’s size anyway. The only fault I can find with this FE is what appears to be an incident with a forklift or some other heavy machinery.

Once again I should emphasize this point: never ever scrimp on a monitor. It might be tempting to get a no-name monitor so you can afford more memory or a faster CPU, but memory and CPU prices drop much faster than monitor prices, and they always have. Plus, their useful life is much shorter. A good monitor can outlive two or three computers, so in the long run, you save money with a premium monitor.

Why was I stumbling over the name Miniscribe? I was recalling my first-ever building of a PC. I was salvaging parts from a 286 with a blown power supply. I couldn’t get a replacement power supply because it was a Samsung PC, largely proprietary. The power supply had cooked itself because a poorly placed IDE cable totally blocked its vents, so it never had proper cooling. This was 1993, my first year of college. The PC was owned by my fraternity. We went and bought a barebones 386DX-25–just a motherboard in a case–and went to work. The video card and floppy drives and I/O cards moved without a hitch. But the Miniscribe 40-meg IDE drive gave us problems. I couldn’t get it to work, and I doubted I had much future building PCs. I took it into the shop, and they couldn’t make any sense of it either. Their most experienced tech remembered that Miniscribe had been bought out by Maxtor, so he called a contact at Maxtor. The drive turned out to be an 8-bit IDE drive that worked on some 286s but would never work in a 386 or better. They took the drive in trade for a used 40-meg IDE drive using the more conventional 16-bit interface and transferred the data for us. We got a couple of years out of that PC, though it was never a speed demon. But it was functional and cheap.

Of course I recovered from those early stumbles. Within a couple months I was selling PCs, and a couple of months after that I was working as a tech myself.

The wages of spam. And finally, I saw yesterday that Nasdaq suspended trading of PSInet and the company is considering bankruptcy. Excellent. During its not-troubled-enough life, PSInet was frequently accused of operating a safe harbor for spammers, and back in the days when I bothered to try tracking down spammers, I traced large percentages of it to PSInet.

I do not like green eggs and spam. I do not like them, Sam I am.

Hopefully this is the start of a trend. I’ve seen estimates that the traffic generated by spammers increases the costs you and I pay for Internet service by a full $2 per month. That’s just the infrastructure costs our ISPs have to bear and pass on to us. And of course it’s a huge waste of time.

01/05/2001

Mailbag:

Video card; Optimizing Windows; Maxtor drive

A links day, mostly. I spent most of my free time last night conducting an interview, the fruits of which just aren’t ready for here yet. But man… There really is something that’s better than messing with computers. It’s chasing down a story. (Purely my opinion, of course. I can hear the “Shaddup, ya slimy journalist!” mutterings now.)

I messed around the last couple of days with importing messages and addresses from the Mac version of Netscape Communicator into Outlook. That’s an adventure. I’ll have to write that up, maybe this weekend. And for the first time in several years, I’m actually doing Windows NT administration on the domain level again. Granted, it’s not a production domain–the purpose is strictly research. But it’s kinda nice to move back into that realm for a little bit, though I don’t want to stay in that role too long.

I had tons of mail, some of which I got to and some I didn’t. I put off the less time-critical stuff until the weekend. But keep it coming. Frankly the mail’s better than the stuff I come up with on my own, I think.

Search request of the day. Every once in a while I get a weird one. Yesterday’s was, from Google, “hate Southwestern Bell.” Who doesn’t?

But first the big news. Linux 2.4 is out. Its release seemed like a bit of a letdown, with Linus Torvalds saying pretty much, “Oh, by the way, it’s out.” Expect to see distributions based around it soon, but probably not tomorrow.

What’s new about it? Scalability and speed, mostly. And I found the 2.3 series had slightly better memory management. Hmm. Seems quite the opposite of Microsoft, doesn’t it, when new releases require less memory than the previous version did? Of course the bloated GUIs will eat up all the memory the kernel frees up.

Duron vs. Celeron. From the head-to-head comparisons I’ve read, the Celeron/i815 combination is a better productivity box, by a hair. But the Duron/KM133 combo, though slow for productivity, is a surprisingly good low-end gaming box. And even in its weak spots, it’s still better than anything we had a couple of years ago. And I hold firmly to my statement that no computer made since 1997 is truly obsolete.

And on to the links…

A place to buy SCSI stuff. The great people over at Storage Review love Hypermicro. They’re at www.hypermicro.com .

Everything you ever wanted to know about SCSI. (I’m on a SCSI kick.) It’s at www.scsifaq.org .

Fix your VIA-based mobo. All the latest VIA drivers are over at www.viahardware.com/download/index.shtm .

Gigabyte GA-7DX preview. Get your AMD-760 fix over at www.xbitlabs.com/mainboards/ga-7dx.html . It’ll probably be a few weeks yet before you can buy one though. But this board sure looks good.

Mailbag:

Video card; Optimizing Windows; Maxtor drive

Optimizing a K6-2

Now I remember why I’m here. I was at my mom’s and stepdad’s, and of course the inevitable topic came up.
“I’ve got Kristin going through your book and implementing some of it,” John says. “Our computer is SLOW.” So you know what I did… I fired it up and gave it a look myself. (Besides, they couldn’t get Duke Nuke ‘Em to run and I’ve been working on an article on getting DOS games running inside Windows so I welcomed the chance to practice.)

The story: It’s an 18-month-old whitebox clone. AMD K6-2/350, 64 megs RAM. No idea what motherboard. Old non-UDMA 4.3-gig hard drive. Trident 9750-based video, and a C-Media ISA sound card. Oh yes, and of course, a Rockwell-based PCI softmodem.

A computer is a team, and what we’ve got here isn’t exactly the computing equivalent of the 1962 Mets, but I’d rate it about as highly as the 1996 Kansas City Royals. Making matters worse, it was loaded down with way too many gee-whiz features. I slimmed it down to what’s necessary, got its boot time down to well under a minute, and got the software running decently.
I’m guessing there are millions of PCs like this one out there. Buying a new one isn’t an answer, because if you buy one PC like this, chances are the next one you buy will have the same problems. You’ll probably get another softmodem. You’ll probably get another cheapo sound and video card. You’ll get a superfast CPU. But the problem is, that’s like adding the 1999 or 2000 edition of Mike Sweeney or Jermaine Dye to the 1996 Royals. You’ve still got a last-place team. The difference is, now you’ve got a last-place team with a .300 hitter or two in the heart of the lineup. Makes the team more fun to watch, and you’ll win a few more games, but the fundamental problem that got you into last place is still there.

Sure, I’d recommend some hardware upgrades for this beast. A SoundBlaster Live! sound card, for sure. An ISA sound card can eat up 35% of available CPU time. The SB Live! uses 1-2 percent. An inexpensive TNT2-based video card, certainly. At about $70, it’ll free up a lot of CPU time and speed the video along. I’d give serious thought to a newer, faster hard drive as well. A Maxtor 30-gigger (5400 rpm but still a massive improvement over this drive) runs $99 at CompUSA this week. Deals like that are common. And it wouldn’t hurt to get a controller-based modem as well. Zoom has such a beast available that’s getting good marks (I need to find the model number) for under $100.

Do all that, and you’re looking at about $350-$400 worth of upgrades. That’s a substantial chunk of a new computer, yes. But it re-uses the stuff that’s still serviceable under the hood. And these peripherals are all good enough to move on if you decide to replace what’s left (essentially, the motherboard).

So there’s a huge market for Optimizing Windows. People need this kind of information. Now, how to get it to them…? O’Reilly hasn’t figured out how to do it. It’s up to me.

Good thing there’s a marketing genius at work I can talk to. I’ll be bouncing this off him this week to see what he thinks. Then I get the first full week of December off. Time for a marketing blitz.

I’m still on the road. So if you’ve e-mailed me, it’ll be a day or two before I can get back to you. I’ll field all that when I get back.

Boot multiple operating systems for free

~Mail follows today’s post~

XOSL doesn’t seem to like my Promise Ultra66 controller. At least not all the time. I don’t like that. I also don’t like how XOSL installs itself in the root directory–my poor root ballooned to over 40 entries after installing it. That’ll cause some system slowdowns. I don’t like having any more than 16 entries in there if I can avoid it.

Fortunately you can install XOSL to a dedicated partition, and that looks to be the better method.

But when XOSL works, it seems to work well. It’s slick and versatile and gives you a great deal of freedom over how and where you install your OSs, as well as how many you can install (and let’s face it, with 30-gig drives selling for $99 at CompUSA, running multiple operating systems is going to get common).

And I see from Brian Bilbrey’s site that patents may accomplish what the RIAA could not. Makes me wonder why one of the RIAA members didn’t just buy Fraunhofer Institut (who owns the applicable patents on MP3) and start charging outrageous royalties immediately. That’ll kill new technologies faster than anything — just ask Rambus.

~~~~~~~~~~

From: “Dustin D. Cook” <dcook32p@nospam.htcomp.net>
Subject: Windows Me
Dave,

Here’s my two cents on Windows Me.

I have been testing this operating system for some time now before I begin pre-installing it on new computers. We’ve run the gamut of stress tests, benchmarks, and usability tests, and we have some interesting results.

All tests were run on multiple machines with a minimum system being an AMD K6-2 500 with 64MB RAM and a Voodoo3 3000 graphics card. The best system tested was an AMD Athlon 1.0 GHz with 512 MB Mushkin PC133 2.0 memory and
a GeForce2 GTS 32MB DDR. We used the same HDD for each machine. It is a Maxtor DiamondMax 45 Plus (ATA/100, 7,200 RPM).

Windows Me should take home a gold medal for speed. It booted quickly, it loaded programs at blistering speeds, and it performed very well in our 3D tests. All-in-all, Windows Me is about one percent faster than Windows 98 SE. This came as something of a surprise to me. I was expecting slightly degraded performance due to the additional system overhead of Internet Explorer 5.5 and the new features of Windows Me. Either Microsoft did some serious “tweaking” to their code, or I’m missing something entirely about this operating system.

Stress tests were a different story. Occasionally, Windows Me would lock-up on us for no apparent reason. The same computer running Windows 98 SE would never falter during our tests. Actually, sometimes Windows Me would lock-up when we were not even running the tests! We replaced some hardware in the machine, but it did this on all of the test PCs. This was a big problem for us. We still haven’t officially tracked down the killer, but we think it involves the new version of Internet Explorer. We had already completed our tests before the new service pack was released, so I don’t have any data from that version. The stress tests involved opening a 25 MB Excel 2000 spreadsheet and minimizing it; open eight browser windows and loading miscellaneous things like Flash movies, several animated GIFs and PNGs, and several Java applications; having The Matrix DVD-ROM’s menu playing in WinDVD 2000; and running Unreal Tournament at 1280x1024x16bpp with our custom “movie”. Windows 98 SE performed admirably, but, as I had mentioned earlier, Windows Me couldn’t do it.

In the usability tests, we had some elderly people try out each computer. This isn’t really a test that can be easily replicated, but overall Windows Me seemed easier for them to use.

What’s my opinion on Windows Me? I think Microsoft made a fairly good product. I’m not very impressed by the lack of native DOS support. I frequently use that to diagnose customer’s computers. What do I do if I have forgotten my boot diskette? I return to the shop and grab one instead of making one right there. The stability issue is a big concern of mine. I’ll try to reproduce those results after downloading the new Internet Explorer service pack, and I’ll write back to you with those results. The speed is commendable. I appreciate the extra “oomph” that Windows Me appears to have behind it. The boot time is quite impressive!

My prize goes to Windows 98 SE. Speed is a very good thing, but when it comes at the cost of stability…we have a problem. My customers don’t want their machine freezing every time they try to open http://thesiliconunderground.editthispage.com/ . 😉

Sincerely,

Dustin D. Cook,
A+ Campus Computers
Stephenville, Texas – USA
~~~~~

Thanks for the info!

You can add DOS support back in with a utility available at www.geocities.com/mfd4life_2000 — that was one of the first things I did after installing WinMe. As for stability, IE5.5SP1 might help. Running 98lite (www.98lite.net) to remove IE 5.5, then replacing it with IE 5.01 (or not at all) could help. I’m not at all impressed with IE5.5, so I’m inclined to speculate the blame lies at its clumsy feet.

I’ll keep experimenting with it myself. And I’m hoping my page is simple enough that it won’t crash any browsers. 🙂

Hardware developments

Hardware news. Lots of stuff today. We’ll take it one at a time.
AMD to hit 1.5 GHz by January. Intel intends to release a 1.5 GHz P4 in late November/early December. AMD’s a bit behind that (assuming Intel will deliver, which they’ve been having difficulty doing lately), but the 1 GHz Athlon performs similarly to a 1.4 GHz P4. Good news for us, bad news for Intel. AMD intends to release a 1.2 GHz Athlon within a month, along with an 800 MHz Duron.

In related news, the AMD 760 chipset (the SMP-enabled one) will be released this year.

The P4 problems are related to the use of PCI graphics cards and Intel has reportedly fixed the problem. Although allowing much higher clock rates, the P4 is less efficient than the P3, so a 1.4 GHz P4 is expected to give comparable performance to a 1 GHz P3. It won’t be until Intel hits 1.5 GHz and higher that the new architecture will give any performance advantage over what’s available now. Not that you can find a 1 GHz P3…

Memory prices are down. If you’re looking to buy, this is a good time. You never know when they’ll rise again, or fall for that matter.

Maxtor buys Quantum. In a consolidation of disk manufacturers, Maxtor bought the disk manufacturing wing of Quantum for $2 billion, making Maxtor the world’s biggest disk manufacturer. Quantum’s tape operations will be spun off into a new company, to be named Quantum.

NaturallySpeaking arrives, plus W2K hardware compatibility issues

Naturally Speaking is here. Along with my SB Live! card. But alas, I’m not. I’m up to my neck in a brochure for my church. I’d grade my writing an A or A-, my editing an A, my design a B+, and my photography a C. Not perfect, but it gets the job done, and there’s no time for perfection. And I never claimed to be anything more than a competent designer and I never claimed anything at all about photography, besides owning a good camera.
There’s no time for much of anything, I’m afraid. I even blew off the last person in the world I want to blow off at this point in time this weekend. Such is life. Three pages down and three to go, so I have no idea how much I’ll have to say in the next few days. I’ll have a lot to say when it’s finally over, I’m sure.

———-

From: “Gary M. Berg” Subject: Maxtor drives and Win2K SP1

Dave,

The reference I remember seeing (and could locate quickly) was in Paul Thurrott’s Winfo Daily Update for 8/11: (deleted because it’s copyrighted material, but it basically says some IDE and SCSI Maxtor drives report incorrect sizes or even data loss). I’m not sure what to make of this, and I suppose it might be reasonable to check with Paul to see if he knows anything more yea or nay on this

———-

Thurrot’s a pretty reputable source. I’ll keep my eyes peeled. I’m running W2K on a Maxtor but it’s not SP1 yet.

Thanks.

“Apple lost,” Steve Jobs says

Apple obsession continues. See if you can guess who said the following:

The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That’s over. Apple lost.

ArsTechnica readers may already know the answer. The answer (drum roll) is, none other than Steve Jobs, in an interview that appeared in the Feb. 1996 issue of Wired. Jobs was, at the time, CEO of NeXT, maker of overstyled and overpriced Unix boxes (though by then they were out of the hardware business and just selling NeXTStep, their Unix variant). Apple, of course, bought NeXT a few months after Jobs said this, and in a strange turn of events, Jobs ended up becoming Apple’s CEO.

It was an interesting interview. In it, Jobs said he didn’t think there was any way Microsoft could seize control of the Web (they’ve tried, and they’ve succeeded far more than Jobs probably anticipated–exhibit the large number of sites that only look right in Internet Explorer), but I found I agreed with a surprisingly large percentage of the things he said–particularly when he talked about things other than computers.

Here’s the link if you’re interested.

——-

From: Scott Vogt

Subject: Win2k On A Maxtor..

Dave,

I am running Windows 2000 with SP1 on a Maxtor 40gig 7200rpm drive with no troubles at all.

Great site, Glad to see you back!

Scott

———-

Thanks, both for the answer and the compliment.

Sound card and hard drive troubleshooting

Sound card woes. Gatermann recently ran into some problems with sound cards forcing his Internet connection to drop. It had literally been six years since I’ve seen a problem like that before, but he kept running into it. Finally, it dawned on me: Try changing slots to force it to use a different interrupt. Therein was the silver bullet. The problem didn’t go away completely, but the culprit arose: the Sound Blaster 16 emulation. So I had him go into Device Manager and put the SB16 emulation on a different interrupt, and the problem went away.
It’s been forever since I’ve seen an honest-to-goodness interrupt conflict. This particular PC has every expansion slot filled with something or other, which is why he ran up against it. Keep that in mind: Just because we have PCI and plug and play these days, doesn’t mean you won’t ever see an interrupt conflict. On a well-expanded system, this ancient problem can occasionally rear its ugly head (while Microchannel required their cards to be capable of interrupt sharing; PCI only *recommends* it–so not every PCI device can share an interrupt, particularly if an ISA device has grabbed it. Alas, Microchannel fell victim to IBM’s greedy overly restrictive licensing terms and raw-dead-fish marketing, so as a result we have cheap PCs today but more headaches than we necessarily need. Speaking of raw-dead-fish marketing, I could mention that the Amiga’s Zorro bus had true plug and play and hundreds of interrupts from Day One in 1985, but nobody wants to hear that. Oops, I said it anyway.)

This problem used to happen all the time when people would put their modems on COM4 and a serial mouse on COM2 (or COM1 and 3). Since those ports by default shared interrupts with one another, you got goofy symptoms like your Internet connection dropping whenever you moved the mouse. People don’t configure their COM ports that way anymore, which is what’s made that problem so rare.

I think I finally got that G4 deployed. Wednesday it decided it didn’t want to shut down, and I had to reinstall the OS to fix it. Then on Thursday, it decided it didn’t want to recognize the mouse button anymore. I still don’t know what exactly I did to fix that–I booted off a spare MacOS 9 partition, ran a battery of disk repair tools and a defragmenter, and the problem went away. So while Mac users can snicker about interrupt problems, their machines aren’t exactly immune to weird problems either.

——-

From: “Gialluca, Tony”

question: RE Optimizing Windows and Temp files

Hi Mr. Farquhar,

In you book on page 112 you discuss placing temp files on a ramdisk. On this page you show an example where:

Set temp=ram disk letter:\temp Set tmp=ram disk letter:\temp

Shouldn’t you also include changing

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer\Volum eCaches\Temporary files\folder] to “ram disk letter:\temp” also ??

Per the description

([HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer\Volu meCaches\Temporary files\description]) says: “Programs sometimes store temporary information in a TEMP folder. Before a program closes, it usually deletes this information.\r\n\r\nYou can safely delete temporary files that have not been modified in over a week.” The only potential pitfall that I can think of is if windows or programs (say during installations) need this area to remain persistant through reboots, even though the files may be of
a temporary nature…

Your thoughts would be appreciated …

Respectfully,

Tony

———-

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t know that registry key existed (nor did the book’s technical reviewers, evidently). That registry key, too, should be changed, yes. Thanks!

You are correct that if a program does a hard reboot (rather than just exiting to real mode and reloading Windows), you’ll lose the contents of the ramdisk and thus the temp folder. Fortunately, most programs seem to use the temp directory the way they’re supposed to–for temporary, fleeting things. Now if they’d just learn to clean up after themselves…

Of course, this also applies to my advice on creating a temp partition, on page 62.

Thanks much; this is very good information.

———-

From: “Gary M. Berg”

Subject: Maxtor hard drives

Since you’ve been talking about WD and Maxtor hard drives…

I heard rumors just after Win2K SP1 came out that the service pack had problems with machines with Maxtor hard drives. I’ve not been able to find much of anything else on this. What have you heard?

———-

That’s a new one to me. Maybe another reader has heard something, but it sure seems odd. I can’t imagine Microsoft didn’t test SP1 on the major drive manufactuers’ drives (Fujitsu, IBM, Maxtor, Quantum, Samsung, Seagate, and Western Digital), and with Maxtor being one of the Big Two in retail….

Once I get my current big project off my back this weekend, I’m half-tempted to try it just to see. Unless someone already has…

Sounds cards, hard drives, and initial dual G4 impressions

The underwhelming dual G4. I had a conversation Tuesday with someone who was thinking about ditching his PII to get a dual G4 because he thought it would be faster. I guess he thought if he got VirtualPC or SoftWindows, a dual G4/500 would run like a dual PIII/500 or something, plus give him access to all the Mac software. Nice try.
I’m sure one of these dual G4s would make an outstanding Linux box, but the loss of binary compatibility with all the x86 software is something. Sure you can recompile, but there are those instances where that isn’t an option. And under Mac OS 9, that second CPU sits idle most of the time. Photoshop and a couple of other apps use it, but the OS doesn’t–certainly not to the extent that Windows NT or a Unix variant will use a second CPU.

I’m also very disappointed with the hardware. The dual G4 I’m setting up right now has a 124-watt power supply in it. Yes, 124 watts! Now, the PPC chips use less power than an Intel or AMD CPU, and the G4 uses a microATX-like architecture, but they know full well that graphics professionals are going to buy these things and stick four internal hard drives, a Zip, a DVD-RAM, and a gigabyte of RAM inside. Do that, and you don’t have much punch left to power such “non-essentials” as the video card, extra disk controller, and CPUs… This will cause problems down the line. It would seem they’re paying for the extra CPU without increasing the price dramatically by cutting corners elsewhere.

The G4 remains an excellent example of marketing. IBM could invent sushi, but they’d market it as raw, dead fish (which is why they’ve become a non-contender in the PC arena that they created, with the possible exception of the ThinkPad line) while Apple continues to sell sand in the desert. Remarkable.

AMD pricing. The Duron-600 is a great buy right now; according to Sharky Extreme’s CPU pricing, it’s as low as $51. My motherboard vendor of choice, mwave.com, has the Duron-600 with a Gigabyte 7ZX-1 and fan for $191. Outstanding deal. I’d get a PC Power and Cooling fan for it to replace whatever cheapie they’re bundling.

I prefer Asus motherboards to everything else, but the performance difference between the Gigabyte and Asus offerings is really close (Asus wins some benchmarks by a hair, Gigabyte wins others, with Asus being a bit better overall but we’re talking differences of under 1-4 percent, barely noticeable). The Gigabyte boards cost about $30 less than the Asus. I’m thinking if I were getting a Duron for a value system, I’d go Gigabyte; if I were looking for a Thunderbird-based performance system, I’d go Asus.

I plan to see how Naturally Speaking fares on my Celeron; if it’s not quick enough for me I’ll probably retire my trusty K6-2/350 and replace the board with a Duron or Thunderbird.

Voice recognition. I got my Andrea ANC-600 mic on Monday. Since Naturally Speaking and the SB Live! card hadn’t even shipped yet, I went ahead and put the ANC-600 on my Celeron-400 (still equipped with an ESS sound card) and fired up ViaVoice. The ANC-600 eliminated the background noise and increased accuracy noticeably. ViaVoice still tended to mess up a word per sentence, but at least it was in the neighborhood (it had real problems with past/present tense) and its speed was a little better, though it still tended to drag behind me. The SB Live! should help that; as should the newer software’s reliance on newer processor architecture (ViaVoice 97 was designed with the Pentium-MMX in mind, rather than the PII/Celeron or something newer). I await Naturally Speaking’s arrival with much, much greater confidence now.

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From: Dan Bowman

Maxtor HDDs

And the CompUSA down the street always has a good deal on them…

This week, Office Depot is selling Maxtor 15gig drives for $99. That’s a “Warlock’s Mirror” for a little over $200 with tax.

dan

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Thanks.