Problems
So we had a thunderstorm this morning and it fried the Ethernet card in my regular computer.
I’m typing this on a laptop that I just bought today to tide me over until I can build a new box. The best thing I can say about it is that is was cheap. It doesn’t have the worst keyboard I’ve ever used, the ASR Teletypes that were standard in the military and early mini-computers will always have that place, but it is nothing a typist wants to live with for long.
I’m using strange software until I have time to do some downloading and the individual who created the touch-pad on this machine has obviously never used a keyboard, given that it is located exactly where you want to rest your wrists.
I may or may not get into the bank accidentally destroying my ATM card, and then having their ‘card printer’ commit suicide when they tried to replace it, but it has been that kind of week.
I may or may not be around.
44 comments
Sorry to hear about your ‘puter Bryan! You didn’t have those fancy protected power bar thingies then (not that they always work). I got one of those Belkin with the $150k guarantee when my PSU got fried last year in a storm. I don’t know of anyone whose ever tried to collect on this supposed *insurance* if their ‘puter get’s fried whilst using one. Hope I never have to find out! 😆
Bu a curious coincidence… I was looking at a new notebook today! 😀 Around the AU$700-$900 mark. For some weird marketing reason, they count the HDMI port as a USB port, and all the ones I saw only have Wireless ‘N’ and none had support for ‘G’! Oh… and they all have crappy 6-cell batteries with short *operational* battery life (Another marketing gimmick! They quote things like *10 hour battery operation*, but that’s on standby!) They want you to pay $80-$120 for a 9-cell if you actually want to use it on the road. I found a place in Hong Kong that manufactured 9-cell batteries for most notebooks, for about $30 (via an eBay shop.) I got one for my old Dell Inspiron when it’s battery finally died. Had it two years now and it works great! Almost all manufacturers are crooks! Hmmph! 😉
Anyway… good luck! 😀
It was on the correct side of an APC UPS, but the voltage was generated by induction in the Cat 5 cable, which isn’t supposed to happen, well, unless lightning strikes in your front yard. Actually the wiring surge protection on the mains took care of everything before it got to the UPS, but induction works on any wire available.
Belkin pays off as long as you have registered everything affected with them, including serial numbers, and kept your proofs of purchase to determine costs, pictures of melted equipment isn’t enough.
The box is a Toshiba with an AMD C-50, 2GB RAM, 250GB HD, DVD burner, Win 7 Home Premium, for under USD$300, tax included, and it will go to linux after I salvage the data. to the new box.
The file manager in 7 really sucks, I have to get something that provides a tree so I can use it. They stuff things in hidden places and you can’t find anything to use it. For text oriented people every new version is worse.
IIRC, some UPSs have a Cat 5 pass-through. I was fortunate: I never found out if mine worked or didn’t.
In a city, there’s so much stuff for lightning to strike that I don’t worry over the possibility of suffering what happened to you, a direct strike in your yard. (Not that I’m not prepared…) I was far more worried back in my cycling days, riding every day along a long, straight, flat path beside a bayou, where I was occasionally the tallest thing around when thunderstorms came up suddenly. Now that scared me!
Yes! Win7 file manager is terrible! Here’s a review of some free ones:
http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-file-manager.htm
I’ve heard from a friend that this isn’t a bad one for W7, called Unreal Commander (freeware). Has FTP & archive support built in also. Never used it myself, so can’t say how good it is. 🙂
http://x-diesel.com/
I use Total Commander, and have for years, when it was called Windows Commander, before M$ scared Ghisler off with a letter from their lawyer for using the word “Windows”. *shrug*
My housemate uses XYplorer full (licensed) on her win7 x64. Seems OK. 🙂
The Belkin power board I have has provision for ethernet, phone & A/V cable protection also. And yeah, had to reg everything with them.
Do you remember the old XTree Gold on DOS? 😉 I did some work on that and have the final (unreleased) version before they closed shop (the masters are on 5.25″ floppies!) 😆 v4.1beta (I think from memory). Anyway, I got nostalgic one day, and found someone had done a fairly good copy for win (with a lot of extra features) called ZTreeWin. I got a copy, but haven’t really had time to play with it. I found a copy of the old 4DOS v7 when looking through my archives and installed it on my XP box. Still works in a DOS shell. I have a ton of batch scripts I wrote many years ago! 😉 😀
Ahh, well… Good luck (again!) 😀
Ouch! Sorry to hear about your computer. I don’t find laptops easy to type on, but I guess you could hook a keyboard to it? At least if you build your new computer, you will know it’s done right.
Steve, I have one six-foot Ethernet cable running between the computer and the modem, so it isn’t on a surge protector, even though the power, DSL, and phone all are. I thought my little DC fan was going to lift off, it still runs.
Yeah, I see the fools with aluminum masted sailboats out on the bay when these storms are predicted and am surprised that no more than two or three are struck each year. Most of the lightning in the area hits the bay, since the cable company finally grounded their system to stop the rash of exploding televisions.
Kryten, I don’t have to remember XTree, I still use it on my Mother’s computer, which is still a DOS machine. Thanks for the suggestions, I’ll try them after I get a mouse for the sucker, Apparently just resting the cursor on a selection is enough to launch it, so I have to stop that from happening.
The dates on the directories say it was built a month ago, but I had to wait for 28 updates the first time I connected to the ‘Net. What a piece of work.
I appreciate your thoughts, OWL. I may just get a wireless mouse and keyboard, instead of just a mouse, and then I can use them with the new box as well. Actually, when you build your own, you have to accept the problems, instead of being able to blame someone else.
LOL @ XTree! 😀 Heh… Well, as I *knda, sorta* own it now (well, the latest Beta version I was working on), I can give you a copy if you want. It works great and is a bit faster than the released 3.x series. You may already have a 4.1 though… After I was annoyed because of broken agreements with the owners, I released it into the wild (on BBS’s mostly) in the late 90’s. 😉
*Hell hath no fury like a programmer screwed!” :twisted”
I decided to have a quick look at that Unreal Commander, it’s not actually freeware, shareware is more like. You can use the main basic features for free, but advanced (like FTP) you have to buy a license. *shrug* Other than that, it does work fine. 🙂
I’ll probably check out a couple of them, and I don’t mind paying for software that works, it’s being charged outrageous amounts of money for software that doesn’t work from people who won’t fix it, and treat me like a criminal.
I burned the recovery discs for the machine and now I can uninstall all kinds of crap that they preloaded on the computer.
I used Chrome which was preloaded but it has already done a couple of annoying things, like not asking where I want to put downloads. Locating the file I downloaded was how I discovered what a major PITA the new file manager is.
I avoid changing anything on my Mother’s machine, because she is strictly a user, and is not fond of ‘new, faster, better’ software.
Actually Bryan, it seems I was mistaken about Unreal Commander. You do need a license key, but you can get one free for personal use. 🙂 Have to use the license manager under *help*, set to *personal* and *manual* when asked. It’s a bit annoying… but what isn’t these days! 😉
Yes, the Google Chrome is annoying. It seems Google assumes (possibly rightly) that people who use it are idiots. 😉
SRWare Iron is a much better way to go! Lightweight, faster, doesn’t snoop (chrome collects everything), and has an adblocker. Check it out. 🙂
Oh! Another invaluable piece of software is:
XP-Antispy
Works with all Windoze ver’s. Just don’t go nutz and turn off everything! 😉 😆
I can help if you need it. 🙂
I’m not turning things off, I’m going to uninstall all of the promotional crap that is included out of the box. You have to leave IE because so many programs use it for displaying Help files and other purposes, but I removed Outlook from the XP machine years ago, because I only look at text e-mails and won’t launch the browser to see something unless I really trust the person sending it to have verified it wasn’t malignant.
The biggest pain is going to be removing Norton, and that requires a special program that you have to get from them. I’ve done it before, but it is annoying.
The thing is that I use a computer as a tool, not a toy. In the phantom pursuit of ease of use, M$ and others are trying to turning them into toys. I’m text-based, so all of the graphic enhancements are wasted on me, and just get in the way of what I want to do. There is no ease of use if every time there’s a software upgrade you have to re-learn how to perform basic tasks like file management.
You need huge hard drives if you can’t find files.
That’s why XP-AntiSpy is useful. 🙂 It shows all the Win settings (and a LOT of crap you will never need is on by default) and an explanation of what each setting does. That way, you can decide what you do or don’t want. Win out of the box is a resource hog, especially on a lower spec’d machine, and especially Win 7! IE for eg will d/l a stuff in the b/g without you knowing and it won’t tell you. 🙂 😉
M$ is anything but fair and benevolent. *shrug*
I will definitely check it out because it sounds a lot easier that all of the manual removals I did on XP after Norton slowed my machine to a halt. I went looking for a worm / virus / trojan and discovered that the security was smothering the machine. There was a lot of other crap installed by HP for my camera and printer that really bogged things down too, usually by loading IE to show what a wonderful job it was doing. [bleechhhhhhh!]
I hear you m8. 🙁 Yeah… been there… yadda. Symantec are one of the worst offenders (not just boated s/w, but as insults to reason and sanity also)!
You may find this amusing (I do every time I think of it, usually accompanied by a shake of the head), but I have found that the Win Firewall and M$ Security Essentials actually do a decent job on Win 7 & XP (The firewall part on XP isn’t as good as Win7, but good enough for most people). I discovered the MSE is based on the Bitdefender core, which I have used for years and it’s kep’t me safe. Amazing… even M$ can get something right! 😆 😉 You can turn off the annoying Security Center without disabling either (stops the endless annoying popup alerts)!
There is a site called “The Windows Club” that has some good info and free tools. One I use on Win7 is Ultimate Windows Tweaker, a free Tweak UI for Windows 7 (It does those things XP-AntiSpy doesn’t. XP-AntiSpy is primarily geared to stop Win/M$ snooping etc. 🙂
But my all time fave, where I have been a member for years, for all Win’s from XP to 7 is Black Viper’s Website. The guy is a genius! (Not a word I use often). 😉 🙂 Lot’s of very useful info, tips, and warnings! He explains what bit’s do what and why, and why you do/don’t need them. 🙂 (Look under ‘Guides’ –> ‘Windows 7’).
Good luck my friend. I hope all this helps ease the pain a bit. It has helped me over the years. 🙂
Thanks for all the leads, Kryten, I really appreciate hearing from someone who has already been through the aggravation, so I know there is a ‘tunnel’ that might actually have ‘a light’ at the end.
the individual who created the touch-pad on this machine has obviously never used a keyboard, given that it is located exactly where you want to rest your wrists.
That is one of the things keeping me from buying a Windows laptop. Macbooks have huge touchpads that are one big button and it’s impossible to *not* touch it with the meaty part of your hand while typing, but see, Apple isn’t staffed by idiots and, uhm…. IGNORES WRIST-SURFING INPUTS ON THE TOUCHPAD.
I mean, this isn’t rocket science. Any modern multi-touch-capable touch pad has the hardware to do this kind of thing. But I went into Fry’s and tried out the top of the line Sony, HP, etc. laptops… and every single one of them either had a touchpad the size of a postage stamp (i.e. useless), or surfed when I was trying to type. Because, y’know, writing a driver to actually control the hardware that will detect wrist-surfing inputs would, apparently, cost too much and raise the price of each laptop by $1 or something stupid like that. Siiiiiigh. I am *so* tired of paying the Apple Tax, but while Microsoft seems to have it together a lot more than they used to (turn on the MS Security Essentials and Windows 7 is actually reasonably secure and capable, albeit as bloated as a pig in a bread factory), the vendors are such cheap-ass nincompoops that even the top-of-the-line Windows based notebook computers are a reeking pile of dung. Meaning, if you do buy a Windows notebook, buy a cheap one and consider it disposable. Which appears to be what you did ;).
– Badtux the Geeky Penguin
I was going to buy a netbook to tide me over, but this was only $30 more and it has a numeric keypad and a 15-inch screen.
A wireless mouse solved the big problem, so now I’ll strip the old machine, and after I build the new box use the laptop for a hurricane back-up.
Among the many things you don’t know you need until they are gone is the scroll wheel. Reading web sites without a scroll wheel was a real PITA, my site included.
I’m helping my housmate get a new notebook. I found out that most based on the Intel Mobile HM65 Express chipset were recalled and *refurbished* (ie. the faulty MoBo was replaced with a newer Intel B3 stepping 6-Series chipset MoBo). One of the only companies to acknowledge this is HP (which I find almost amazing). Anyway, some great deals are to be had here!
A HP Pavilion DV6-4020TX RRP is $1,699. From a company here called GreysOnline (kinda Aus equiv of eBay), can get it for $699 plus with an upgraded HDD (320GB -> 750GB) and a BlueRay Combo Drive instead of the standard DVD drive. And because it was a factory refurbishment after a product recall, it still has new Warranty etc. People might be surprised actually how many notebooks are actually *refurbished* before they get them new. At the Apple Center, we did it all the time. *shrug*
GeysOnline: HP Pavilion dv6-4020TX
Due to a recall announced by Intel earlier this year, these HP notebooks have been re-worked with new Intel B3 stepping 6-Series Chipset Motherboards. These have been expertly installed by an Authorised HP Repair Centre on behalf of Grays Online.
A complete refurbishment was not required, as these items have not been used or sold to end user customers.
The main problem with the earlier chipset was that they would overheat badly.
With the money saved (she had $900 for a new notebook), I’m installing a Seagate Momentus XT HDD (A hybrid magnetic & SSD drive) for $112, adding 4GB RAM (Kingston $56) and getting a Cooler Master Notepal U3 modular Notebook stand/cooler (has 3 fans that can be rearranged to cool the hotspots, $33). Plus extending the Warranty to 3 years for $168. All up, it’s slightly over her $900 budget, but she forgot to allow for the warranty extension anyway and has the extra, and the original 750GB HDD goes into an external 2.5″ USB/eSata case). This notebook has eSata also, handy! 🙂
*Buyer Beware!* Indeed! 😉 😀
Sounds like a very good deal for your housemate, but more than I want to spend on a machine.
I bought a stop-gap machine, until I can build my new one, and I don’t need the ‘bells and whistles’, just a solid box that does what I want.
Of course. 🙂 She does a lot of multimedia stuff, so needed a fairly grunty notebook, but it’s very difficult to do on a sub $1,000 budget!! (People do love to give me challenges!) She got lucky. 🙂 As well as a 2nd gen i7, it has one of the best dedicated graphics systems in a notebook (for under $2,000 anyway). If it was for general purpose/occasional use, I would have recommended something a few hundred $ cheaper. 🙂
Heck, I still have an old Gateway from ’98 that was then one of the top multimedia systems available! Even had a hardware MPEG De/EnCoder & was one of the few with a DVD burner, cost me over $3k! Now it’s worth nothing (but still works! Does vid’s very well.) 😉
If I were in your situation, I would have done something similar. I don’t believe in spending money unnecessarily. And really, these days, definitely cannot afford to! 😉 🙂
One thing I ALWAYS recommend to anyone getting a Notebook… Get the extended warranty!! Via experience I can say that Notebooks will usually experience trouble in the first 2-3 years. After that, they will either run forever, or break, but it’s cheaper to replace than repair after 3 years anyway. 🙂 And it’s cheap insurance. If nothing happens, lucky you! I don’t bother with PC’ extended warranties, because parts are cheap and easy to install (well, for me anyway).
Kryten, there’s one reason *not* to get an extended warranty — if you bought a “disposable” laptop like Bryan did, where if it breaks after the original warranty is out, you shrug and send it in for recycling. Or if, as I do, I use a laptop breaking as an excuse to buy a new one with the latest greatest technology :twisted:. Actually, the last time I had anything break on a laptop, it was on an HP, where one of the fans decided to die. That was back in the days of the Pentium IV when laptops were over an inch thick and had enough fans in them to serve as hovercraft (as well as an awesome 40 minute battery life). I also had an HP power supply self-destruct on another HP laptop, but I bought a new power supply, used it for another year, then gave it to an out-of-work drywaller who couldn’t find jobs because he didn’t speak Spanish so he was trying to retrain for another building trade where speaking Spanish was not a requirement (yet) but needed a computer to do so (yes, I know this person personally, no, he didn’t ask for it, I had to pretty much shove it on him). But anyhow, there is a problem with the HP notebooks with the ATI graphics chips that affects those who do gaming — they won’t accelerate OpenGL games, just DirectX games. This is apparently a driver issue because Apple uses the same graphics chip in their latest Macbook Pro machines and it accelerates OpenGL just fine there. But thus far HP has been utterly silent on solutions to the problem. Granted, the fault is with ATI, which has produced completely flaky drivers recently (for the ATI card in my desktop gaming machine I have to turn off the “video acceleration” setting because otherwise attempting to view YouTube videos locks up the whole computer, the only reason I don’t dump the ATI card and put an nVidia card back in is because nVidia cards don’t work in IOMMU mode and I occasionally use this machine to test out virtualization stuff via that front-loading slot), but of course that fact doesn’t really help you run your OpenGL stuff fast, which is the whole *point* of having a discrete GPU onboard, to accelerate things that are bog-slow with the on-chipset Intel GPU. HP Fail. So get a laptop with an nVidia GPU if you’re wanting to run all games, even though the nVidia GPU isn’t quite as fast and uses a bit more power (the reason why HP went ATI — speed and power consumption — looked good on paper, sigh!).
Anyhow, the closest I’ve come to having an Apple laptop break is that I apparently managed to break the wire to the front LED on my first unibody Macbook when I swapped out the hard drive, and said LED quit working. I no longer buy the Apple extended warranty because it’s a waste of money — if Apple laptops break, it’s within the first year (during the 1 year warranty).
Regarding the Momentus XD hybrid, yes, awesome drive. I am actually using it here on my gaming desktop machine (which has a front slot for an SSD or 2 1/2″ drive) as my boot drive because it’s faster than desktop SATA drives. But if you need 750GB of capacity, the WD 7200 rpm 750GB drive is almost as fast *if* you partition it properly. Most people partition their drive in one big partition because that’s easy. But as you install stuff on the drive, it gets scattered all over the place. Few people are going to install more than 200GB of programs on their hard drive, the rest of what they have is music, pictures, and movies, so if you create a 200GB OS drive then devote the rest to Windows “smart folders” for those purposes (or symlinks if on MacOS), your system boots *almost* as fast as with the XD. And the WD may be 7200 rpm but supposedly pulls the same amount of power as the 5400 rpm 750GB drives. I don’t know how they managed that, but it’s nice to have a faster drive without harming the ability to use your laptop unplugged, which is half the fun of having a laptop computer.
– Badtux the Geeky Penguin
Oh, sure (warranty). I meant it as a general thing for notebooks in the $500+ or so range. *shrug* If people can afford to toss it if it breaks after the std warranty has expired, good for them. 🙂
I saw another HP at Greys with a 17.3″ and better spec’s for $949 (RRP: $2,199.)
Intel Core i7-2630QM (4C, 2.00GHz/6MB/5GTs)
8GB DDR3 RAM (2 x 4GB SODIMM’s)
1.5TB SATA HDD (2 x 750 GB hard drives)
Blu-Ray R/RW with DVD+/-RW Dual Layer optical disc writer
17.3 inch HD+ (1600 x 900) LED Backlit BrightView Infinity display
ATI Radeon HD 4650 with 1GB of dedicated GDDR5 video memory
10/100/1000 LAN
802.11 b/g/n WLAN
Bluetooth 3.0
HP Integrated DVB-T/Analog TV Tuner (configurable)
BEATS Audio with Triple Bass Reflex Subwoofer, Altec Lansing speakers
HP Pavilion Webcam with Integrated Digital Microphone
Digital Media Card Reader (5-in-1)
HP Mobile Remote Control
1x HDMI, 1x VGA, 3x USB 2.0, 1x USB/eSATA, 1x RJ-45 ports
8-cell travel battery pack
Again with the latest MoBo upgrade. One of the comments/customer reviews was interesting. 🙂
As a general rule, I stay away from HP products, and rarely, if ever, recommend them. I have no idea about their inkjet printers now, but up until I was forced to use one a few years ago, they were all garbage! 🙂
Yes, I have an XD drive in my PC. One thing to remember is that the 4GB NAND is ONLY a read cache! However, it’s fairly smart and get’s better over time to cache the app’s you use most often. If you use a lot of different app’s often, the performance increase isn’t that great (for anyone else interested). 😉 🙂 I think I read an AnandTech review before I decided to get it. They tested against a WD VelociRaptor, and an SSD. In some cases, the XD was faster than the VelociRaptor. One test was booting Win7. After 3 boots, the XD went from 33 sec to 15 sec to load, the VelociRaptor took 35 to 21 sec’s. The Patriot Inferno SSD took 10 sec’s. Not bad at all!:)
I usually have 2 (or more) HDD’s (I currently have 1 x 500GB XD, 2 x 1TB + 2TB eSATA). I patition the primary HDD with OS boot partitions. I currently have XP & Win7 @ 100GB each, Scientific Linux 6.1 x86_64 & Ubuntu Studio 11.04 (the 2 linux install’s have multi-partitions of course), and the rest is data. The 2 1TB are RAID 0 and are data only (I move all win data directories, such as ‘My Documents’ etc, here.) The external is mainly backup. When it’s full, I take it out of the eSATA dock and put it away and get another HDD. 🙂 I used to have a separate partition on another HDD for Win TEMP & swap. But with the XD, that’s no longer necessary. I use OSL2000 as my boot loader.
Can use *simbolic links* on Win also. 😉 Though available from NT4 to Win7, they are a PITA to manage (and can only be done from a Command (CMD) Shell normally)! There is a great free tool called Link ShellExtension with MUCH better junction support than is available in Win. It supports Symbolic Links, Hardlinks, Junctions and Volume Mountpoints, and is easily accessible via right-click menu in most file managers. 🙂
Yes, that is one of the laptops that I was looking at. I was thinking about retiring my big desktop gaming system, which makes an awful howl, sucks down 100 watts of power just idling, and takes up a huge chunk of real estate, and replacing it with a laptop gaming system that I could move to whatever room I felt like sitting in at any given time (no air conditioning, and the best room in the house depends upon what breezes are blowing). But after playing with it for a while at Fry’s Electronics (our local computer geek paradise spot, I take visitors from out-of-town to Fry’s so they can get the real Silicon Valley experience 🙂 ), where I was palm-surfing big time and ran into the ATI OpenGL driver problem, I sighed and returned to waiting for the next generation of Apple laptops to arrive in hopes they’ll fix some long-time limitations of the Apple design like the lack of USB3 (sigh!).
I’ve read about the OpenGL problems on ATI gfx cards since about 2006. AMD/ATI fix them eventually, then break them again with new chipsets/drivers. It’s now mainly a problem under Windoze, it’s been solved in the Linux community (to what degree I’m unsure). 🙂
[Solved] Ati Radeon HD4650 giving poor OpenGL performance & corruption
And there are others for Ubuntu etc around.
One of the best Catalyst drivers for Win was 9.6. OpenGL worked well under that, but they don’t support the newer HD 6000 series. I heard there was a version of Catalyst 10 that worked. Have to use Google… 😉 I no longer have a need to use OpenGL on Win, though I used to. I had an Nvidia card 3-4 years ago, and it’s OPenGL drivers were crap also. *shrug*
Could try looking for something like the Alienware gaming notebooks. They use nVidia. I saw a couple on clearance sale (new) on Greys @ 50% off, and have seen them on eBay.
I am getting annoyed with all the hardware vendors, especially AMD & Intel. They are in such a rush to get the latest & greatest hardware out, that their s/w support is seriously flawed and takes ages to catch up just to be merely mediocre! And their manufacturing partners are not much help! I used to recommend ASUS MoBo’s, and have been a VIP member for many years. Now, you have to get upto a half dozen BIOS updates (all usually within a month) just get the thing to boot properly & consistently! Most of the others are no better (esp. Gigabyte). A friend recently got an ASUS Crossfire MoBo and a new 250GB SSD. It refused to boot off the SSD. ASUS told him to disconnect it, use a std HDD and update the BIOS. He did that, and it would no longer recognise his RAM and wouldn’t boot at all! He managed to get that fixed, and still no SSD. ASUS stopped talking to him, so he sent it back with a nasty note and got an MSI. It had problems also, he sent that back, and as a last resort of desperation, got an ASrock (that was half the price of the big brother company ASUS), and it worked with a couple minor problems, that ASrock promptly fixed with a BIOS update, and he’s happy! Moral: Money will NOT always buy happiness! 😆 Like me, he would never have thought of buying an ASrock MoBo for a high end system! They were always the el-cheapo solution with almost no features! Not any longer! He was surprised at the feature level including things the Crossfire didn’t have! I’m thinking about getting one for my new build. 🙂
I mentioned that I was looking at an ASrock board because it supported all of the new standards, and the other boards didn’t. It wasn’t a matter of wanting the newest and the fastest, I want something that is going to around for a while so I can get replacements, instead of a new box when something breaks.
The above problems with Taiwanese vendors are why I have an Intel motherboard in my gaming system. In my experience Intel and Supermicro motherboards are the most stable motherboards you’ll find, the only downside is that they typically don’t have all the bells and whistles of the bleeding edge boards, but they’re stable as a rock. I’ve had *very* bad luck with the Taiwanese vendors, twice having to debug their very own BIOS for them (when I was working for computer companies that OEM’ed their motherboards) because they don’t have *any* software engineers on staff, they hire contractors whenever they need a BIOS revision and the contractors are going in blind and have turned their BIOS’s into the worst spaghetti code you’ll ever see (yes, I’ve seen the source code, yes, you would rather be eaten by Cthulhu than have to deal with that). And let’s not talk about their bad habit of making random hardware changes in midstream, like when they changed the i2c sensors chip without even a change notice (remember, we were an *OEM* putting their board into a commercial product, not just Joe Bloke off the street!).
BTW, the stability issue is also why I’ve gone with Intel rather than AMD processors for my last two system builds, and why my last two employers have gone with Intel rather than AMD processors for their appliances. It’s proven almost impossible to get a stable AMD motherboard, not because the AMD processor is bad (it’s not, it’s a great architecture, albeit the process it’s manufactured in is, alas, outdated), but because the AMD motherboard vendors are such Fail with their BIOS’s. I mean, look. We had to fix the PCI BUS ENUMERATION code in one AMD motherboard vendor’s BIOS. Which is, like, *the* most important function in the whole bloody pile of rubbish, because if you don’t enumerate your buses properly, you can’t see your bloody peripheral hardware! Life’s too short. My current employer sticks with Supermicro and Intel server-grade motherboards, and life is good, now all we have to worry about is our software falling over, not our hardware falling over.
@ Bryan: There are 3 reasons I like the ASrock MoBo. 1. It has the full UEFI BIOS, which is required to support a decent PCI-E SATA/SAS RAID card (the ordinary BIOS didn’t support the memory space required for most of them), 2. Has plenty of Fan headers, and a few are PWM (4-pin), I like the intelligent layout of the new boards. Even so… I’m gonna wait a while, until they get the kinks ironed out! 😉 😀
Curiously Badtux, I found the ASUS KGPE-D16 Server board to be quite good! I’ve used it in a few build now for clients, and had nary a problem. One client used SuperMicro, and had a number of issues. (I do like Intel server cases though!) 😉
I actually posted (angrily) on the ASUS forum a while back about why the hell ASUS could make such a good Server board, and such absolutely garbage workstation or general purpose boards! (I kinda expected the post to be deleted). All I got was a lot of “Yeah! Why is that?” kinda replies, nothing from ASUS (what a surprise!) I also have an ASUS router, WiFi cards and ASUS LCD display, all good! And friends have ASUS 15 & 17″ Notebooks, all good also! What a crazy company!
I designed a big system for a client who is heavily into animated video design and rendering a short while ago:
1 x ASUS KGPE-D16 Dual G34 AMD SR5690 SSI EEB 3.61 8/12 Core AMD Opteron 6000 series Server Motherboard.
1 x ASUS PIKE 2108 SATA3/SAS2 RAID 0-60 card w/ 512MB Cache (LSI controller).
1 x LSI MegaRAID LSIiBBU07 Battery Backup Unit (for ASUS PIKE).
1 x LSI MegaRAID External SATA/SAS 9280-8e 6Gb/s PCI-E w/ 512MB Cache
2 x AMD Opteron 6136 Magny-Cours 2.4GHz G34 115W 8-Core Server Processor
8 x Patriot Signature 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) ECC Registered Server SDRAM (128 GB).
6 x OCZ Talos C Series 230GB Dual-Port SAS-II 6Gb/s high-performance mixed-workload Enterprise MLC SSD’s (RAID 6).
2 x Noctua NH-U9DO A3 AMD Opteron, 4 Dual Heat-pipe SSO Bearing Quiet CPU Cooler.
2 x ATI 100-505602 FirePro V9800 4GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E 2.1 x16 W/S Video Card’s.
1 x ATI 100-505590 FirePro S400 Synchronization Module
1 x ASUS Xonar Essence STX Virtual 24-bit 192KHz 124 dB SNR w/ Headphone Amplifier Card.
2 x NEC LCD3090W-BK-SV 30″ 6ms(GTG), Widescreen LCD Monitor w/ SpectraViewII Color Calibration Solution 350 cd/m2 1000:1
1 x Tandberg 2480-LTO 36TB Data StorageLibrary Tape Library – 1 x Drive/12 x Slot – LTO Ultrium 5
1 x Athena Power CA-SWH02BH8T Black Pedestal Server Chassis with 3 x 120mm Fans, 2 x 4 3.5″ Hot Swap Trayless HDD Bay’s + MiniRedundant ATLAS658W PSU.
1 x Promise VTRak E-Class VTE610sD 16-Bay SAS-wide-toSAS2/SATA3 RAID 0-60 NAS /w dual redundant 500W PSU & Dual redundant controllers.
16 x Hitachi Ultrastar 15K600 600GB 15,000RPM SAS-II HDD’s (RAID 60)
With assorted other bit’s and pieces (2 x optical drives, various cables, etc). 🙂 Cost around US$60k all up. 😉 😀
*sigh* Wish I had one to play with! 😉 Next time… I’ll make that part of the deal! 😆
They’ve been using it almost 3 months, and are ecstatic! It’s 3 times faster (rendering) than the system they had before (without the NAS & tape backup) which cost almost the same! And since an hour is worth over $1k to them… *shrug*! 🙂 They argued about only having dual 8-core CPU’s instead of 12-core’s… But I really didn’t think it would be any noticeable difference for the extra $. *shrug* And apparently, I was correct! I have a good rep for not spending money unnecessarily, and building system with excellent ROI!
The deal with Supermicro motherboards is that you must use *only* RAM modules that have been explicitly certified for use with that particular motherboard. Use anything else, and it’s unstable. The mistake most people make is just grabbing DDR3 off the shelf, plonking it in, and expecting it to Just Work. It doesn’t.
Regarding the configuration you mention, I get to play with hardware on that scale every day :twisted:. Just one reason I love my job, heh!
I hate reading modern specs, because I still remember the days when a 5-MB fixed / 5-MB removable hard disk subsystem was $10K for a minicomputer, and the cost of an IBM 360 with so much less actual processing power than that machine was hundreds of thousands, not counting the cost of remodeling the room and air conditioning system required to install it.
A 10MB hard drive for $900 was a steal when they came out, as the floppy for an Apple }{ or IBM-PC cost $450, and they were single-sided.
I know what you mean Bryan! 😀 Yeah… I remember *those* days well! I even kept a couple old Mag’s from the 70’s & 80’s (Byte, Dr. Dobbs, and Our APC), mainly because they had very interesting articles, but also because I look at the ad’s or show them to people occasionally (when they whinge about the prices these days usually!) 😆
I used to sell a basic XT clone (we had a few, one from Singapore, China, and Japan) and they were around $4k, without a display! I still remember selling lot’s of Shugart 8″ & 5.25″ FDD’s, and they had huge, noisy, power hungry, motors (the only thing *Green* in those days were the CRT’s and sometimes, the cases)! 😆
The wost MoBo’s I’ve used (Server) were Tyan actually. And their support was terrible. In that rig above, I had to use ASUS! No other MoBo had enough slots for the cards! 😆 The PIKE card has it’s own special slot. Plus, it was the only one I found at that time that had 8 SAS ports, as well as 8 SATA ports on the board. Oh! It also has a good IPMI 2.0 KVM Over IP remote management module. Very handy for me for support (especially when the client is in the USA!) 😀 Actually, I used my early notes for the above spec. It was changed in the final config a bit. Had 8 x OCZ Talos C SSD’s, and the Tandberg tape library had a 2nd drive installed (the client was worried about the backup time. 2 drives gave it 1-2 TB / hr, depending on data compression). I tried to tell them it was nothing to worry about, it was only a local secondary backup. They had a much bigger version for their primary site backup (had 8 drives, and 120 cartridge slots), over a 10Gbps LAN, and a 260 TB SAN. The other reason I chose the 8-core opteron’s, is that they can be OC’d to 3 GHz (with a very good cooler, which those are, we changed the fans to better ones to make sure, noise wasn’t an issue), and raw throughput is more important to them than number of simultaneous threads. 🙂
Promise are another strange company. Their high-end storage systems (like the above) are extremely good, but their low-mid RAID cards etc are mostly garbage! The throughput from that storage system is extreme. Has 4 SAS ports connected to the LSI card. There are 2 to the tape library, and two spare (it’s an 8 port card).
Tyan sucks in so many ways… another one that sucked was Iwill. They were the one whose BIOS wouldn’t even enumerate the bus correctly on their top-of-the-line AMD motherboard. But they’re out of business (and their remnants acquired by Flextronics). Good riddance :twisted:.
The first computer I actually physically owned was a Commodore VIC-20. It had 5K of RAM. I bought a VICMON cartridge and programmed my own stuff directly in 6502 machine language right there on the spot, no macro assembler or anything (VICMON would turn an opcode into hex codes, but that was it). That was pretty cool, but when the Commodore 64 came out with an actual floppy drive and an actual macro assembler, I was quite overjoyed, thank you very much. I paid $600 for that Commodore 64 setup — *without* a computer monitor (hooked it to a TV). Nowadays $600 gets you a computer many times more powerful than the mainframe I used in college — in laptop format, no less.
Regarding storage systems, it’s interesting how our approach (which is for bulk storage of video surveillance data) differs from your approach (which is about ultimate speed). Let’s just say that we have lots of JBOD’s attached to multiple LSI cards in our CPU/JBOD chassis plus we cluster these suckers, and we use our own software RAID to turn the JBOD’s into RAID arrays. A 16 node cluster with two JBOD’s apiece (as well as the internal 24 drives) all of which is running 2 terabyte SATA drives (we haven’t certified the 3 terabyte drives yet) results in, errm… a *lot* of storage :). (2304 terabytes? Am I adding that right? YOW!). Let’s just say we have no trouble keeping several month’s worth of video surveillance data for a large corporate skyscraper that has close to a thousand 720p video surveillance cameras in it, and leave it at that :twisted:.
BTW, the software RAID is also used to turn the three to sixteen nodes in the cluster into big cross-node RAID arrays so you can yank out one node that failed, replace it with a new node, and have your RAID array rebuild onto the new node. I *love* my job :).
Geez, I’m still trying to get used to Terabytes, and you guys already head into Petabyte territory, with more bad geek puns on the way.
That sounds like a huge leap over the VHS-based systems we had to deal with to present cases in court. The CCTV systems would generally rotate through the cameras and record only the currently selected camera when on autoscan. Only the most expensive had a machine dedicated to each camera, and most of the time the clocks weren’t displaying the correct time or date, because there was no battery back-up.
Oooh yes, Bryan. And some of the cool things they’ll do would amaze you. You’ve heard of the face recognition stuff, I’m sure. Add a few photos of the face of someone who’s been banned from your building because, say, he shoplifted, and the software will automatically beep at you when said person comes into your building and put him on-screen front and center in the security control room. But there’s also behavioral stuff the VDMR software will recognize now to bring to the attention of whoever is doing the real-time monitoring. That person lingering near the exit door? That person who’s lingered at the door to an office fiddling with the lock for 20 seconds longer than the typical person needs to unlock and open that office door? Suspicious. That means the days of expecting some fat mall cop in a control room to have fallen asleep watching empty monitors is over — he’ll never get presented with an empty monitor, and there’s a good chance that if the software does bring something to his attention on the monitor, it’s something worthy of his attention. There’s ways to defeat all of this, of course, if you have the right training and know exactly how it’s being done (for example, shape recognition can be defeated with a simple gillie net, a couple of coat hangers, and some duct tape, albeit this would make you somewhat conspicuous!), but as I’m sure you’re aware, the majority of common criminals are idiots because the smart ones become Wall Street bankers instead :twisted:.
It can’t be worse than eye-witness testimony, as in 5 people see an accident and three get the color of the cars wrong.
At the cop shop it is known as ‘hinky’, not quite ‘reasonablysuspicious’, but not normal behavior, and a reason to drive by again, or park and watch.
The scanning camera systems were fairly worthless. Studies showed that dummy cameras were just as effective at lowering crime rates.
People who think sending people to prison is like sending them to a graduate course in crime miss the point that all of the ‘instructors’ failed their exams, or they wouldn’t be in prison.
“Hinky”. Yes, quite appropriate word. The software isn’t perfect, of course, but then, neither are the common criminals it’s attempting to detect :). It definitely is good at spotting people lingering in places where people usually don’t linger, which seems to indicate possible criminal activity far more often than you’d think. And yes, it detects *people*, and will even identify their face and zoom in on it for you (insofar as is possible given that the majority of cameras on the market are fixed focus — i.e., it’s a software zoom). Definitely not your granddaddy’s security camera system, or even your generation’s ;). Actually, the systems make me nervous, knowing exactly what they’re capable of doing, but (shrug). That genie is out of the lamp, so not much to do about it other than try to make money selling the storage that all these cameras and associated software need on the back end.
Regarding criminals studying crime, we have a name for the graduate course in crime here in the real world. It’s called “Wall Street” :twisted:.
It’s really a standard ‘expert’ system. You ask street cops what makes them want a second look, and you will know what kind of behaviors are associated with crimes. Loitering is on the books in most states because it is associated with crime, and the law gives you a reason to stop people and ask questions. There was a time when you had to have a reason for stopping people, but these days not so much.
In cities you may as well assume you are under surveillance, because everyone uses CCTV these days.
The first rule of Wall Street is buy the cops, and then you don’t have to be clever. It has worked for them so far.
@ Badtux: It’s *horses for courses* of course. 😉 That rig above was for one of the major SFX/Animation studio’s (I met one of the Directors in the early 80’s when he was fresh out of Uni here & introduced him to George Lucas at the first AusGraph conference I helped organise where GL was the guest speaker. So, the guy owes me)! Very handy to get some decent work that I wouldn’t otherwise get!) 😉 😆 I designed their security, render farm (it’s a massive system, cost well over a half mill $), designed their redundancies/fail-over/backup systems (and policies/procedures of course). The system above was because they wanted to get into small projects also. There isn’t a lot of *huge budget* work around these days, but enough to keep the big system busy. The cost of using their primary systems for smaller projects was not at all cost effective. So they wanted something smaller, but it had to have very high performance. 🙂 Now they can be very competitive for the smaller projects. 🙂
Yeah, I’ve worked on some massive storage systems Bryan. The one above is going to be doubled in the new year. They have also decided they want an *offshore* mirror site for security & redundancy (they don’t feel very *secure* in the USA just now, wisely so IMHO). I’m just starting the planning for all that now.
I’ve worked on 3 security/surveillance system over the past 2 decades. First was Coles-Myer for their department stores (mid-90’s), No. 1 Collins street Tower & 101 Collins St (32 story home to several ISP’s and Data companies, like Powertell & Global Crossing). Though I didn’t have much to do with the design of the vid systems in those cases. 🙂 I did design a video system for one of our biggest AFL Football clubs in 2006. 🙂 They video every game every club played on the day from several position’s. They built up profiles of all their players and they other teams players, and used special s/w that would look at it all and recommend player match-ups. They did very well over the next couple years, until the other teams had their own systems in place! 😆 That was all based on G5 PowerMac & a large Xserve G5 + Xserve RAID cluster. Unfortunately, the Xserve proved to be unreliable over time. Well, at least I got to use my Apple Server & Admin (and Cisco) cert’s! 😆
I’ve designed some fairly *pedestrian* systems where the top priority was security, reliability & as close to 100% guaranteed availability as possible. Curiously, in terms of cost, the two (extreme reliability vs extreme performance) are about the same, and in some very extreme cases, reliability costs a lot more! It all depends of course on what the client defines as *acceptable risk* and how much they are prepared to spend. 🙂 Now… If I had an unlimited budget, access to lot’s of resources (human and other), and lot’s of time… well! 😉 😀
BTW, the main reason they chose 2 of those V9800 cards, was because 1. together (Crossfire) they have 8GB very fast frame buffer, 2. There are 3,200 stream processors that they use with their custom in-house s/w, & 3. OpenGL 4.0 actually works well on them (even framelock, genlock, HDTV tri-level sync, etc, with the addon module)! So obviously, ATI/AMD can get the drivers right, when the money is right and it suits them! (Although, I suspect it’s actually a different dev team for these cards than the mainstream ones). 😉
I think the last paragraph is a hard truth throughout the industry, i.e. a good team produces good product. The key is building good teams and there is no hard and fast protocol for that.
Getting the best doesn’t work, because you need people who will work together, and the best tend to view other people as competitors or lackeys, not as team mates.
There were a lot of product lines that turned to crap immediately after their IPO, or when a new management team came in because the job was no longer fun, and the company lost all of the in-depth personal knowledge of the products.
Ooooooh, I just brought home that wireless solar-powered Logitech keyboard, the K750. This is a suh-WEEET little keyboard. And everything Just Worked. I plugged its receiver into the front of my computer, the Logitech driver popped up a notice that I’d just plugged in a keyboard with a new Unifying receiver and do I want to instead pair the keyboard with the existing Unifying receiver for my MX Anywhere mouse in order to save USB ports, I followed the directions on screen, and voila. One USB dongle thingie, both keyboard and mouse going to it :). It even automagically downloaded and installed the Solar App that tells the battery state and solar panel lux readings for me. I think Logitech has been taking lessons from Apple, this is some slick stuff :).
It’s not staying home because it’s not illuminated, which I need in order to make my keyboard work in that gloomy cranny under my computer desk (the 12 watt florescent table lamp on the shelf over my computer is the only light in the room most of the time, deliberately on the *other* side of the monitor so it cannot put any glare on it, but which also means no light gets to that cranny that is the shelf under my desk). Still, it’s clear to me that Logitech is decidedly the Apple of input devices. Their stuff Just Works and has an attention to detail that gets two flippers up from this penguin :).
— Badtux the Geeky Penguin
Oops, Bryan, yours slipped in while I was typing :). I once had the misfortune of working for a company that set out to hire the best and brightest minds in its area, and only the best and brightest. Soon the company was a morass of feuding factions as the former Sun people faced off against the former SGI people (completely different development philosophies) and the Netapp people sneered at both of them as archaisms, while us Linux geeks stood around incredulously gawking at the carnage because we’re basically practical folk (that’s how we can manage to cope with Linus, whose head is pretty much the size of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier) and all this politics made the politics surrounding Linux (and look, there *is* a lot of politics involved in what gets into the kernel or into any specific distribution because you have to stroke some egos the right way to make it happen) look like child’s play. It took 2 1/2 years to produce a product that they’d promised the investors could be created in 6 months by using acquired technology and people from another company, and they missed their market window by at least a year (I left right after the first systems shipped to paying customers because I wasn’t having fun, only reason I stayed that long is because I’ve never been part of a project that failed to ship and wasn’t intending to change that). Meanwhile at my current company we’ve created two entire new product lines (as in, they didn’t exist *at all* when I arrived, I did the initial system bringup to get them up and going) plus refreshes of two other product lines in the 10 months I’ve been with the company, despite having 1/4th the staff of that startup that had the “best and the brightest”.
One thing I *will* say is that management is key. If your management is on top of things and has the technical chops to deal with the engineers on their level, even top people can be cajoled, coaxed, and coerced into producing good product in a timely manner without all the politics and drama of prima donnas. I’ve seen it done twice in my career, where a good or great manager managed to get amazing work in a short time out of a small team of some of the top people in the field. I will say that it takes one herculean effort on the part of the manager to make that happen, I say that because I was on the opposite side (the one doing the managing) for a while and discovered that staying on top of my geeks who wanted to go every which way but the way they needed to go was more than a full time job…
– Badtux the Geeky Penguin
I use indirect lighting, so glare isn’t a problem. I do like the feedback from the key travel, probably because I learned to touch-type on a manual typewriter, and we used manuals in the military for ‘fear’ that foreign agents would be able to pick up the signals generated by the electrics and read what we were typing [seriously, that was the stated reason, that someone could detect the signals on machines being used inside the ‘bank vaults’ where we worked].
That said, that looks like a very good keyboard for the aftermath of a hurricane.
There is no obvious way of finding good managers. You have to find someone with great people skills who can understand what needs to be done, and can see the path to accomplishing it. They are born, not created. The trend of replacing engineers with MBAs at the management of technology companies is a kiss of death, as you have to really understand your product line and what is required to create it, to know how to manage the company. Putting the former head of Pepsi in as the CEO of Apple is a textbook case. For MBAs everything is a marketing problem/solution.
Whether they’re engineers or not, top managers who don’t understand the technology they’re selling are a disaster in so many ways that it’s ridiculous. He’s not an engineer, but you can’t say that Steve Jobs doesn’t understand the technology he’s selling, and he certainly knows how to tell the engineers “This sucks, go fix it” if what they produce doesn’t meet his standards. The iPad is apparently the THIRD different tablet that Apple designed during Jobs’s tenure, they apparently started designing a tablet around the same time that Microsoft did their whole Tablet Computer thingy. The previous two times, Steve fiddled with it a bit, and then told the engineers, “this sucks, it’s too slow and laggy and too hard to use, start over” even though there was likely millions invested in developing that prototype. Whereas a manager who didn’t understand technology would have green-lighted it and it’d have been as ignominious a disaster as Windows Tablet, rather than the eventual iPad being the #1 selling computing device on the planet.
Of course, there’s also plenty of examples of geeks promoted beyond their level of competence who turn out to be disasters as managers. As you say, it takes a mix of skills.
Anyhow, one question: What good is a solar-powered keyboard in the aftermath of a hurricane, unless you have a solar-powered computer too? Just wonderin’ :).
I have the converter to charge the laptop from the car, and keep the modem router working. I could use the built in features of the laptop, like I did with the ancient HP that died a couple of years ago, but that would require having the thing on my lap or a low table, and not something you want to do without air conditioning.
There are several solar solutions for laptops, and given that the new modem and router are both 12V DC, they can use the same system.