Computer Genius Blog :: aka “TheGarage”

I can’t believe it is already Sunday. Where does the time go?

Quick update on the computer order

Sure enough, as suspected the ZipZoomFly delivery didn’t make it on Friday. ZZF had hands down the best overall apples-to-apples prices and offered free standard ground shipping on most products. If you are not in any particular hurry ZZF is a great deal. But I paid extra for 2nd day delivery and a week is not satisfactory.

Will I use them again, of course. Will their performance on express delivery affect my buying decisions on items needed in a rush? Of course. Maybe up to 15%.

On the Linux box:

There seems to be a major malfunction with this beeyotch. I installed a different power supply, supposedly known to be in working order, and still Suse wont turn on. I tried rubbing her power button just right and nary a flicker.

Shoot. This is a conundrum because now I have a decision fork, three pronged in this case.

1. Is the button switch bad? How often does that happen? Not too often I suspect. I don’t recall ever having a bad button switch service call.
2. Is the motherboard fried? There are decent odds that if the power supplied fried, the motherboard could be fried. Usually the power supply sacrifices itself to save the computer, but that is not always the case. Bad power conditions over the long term can stress every component in a system and the final fatal surge or spike can have multiple casualties.
3. Did I replace a bad power supply with a bad power supply? With used parts from a storage bin you never know.

This is a relatively low-end machine. A 1GHz Intel Celeron circa 2002 built on the cheap for strictly utilitarian purposes it was nothing to write home about in 2002. I don’t know if I want to spend too much more time jacking around with it. I can order a 2 GHz P4 chip with motherboard and a new power supply for a hundred bucks. Probably less.

iPod/iTunes support.

Yesterday I learned that to get the most enjoyment from an iPod you have to a better PC than a Dell Dimension 500L.

I stick the biggest dog in TheGarage’s PC inventory in the house for the kids to use. Up until recently it was all they needed since Nicktoon and Disney Channel websites and Reader Rabbit games were not big resource hounds. Can’t say the same for Apple’s iTunes.

I had an urgent request come in for software support: Could I download and install the latest iTunes so my daughter can buy videos from iStore? Sure I can.

No biggie, took about ten minutes and it was free. Except that now the old Dell can’t run iTunes and play the video. With a quick glance I noticed the on-board graphics was being used and taking pity I decide to give Cool-Kidz, the computer name, a quick upgrade that will hopefully be good enough to allow some semblance of the video to play. I figured an old Radeon 7000 64 Meg card ought to take quite a load off the processor and RAM.

No good deed goes unpunished.

The drivers I had for the ATI Radeon wouldn’t work because at some point Cool-Kidz was updated DirectX to version 9, a natural occurence of loading new software. The drivers I had checked the system for DirectX8 and could not recognize the newer DirectX 9, even though backwards compatibility is one of the hallmarks of DirectX. I have to download a 40 meg package to get the drivers I need.

In the end, iTunes running on the Dell with a 64 meg Radeon graphics card still wont play the video purchased from iStore. Of course you can only play video purchased from iStore on iTunes, I think, or an iPod with video, which we don’t have. We have an iPod Nano.

Interesting how a simple toy can drive big box consumer electronic purchases.

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Thursday’s wrap

After I started looking into the Dell PowerEdge upgrade costs it all started to become very familiar. I had already done this. The conclusion from previous research suddenly hit me. The cheapest way to upgrade the Dell PowerEdge 6300/400 from dual Xeon 400s to quad 550s is to buy this for $189.95. Ridiculous.

On the Suse Linux box the news is not so good. All the extra memory I have laying around is DDR and the Linux box uses the older SDRAM. It has 256MB installed and that is abit thin for any kind of real work, but I only use it as a trainer/demo. The onboard video was being used so I grabbed an old Riva 128 video card off the shelf and popped it in. That will save some CPU clocks and 8MB of precious RAM.

I never got to test it. I think the Power supply is fried. Luckily I have a few power supplies laying around. I may have to repurpose this machine and find something a bit more capable for my Linux sandbox.

Online for today

Rebench the Suse Linux machine and replace power supply, if needed, which I am fairly certain it does. Given that it would not turn on it is either the power supply or the little wire on the front power button was knocked loose when I was fiddling around with the RAM sticks.

Hopefully my ZipZoomFly order containing the bulk of my new workstation components will arrive today but I am not so optimistic. If the order does arrive, I will be assembling the pieces into a greater whole.

I ordered all the new computer stuff this past Monday from two vendors: TigerDirect and ZipZoomFly. All I ordered from TigerDirect was the Natural Keyboard and the GeForce video card and that package arrived Wednesday. Impressive. I had been thinking Thursday delivery would be good and Friday would be satisfactory. Monday, not so satisfactory. I paid about $80 total for 2nd day delivery on both orders. TigerDirect obviously takes their 2nd day a little more seriously than ZipZoomFly.

I also have a lot of research to do in support of the report I have been working on. Maybe I will share some of that if any of it turns out to be interesting.

Of course my dead workstation is now the second most powerful machine I have in inventory. The motherboard and processor work fine so I can build around it. I think the power supply may be a little weak but luckily I have a few power supplies laying around. Perhaps it will be the new Linux sandbox?

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We left off yesterday with a recycled workstation set up for temporary purposes until I get the new $1,000 Core 2 Duo unit assembled and put into service. I installed the hard drives from the dead PC into the temp PC so I already have access to all my non-server based data exactly as it was before. More importantly, the temp PC will allow me to get off this old ThinkPad.

I quickly setup Office 2000, FireFox, and AdAware on the temp PC from an install directory accessed over the high-speed network here in TheGarage. Took about ten minutes. Now all I have to do is drag the entire “My Documents” structure from the old harddrive and drop it into the “My Documents” folder on the Temp PC’s C drive and it’s like nothing ever happened.

Here is a word of caution, or is it more of a tip. If you ever use this technique you might find that you can’t access the “My Documents” folder on the old hard drive after it is attached to a new WinXP installation. Even if the same user name is used, the actual security is based on a user object from another machine and wont work. This problem occurs on NTSF formatted drives where special permissions were applied to a folder, e.g., My Documents, by the owner.

In the case where the other machine is dead making it impossible to log in from the other computer to reset the permissions, another solution is needed. Even the administrator can’t change permissions on a folder with special permissions denying access to everyone; however, the administrator can take ownership of the folder and then reset permissions. Kinda picky, isn’t it? But there ya go. Choose Safe Mode at boot up and login as the Administrator to have complete control over the computer.

Today I am going to take a quick look at upgrading the PowerEdge 6300 to make it a bit more substantial in the processing power dept. I think the geriatric server can get me to where I want to get in the near term. Temporarily, in other words.

Then I have some report writing to do but I am also going to see about getting my Linux box on the bench. The Linux PC is operational but has been ailing a bit. I think I scavenged the RAM from it for something else. I have some extra RAM now so I’m going to pop it in and see if Suse doesn’t perk up a bit.

I’ll post the PowerEdge and Linux hardware configurations later.

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In my last entry on the $1,000 workstation we built a brand spanking new general purpose workstation that will be able slice through productivity apps, IDE applications (integrated development environments, like eclipse) and video editing like a hot knife through butter.

I thought since I will be pre occupied with this project for several days it would be fun to continue with a few more entries outlining the process as I go forward. The next step is to break down the dead workstation and slam the hard drives into one of the old PC’s I have laying around so I can access and move my data.

When I get my old workstation tore down I’ll post the parts list to give an idea of the magnitude of this upgrade.

OKAY, I CLEARED THE BENCH. FOLLOWING IS the configuration I had been trudging along with for about the past five years.

I built the above, now deceased rig almost five years ago as a temporary, general purpose workstation, just like the $1,000 configuration I built the other day. It probably cost about $1,000 when it was built. Stuff happened and I never got around to building the dream machine I wanted and my temporary workstation turned out to be just my workstation. Which in a way is good because everything now is so much better and so much cheaper it’s ridiculous. I don’t even think in terms of a dream workstation any more. I just built it for $1,000. Spend another $750 and it’d be surreal.

No, no more lofty thoughts of stable, high-performing ergonomic PC workstations. Now I dream of internet application servers, unlimited bandwidth, and high-tech media production systems.

So now I’ve gutted my semi faithful companion, what to do with the remains? Ahh, the donor card is signed.

The other month ago, my brother dropped two PC’s that were a bit long in the tooth over to my house. I had helped him restore these machines to working order on an occasion or two in the past but when you let kids of any age have unrestricted access to your computers and the internet your stuff will become fubar very quickly. No exceptions to this.

He said he had given up hope on fixing them and did I want them. Sure.

Eventually I got around to putting them on the bench, gave them life and began the diagnosing process. Ahhh. Windows 98 on both machines. I formatted the drives and loaded Win XP Pro and both machines work fine. Too bad they can’t all be like that. Funny, huh? Little bro kinda frowned when I told him. Which made it even kinda funnier.

He said to me, “Oh yeah, cool I’ll swing by and pick them up.”

Having forseen this tact I said, “Okay, bring your checkbook, there’s a service bill owing.”

Thanks to my brother I have onw low-end and one middle-to-low-end PC sitting around with nothing to do. Waiting. Waiting for something to do. So I grabbed this one:

I marked with an asterisk where I scavenged from the dead PC to the new temporary PC. Now here is what sucks. The machine I just put into temporary service has everything the one that just died had plus an extra 40 gig hard drive storage and a pristine WinXP installation. Not only that it’s much peppier than the dead one was. I could live with this machine–temporarily.

Buggers. That’s negative thinking. The new machine is going to be great. With it I will be able to dip my toes into video casting, live streaming and such. And I have some pretty big toes.

Also on the project list I have a Dell PowerEdge 6300 server with dual Intel Xeon processors and Raid 5 disk array that I use as my primary web server. A reader donated it to the cause. He had it laying around. It didn’t work. Did I want it? Sure.

It took me a couple of days to sort this beast out but since I could not detect any hardware malfunctions I downloaded the latest drivers for every component and flashed the BIOS with the latest revision. MS Server 3000 was installed but since I didn’t have admin authoritry it was useless so I reformatted the boot partition and put a fresh install of Windows NT 4, service pack 297. NT4 is a solid OS. Rarely does this machine need attention.

The Dell 6300 limps along at the ridiculously slow speed of 400 mHz but the Intel Xeon processors are workhorses and I have two working together. Tomorrow I am going to find out what it will take and how much will it cost to beef the bad boy up a tad. I’ll have to research the motherboard specs to determine the fastest processor supported then go shopping. I think I can go from the current 450 mHz to 1,000 mHz. A significant boost I think.

The big question is the cost. The ASUS P5B Deluxe mobo I just bought formy new workstation supports RAID and certainly a Core 2 Duo can give a couple of 1 gHz Xeon P2 processors a run for their money. Thus, the processor upgrade will have to come in less than five or six hundred bucks to be cost efficient.

But that’s tomorrow…

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For the third year in a row my personal workstation has gone on the fritz with the dreaded Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) problems. Same symptoms, same time of year. I had to break out the old Thinkpad and hook up the wireless to write this post.

I think the problems coincide with the cold weather. The portable heaters come out, TheGarage office is like a meat locker, and static electicity is high. It’s as good a guess as any.

Fudge. This year I am not even going to try to fix the POS. I am going to spend money. Coming soon, a new workstation for me.

HP/Compaq, Dell/Alienware, IBM/Lenovo, Gateway/eMachines, Sony, ect can go to hell with their mass market pieces of high margin crap. I am building from scratch. I am finalizing my hardware list today and will post the components later. The target is a high performance, general purpose, Core 2 Duo machine for under $1,000. Maybe $1,200.

Is it doable? We will see.

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