Tag Archive for CPU

A little more freedom

December 10, 2011 2 comments

A few weeks ago, I decided to address the fact that my Toshiba laptop have next to useless battery life. The arrival of an issue of PC Pro that included a review of lower cost laptops was another spur and I ended up looking on the web to see what was in stock at nearby chain stores. In the end, I plumped for an HP Pavilion dm4 and it was Argos that supplied yet another piece of computing kit to me. In fact, they seem to have a wider range of laptops than PC World!

The Pavillion dm4 seems to come in two editions and I opted for the heavier of these though it still is lighter than my Toshiba Equium as I found on a recent trip away from home. Its battery life is a revelation for someone who never has got anything better than three hours from a netbook. Having more than five hours certainly makes it suitable for those longer train journeys away from home and I have seen remaining battery life being quoted as exceeding seven hours from time to time though I wouldn’t depend on that.

Of course, having longer battery life would be pointless if the machine didn’t do what else was asked of it. It comes with the 64-bit of Windows 7 and this thought me that this edition of the operating system also runs 32-bit software, a reassuring discovering. There’s a trial version of Office 2010 on there too and, having a licence key for the Home and Student edition, I fully activated it. Otherwise, I added a few extras to make myself at home such as Dropbox and VirtuaWin (for virtual desktops as I would in Linux). While I playing with the idea of adding Ubuntu using Wubi, I am not planning to set up dual booting of Windows and Linux like I have on the Toshiba. Little developments like this can wait.

Regarding the hardware, the CPU is an Intel Core i3 affair and there’s 4 MB of memory on board. The screen is a 14″ one and that makes for a more compact machine without making it too diminutive. The keyboard is of the scrabble-key variety and works well too as does the trackpad. There’s a fingerprint scanner for logging in and out without using a password but I haven’t got to checking how this works so far. It all zips along without any delays and that’s all that anyone can ask of a computer.

There is one eccentricity in my eyes though and it seems that the functions need to be used in combination with Fn for them to work like they would on a desktop machine. That makes functions like changing the brightness of the screen, adjusting the sound of the speakers and turning the WiFi on and off more accessible. My Asus Eee PC netbook and the Toshiba Equium both have things the other way around so I found this set of affairs unusual but it’s just a point to remember rather than being a nuisance.

HP may have had its wobbles regarding its future in the PC making business but the Pavilion feels well put together and very solidly built. It commanded a little premium over the others on my shortlist but it seems to have been worth it. If HP does go down the premium laptop route as has been reported recently, this is the kind of quality that they would need to deliver to just higher prices. Saying that, is this the time to do such a thing would other devices challenging the PC’s place in consumer computing? It would be a shame to lose the likes of the Pavilion dm4 from the market to an act of folly.

Hardware

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Best left until later in the year?

January 26, 2010 No comments

In the middle of last year, my home computing experience was one of feeling displaced. A combination of a stupid accident and a power outage had rendered my main PC unusable. What followed was an enforced upgrade that use combination that was familiar to me: Gigabyte motherboard, AMD CPU and Crucial memory. However, assembling that lot and attaching components from the old system from the old system resulted in the sound of whirring fans but nothing appearing on-screen. Not having useful beeps to guide me meant that it was a case of undertaking educated guesswork until the motherboard was found to be at fault. In a situation like this, a deeper knowledge of electronics would have been handy and might have saved me money too. As for the motherboard, it is hard to say whether it was a faulty set from the outset or whether there was a mishap along the way, either due ineptitude with static or incompatibility with a power supply. What really tells the tale on the mainboard was the fact that all of the other components are working well in other circumstances, even that old power supply.

A few years back, I had another experience with a problematic motherboard, an Asus this time, that ate CPU’s and damaged a hard drive before I stabilised things. That was another upgrade attempted in the first half of the year. My first round of PC building was in the third quarter of 1998 and that went smoothly once I realised that a new case was needed. Similarly, another PC rebuild around the same time of year in 2005 was equally painless. Based on these experiences, I should not be blamed for waiting until later in the year before doing another rebuild, preferably a planned one rather than an emergency.

Of course, there may be another factor involved too. The hint was a non-working Sony DVD writer that was acquired early last year when it really was obvious that we were in the middle of a downturn. Could older unsold inventory be a contributor? Well, it fits in with seeing poor results twice, In addition, it would certainly tally with a problematical PC rebuild in 2002 following the end of the Dot Com bubble and after the deadly Al Qaeda attack on New York’s World Trade Centre. An IBM hard drive that was acquired may not have been the best example of the bunch and the same comment could apply to the Asus motherboard. The resulting construction may have been limping but it was working and I tolerated.

In contrast, last year’s episode had me launched into using a Toshiba laptop and a spare older PC for my needs with an external hard drive enclosure used to extract my data onto other external hard drives to keep me going. It felt a precarious arrangement but it was a useful experience in ways too. There was cause for making acquaintance with nearby PC component stores that I hadn’t visited before and I got to learning about things that otherwise wouldn’t have come my way. Using an external hard drive enclosure for accessing data on hard drives from a non-functioning PC is one of these. Discovering that it is possible to boot from external optical and hard disk drives came as a surprise too and will work so long as there is motherboard support for it. Another experience came from a crisis of confidence that had me acquiring a bare-bones system from Novatech and populating it with optical and hard disk drives. Then, I discovered that I have no need for power supplies rated more than 300 watts (around 200 W suffices). Turning my PC off more often became a habit friendly both to the planet and to household running costs too. Then, there’s the beneficial practice of shopping locally and it can suffice even if what PC magazines stick on their hot lists but shopping online for those pieces doesn’t guarantee success either. All of these were useful lessons and, while I’d rather not throw away good money after bad, it goes to show that even unsuccessful acquisitions had something to offer in the form of learning opportunities. Whether you consider that is worthwhile is up to you.

Hardware

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Still able to build PC systems

October 25, 2009 No comments

This weekend has been something of a success for me on the PC hardware front. Earlier this year, a series of mishaps rendering my former main home PC unusable; it was a power failure that finished it off for good. My remedy was a rebuild using my then usual recipe of a Gigabyte motherboard, AMD CPU and crucial memory. However, assembling the said pieces never returned the thing to life and I ended up in no man’s land for a while, dependent on and my backup machine and laptop. That wouldn’t have been so bad but for the need for accessing data from the old behemoth’s hard drives but an external drive housing set that in order. Nevertheless, there is something unfinished about work with machines having a series of external drives hanging off them. That appearance of disarray was set to rights by the arrival of a bare bones system from Novatech in July with any assembly work restricted to the kitchen table.There was a certain pleasure in seeing a system come to life after my developing a fear that I had lost all of my PC building prowess.

That restoration of order still left finding out why those components bought earlier in the year didn’t work together well enough to give me a screen display on start-up. Having electronics testing equipment and the knowledge of its correct use would make any troubleshooting far easier but I haven’t got these. There is a place near to me where I could go for this but you are left wondering what might be said to a PC build gone wrong. Of course, the last thing that you want to be doing is embarking on a series of purchases that do not fix the problem, especially in the current economic climate.

One thing to suspect when all doesn’t turn out as hoped is the motherboard and, for whatever reason, I always suspect it last. It now looks as if that needs to change after I discovered that it was the Gigabyte motherboard that was at fault. Whether it was faulty from the outset or it came a cropper with a rogue power supply or careless with static protection is something that I’ll never know. An Asus motherboard did go rogue on me in the past and it might be that it ruined CPU’s and even a hard drive before I laid it to rest. Its eventual replacement put a stop to a year of computing misfortune and kick-started my reliance on Gigabyte. That faith is under question now but the 2009 computing hardware mishap seems to be behind me and any PC rebuilds will be done on tables and motherboards will be suspected earlier when anything goes awry.

Returning to the present, my acquisition of an ASRock K10N78 and subsequent building activities has brought a new system using an AMD Phenom X4 CPU and 4 GB of memory into use. In fact, I writing these very words using the thing. It’s all in a new TrendSonic case too (placing an elderly behemoth into retirement) and with a SATA hard drive and DVD writer. The new motherboard has onboard audio and graphics so external cards are not needed unless you are an audiophile and/or a gamer; for the record, I am neither. Those additional facilities make for easier building and fault-finding should the undesirable happen.

The new box is running the release candidate of Ubuntu 9.10 and it seems to be working without a hitch too. Earlier builds of 9.10 broke in their VirtualBox VM so you should understand the level of concern that this aroused in my mind; the last thing that you want to be doing is reinstalling an operating system because its booting capability breaks every other day. Thankfully, the RC seems to have none of these rough edges so I can upgrade the Novatech box, still my main machine and likely to remain so for now, with peace of mind when the time comes.

Hardware, Linux, Virtualisation

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A restoration of order

July 12, 2009 No comments

This weekend, I finally put my home computing displacement behind me. My laptop had become my main PC with a combination of external hard drives and an Octigen external hard drive enclosure keeping me motoring in laptop limbo. Having had no joy in the realm of PC building, I decided to go down the partially built route and order a bare bones system from Novatech. That gave me a Foxconn case and motherboard loaded up with an AMD 7850 dual core CPU and 2 GB of RAM. With the motherboard offering onboard sound and video capability, all that was needed was to add drives. I added no floppy drive but instead installed a SATA DVD Writer (not sure that it was a successful purchase, though, but that can be resolved at my leisure) and the hard drives from the old behemoth that had been serving me until its demise. A session of work on the kitchen table and some toing and froing ensued as I inched my way towards a working system.

Once I had set all of the expected hard disks into place, Ubuntu was capable of being summoned to life with the only impediment being an insistence of scanning the 1 TB Western Digital and getting stuck along the way. Not having the patience, I skipped this at start up and later unmounted the drive to let fsck to its thing while I got on with other tasks; the hold up had been the presence of VirtualBox disk images on the drive. Speaking of VirtualBox, I needed to scale back the capabilities of Compiz so things would work as they should. Otherwise, it was a matter of updating various directories with files that had appeared on external drives without making it into their usual storage areas. Windows would never have been so tolerant and, as if to prove the point, I needed to repair an XP installation in one of my virtual machines.

In the instructions that came with the new box, Novatech stated that time was a vital ingredient for a build and they weren’t wrong. The delivery arrived at 09:30 and I later got a shock when I saw the time to be 15:15! However, it was time well spent and I noticed the speed increase when putting ImageMagick through its paces with a Perl script. In time, I might get brave and be tempted to add more memory to get up to 4 GB; the motherboard may only have two slots but that’s not such a problem with my planning on sticking with 32-bit Linux for a while to come. My brief brush with its 64-bit counterpart revealed some roughness that ward me off for a little while longer. For now, I’ll leave well alone and allow things to settle down again. Lessons for the future remain and I may even mull over them in another post…

Hardware, Linux, Software, Virtualisation

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Out of memory at line: 56

May 28, 2009 No comments

This is an error that I have started to see a lot in the last few weeks. First, it was with Piwik and latterly with WordPress.com Stats. For the record, I have never seen it on up to date systems but always with IE6 and at page unloading time. The CPU usage hits 100% before the error is produced and that has had me blaming JavaScript in error; it isn’t the cause of all ills. In fact, the cause seems to be a bug in a certain release of Adobe Flash 9 but I am of the opinion that the inclusion of certain features in a Flash movie are needed to trigger it too. I don’t have the exact details of this but WordPress.com Stats worked without fault until a recent update and that is what is making me reach the conclusion that I have. That observation is making me wonder whether we are coming to a point where Flash compatibility is something that needs to factored into the use of the said technology in a website or web application. Updating Flash will solve the problem on the client but it might be better if it wasn’t triggered on the server side either.

Scripting, Software, Video, Web, Web Development, Web Technologies, Web Tools

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Adding a new hard drive to Ubuntu

January 19, 2009 No comments

This is a subject that I thought that I had discussed on this blog before but I can’t seem to find any reference to it now. I have discussed the subject of adding hard drives to Windows machines a while back so that might explain what I was under the impression that I was. Of course, there’s always the possibility that I can’t find things on my own blog but I’ll go through the process.

What has brought all of this about was the rate at which digital images were filling my hard disks. Even with some housekeeping, I could only foresee the collection growing so I went and ordered a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Green Power from Misco. City Link did the honours with the delivery and I can credit their customer service with regard to organising delivery without my needing to get to the depot to collect the thing; it was a refreshing experience that left me pleasantly surprised.

For the most of the time, hard drives that I have had generally got on with the job there was one experience that has left me wary. Assured by good reviews, I went and got myself an IBM DeskStar and its reliability didn’t fill me with confidence and I will not touch their Hitachi equivalents because of it (IBM sold their hard drive business to Hitachi). This was a period in time when I had a hardware faltering on me with an Asus motherboard putting me off that brand around the same time as well (I now blame it for going through a succession of AMD Athlon CPU’s). The result is that I have a tendency to go for brands that I can trust from personal experience and both Western Digital falls into this category (as does Gigabyte for motherboards), hence my going for a WD this time around. That’s not to say that other hard drive makers wouldn’t satisfy my needs since I have had no problems with disks from Maxtor or Samsung but Ill stick with those makers that I know until they leave me down, something that I hope never happens.

GParted running on Ubuntu

GParted running on Ubuntu

Anyway, let’s get back to installing the hard drive. The physical side of the business was the usual shuffle within the PC to add the SATA drive before starting up Ubuntu. From there, it was a matter of firing up GParted (System -> Administration -> Partition Editor on the menus if you already have it installed). The next step was to find the new empty drive and create a partition table on it. At this point, I selected msdos from the menu before proceeding to set up a single ext3 partition on the drive. You need to select Edit -> Apply All Operations from the menus set things into motion before sitting back and waiting for GParted to do its thing.

After the GParted activities, the next task is to set up automounting for the drive so that it is available every time that Ubuntu starts up. The first thing to be done is to create the folder that will be the mount point for your new drive, /newdrive in this example. This involves editing /etc/fstab with superuser access to add a line like the following with the correct UUID for your situation:

UUID=”32cf775f-9d3d-4c66-b943-bad96049da53″ /newdrive ext3 defaults,noatime,errors=remount-ro

You can can also add a comment like “# /dev/sdd1″ above that so that you know what’s what in the future. To get the actual UUID that you need to add to fstab, issue a command like one of those below, changing /dev/sdd1 to what is right for you:

sudo vol_id /dev/sdd1 | grep “UUID=” /* Older Ubuntu versions */

sudo blkid /dev/sdd1 | grep “UUID=” /* Newer Ubuntu versions */

This is the sort of thing that you get back and the part beyond the “=” is what you need:

ID_FS_UUID=32cf775f-9d3d-4c66-b943-bad96049da53

Once all of this has been done, a reboot is in order and you then need to set up folder permissions as required before you can use the drive. This part gets me firing up Nautilus using gksu and adding myself to the user group in the Permissions tab of the Properties dialogue for the mount point (/newdrive, for example). After that, I issued something akin to the following command to set global permissions:

chmod 775 /newdrive

With that, I had completed what I needed to do to get the WD drive going under Ubuntu. After that IBM DeskStar experience, the new drive remains on probation but moving some non-essential things on there has allowed me to free some space elsewhere and carry out a reorganisation. Further consolidation will follow but I hope that the new 931.51 GiB (binary gigabytes or 1024*1024*1024 rather the decimal gigabytes (1,000,000,000) preferred by hard disk manufacturers) will keep me going for a good while before I need to add extra space again.

Hardware, Linux

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