Lab of Doom and Pepsi Cola › Stumbling Through Technology One Tip at a Time

The Currently Definitive SSD Report

Saturday, January 24, 2009

Myth 1: A Solid State Disk will boot faster than mechanical hard drive.
This is true but it’s partially smoke and mirrors as well. When SSDs first appeared, they were rather pathetic 8GB and 16GB devices. Not much fits in that size. Even at 32GB you’ll still be somewhat cramped if you have hardware drivers and applications.

In fact, that’s where SSDs got their initial reputation for fast boots. With no drivers or background software to load, most of what you had to wait through was your portable’s BIOS, which probably took about 20 seconds, and then maybe another 35 seconds or so for the operating system.

But when you get to 64GB or 80GB or 128GB –and you have some room to feel confident about carrying the additional software you need around with you—you start to add time to the boot process. Depending on just how much you’re loading, you’ll probably be waiting at least an extra 15 seconds. To be fair, a similarly stocked mechanical drive can carry on for an additional 20 – 30 seconds and that’s what you’re paying to avoid with an SSD.

(Continued)

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Twas Two Weeks Before Christmas

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Bill,

I know you are probably wondering what I finally decided upon since I’ve been hemming and hawing for over a year as to what I’d build as my next PC. Thanks to the great job you do with posting information here and there about what’s what, you have pointed me in what I believe is the proper direction and I have settled on the following parts:

Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R (it’s got only one PCIe slot but I decided against Crossfire or SLI and instead opted for the backwards compatibility of more standard PCI slots in case they are needed should any of the built-in bits fail). It’s not their top board but it’s got just about everything you could think of needing now and in the future including plenty of SATA and USB ports, GB ethernet, Firewire, eSATA, etc. And it has very good tweaking features I likely will never use but like having nonetheless. At Newegg it was $119 with a $15 MIR .

Intel Q9550 Core2 Quad. It’s close to the sweet spot for quad cores (or what I’d consider the sweet spot) and, though I could have been a bit more future proof by getting the lowest i7, I opted for a tested and well regarded quad Core2. It apparently overclocks well and is brand new (manufactured just last month and has the new e0 stepping). That was $319. NO rebate.

4GB Corsair Dominator TWIN2X4096-8500C5DF which was only $99 yet came with a huge $40 rebate and had the clip-on fan and ended up being only a few dollars more than the kit without the fan. More RAM than I can actually use but it’s good RAM and relatively cheap.

Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 1G which was cheap compared to all the X2 cards and better than most of the nVidia range at $240 with a $15 rebate.

I opted for another new PSU as the one you sent me is still in the old computer and that’s going to be my spare. I decided on the Corsair TX750 at $119 with a $20 rebate.

Lastly, I had to get a case and didn’t do much research on that. I went to Micro Center and picked up one that struck a chord with me that turned out to be, not a mistake, but could have been better thought out. A Thermaltake VJ4000 V9 which was twice what I really wanted to spend at $114. I was hoping for a $60 case. The PSU mounts to the bottom which I realize does nothing other than place the intake at the floor and really does not function as an exhaust fan as it would had I bought a top-mounted case. Still it has dual 120mm fans and a giant 233mm fan at the top. I could have gotten it cheaper elsewhere but didn’t want to wait. I kinda wish I waited.

I am using the Seagate 500GB and 750 GB SATA drives from my old computer but now at maximum SATA 2.0 speed. I’ve always had good luck with Seagate.

Anyway, the parts I bought were $1000 with $115 in rebates (including a $25 in Newegg coupons) that made the case “free”. A bit more than I had planned on but I think it builds a respectable machine. Not an ultra gaming powerhouse but adequate for my needs.

Everything I got from Newegg worked out of the box. No DOA on any of it.

It’s pretty fast without overclocking of any sort. I need to do some benchmarking but will be busy for Christmas and won’t get to that for at least a week. Any suggestions on a good suite to use to get some numbers?

Anyway, thought you might like to hear what I finally put together.

Have a great Christmas and Happy New Year. My best to you and your significant other and my hopes that all your gift selections were “correct”!

I’ll see you on TechNudge!

Kevin

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Epson CX9400Fax: Over-Engineered

Thursday, February 21, 2008

So here I am, the proud owner of the aforementioned Epson All-in-One printer, replacing a tired HP K80. Dagnabbit! One of the things I print are Stomper CD/DVD labels. They’re die cut, two-up on a sheet, and there’s a tiny slit in the page adjacent to two tabs that let you lift the labels off the sheet.

The dilemma: The printer stops printing about an eighth of an inch from the bottom of the top label and shoots out the sheet with the rest of it blank.

Epson’s technical support would be comical if it wasn’t so clueless. Over the last three days it’s told me how to possibly resolve the problem for a different printer entirely and has just told me that the software I’m using is probably the culprit –even though it’s the same software -and hardware- I’ve been using for years on the K80.

So I started playing around a bit.

Click ‘n’ Design 3D V5 prints great to plain paper. Try to print the same template to a label sheet and, Shazaam!, it stops printing as previously described and spits out the sheet. That absolves the software. By golly! It’s something about the printer! Who’d have thunk!?!

Silly person that I am, I put some blue painter’s tape across the two slits in the label sheet and tried again. Shazaam! It prints the full sheet, two labels, just what I want! It’s a miracle! Well, all right, it’s probably a sensor in the feed path that, on seeing the gap in the label at the slits, stops printing so ink isn’t flying about willy-nilly.

Now comes the hard part. No, not putting blue tape over the slits whenever I try to print a CD/DVD label. The hard part will now be waiting for Epson’s reply on Friday and then trying to get them to tell me how to disable that sensor.

Do you wonder why I hate change?

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Format Hell

Friday, January 18, 2008

I’ve been testing a bunch of 1TB drives and, on average, they take about 3.5 hours to format using the admin tools in Vista Ultimate. Then I get a Samsung drive in earlier this week. That one takes 37 hours to format. Samsung sends a replacement. Again, 37 hours –or at least it was heading there when I canceled it.

Being a glutton for punishment, I tried it on an XP MCE system. Shazaam!! Roughly 3.5 hours. WTH? I went back to the Vista Ultimate system and tried a 1TB Seagate drive. You guessed it, 3.5 hours. On the XP MCE system: 3.5 hours.

Ever get that feeling deep down in your gut that God was trying to teach you a lesson?

Then I remembered that there had been a patch Tuesday just recently and the Vista Ultimate system was on auto download and install. I backed the box up (using a restore point) to before the patch was delivered and then tried the Samsung drive again. There it was: 3.5 hours.

I’ve left a note for Samsung asking if they might not want to check out whatever the interaction is. The patch contains one of three elements needed for the upgrade to SP1. From the looks of it (and this is a gut feeling, not a proven fact), something in the patch and something in the Samsung firmware don’t seem to be getting along together. (At least not on the format level. Overall performance was just as expected.)

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Antec P190 + 1200

Tuesday, January 1, 2008

Antec’s changing names again. This time the P190 has become the P190 +1200 –the latter referring to the Neo-Link 1200 watt power supply. (Apparently, some folk were confused as to the reason the house lights dimmed when they switched it on…)

This is a big case. Why do I say that? Because that’s an ASUS M3A32 MVP WiFi-AP Deluxe full-size motherboard in there and it’s pretty much dwarfed by the space you could possibly use. I’m thinking dual quad core server motherboards might be a better fit… (I had to move the motherboard standoffs two sections to the left.)

I’m at the beginning of construction here, with just the processor (yes, that’s a stock AMD cooling fan -the AM2+ socket wouldn’t fit anything I had on hand and it’s a holiday…), two hard drives (500GB on top, 1TB below in the top bank), and the Gigabyte Radeon HD 2600 Pro PCIe graphics card installed.

And that graphics card is one huge copper heatsink. You have to wonder: there’ll be no additional noise from the GPU fan (because there isn’t one) but how well will the heatsink do its job?

The surprising thing about the HD 2600 Pro (and if you think you’ve heard the name before this, check out an iMac config) is that its doesn’t have an HDMI port. I think the HD 2400GT spoiled me.

More as it goes along…

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Filling Antec’s Fusion Black

Saturday, September 15, 2007

The Crucial 2 x 1GB DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 533 (PC2 4200) memory (which you can barely see in the yellow sockets), Asus M2N-MX motherboard NVIDIA GeForce 6100 (which is now out of stock at Newegg), and the AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ all showed up.

I’d forgotten how small Micro ATX motherboards are. That’s a standard AMD stock fan on top and AMD deserves a bit of applause for making the heatsink and fan quite attractive. Oh, the Fusion Black case is here too.

Unfortunately, the motherboard doesn’t seem to support Firewire.

More as it evolves…

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The 20 Year VHS Tape

Saturday, January 20, 2007

I’ve been transferring video from VHS to DVD for the past two weeks and have come upon some anecdotal data that I, at least, find interesting.

While watching a Doctor Who episode as I recorded it to my PC, I saw a commercial for a Who convention. There were a string of celebrities reportedly attending and, in that fleeting moment of whispy timelessness that sometimes happens when watching events out of context, I thought, “Hey, I should go.” That was before the announcer reminded me that the promo was for WhoCon86 (or some such name) which, of course, was scheduled for May of 1986.

So, I now had an approximate date for my Doctor Who video tapes -they were at least 20 years old.

Surprisingly, most were in pretty could condition. Sure, there were those that wiggled a bit, and a few that were absolutely over-exposed to the point of being painful to watch. But, by in large, the bulk of them were usable.

Now why would that be surprising? Well, for one, it’s tape. For the other, they’ve spent the last nine years in an unheated garage and had no real special storage treatment before that.

Twenty years for tape is not a bad deal considering I have 1x CDs that are no longer readable by current equipment…

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The Digital Tuner Gambit

Friday, January 19, 2007

From TechNudge Master Digital Manipulator Gyro Gearloose

There are “digital” tuners, and then there are “digital tuners.

Be sure to ask if the “digital” tuner is QAM capable. QAM is the modulation scheme in use by most cable companies. Don’t buy a set that does not have a QAM capable tuner.

In my experience the cable companies have digital channels on their systems that are not encrypted. A QAM capable tuner will display digital cable signals that are not encrypted. In many areas, the local HD channels are among the non-encrypted channels. I get about 20 channels, some HD, some standard definition.

So before you go out and subscribe to an expensive digital service with yet another box to deal with, plug your QAM capable set into your cable and tell it to do a digital as well as an analog search. You might be surprised at the results!

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A Few Words About Little Words

Tuesday, December 5, 2006

I’ve been working on putting my new laser printer, the Samsung ML-2010, to the test. This is the first printer we’re reviewing, although I have used many printers through the years. After looking around the internet, I decided that while small fonts are the challenge I would focus on (people buy lasers for text, not images), I couldn’t find an existing test page that fairly tested this for download.

(Continued)

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Tackling Vista for Under $1,300

Monday, December 4, 2006

ATX Mid Tower Computer Case $44.99

2.0 ATX12V 500W Power Supply $74.99

Socket T (LGA 775) Intel P965 Express ATX Intel Motherboard $139.99

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe 2.4GHz
4M sharing L2 Cache LGA 775 Processor $309.99

GeForce 7900GT PVT71GUQL3 Video Card $235.99 2GB

(2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM Memory $219.99

Two 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive $159.98

250GB 7200 RPM IDE Ultra ATA100 Hard Drive $74.99

18X DVD±R DVD Burner E-IDE/ATAPI $29.99

Total $1,290.90

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Speed and the Quad Core

Wednesday, November 1, 2006

Just a brief note because I had the opportunity to test a CyberPower Gamer Infinity 1950 system with an Intel QX6700 (Q=Quad Core, X=eXtreme) that they’d clocked up to 3.46GHz from its native 2.66GHz…

The quads are way faster than the dual core HT Pentiums. (See what adjusting your pipelines will do?) They’re also equivalently faster than the Core 2 Duos. Now the caveat to that is that all depends on the software you’re using.

When addressing all four cores, the thing speeds along without a hitch. If the software only uses one core, the QX6700 is about as fast as a Pentium 955 Extreme for heavy lifting task and about as fast as an FX60 for task that require minimal processing but a lot of CPU/memory throughput.The moral of this story is, don’t buy a quad core unless you can actually use one.

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Oppor Tuner Ty

Saturday, October 14, 2006

As the Intel booth guy played with the remote on his MCE (or was it Vista?) enabled PC, I remarked that it was a great program except that it was extremely stupid.

“What?”

Well, suppose you want to record two programs sequentially on the same channel… You know, maybe one from 8:00pm to 9:00pm and the second from 9:00pm to 10:00pm. Sounds simple enough, right?

Well. neither Vista nor MCE are smart enough to realize that these are consequtive shows. Each stopped recrding the first and then starts recording the second. In between, you could loose as much as 12 - 18 seconds,

“What’s that, the middle of a commercial?” Said Mr. Intel.

More like a slice of the front end of the second show, especially on a cable channel where they play a little faster and looser with start and finish times. And for a show with a 2:38 first segment, 18 seconds is a little more than 10% pf the setup.

Now, if you have two tuners you can tell MCE or Vista to end the first show five minutes after it should theoretically end. That extension will force the second show onto the second tuner and preserve it in its entirety.

Nice trick and pretty much obvious once you know it.

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Vista Pre-RC1 Build 5536

Saturday, September 2, 2006

The worst thing that can happen when you’re busy is for someone to waste your time. I must be missing something that everyone praising the latest Vista build has seen but it’s a waste of time. It gave a perfectly good Pentiun 4 Extreme (the original) system with 1.5GB of memory into a “3.3″ evaluation, and then refused to recognize the integrated LAN electronics on the ASUS P4C800 motherboard that had been working just fine under XP.

Worse still, from my point of view, trying to install a Belkin USB G+MIMO adapter on the system (”Only 3 Days to Register!”) proved equally fruitless. The manufacturer’s install disk wouldn’t run. Vista wanted to pick up the drivers on its own but that didn’t work either. I think I must have shuffled 6 or 7 CDs between computers (it’s barbaric working without a network!) trying to get things together.

And just forget about my WinTV PVR-250 tuner card that had worked so well under XP and MCE. Vista couldn’t care less. That was another couple of CDs.All told, switching from XP to Vista has left me with a thoroughly autistic PC …and wasted about 6 hours of my time. That’s the part that really ticks me off.

We went through this same nonsense with Windows XP. You’d think that Microsoft would have gotten the message already -an operating system is nothing without hardware drivers and a computer isn’t worth the power it takes to turn it on without the hardware needed to make life interesting.

Now there are another couple of hours about to be shot to heck putting everything back the way it was… I hate this crap.

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Observation: WinTV PVR-250 versus WinTV PVR-150

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

I’ve been complaining for a while about the absolute crap quality of NBC HD broadcasts (1080i) after they’ve been received, compressed, retransmitted by Cablevision and viewed through my Hauuppauge WinTV PVR-250 tuner card. Well, I may need to apologize to Cablevision….

I recently recorded a NASCAR race on a system with a PVR-150 card. I’d assume (I know, bad word) that a “150″ would be a downgrade from a “250″ just by virtue of its lower model number. Not so, it seems. Through the PVR-150, there’s practically no on-screen artifacts and the video presentation is near perfect.

At first I thought it might be some interaction with Windows XP Media Center but I tried the PVR-250 in the box and the onscreen artifacts were back in full force. Swap in the PVR-150 and they were gone.

Also, the dual tuner PVR-500 exhibts the same behavior as the PVR-150. (What can I tell you? I didn’t have much to do that day.) Of course, having a dual tuner (or two) is a hoot all its own and a story for another day….

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Render Unto Conroe

Saturday, August 26, 2006

A formatted render is not as enthusiastic for the C2D, where it’s just a smidge faster than a Pentium D 840 Extreme. To be fair, the 840 is not only dual core but also Hythreaded, which the C2D is not. And the 840 is also clocked 280MHz faster.

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