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Category: Geek service

  • CES 2011: Waiting for Alienware M13x 🙂

    Remember my earlier laptop angst? Well, I’m not exactly bowled over by the new Thinkpads just announced at CES, and the logic that we are unlikely to see a M11x R3 refresh this soon after the R2 refresh just a few months ago is pretty compelling (per this long thread at the NBReview forums). Plus, Sandy Bridge architecture is out now, and probably most importantly I’ve built myself a professional desktop rig (my long-standing advocacy for flex computing be darned).

    And yet, Alienware has been teasing about something… “huge, exciting, skinny, [other superlatives], sexy” via email:

    Could it be, an M13x?

    Anyway, tomorrow morning we will find out. I hope it’s not just the M17x R3 which has already been leaked. Yawn… I’ll update the post accordingly… but I’m hoping for a 13-inch, sandy-bridge sibling to plug the hole in AW’s mobile line. Let’s see!

    UPDATE: I agree mostly with this list of pros and cons of the M11x which hopefully will/won’t make it into an M11x R3 or a M13x.

    UPDATE: Yup, just the M17x R3. On what planet does Alienware think “skinny” applies to this beast? I expect the M11x R3 sometime this summer, and maybe they will have an M13x by then as well, though if they give the M11x a better screen and Sandy Bridge, I’ll probably be sold on it.

  • Static concerns and UPS power protection for an enthusiast PC

    My case is too large for my desk, so it went on the floor. A carpeted floor, that is, which means that my arm hairs are perpetually on edge as my arms rest on my desk (actually, a plastic table, which makes it worse. I’ll replace that soon with a proper metal and wood desk from upstairs). My initial assumption was that since the case is metal (steel), and the power supply has a grounding plug, that the PC was basically immune to static discharges. However, reflecting on this a bit more, I realized that if I build up a charge in myself (say, by walking across carpet, in winter, while the heater is on, thus in a very dry air environment, especially so in our basement), and i were to accidentally discharge by touching the PC, then that charge has to travel through the PC to get to ground. Granted, the current might well pass solely through the case, and I assume that the motherboard is at a higher potential. I don’t really know what to do about this, or whether it’s a serious concern.

    I have put the PC on a piece of corkboard rather than directly on carpet, but that’s more to prevent carpet from impeding airflow entering via the bottom fan below the CPU. This does isolate the PC a bit more from static, though that would actually be a bad thing because if the PC were truly isolated then it could conceivably build up a charge itself (though, I still assume that the PSU connection to ground will dissipate this). I’m not connecting the PC to any stereo equipment, so there’s no issues with ground loops, at least. If anyone has any advice or can assuage my concerns about static further, I’d be grateful.

    Next, I realized that I am running a lot of wattage to very sensitive electrical equipment. DUH! But in the past I;ve just used simple surge suppression strips and not worried much about it. Given the investment in hardware, and my intention to make this PC my main data storage home, I’m going to have to consider some sort of power protection beyond surges. To that end I found an absolutely stellar reference by ExtremeTech on Uninterruptible Power Supplies (or Systems) from which I took home the following points:

    – the VA rating on my computer hardware is probably very close to the actual wattage, since my PSU (like most nowaddays) is a Power Factor Correction (PFC) type. Hence I just need to make sure that the VA rating is well above my watts rating – in this case, I have a 650W PSU, so I’d need a VA of at least 700. Caveat: most UPS systems quote a higher watts rating than the VA, so actually I probably should get at least a 700 W UPS, not just 700 VA. That will give me overhead, future growth, etc.

    – I need a PFC-compatible, line-interactive UPS. It needs USB interactivity/compatibility with Windows 7 to permit graceful system shutdown in event of power loss (just like notebooks – a good UPS basically gives desktops the same capabilities for power management, which are built into the OS by default).

    – Never plug a laser printer into a UPS.

    CyberPower PFC UPS
    1350 VA, 810W PFC UPS from CyberPower
    Tom’s has already done a review of various UPS systems, taking into account the fact that enthusiast-level systems (and above) have more stringent protection needs than a typical office desktop, particularly in terms of drawing higher loads. As I noted in my epic hardware post earlier, I’m not running SLI or doing major overclocking, but even so my 650W PSU is pretty hefty compared to what you’ll find in an office cubicle Dell. My system is on par with the enthusiast build at Tom’s (minus SLI, but plus an i5 quad core), or the Editor’s Choice build at TechReport (minus SSDs/RAID). The bottom line is that they found Cyberpower’s “green” series to be the best value, quiet, and amazingly efficient. The prices for these are better at Amazon than at NewEgg – I’m just unsure whether I should buy the 810W version or the 900W version.

    The bad news of course is that this is another $200 to bear. Can I get away with just a surge strip after all? Any thoughts on the matter would be most appreciated 🙂

  • building for the future

    If you’re following my PC build saga, you’ll know that I was torn between trying to exploit old hardware for cheaper or splurge on new components. I think I’ve decided the latter route and focused on what my major uses are going to be: scientific computing (so, need lots of ram), and WoW Cataclysm (so, need decent graphics performance but not top of line). However, beyond those broad outlines, the specifics of what CPU, graphics card and motherboard to choose were pretty daunting. Luckily, I found the perfect guide to help me make some decisions: an article in Tom’s Hardware about performance in Cata.

    Reading this superb and in-depth article, I am concluding:

    – AMD chips seems to be bottlenecked in Cataclysm, whereas Intel chips hit their stride. Intel chips need only 2 cores to really shine whereas the AMD chips don’t utilize fewer cores efficiently. So, Intel is the way to go, and given my need for scientific computing I’ll go middle of the road with Core i5 rather than entry-level i3 or maxed-out i7.

    – Hyperthreading doesn’t help performance, and chip frequency isn’t as important as cores and cache. So, I’m leaning towards an i5-655k dual/HT or an i5-750 quad. Both are the same price ($200) – but will probably the latter, since more cores will also help my scientific work. The Core i5-750 gets a lot of love from Anandtech.

    – It looks like Nvidia’s series 4xx is the way to go for video card, as they support DX11. Of course ATI is always an option but the GeForce GT 460 seems to be a great value card with no equivalent value on the Radeon side. There are lots of manufacturers making these, I’m leaning towards Asus’s version even though it’s $20 more expensive than MSI’s.

    – I am an Asus partisan when it comes to motherboards, though that’s really just a pragmatic choice to narrow down the choice. The real issue seems to be, do I need to run a dual-GPU setup (SLI, in this case, given that I’m leaning towards the nvidia rather than ATI video cards) ? According to Anandtech, If I were leaning towards SLI then an X58 board like the Rampage or Sabretooth would be better – most likely the Sabretooth since it’s got less gamer/lanparty bling I don’t need. However, multi-GPU doesn’t seem to be important in cata, according to the Tom’s article, and I’m not sure why I’d need multi-GPU in my scientific computing either. So I think I’m going to go with a P55-based board, which are designed to be compatible with Lynnfield chips like the i5-750 quad I mentioned above. I’m leaning towards the ASUS P7P55D-E, which comes in an LX and a Pro version. The Pro is about $50 USD more expensive but permits SLI also, but I’d rather save the money since otherwise the boards look pretty much identical.

    Though I haven’t picked out memory yet, I know I want 8GB for about $100. Should be easy enough to find, but need to figure out what speed (this looks helpful…). The result looks a lot like the Editor’s Choice system at Tech Report. The key is balance – not to get any one component out of whack with the others. A fantastic video card but low end processor will handicap the GPU (and vice versa). The Core i5 coupled with the GT 460 seems like a good pairing here (though I request more saavy readers to critique me on this).

    Amusingly, Tom’s sneers at the “Low” quality setting, saying it’s ugly but acknowledging that’s what you are stuck with if you’re playing on a netbook. But frankly I am really impressed that WoW is playable on a netbook at all. Regular commentor Anachronda has told me he played WoW on a Asus EEE 701; right now my only WoW-capable machine is a Dell Mini 10. You know, it may be ugly, but if you need an Azeroth fix, it suffices. That said, the rig above will be about $600 ($200 each for CP and video, $129 for mobo, and $100 for 8GB ram) and I’ll be playing at Ultra in addition to actually getting work done.

    So, it’s in my cart at Newegg. I’ll look it all over again and choose some memory to go along with it. Also, I need to verify that my existing power supply will handle this stuff (not too worried about this). I think this is the way to go…

  • thinking about Thinkpad, seduced by Alienware

    I’m waiting for my aging Thinkpad T42 to be delivered today from repair – it had the same fan error as last time, and fortuitously chose the day before my 3-year warranty expired to conk out. My desktop PC replacement saga aside, I need to think seriously about what my next laptop will be – especcially since I can’t renew the extended warranty on the T42 anymore.

    The T42 is a 14″ machine and it’s basically been the best laptop I’ve ever owned. I have no complaints, and for a replacement the T401s looks like an obvious choice. However, my dalliance with netbooks has me convinced that smaller is better. Unfortunately, netbooks seems to have imploded as a category, I still cant find a decent Core Duo 9-inch netbook with an SSD and Nvidia’s ION2 “Optimus” – and even if I could, I doubt it would come in under the $500 mark (if anyone knows otherwise, though, please let me know ASAP!).

    However, I’ve become aware of Alienware’s new M11x, an 11-inch laptop which is designed for gaming portability. The smaller size makes it compelling, and it would scream at my scientific work as well as run Warcraft better than anything I’ve ever played on. And it has Optimus and an SSD option (only on the R2 revision, which has the i-series processor instead of Core Duo). The downside is of course that it won’t be cheap, probably $1k minimum if I get a good deal or closer to $2k loaded including 3yr warranty. Thats what I’d be paying for a Thinkpad though as well.

    I’m going to have stay tuned to @DellOutlet and see if they have any deals on the M11 in the pipe. I’m seriously tempted by it, enough to even consider straying outside the Thinkpad tent.

  • iPad vs Kindle – no contest

    The quintessential question – buy an iPad or a Kindle? – is rather glibly answered by Mark Jaquith here: buy both.

    Well, that’s what you’d expect an iPad owner to say, because they are the sort that can afford to blow $500 on an oversized iPod (the new 4th generation version of which is, as even Jobs himself conceded, basically iPhone 4 without the flawed phone or exorbitant monthly expenses).

    But Jaquith also makes a pretty solid case on the philosophical merits for one of the devices over the other. It’s implicit, but pretty much impossible to deny which device is superior, from this:

    With the Kindle, you’re becoming absorbed in a story for an hour or more at a time. You can read in bed, right before you go to sleep, without worrying that it will rile you up. To the contrary, the Kindle relaxes you. You might even take it outside to the pool or to the hammock. Flight attendants will chastise the iPhone-using passenger next to you as the plane descends for landing; but you, the gentle Kindle user, she’ll merely touch on the shoulder and tell you with a smile to make sure your seatbelt is securely fastened.

    The iPad wakes you up. BAM! Here’s the news, with pictures and video. TWEET! Here’s the torrential banality of Twitter to distract you from something (or everything) important. TWEET! Here’s the same exclamation used again because you’re paying the insanely addictive Angry Birds game. ZAP! Here’s you firing off an e-mail over your morning coffee.

    I’ve never found myself struggling which to pick, much in the same way that nobody is ever torn between having tea and going sky diving. They are different devices, for different purposes. And that’s a good thing in the case of the Kindle. There is something almost drug-like about having a device that can do anything. It’s hard to turn off that ability. With the Kindle, you won’t be thinking about increasing your Fruit Ninja high score, or frantically checking and re-checking your e-mail. You’ll be in the only state that is appropriate when reading a book: completely lost in it.

    And the iPad? It lets you live your soul crushing, hyper connected, vanity searching, e-mail enslaved life in any room of the house, instead of being planted in a desk chair in a darkened basement. And it has two other things going for it: it’s easy to set it down and rejoin the world, and sometimes you’ll lose it in a stack of mail for a day and be forced to do something edifying instead.

    I just bought an iPod Touch 4th Gen because my kids took my 3rd Gen away from me. I intend to use it entirely for two things: Skype and Facetime with my iPhone-4-totin’ wife. For everything else, I have my blackberry – and if I really want to play Angry Birds, I can ask my kids’ permission.

  • new PC build

    I think we badly need another PC in the house. Of course this is sort of a strange statement given that we presently have a Dell 800 and Thinkpad 42 (laptops), an EEE 701 and a Dell Mini 10v (netbooks), the current kids/gaming rig (whose evolution I described in detail here) and an aging Dell minitower handmedown that originally shipped with Windows Me.

    The problem is that I never got around to upgrading the handmedown, and am right now running the rig with the Asrock mobo, the AGP card, and DDR 400 ram with a dual-core chip. The Asus mobo is sitting around unused. My original plan of moving the DDR400 ram and AGP card to the Asus mobo and buying new DDR2 ram and a PCE-e card for the Asrock had a fatal flaw: it’s hard to find a decent PCI-e card for the Asrock, since all the compatible PCI-e cards seem to be discontinued on newegg.

    Also, the rig gave me some major headaches the last few days. While playing WoW suddenly teh entire PC would completely freeze – not BSOD, but literally freeze so solid that nothing responded, not even the three-fingered salute. Only a hard power cycle would wourk, and then i would sometimes be able to boot up and other times the primary boot device would not be found. To summarize, the problem only triggered when doing heavy graphics load, but manifested as a boot device problem. I initially suspected a corrupt MBR or a failing video card fan, but why was there a connection between video card use and booting up? Ultimately after taking the PC apart, vacuuming the inside, and poking around, I realized what had happened – the fan on teh video card was full of dust (because the PC was on the floor.) This caused the fan to seize up, and vibrate the card – which was causing the SATA power connection on the hard drive to jiggle loose a little bit. This was because inside the case, the power cord from the CPU to both units was on the same bundle, and also rested a bit on the video card vertically.

    Let me tell you, the diagnosis for the above was not as easy in real life as it was to type.

    Anyway the PC is vacuumed, the power cords reseated and reorganized, and the PC is now up off the floor. And i was able to get back to Azeroth yesterday to tweak the guild settings and bank without crashing. But the whole affair made me realize that this was the only PC in the house that can actually play WoW at all – with the exception of the Dell Mini 10v, which is also kind of remarkable if you think about it.

    At any rate, i need to upgrade the hand-me-down now, but finding the right PCI-e card for the gaming rig is not easy. I have two choices here:

    1. persevere and find a compat video card for the Asrock machine, and build the other PC as I originally planned (though Id probably buy a new case). This will require about $50 for a PCI-e card from this list (if I can even find one!), and abouut $80 for 2 sticks of 2GB DDR2 667, along with a power supply and case (~$150). Total: about $300, and reuse of everything I’ve bought so far.

    2. give up on the old Asus mobo and just redesignate the gaming rig as kids PC, then buy myself a shiny new kit. The total: $500. Only $200 more than the upgrade path, but sort of an admission of defeat.

    I guess there is also option 3, which is to upgrade the present gaming rig as in option 1, and then redesignate that as the kids PC as in option 2. The downside, other than the total cost, would be that I’d be throwing away a perfectly usable P4 chip and Asus mobo. Admittedly these are outdated and ancient, but for a kids PC running W7?

    I am just loath to discard the old mobo, and also the whole reason I bought the Asrock was this idea that I’d do incremental upgrades. I suppose option 1 would be the smarter route. but finding the PCI-e card for the asrock is the real sticking point – ive searched in newegg for every card in the list but cannot find the exact products. There are some similar matches, but I am uncertain if those would work. For example, the compat list has “GeForce 8400GS Foxconn GF 8400GS/256M” but none of the 8400GS cards on newegg are Foxconn. Would any of them still work? I need some advice here!

    UPDATE: I am really confused as to what cards are compatible. Here’s the website for my asrock mobo; would this $100 card work? or this $40 one? if yes to both, what am I really getting for the extra money?

  • a hackintosh for me, iphone applications for thee

    I’m embarking on a hackintosh project because I want to dabble in some iPhone/iPod application development. This post is really a sort of notepad for some of the resources I am researching to help with this. The hardware is a refurbished Dell Mini v10, and I can report that it gets 2 fps (Dalaran) to 20 fps (out in the wild) playing Warcraft. 🙂

    I was a moderately good citizen and snagged a legitimate copy of Snow Leopard off Amazon – the upgrade disc, mind you. The OSX installation guides vary but here are the main ones (slightly contradictory):

    Mech Drew: http://osx.mechdrew.com/guides/

    Gizmodo: http://bit.ly/ItgcC

    Lifehacker: http://bit.ly/6sdVx

    As far as learning how to do app development, I will use the courses on Apple ITunes University and also I bought this book.

    unfortunately, none provide a simple way to add an OS/X install as a multiboot option. I used a freeware partition software to create a new 80 GB partition, so hopefully I can use that for OS/X but I’m really treading on new ground here. Ideally I can multi-boot into XP or Snow Leopard.

    If anyone has any words of wisdom or advice, please do let me know! This isn’t for the faint of heart, clearly.

  • Martin Gardner, 1914 – 2010

    A legend has passed away last week: Martin Gardner, arguably the inventor of the term “recreational mathematics” and columnist for Scientific American for almost 30 years.

    Here are tributes to Gardner at Discover Magazine, Scientific American, and also some thoughts by Richard Dawkins. I find it interesting that Gardner is remembered for his skepticism; I wonder how many people praising him for it are also true believers in the Singularity? (a concept ever deserving of Gardner’s critique, if there ever was one. My skepticism on Singularity is a matter of record).

  • graphic calculators in the iPod/iPad age

    A friend of mine at work has an aging TI-92 – it’s a massive beast, and makes me remember just how obsessed we all were with graphing calculators back in college. There’s no truly equivalent app that replicates that sort of computational power in the various app stores that I am aware of (I looked for something akin to that for my iPod Touch, but no luck). Even a simple math scripting app, like SpeQ (sort of a mini-Matlab), would be a huge quantum leap in usability. I wonder if I am just missing something? I’d probably pay quite a bit of money for the ability to replicate the sophisticated graphing calc power of old on my iPod (and it would probably do even better in the iPad).

    This is what would literally turn iPads into Padds overnite.

  • cell phones don’t cause cancer

    If they did, then these gigantic multi-year studies would actually have found evidence of it, rather than being “inconclusive”.

    Consider this a public service announcement. I could say more about the impossibility of radio waves at these wavelengths to actually penetrate more than a few millimeters of skin, but that’s really a waste of time when dealing with this sort of issue.