:: MIS Insights ::

I went to cPx today to have my computer’s abnormal CPU temperature checked. As I mentioned earlier, my Athlon64 3200+ (socket 939) was simmering at 58 degC idle and boils at 67 full load - without any overclocking. I’ve been using it with an MSI RS480M2-IL motherboard. From what I’ve read in the internet, thirty-two hundreds like mine should run somewhere from 40 to 50 degC normally.

Technician: “What seems to be the problem?”
Me: “My computer[Trailblazer] overheats. CPU temperature reaches 67 degrees at full load. Either when I’m playing CPU-intensive games or have all my work applications running”
Technician: “Please play for a while and try to replicate the situation”
Me: Sure.
…
Trailblazer: 53 degrees C at Idle
Me: “Must be the aircon” <plays Heroes 5 at maximum settings and draws attention of bystanders in the shop>
Trailblazer: 57 degrees C…
Me: “Hmm…” <opens up photoshop, dreamweaver, explorer, firefox, azureus while playing Heroes 5>
Trailblazer: 59 degrees C…
Me: “Hmm…still won’t hang…”
Trailblazer: 58 degrees C…

Me: “Oh Mr. Technician, I don’t think I’ll be able to make it hang. Would it be possible to swap my components with your stock components? I just want to know which component is not working properly.”
Technician: “I’m sorry, sir, but we don’t open stock components for such purposes. If you want to, we can send it to the supplier to have it checked.”
Me: <thinks to myself>”That’s a three week wait…”</thinks to myself> Hmm… un momento por favor…

Don’t Wait for Opportunities, Create One

Since I promised my cousins after my graduation that I’d get them a computer, I took this unplanned opportunity to get them one… No, really, I didn’t plan for this. I didn’t see the above-mentioned technical support story coming. Read ahead and see.

Since the PC was going to be used mainly for educational purposes - research, documentation (fancy word for encoding / typing documents) - and a bit of multimedia (listening to sounds, watching videos), picking components was easy.

Cool Dude: How may I help you, sir?
Me: I need a PC, do you have a Celeron Blah?
Cool Dude at the Counter: … Yes, we have stock.
Me: How about XYZ Motherboard?
Cool Dude Using Computer to Verify for Stock: I’m sorry we’re out of stock.
Me: Recommend anything?
Cool Dude Using His Knowledge to Help Me: Sure, let me recommend Motherboard ABC.
Me: Ahhhh… ok. I’ll take that.
Cool Dude at the Counter whose existence has been re-affirmed by my acquiescence to his suggestion: How about a Hard drive?
Me: Sure. What do you have at 80 gigs? … Do you have Kingston?… Etc? …
…
Me: Ahh, I guess that’s it. Where do I pay?
Cool Dude who’s very pleased with his participation at making the sale happen: Over there, sir!
Me: By the way, would you happen to know the normal operating temperature ranges of an Athlon64 3200? I bought a desktop here two months ago and I’m having temperature problems with it. Would it be possible to take out some of your stock components and swap them with mine? I just want to see which component is the culprit.
Cool Dude Who Feels Empowered to The Bones and Who Can’t Say ‘No’ To A Customer Who Just Bought A Desktop: Sure!

ScoutMaster

Ladies and Gentlemen, say hello to ScoutMaster. Lithe and swift, this baby can easily scout through basic multimedia and educational computing territory. While not as buffed as Trailblazer or as fast as Zoom, ScoutMaster can bring you to your destination nice and easy.

• Intel Celeron 3.06D Prescott (346) - I was feeling a bit Intel today after using AMD for the past couple of years.
• Elite P4M800-M7 - It was cheap, compatible and had integrated peripherals - Audio, Video, Lan
• Kingston 512MB 400Mhz - a few hundred more than the generic, why not?
• Lite-On Combo Drive - since they weren’t going to be doing any heavy duty downloading or work, I skipped the DVD-burner
• Western Digital 80GB SATA - offered the best ratio of Pesos to Gigabytes and Gigabytes to Needs
• X-Blade Casing (black) - looks cool. Hey, indulge me.
• Modem - Man does not live on DSL alone.
• 3 Auxiliary Fans - I love auxiliary fans. Two at the front, one at the side and another at the back. I’d place more if I could. But don’t get me one for my birthday. You won’t get invited again.

While ScoutMaster was being assembled, a series of component swaps determined Trailblazer’s heating problems. It turns out that my processor wasn’t really overheating. It was just a fscked up case of a malfunctioning motherboard temperature probe. Another motherboard read my thirtytwo hundred at 31degC. Wow! That’s so Cool!

With such a problem, I had no choice but to send the mobo to the supplier for fixing and miss the services of Trailblazer for a good three weeks. At this point, I am very thankful for having spare machines at my disposal because my work and projects won’t get disrupted. I can always plug Trailblazer’s hard drive into Grunt or ScoutMaster - or have Zoom (or even Swoosh!) retrieve my files from my external hard drive to resume work. Doesn’t it feel good to have redundancy at work?

So, join me in the next few days, as I explore the capabilities of my “New” desktop. Well, it is mine, until I hand it over to my cousins in about two weeks time. You have to “break-in” and do a bit of stress-testing on these things, you know.

My Trailblazer (Desktop Computer) has got a hot processor - not as in Carmen Electra Hot or Wendy’s Burger Hot, but literally hot.

Does anyone have an idea of how hot an Athlon64 3200+ should be running at idle and full load?

Mine used to idle at 61 degrees Celsius and would freeze at 66 degC under full load before I solved it with a temporary fix.

Details

• I’m using the stock Heat Sink and Fan for the processor.
• I also have four auxiliary fans inside the casing to redirect proper air flow.
• CPU box temperature is at 38 degC.
• I can play GPU-intensive games like Doom3 but I can’t play CPU-intensive games like Heroes 5.
• MSI RS480M2-IL, 1 GB Kingston PC3200, nvidia 7600GT, 160GB Seagate

What CPU Cooling solutions would you recommend? Nothing liquid-based please.

Temporary Fix : Disabled Cool’n'Quiet and the Fan Tripping Point (the low safe, medium safe, high safe) settings at the BIOS. Got it to idle at 58 degC and runs at 64 degC under full load.

The latest installment in my computer laboratory is an HP f1905. It’s a glorious 19-inch flatscreen LCD monitor - a big step up from my 17-inch CRT monitor (whose actual viewable area was only 15 inches). Ya-ha!

With a 1280×1024 native screen resolution spread over 19 inches of screen, I get more real estate than my previous 1024×768/17″ setup. Native means I can only set my screen resolution to its default 1280×1024 configuration. Anything more or less than that will just produce crappy visual output. However, with 19 inches of surface area, who needs more? Not me! (or not yet!)

Web Design

One of the things that I’m loving with this monitor is that I can see more of my code while working with Dreamweaver. No need to minimize / hide / close my favorite task panels! They’re always there for fast and easy access along with more of my code! Ya-ha!

Note: It’s not really good practice to write long strings of code when you can always chop it down. I was taught in my Java college class to limit the number of characters per line to 80 characters. This is in consideration of other people viewing my code on lower resoultions. A little courtesy so that they don’t have to fidget with the horizontal scroll bar while reading code. Moreover, shorter horizontal code is more printer-friendly than Telenovela Code.

Linux

While I’ve been using Linux for three years already, I still consider myself a n00b in the field. There are still a lot of instances when I have to refer to manuals, forums and tutorials to help me get my work done. This upgrade allows me to squeeze more stuff in the screen. For instance, it allows me to RTFM on the upper half of the screen while happily typing away on the lower half of the screen dedicated for the terminal. If you think four 1024×768/17 workspaces are a lot, wait till you get four 1280×1024/19! Ya-ha!

Entertainment

Of course, no kick-ass computer kicks ass until it can do everything that it’s master wants it to do. After programming or doing systems analysis or doing whatever MIS should do for a living, I usually unwind with an action-packed level of Doom3 or a funny episode of South Park. The big screen makes me feel like i’m watching from a television set. And yes, all the games I’m currently playing rock with my upgraded setup. Ya-ha!

There is a down side to this setup though. As with most LCDs, this LCD has a limited viewing angle. This means that while everything might look perfect when viewing the LCD at eye-level, image quality diminishes when viewing it from another angle (e.g. i don’t see anything when i’m watching the screen diagonally from the sofa). But I can live with that - that only means that Trailblazer will be dedicated for *cough* work *cough*!

Do You See What I See?

I’d have to say that this is better than my dual-monitor setup with Zoom (laptop monitor + CRT monitor). It offers big savings on the electricity bill (LCD consumes less power than CRT) and sets the right mood for either play or work - and sometimes, that little change in mood makes all the difference between a boring day of problem-solving and a cool day of making progress in work.

A few inches of difference for mankind, a big step for Pipboy.

After my long pilgrimage that brought me to the heights of the Himalayan mountains, the depths of the Marianas trench and the newly-opened KFC branch at Greenbelt just besides Chili’s, I am proud to say that I am back!!! Gone for more than two weeks, let me fill you in with what’s been keeping me very busy so far.

My Desktop Rocks!

I’ve got a new baby now. Her name’s Trailblazer. It’s a replacement desktop for Grunt - the rig that I borrowed from my brother. Grunt’s been acting up on me lately, randomly resetting on its own and not allowing me to use more than one USB device at a time. Really can’t blame Grunt for its failing hardware, it’s a six year old AMD Athlon 1Ghz desktop that’s served as a computer gaming desktop in its wee years, a school productivity workstation during its mid-life and a downloader/file server/home theater pc (htpc) in it’s recent years.

Hardware is like a flower… it Dies

Grunt still works, but as a system developer and trained with certain computer security princeiples in mind, I can’t tolerate random resets.

While Zoom (my core duo laptop) will happily bear the burden of my system developing escapades, nothing replaces a desktop in terms of graceful accident escalation. If my current desktop dies late at night, I can take out the hard disk, plop it in another desktop, and resume working. Takes no more than 10 minutes to recover. Now I can’t say the same with a laptop since I’m not too comfortable with the inner workings of laptops. Different tools for different situations.

Eh? Hard drive failure you say? I do a FULL backup of my work files every night before I go to sleep (or every morning before I go to sleep, heh) ~ I always have a tube of blank CDs just for that purpose. And I backup my current project on two different hard disks over my house network every hour so the most that can be lost is an hour worth of work.

Going back to Trailblazer, such peace of mind costs only PhP33,500. For a low, low, low price of $600, you’ll get a computer that slices, dices, mixes, peels potato skin with ease and squeezes orange juice like no other can!

• AMD Athlon64 3200+ @ 2.0 Ghz
• MSI RS480M2-IL
• Inno3d GeForce 7600GT
• 1×1GB Kingston PC3200
• Sony Dual-Layer DVD Writer
• Enforcer Casing
• Two Auxiliary Fans

Yes, you read that right. I didn’t get the following :

• hard drive - I transferred my 160GB Seagate Hard Drive from Grunt and used it as my hard drive
• floppy drive - I can’t recall the last time I used a floppy. With the ability to boot from high storage capacity and reliable USB thumb drives, I’m passing out on the 3point5s
• sound card - My motherboard already has a built-in 5.1 audio solution. I tried it out but it’s crappy ~ you’ll hear clicks whenever you play something that’s above a certain sound wave frequency. Did that make sense? So I got my old Creative Sound Card (P300 ~ $6) to banish all the clicks and hisses to oblivion.
• monitor - Current one still works. And while I might want a bigger or newer one, I really don’t need one.

I’m currently stress-testing Trailblazer right now. I’m looking at how the hardware manages through 24/7 up times , how well it can run my development software and perform my entertainment-related needs.

More on such intricacies and actual performance next time. For now, gotta go!

now this topic is a primary concern for gaming enthusiasts and 3d-modelers. while studying my laptop’s graphics hardware, i came across two wonderful numbers. the 945 and the 950. so what’s the difference?

945 stands for the Mobile Intel® 945 GM/PM/GMS Express Chipsets. this family will be the grunts of Intel’s next generation of laptops.

included within the roster of the 945 series is the 940 (designed for celeron m) and the 950 gma (designed for core duo). gma stands for graphics media accelerator - it’s supposed to provide a 200% increase on 3d performance [compaq website] over the previous generation

but those are just minor definitions that one can find over the internet by themselves. i just posted them as part of my research and for people to correct me if i’m wrong. wouldn’t want to walk around talking about wrong ideas, heh.

let’s talk about performance.

when it comes to work, zoom can use as low as 8mb of shared memory for its graphics processing and up to a max of 128mb. now i’d say that’s a lot of memory already for my kind of work. i usually work with a few photoshop files at a time. and when i say work with photoshop, that means slicing images and rearranging some layers to get my clients what they want. hehe, most of the grunt work is done by my good friend rory.

what kills me though is it’s capability for dual monitors. yeap, i know it’s been around for quite some time already. but this is the first time that i’ve experienced dual monitors, so if you’ll let me have my piece of heaven, thank you very much. hehe. working has never been this cool. i’ve got a widescreen already on my laptop which gives me more real estate on the coding screen at dream weaver even if some panel groups are open. yes, the extra monitor consumes more electricity, but the coolness of browsing for snippets / research on one screen while happily coding away on the other is just fabulous.

enough of work. let’s talk about games.

doom 3. since i have to be honest on my report, let me make this quick. doom 3 crawls on my laptop. a full-screen 640×480 low quality everything is turned off settings just doesn’t cut it. if anybody knows how to make it work on a compaq v2000t, do not hesitate to pm me

hehe, with regards to other games, i’d say that it’s good. currently stress testing it with max quality settings on never winter nights. a game from my high school days which i never really got to play and enjoy. good thing nwn has support for widescreens!

i could go on and write a more comprehensive review, but since it’s labor day tomorrow, i’ve got work to do. hehe. and before i leave, let me share one thing about my graphical experience on core duo:

+--------+
|        |   +--------+
|   it   |   |  rocks |
+--------+...+mmmmmmmm+

welcome to another installment of my laptop rocks. today, we’re going to talk about my experiences with storage devices since the beginning of my computer era.

1995: 500 mb

the first hard drive that i had was a 500mb maxtor hard disk eleven years ago. that 500mb ceiling was like an extravagance for me back then - housing all the shareware, freeware, applications and utilities that i could ever want - and with room to spare. i could still remember the days when all my data backups required one (yes, ladies and gentlemen, ONE) diskette! the applications of course required several other disks but those were besides the point. it was a time when pkware’s pkzip ruled my world and a bad sector on disk 3 of 5 ruined my world.

it was a time of learning. hard disks back then were prone to bad sectors. as such, i got immersed into the wonderful world of hard disk partitioning, reformatting and system recovery. after a few years of experimentation and bi-weekly reformats though, too many bad sectors rendered the disk impractical close to useless.

1998: 4 gb

when i got into high school, i replaced my hard disk with a 4gb one. now this was the beginneing of the mp3 era (well, at least for me). i could still remember [insert name of person here to avoid legal crap] hex-editing an mp3 ripper to extend the program’s usefulness beyond the 30-day trial. hehe.

2000: 14gb

thanks ealden for providing the missing link in my story (pointing out that win xp came out in 2001). executing graceful recovery now…

for a year or two with my 14gb hd, i was thinking, what am i going to do with all that space? all that unused space for what? even my mp3s back then topped up at only 2gigs! what to do… what to do… then win xp came into my life. and as much as i wanted to believe that i could live forever with my win95 + ie5 setup, i just couldn’t resist winxp. so, at this part of my hard disk life, i went about experimenting with a multi-os setup. i’d have fun playing with my 14gb repartitioning it to have as many as 4 operating systems on separate partitions at a time, shuffling between 95, ME, XP and NT.

2002: 40gb

i can’t remember what happened but i think the hard drive died. therefore, a 40gb ibm drive came into the picture. this drive deserves praise because it still works mighty fine till now. it’s done well, serving as my main os hard disk without a bad cluster *knocks on wood* to date. it’s handled countless nights of school papers and projects with long days of java and php programming.

2005: 160gb

this was the year that i stopped spelling download with the letters H,T,T,P or F,T,P and I,R,C. 2005 will be remembered as the year that i learned how to spell download with only two letters, B and T - thanks to bram and ashwin. it will also be the time when i learned that leaving your pc up and running for days isn’t really going to do you any harm except when your parents find out about your electricity bill. hehe

2006: Now

of the above mentioned disks, only the 40 and 160 gb disks remain alive. and even with a 200gb real estate, i always find myself running out of disk space because of PLDT’s myDSL.

as such, i have rounded up several gadgets to help me get by. listed below are my storage devices, their capacities and pet names for them.

30 gb ipod video - erg raider
60 gb ipod photo - ihsan shade
200gb external hard drive - superman
160gb internal desktop hd - batman
40 gb internal desktop hd - robin

…

which brings us to the topic of the day.

my v2000t packs a fujitsu mvh2080bh or an 80gb 5400rpm sata hard drive with an 8mb cache. let’s disect this gibberish.

5400 revolutions per minute. while that’s not as fast as the 7200 rpm mobile hard drives that’s gaining popularity in the market right now, it is a lot better than the 4200 rpm models and more cost-effective than both. rpms play an important role in system performance by allowing data to be read and written to the platters faster. in general, the more rpms, the better!

sata is short for serial-advanced technology attachment. it is an improvement over its predecessor of eide in that it allows faster data transfer. allowing transfer of 1.5gb/s, i’m very sure all my productivity software will have access to my hard disk on the fly.

what’s gotten me drooling though is sata 2. an upgrade to the serial-advanced technology attachment, sata2 hard-drives are capable of delivering 3Gb/s of data transfer rate if the hard drive is capable and the system is configured to do so. this simply means that reading and writing should be faster - an improvement geared towards heavy gamers (for shorter waits on load screens), graphic artists (update your 20gb photoshop document in a jiffy), scientists (for those calculators that require large amounts of interaction with the hard disk) and many more. and among those two, i can assure you, i am not a graphic artist nor a scientist.

8mb cache. yeah, you’ve got to love these things. this cache provides a buffer between your system and the hard disk. recently used data are kept there in the hopes of being accessed again. as i mentioned in my previous article, caches are very fast memory holders. in this case, the access time for the cache is considerably lower (it is faster to retrieve data from there) than the hard disk itself. as opposed to the traditional 2 and 4 mb caches, this 8mb cache is a blessing for me since i work with a lot of small files whenver i design web pages.

from the fujitsu website, they’re expecting this hard drive to last for around five years. not bad for a laptop. whether it reaches that amount of usefulness or not, only one way to find out!

with all those in mind, i’d like to say that i’m very pleased with my 80gb baby. it’s a four-fold increase from my previous 20gb laptop. while a part of my head might say that 80gb is too much for all the work that i do, i’d like to remind myself that i like keeping several versions of my work on my hard drive. while this eats up hard drive real estate fast, the stress saved by having restore points is priceless. especially with unintentionally deleted data.

it’s dinner time. and until then, see you in the next episode of my laptop rocks.

welcome to part 1 of “my laptop rocks” series. this will be a series of documents explaining (or glorfiying) my compaq v2000t. if ever you find something that doesn’t seem right or something you’d like to talk about, i’d appreciate a comment.

1.73ghz core duo processor

given the hard time that processor manufacturers are having to break the 4ghz processor speed barrier for commercial sale, the big boys are left to tinker around with other configurations to improve computer performance.

gone are the days when computer performance was based solely on the processor speed. these days, processors are getting a lot of help from its instruction sets, improvements in the front-side buses, L1 / L2 cache reconfiguration, etc.

instruction sets

for instance, core duo processors have an additional 13 functions for its instruction set - dubbed SSE3.

why is the addition of 13 functions relevant? sometimes, the computer may need to perform a certain operation. without a native function for the required operation, the processor is forced to arrive at the solution after two or three native functions. think of a processor that’s required to multipy 2×10. but since it only know how to add, it goes 2+2=4. then 4+2 =6. then 6+2=8 and so on and so forth.

what’s the other side? sometimes, the instruction sets get too crowded with too many functions - most of which are ignored or waste cpu cycles by being too complex. a good example is the Reduced Instruction Set Computer which came out a few years ago advocating the less is more rule.

that’s why it’s not unusual to find added and removed instructions in the IS once in a while.

front side buses

core duo’s front side bus is pegged at 667mhz. well, at least mine is. front-side buses are important when choosing your system because they determine how fast your computer can run. your processor speed is based on the fsb and the multiplier.

processor speed = fsb x multiplier

this simple formula is what most overclockers have been tinkering around with to increase cpu speed or stability.

take for example a 500mhz processor with a 100mhz frontside bus. in this case, the multiplier is 5. playing around with the fsb or multiplier settings can usually be done in the BIOS (it’s the press “Something” to enter setup when you boot up your computer) or from the motherboard jumpers.

so, class, if my processor speed is at 1.73ghz, with my front-side bus at 667 mhz, what’s my multiplier? … Good job!

L1 and L2 cache

you’ve probably heard of cache sizes since forever. Introducing the new Product Z! Comes with a 32kb L1 cache and 256kb L2 cache! now these caches are vital to your computer experience because these are the places (or technically speaking, memory registers) where data and instructions are stored when the computer is doing something. what’s the difference between the cache and ram? cache is faster but more expensive! so while fast fast fast might be the way to go, broke broke broke is not an option for most people. typically speaking bigger cache sizes means better cpu performance. relevant data can be stored on a faster memory holder longer - reducing the processor wait times when data is fetched from slower types of memory.

but enough of academic stuff that you already know about anyway, i want to talk about my core duo. woooot!

what makes core duo so special? beside being something that i own, it’s a processor chip with two processor cores in it. think of two pentium M processors sandwiched into one wonderful package. think of two scoops of sundae… in one cone! or think siamese. you get the drift.

each core has its own 64kb cache for data and 64kb cache for instructions (i’m not sure, correct me if i’m wrong) and both has access to the 2mb L2 cache. if you thought these numbers are good enough, wait, there’s more! each core can sleep. yeah. sleep. as in zzzzzzzz. whenever there’s nothing much running on the background, like your cool screensaver or your favorite word processor only, one core can enter sleep mode where it leaves all the processing to the other core and consumes less energy.

made with the 65 nanometer process, a fairly new commercial technology, the processor chip packs in more transistors for increased processing power. this is a 25nanometer leap from the widespread 90nm tech used by others. in addition, electrons no longer have to travel 90nm to get from one place to the next - this means faster processing cycles too! though even as we speak, intel is already talking about its 45nm chips! wow.

and i think that does it for my laptop rocks session today. more on this gadget next time.

Celeron 1.5ghz, 256mb sdram, 20gb hd. That’s Swoosh. My trusty laptop.

Nothing fancy here - no wi-fi, firewire, card readers or cd-rom write capability. Packing the usual 10/100, 56k modem, monitor output, a pc card slot and four 1.1 usb ports, i’d say i like that configuration. It’s your generic grunt that gets the job done.

The lack of unnecessary devices allowed me to drop Windows processes down to less than 30 while running my web development suite (a glorified term for wamp + dreamweaver). That makes things a lot faster than say, when you’re running 50 processes or so to support your additional devices.

Wi-fi could have been good but i’ve got DSL at home and the slowly but surely computer labs at ateneo for the interweb. If you plan very well, you really don’t need wi-fi at ateneo - you just want it. Lolz. But this isn’t a rant against wi-fi, justification for having no wi-fi or a troll against ateneo wi-fi. hell, they’re all good things in many occassions. There was just nothing to do over the net while i was at ateneo (well, except for fegame, perhaps) so i really didn’t feel the need for it - even if the Php1,500 (US$30) cards were dropping their panties for me to buy them.

When it comes to games, Swoosh did well, allowing me to play:

• Diablo series
• Ragnarok Online
• WC3 ~ DoTA
• console-emulated games
• Fallout series
• Baldur’s Gate series
• Arcanum

hehe. and that’s a lot - all i’ve ever needed to play, actually.

When it comes to applications, Swoosh ran my office productivity software properly. The only programs i remembered having a hard time with it was my J2EE IDEs. Took me back to my 80486dx4-16mb ram days.

There was also a time when i was running Linux on it. Fedora Core and Ubuntu worked like a charm, detecting every piece of hardware and running them perfeclty. Would have wanted Damn Small Linux for a liveCD but there was a keyboard bug that couldn’t map my keys properly. And oh, booting from the USB wasn’t an option either, the BIOS didn’t support it.

Swoosh still works perfectly well. Besides the dead battery and malfunctioning CD-ROM, everything is as good as the day I got it.

This tribute is due to the arrival of Zoom, a Compaq v2000t [more on this later], who is giving Swoosh a chance to explore other roles in my laboratory (a server for mail / backup / router / etc). Well, well, this is going to be very exciting! So tag along as I Serve in Silence