WhistlinDixie

The New Laptop

I’m a bit late updating everyone, but I got home last Saturday night. First thing Sunday evening, I opened up my new laptop. Excitement ensued.

I noticed soon after booting up that I only had one hard drive showing up in Windows. This was bad because there were two (confirmed by visual inspection) hard drives in the computer. I initialized and formatted the drive, but no new drives showed up in Windows Explorer. After I rebooted the computer, the hard drive appeared uninitialized and unformatted. I popped in SpinRite and started it running on both drives in my computer and went to bed. Late the next night, it completed. I hurriedly tried formatting the hard drive again, but with the same results.

On Tuesday, I started chatting with HP tech support. I ended up going through four different reps. The first one thought that I had NTFS permission issues that were preventing me from accessing the drive (completely wrong). The second one appeared to be on the right track, but I lost my connection, causing the chat to end prematurely. The third rep had me use a Seagate utility to format the drive, but that proved unfruitful.

Before I started chatting with the fourth rep, I decided to jump into the BIOS to see if anything in there might give me an idea. I happened to run across a diagnostics tab that gave me the option to run diagnostics on both of my hard drives and the memory. I ran the diagnostic on my troublesome drive, and less than a minute later got the message Error #10003- Replace hard drive. Excited, I started my fourth and final chat with HP support. I immediately told the rep that I had gotten the message and he immediately started ordering me a new hard drive.

The hard drive showed up Thursday, and I immediately put it in my laptop and booted up. I looked in disk management only to find that this hard drive did not show up at all. I powered down the laptop and looked at the hard drive again. I noticed that the new hard drive appeared to be a few millimeters shorter, causing the contacts on the hard drive to not reach the contacts on the motherboard. This was relatively easy to fix since HP places a proprietary adapter on hard drives. All I had to do was back the adapter off a few millimeters and put the hard drive back in. I booted back up and Windows saw the hard drive. It all works great now, and it didn’t cost me a penny.

At this point, my only outstanding issue is getting Guitar Hero III working. When I try to run it after installing it, I get an error message about not being able to load a security module. Even after applying the v1.1 patch, the error persisted. I tried using a no-DVD crack, which allowed me to start the game. Unfortunately, the game would crash while playing, which made it unplayable. I can’t seem to find a fix on the web, so I’ll be contacting Aspyr soon about this.

I am happy to report that Portal runs just fine now and looks very beautiful. I’ll get around to playing HL2:Ep2 and TF2 later. Also, my brother bought The Orange Box today, so as soon as he gets a graphics card for the family computer (currently using integrated graphics), we can go head-to-head in TF2.

Replacing Lappy

When I graduated from high school, I received an eMachines M6808. It featured a 15″ screen (1280 x 800), an AMD Athlon 64 3000+, 512 MB of RAM, and an ATI Mobility Radeon 9600. Pretty good for mid-2004. It has survived many miles on numerous trips from mid-Ohio to Flint, MI; Chicago, IL; and Jackson, MS. It was replaced with a marginally better M6810 (Athlon 64 3200+) in the fall of 2004 when the hard drive died. (Sometimes warranty repairs actually work out.) It has suffered from a flaky sound card since Thanksgiving 2005 (sometimes doesn’t work when you boot the computer up after it has been off a while) and a flaky Wi-Fi adapter since my trip to Orange Beach, AL last summer (blue screens the computer if you try to disable it before disconnecting from a network). It has also survived a massive milk spill, though it still carries scars from that day. (Luckily, my keyboard absorbed the brunt of the attack.) All in all, I am pretty happy with the time that I have spent with my dear old lappy.

Recently, I purchased the Orange Box. It did not take me long to figure out that the days that this laptop could run new games at its native resolution were long gone. I was forced to run Portal with all details turned down to get it to a playable state with decent framerates and no crashes. Even then, I discovered that Test Chamber 18 (advanced) was virtually unplayable when you’re flying through the air with four indestructible target droids firing at you. I decided that it was finally time to get a new laptop. (Also, my parents had been drooling over my laptop, hoping to inherit it to replace their Windows 95-era Toshiba laptop.)

Choosing the Laptop

The first thing that I looked for was a larger screen. I am a heavy multitasker and need lots of real estate. At the same time, I wanted a laptop that wouldn’t give me a hernia if I decided to take it to class or to a friend’s house. This lead me to look at 17″ laptops. Any smaller and you run into the real estate issue that I am battling right now. Any bigger, and it not only becomes cumbersome to transport, but also starts getting expensive to get it decked out to my specs.

Enjoying games, as well as being a heavy multitasker, I decided that I needed a powerful processor and a good chunk of memory with the ability to expand it in the future when I get more money. My current laptop came with 512 MB of RAM: 256 MB attached directly to the motherboard and another 256 MB that is removable. A year and a half ago, I maxed her out at 1.25 GB. Considering that I still hit this max from time-to-time and that my new laptop will have Windows Vista on it (ready to move up from XP), I knew that anything less than 2 GB of RAM would not cut it. At the same time, to move above 2 GB at this time is extremely pricey, with 4 GB usually being the only option greater than 2GB. This means that 2GB will be my goal, with an upgrade to 3 GB or 4 GB of RAM for a point further down the road.

This new laptop will have to last me for the rest of my undergraduate degree (only a year left ) plus two or so years for my masters degree, so I want some headroom with the processor. Since Intel’s Core 2 Duo is the only viable laptop processor out there (sorry AMD, but the Turion just doesn’t cut it), it will be my target. To give myself the needed headroom, I will look for the fastest Core 2 Duo processor that I can find. (Quad core is too much of a price jump to justify the small performance gains.)

Key in game performance is the video card. Unfortunately, laptop’s don’t have too much available in this area compared to desktops. Due to nVidia’s large performance lead over ATI, I will go with the fastest card offered from them.

After being left in the dark with the lack of driver updates by eMachines (zero in the life of this machine), I will go with an established brand that I know actually updates their drivers and the uses parts that can be updated from their original manufacturer also (no custom stuff if I can help it). I also wanted a laptop that included a number pad on its keyboard. (I heart num pads.) This ruled out a few notebooks right away. I stayed away from Apple because I didn’t want to pay their exorbitant prices, especially when the only time that I would use the pre-loaded OS X would be to set up Boot Camp to get Vista to boot, after which, it would be good by OS X. While I get a discount though my school on Dell products, my friends have had nothing good to say about the notebooks that they have purchased from Dell. I was leery of going with a foreign brand in Asus. Gateway, just being bought by Asus, was also a non-starter. Toshiba seemed a bit high in price and I didn’t like the look of their notebooks either. This left me with HP.

I ended up going with their Pavillion dv9500t. I customized it because the base model was a bit lacking, in my opinion, and I found their recommended configuration a bit pricy. Here are the specs on this beast:

• Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit (will be replaced with Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit for software compatibility reasons)
• Intel Core 2 Duo T7700 (2.40 GHz, 4 MB L2 cache)
• 17.0″ WSXGA+ screen (1680 x 1050)
• 2 GB DDR2 (2 x 1 GB) (max 4 GB)
• 256 MB nVidia GeForce 8600M GS
• 2 x 120 GB 5400 RPM hard drives
• DVD+/-RW burner w/ LightScribe
• Intel PRO/Wireless 4965AGN with Bluetooth (supports 802.11a, b, g, and draft n)
• HP ExpressCard Digital/Analog TV Tuner
• High capacity 8 cell lithium ion battery
• HP Notebook QuickDock

The only weak part on this laptop seems to be the video card. I would have preferred an nVidia GeForce 8700M, or at least an 8600M GT, but this was the best that HP offered on the dv9500t.

The total price on this puppy came out to $1997.98 (USD). Sadly, notebook warranties have gone up in price appreciably in the past few years. My dad got a three year warranty through Best Buy for my eMachines notebook in 2004 for about $80. A similar warranty directly through HP for this laptop runs a hefty $349.99. After tax, I ended up paying a cool $2512.33. Ouch!

Getting the Laptop

I ran into a couple of snags in the process of procuring this notebook. First, I decided to take advantage of HP’s 90-day no interest financing to get the order for the new lappy in before the holiday rush so that I could insure that I had it before I headed back to school after the holiday break. This requires getting a credit card through HSBC bank. Due to my unique employment situation, I was only able to get a credit limit of $1400 on the card, meaning that I could not fit the entire purchase on the card. After an online chat with a sales rep, I found out that I could split the charge between multiple credit cards. Sounded good to me: Put the first $1400 on the HP Store Card and the balance on my credit card ($5000 limit).

After digging a bit, I could not find any place where I could put in my credit card number and my HP Store Card number at the same time. A quick chat later, it was revealed to me that, while you can split the charge between two credit cards, you cannot split it between a credit card and an HP Store Card. You can, however, split the charge between an HP Store Card and HP gift cards. I headed over to the gift card page, ready to purchase a $1115 gift card to cover the balance of my purchase. I then discovered that gift cards can only be of a value between $50 and $500. A quick chat later, I was assured that I could use multiple gift cards on the same purchase. I then proceeded to purchase two $500 gift cards and one $115 gift card. Even though they are delivered electronically via email, you still have to wait a few days before they are delivered. Nonplussed, I went to bed with visions of shiny new laptops dancing in my head.

The next day, I awoke to three shiny new HP gift cards in my inbox. Oh joy, I though to myself as a headed to the HP website. I quickly configured my new laptop, just as I had done many times before. (I had been searching since this summer.) I clicked checkout, entered the numbers on my gift cards, entered my HP Store Card number, and clicked purchase. I was given a pretty progress bar telling me that my transaction was being processed, so I waited. And waited. I began to wonder if some odd combination of me using Firefox, blocking ads, blocking JavaScript, and blocking cookies had prevented the transaction being processed. Eventually, the page refreshed. Success, I thought! Then I read the red error text: HSBC did not approve the transaction. Crap. I figured that I had just typed in my account number incorrectly.

I went back to my shopping cart and started checking out again. I typed in the number on one of my gift cards and looked at the total to make sure that the card’s number was typed in correctly. It updated and said, “Gift Cards: $0.00″. WTF!? I tried another. “Gift Card: $0.00″. I tried the last. “Gift Card: $0.00″. S*#t! What happened?

I hopped on chat with a sales rep, who immediately told me to call the customer service center. Not good. You can never understand these people. Stupid outsourcing! I called and, sure enough, got a rep who had English as his second language. I explained my situation to him and asked him to refund my gift cards since the transaction did not go through. He then put me on hold to talk to HSBC. When he came back, he told me that the transaction had actually gone through. Again, WTF? Thanking him, I hung up, hoping what he said was indeed true. Later that day, I got a confirmation email from HP telling me that my order had been processed. Yay!

In the end, everything ended up going well. That is, except that it is being delivered to my parent’s house in Ohio (Go Bucks!) instead of my Grandma’s in Mississippi, where I am until the holiday season. That means that when my brand new lappy is delivered on Wednesday, December 5th, at 10:30 AM (EST), I won’t be there to greet it. Instead, I’ll just have to keep myself comfortable with the thoughts of the fun that I will have with Lappy II when I get home the Saturday before Christmas. I can’t wait!

What a n00b!

I’m in the process of rebuilding one of my parents’ computers that had the motherboard die a little over three months ago. We decided to get a new motherboard, CPU, and memory, as opposed to buying a new, low-end computer. Getting a replacement motherboard was out of the question since this was a five year old computer (AMD Athlon XP 2000+, 266 MHz DDR SDRAM) because it is simply impossible to find a motherboard that supports all of our old components.

I ended up getting a BIOSTAR K8M800 Micro AM2 motherboard and an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ (1.9 GHz, Brisbane core) along with a gig of 667 MHz DDR2 memory. I chose the motherboard because it has a x8 AGP slot, an IDE slot, and two IDE channels, which would handle all of our old components. I got the processor simply because it was the cheapest dual core processor that I could find.

The parts came in the main on Wednesday and I rushed to put the computer together so that I could get it rebuilt before I leave for school on Saturday. It’s been a very long time since I’ve built a computer and obviously things have changed a bit. I was caught off guard by the pre-applied thermal paste on the heat sink. So was the carpet in my living room. The parents weren’t too happy about that. I completed the otherwise uneventful build and took the computer back downstairs to test it out.

Upon the first boot, the old Windows install tried to boot, but immediately blue-screened. I decided that the computer was probably overdue for a Windows reinstall, so I put in the Windows XP Home CD and rebooted the computer. I immediately noticed weird graphical glitches in the text that was displayed on the screen. I thought that it might be something to do with the graphics card that I was using (possibly died along with the old motherboard), so I plugged the monitor into the on-board video, but did not get a signal. I then removed the video card (maybe the BIOS automatically disables the on-board video when an AGP video card is inserted) and booted the computer again. Well, I tried to boot it anyway. The computer refused to boot until I put the video card back in.

Then I thought about the fact that I was working with a 300W power supply and trying to run a GeForce 4, SoundBlaster Audigy, two hard drives, two optical drives, a case fan, a CPU, and a motherboard. The load seemed to be a little high to me, so I tried out many power requirement calculators around the web and got estimates between about 250W and 350W. I decided to throw in a 450W PS that my dad had in the closet and see if it fixed things. It didn’t change a thing. I decided to call it quits for the night before I went Office Space on it out of frustration.

This morning, my dad talked with the former IT guy at his place of employment to get his feedback on what might be going on. He ended up being right on: the motherboard did not support Athlon 64 X2 processors. I ends up that just being a Socket AM2 motherboard does not mean that it supports all Socket AM2 processors. In this case, the motherboard only supported AMD Sempron 64 processors. So, I’ll be RMA-ing the X2 and getting a Sempron 64 3600+ (2.0 GHz, Manila core) to replace it since it is the cheaper option (versus getting a supporting motherboard and an IDE add-in card). So much for building it before I leave for school.

Bad Luck Computers

Computers seem to have turned against me this past month. First, my laptop stopped keeping time correctly. Started acting up after a night on which I left it to defrag and virus scan. Wasn’t too bad at first, only losing a few minutes a day. It got progressively worse, getting to the point where it would lose around 15 seconds every minute! A little digging revealed that the computer’s BIOS was still keeping time correctly. This was made evident by the fact that the computer never lost time while it was turned off.

A little research online revealed that Windows actually keeps track of time by itself during idle cycles. Since it is a low-priority task, it can be skipped some times when your CPU is under high load, leading to the clock losing time. This description seemed to match my symptoms somewhat (I didn’t seem to have a pegged CPU). Since my computer had been acting up anyway, I went ahead and reformatted and reinstalled XP. Unfortunately, after loading up my normal compliment of programs (virtually the same set that I have been running for years), I noticed that my computer was losing time at the same clip that it was before. Needless to say, I am pretty peeved, especially since my lappy just went out of warranty in mid-June. Next week, I plan to put in my spare hard drive (it’s dying, slowly but surely) with an empty XP install to see if it is also affected. My money says that it will be.

Second issue: my external hard drive, which holds my backups, just started acting up a few days ago. It was accessed every few seconds, and trying to view the contents of at least one folder caused Windows Explorer to hang and the hard drive to have constant access. The only way to stop this without killing explorer.exe was to unplug the drive and then plug it in again. I decided to run SpinRite on the drive since it seems to fix those weird drive issues. Twenty eight hours later, the drive had finished being scanned, so I placed it back in its enclosure and hooked it back up to my lappy. Unfortunately, same results as before. I unhooked the drive to un-hang explorer and then plugged it back in again. For some reason, it didn’t show up. I unplugged it again and plugged it back in. Still, no drive showed up. I popped into the drive management panel to see that the drive itself was recognized, however, Windows claimed that it was unpartitioned. It sure as heck wasn’t a few minutes prior! I decided to call it quits since it was one in the morning at that point.

This afternoon, I got the demo version of Active@ Undelete and ran it on the drive to see what it could find. Disappointingly, it found nothing. I decided to see if it could be read if placed in another computer (testing to see if the enclosure is bad). First computer that I tested it in was a P2-400MHz running XP Pro SP2. Adding it to the computer prevented it from booting. My guess is that the computer’s BIOS is unable to handle 200GB drives. I tried it next in my parent’s new Core 2 Duo E4300 machine running Vista Home Premium. Everything booted fine this time, but it also showed that the drive had no partitions.

Dejected, I placed the drive back in the enclosure and hooked it back up to my laptop. When I went to start running Active@ Undelete on the drive in the Low Level mode (apx 72 hours to complete), I clicked the start button, only to have it report that it had completed a few seconds later. I checked the drive and noticed that it was listed as having a paltry 512 kB capacity. I began worrying that the electronics on the drive had died. I tried unplugging the drive and giving the computer a minute to "readjust" before plugging the drive back in. This time, the drive showed up reporting the correct capacity. When I started running Active@ Undelete on the drive again, it immediately reported that it had found a deleted partition. Joy! I’ll let it run overnight to make sure that everything is found. If it is so, then I’ll fork over $40 so that I can get the version that can recover files over 64 kB in size. (Stupid demo limitations.)

Last issue: project computer. I’m fixing up a computer for my church to be a label printer for CDs. This would be the same P2-400MHz that I used to test my hard drive. Anyway, being the pragmatic techie that I am, the first step that I take in refurbing a computer is reinstalling Windows. I used the Magical Jelly Bean to retrieve the Windows CD key from the install since I did not have the original install media. I wrote it down, then started reinstalling from my custom XP Pro install disc, complete with SP2 slipstreamed in. I got to the CD key screen and typed it in. Invalid key. WTF! I tried it about twenty times, but still got the same error. I decided that I wanted to get the computer up and running, so I typed in my personal CD key, meaning to replace it in the future after I got the original CD key from the previous owner. I finished the install and booted the computer. (XP is surprisingly snappy on this computer.) I went to activate and got a message telling me that I’ve activated this key too many times. WTF! I don’t recall there being a limited number of times that you can activate XP. I decided to give up on the project until I get a good key since you can’t even install updates without having activated.

One last rant for the night. Why does SMC make a USB wi-fi adapter that does not work with XP’s wireless networking app? It forces you to use it’s own app to connect, which is just stupid. Our US Robotics USB wi-fi adapter works just fine, so why not SMC.