Deep Thought about a new Laptop

Its the day after THE day we wait for all year, yes today is Boxing Day and so yesterday was Christmas Day and I've had a fab day, thank you for asking!  Lots of food, a little drink, a fair amount of chocolate, a home made cheese cake to die for and about an hour in the freezing air enjoying the hot tub with all the bubbles on... Hands down has to rate as one of the Best Christmas Days for me ever... and I hope yours were all as good.

Now, I know you're all asking, why have I been so quite on the old blog and YouTube Channel?  Well, you know moving house completely threw things off, but also, in case you missed this news, I'm changing jobs.

Yes, after 14 years I'm leaving where I've been and I'm going to be doing something else.  Quite what I can't tell you very much about, probably for a fair while.  But what I can tell you is, I start the new role on the 2nd January, the team I have been assigned to is brand new and we travel to the US in mid-January to cement the bootstrapping of the new project.

And, this trip brings me to your sage pages.  You have all likely seen my post about my once great and mighty custom built Laptop and you may have also spotted my frustrations (admittedly eight years down the line) getting a replacement battery.

But it's Boxing day there are sales, there's a trip abroad breaching the surface waters, I am frustrated with the older machine (which I still love and am using right now)... Time for a new Laptop.

My requirements are a solid machine for programming, a good screen, RAM upgrade possible and definitely both SATA and M.2 SSD internally stored, I like lots of storage and I like to be able to replace it.  A replaceable battery, preferably as a pack is preferable and all of this as a known brand, so the battery would be on the market a fair while.

This means, GPU is not a concern really, it would be nice, but it's not a major concern, I've been down the gaming laptop whirlpool before it only ends in miserably depleted batteries and headaches replacing them.

The storage requirement I have also precludes eMMC or anything else which is fixed or soldered.

My first thought is for a quality machine, from a name, like Lenovo, Acer, Asus or Dell.

My very first laptop, way back in time was an IBM Thinkpad 360 a 486 SX 25Mhz, rocking 4MB of RAM and a 20MB hard drive running DOS6.22 and Windows 3.1.

I loved that machine, but lent it my brother when he started his business - and he had it stolen during a burglary never to be replaced... Grrr... But I loved the sturdy build on that machine, the keyboard was adorable, if I recall correctly it was a tiny form factor, like a 10" screen that did 640x480.  It travelled brilliantly in North Africa in the late 90's with work, and handled the Turbo Pascal and Turbo C programming I threw at it.  But due to the seeming prohibitive pricing and the changing of the keyboard I've never returned to the Thinkpad range, that thinking may change.

My second laptop is a veritable work horse Dell Inspiron 6400.  I say "is" because we still have this machine, it was purchased when I worked for "The Lordz Gaming Studio" as my workstation and a gaming machine... At the time, when on mains power, it ran beautifully (though I have a tale to tell when it was on battery)... And today we still have it, it's had more RAM and several larger hard drives over time, but we still use it daily as the general house laptop running Lubuntu (the wife still hasn't realized she was covertly switched to Linux about two years ago).

My third machine I've already covered on these pages in 2012.

Wanting to get a brand name, I started where I left off and went to look at the Dell site, which  immediately splits Laptops by "Work" or "Home"... Clicking Work, foooooorget it, they immediately class you as requiring a Core i7 and price me out of the market, it's actually quite shoddy, in work I would say you need to pick the number of real cores to hyper threads, rather than limit the model number and so I know many of the Core i5 4 core 8 thread processors are being denied to me.  I therefore beat a hasty retreat to "Home".

The next thing I noticed is that all the Dell units seem to ship with 8GB of RAM.  Not unexpected 2019 is hurtling towards us at a rate of knots, but still it made me think about upgrade pathways, so set about finding tear down videos and images of inside these machines and was struck by how hard it is to pin down what you're going to be buying against what is on the screen, you can't tell, there's a skewing of the model number to contents within throughout their range, there's identifying model numbers which bear little to no relationship to the contents of the machine and worst of all many of the teardowns listed themselves as applicable to multiple models in the same lineage.  Telling me what?  Well, nothing firm, just that there's options beyond options but many of them look sort of fixes at birth for the boards within.  I saw one out of four units come up as having two RAM slots, many others had only one.  There was also no help trying to ask their online chat, they didn't know, they could only read what was listed with the product "it has 8GB of RAM"... yes, but can I put another one in?

However, I persevered and even started from a £679 machine to spec it up, however, I immediately saw that this whole line only had SSD storage a M.2 2280 no SATA storage option.  Another tear down video later and I confirmed this machine had only the M.2 slot, no internal SATA.  Which put it out of the running.  But it had given me an idea of a base processor I was going to aim for elsewhere, I was edging towards the Intel Core i5-8250U (6MB cache, up to 3.4Ghz).

This processor ticks many of my boxes, it seems to keep the base chasis of a machine at a low price, it has four real cores with hyper threading and a decent boost frequency.  Base frequency is lacking, but TDP is very desirable and it's battery life I'm concerned with.  And the units in built GPU (an Intel UHD 620) supports upto 4096x2304, and 4K maybe somewhere I go (I already have a 2K monitor as my daily driver).  It also supports up to 32GB of DDR4.

Similar processor counts, with slightly more cache, in the i7 range push prices up between £120 and £200, I could seriously live with this machine for 5 years and put that extra money into extra RAM and storage to add to a lower priced machine... So, the i5 is winning out and I'll carry on to other sites.

Now the Boxing day sales have kicked off, so I'm looking at the major high-street names and online retailers.  Like Amazon, AO, Ebuyer and CurrysPCWorld.

Whilst on Amazon and AO I saw a series of Acer and Lenovo units which were very low prices, like £150-£180.  The Lenovo IdeaPad 120 and HP Stream spring back into my mind, nice little units, too low-power for my linking and they're storage seems to be exclusively eMMC and tiny so not of use to me, but nice looking units, especially the Lenovo kit.

The only machine from this pass which really came to hand was the HP Pavillion kit, I saw a few others, but the Pavillion got really close.  It's a brand name, the hard drive is a 2.5" SATA and can be changed.  The RAM can also likely be upgrades with standard SODIMM modules.  However, hard data is hard to get and the price is still just shy of £700.  There's also no clear data on whether it can take both an SSD in M.2 form AND the SATA drive, there's a series of HP support images they themselves provide, but they're generic and clearly not specific to the unit I was looking at.  A minor annoyance is the charger also seems to be a custom pin type to HP, rather than a generic/universal USB/C type.

Without that firm information, with the higher price, I can't justify the risk of just not knowing, I need to know, so the HP now falls to the way-side.

A lot of web pages and a fair few Intel Ark comparisons later and I'm heading to the Lenovo site.

Now the Lenovo site immediately wants you to go down a series channel, so you're looking at the E, the T, the L and X and Yoga lines, there's options all over the place.  My immediate realization was the market (or maybe "experience" is a better description) experience of the Lenovo units, I was easily and quickly able to start see tear downs and information.

I started on the X and T series, quickly finding them drool worthy, but massively too expensive.  The E series came into view, I wanted to keep to 14" screen and so the E4XX series.  I'm an Intel bod, so E480.

So, a starting price of £431.99 today, with the Boxing Day 10% off.

The 2-3 week shipping missive has be worried, it may arrive as I'm on a jet half-way across the Atlantic and if we are in that situation, the machine has to be worth the wait.  But if I can pick an off the shelf version "Ready-To-Ship", I'm happy to get it sooner and upgrade it with parts myself.

The immediate problem in the "Ready-To-Ship" types are the processors and screens, they all seem to be Core i3 and the screens are 1366x768 (hello, I have 2012 on the phone for you Lenovo).  They're therefore straight out.

However, I can immediately see the memory customization options...

I can see 4+4 and 4+8, which is screaming that there are probably two memory slots and a quick google about tells me there are.  This means the 4GB (cheapest) configuration needs checking for a price to upgrade to a total of 8GB or 12GB by adding an additional 4 or 8 stick myself.

If we buy the 12GB configuration straight from Lenovo, then it'll cost an additional £111... Can we get a single 8GB stick cheaper?.... Why yes, a Crucial 8GB stick of the exact same spec RAM is only £49.99, less than half price.  Worth the risk of popping a brand new machine's case open?  Certainly.

But if I got the machine at 4GB spec, that's how I would fly with it, I'd order the additional 8GB, but park opening the machine until after my travel... Still, worth knowing.

What about storage? Well, the motherboard takes an M.2 SSD 2820 and a 2.5" SATA and we can elect to ship with one or the other... 

Playing the same game as with the RAM, we can see a cost of £85 for a 128GB M.2... Can I beat that?.... Yes, a WD Blue M.2 at 250GB is only £44.48.  That's twice the space for half the cost.  Lenovo, that is a pretty badly inflated price there.

We have to have the SATA mechanical drive, so our only question is RPM or the amount of space?  And, I think for now 500GB at 7200RPM would be fine and we can upgrade later (like a 2TB 2.5" SATA is only like £70).

The E480 is looking pretty darn good to far, we can get it in the i5, we can up the screen to HD and it has an HDMI out.  It's a USB-C type standard charger, we are all pretty much there.

It can't all be roses and light, what's the catch?  The battery.

Yeah, we're right back to where I came in on this whole problem of a new machine, changing the battery.  The battery on this is an internal unit, you can get to it, you can change it, but not easily and not on the road.

So, research time, can I find the exact battery type and can you buy them after market?

Yes, I can and Yes you can.  So we're onto a bit of a winner here.

Linux will have to come later, we're probably going with the lowest RAM and disk, to up the CPU and screen, lets price up where we might stand at the end of this glorious research...

That's not a bad price point, lets say we have the RAM (£49.99) and 250GB SSD (44.48) after market, we add £94.47 to that base price.  Giving us £607.99.

That's more machine, with head-room on the RAM expansion and storage for future proofing, 

You know what, I may reach out to Lenovo, see what they can do to assist this project?... If only to improve that shipping time.

Great Rack Mount Mistakes #5

It has been a while since I've brought to you the tales of woe from my past... But this one isn't a tale of woe for myself, it was some other poor bugger who had to suffer, though I was involved.

After my first in-depth IT related job, I got into looking after some big systems, and I mean so Big they could have starred Tom Hanks... The last one of which ended, officially in early 2001, this was my looking after an IBM AS400 machine.

It had several terminals hooked into it, many suited analysts (as the non-programmers were called) regally sipped coffee and generated reports from it, there were also several ASCII Serial wireless hand-held terminals for roaming about the site with, all pretty cool.  I however was not involved in any of this, my job was to look after the PC's on the site and keep the AS400 fed with back-up tapes.

One of the PC's however took me within a solar breath of the chorona of glory that was working with the BIG IRON, and this was a little IBM PC, running OS/2 which was used actually boot the AS400, the mechanism escapes me, the details I've long forgotten, I remember it using OS/2, a terminal and a fancy script.

As I said this role ended for me in 2001, and I whisked my way off to work for a little software shop in Alcester, Warwickshhire (where I know I was a lazy pain in the arse - sorry about that lads - I grew up later, honest!).  Anyway, 23rd December 2001, I had a call at my parents home, a chap asking for me by name.  They handed out my personal mobile (Rocking the Nokia 3310 on Genie Mobile).

Well, this guy didn't let up, Christmas Eve, I'm mid-way through watching the Muppet Christmas Carol for the fifth time that day, and I finally look at the phone, and the seventeen texts to call the head-office of my prior employer.

Which I do, and awake a security guard whom had less hold of English than my dog, and the dog's Greek...

After a mixed conversation, I got through to a chap who was clearly in a server room, you could hear the noise behind him, I love that noise.

As he's talking to me however, the noise disappeared, dead silent...

"Did you just leave the server room?"

His reply.. "No, it just shuts off, it never completes its boot".

He was talking about the AS400, of which I knew nothing, they had very expensive IBM support for it on the way, but they were very worried, and wanted me to take a look, as everything had to be up for the Boxing Day sales - this was my time not in a manufacturing world, but in a retail world - the pressure was real, the target was live.

On the offer of a very nice cash sum, I jumped in my 206 and drove down to the offices, waved through security I signed in, and took a look around my old stomping ground, things had changed since I was last there, the partitioning wall to the server room had been removed, where the analysts sat was now occupied by a modern style series of server rack positions, they were in the process of moving everything to a set of Dell Power Edge 2U servers, with A/C, a hot isle and a cold, some decent kit.

Turning around there was the great big AS400, jet black, with a rectangular base rounded at one end.  And the machine perched on this raised platform.

This was the machine which would not booting... The problem?

Well, that paritioning wall, which had been removed... "How did you remove this wall?"

"Oh" he said "we had them put plastic sheets double lined from the ceiling to floor, took down the stud walling, and clean up, we never had to turn the AS400 off"

"Fabulous" I noted his pride "so the silver racks which were here, the shelving with parts and the little PC sat about here"  I intimated the corner just below waist height.

"All that was removed, with the wall, just old junk parts and pieces"

"Okay" I look around "So where did you remove it all to?"

"A skip" he shrugged "About three months ago"

"Aha" I nodded "I know your problem, the AS400 is coming up into advisory mode and awaiting the start signals from the script host, I'm going to guess you don't run AS400 elsewhere, you're winding down to the new servers?"

"Yeah" he was quite flustered "I know nothing about this hunk of junk, I just need it to work"

"Then you need to find a PC running OS/2 before morning, and restore from one of the back-ups I used to take onto tape, if you can"

He went whiter than my best linen on wash day... "OS2 PC?  Why?"

"Because the machine which sat here, was the boot master for the main shell into the Analysts layer, it sat here" indicating the wall again "whoever unplugged and threw it in a skip should really have looked a the holistic picture, it was a very important little machine, which is why we had two of them and spare parts on those shelves, and why it also got backed up to tape when it was installed or updates performed on it"

Silence filled the gap.

"I'll take that cash and get back to my Christmas pudding".

Code History : Old Computers to Teach New Developers

A fair while ago, I posted about my Virtual CPU code, that code (still not complete) just does addition (and my association subtraction), the point was to lead into code which emulated actual logic gates and indeed I write (somewhere in these pages) a half-adder followed by a full-adder emulation logic in C++ code.

The purpose of this was actually related to my giving a talk to some school children, it was ever intended for these pages, the kids could not wrap their heads around not being able to "just multiply".

They had studied computer memory, and wrote documents in word bigger than the actual memory foot-print of the machines they were talking about.

The teacher, a friend of mine, wanted to demonstrate this to them.... I therefore hoved into view with my 12Kbyte Commodore 16... And challenged the kids to write a program for it... They then had the massive struggle... One bright young chap found a C16 emulator online, and he wrote out a long program in Commodore Basic, which amounted to little more than a text-editor...

It was very impressive work from the young chap, and I've kept his number for when he graduates (in 2021), unfortunately it worked fine on the emulator, as you could assign more memory to the machine... After typing the program into the actual machine... It ran out of memory!  The edit buffer was only 214 bytes...

He had only tested with "10 print 'hello' 20 goto 10", but typing any lengthier program in and it essentially started to overwrite the previous lines of code.

You might call this an oversight, but it was semi-intentional as after all the project was about memory.

So having learned how expensive and precious memory was, and is, in this world of near unlimited storage the kids moved onto assembly, learning about how the lowest level of a machine worked.

This is where my work came into help, because they could not wrap their heads around "not multiplying".  In some chips a multiplication call might be many thousands of gates ("to multiply was 200,000 gates, over half the chip" - 3Dfx Oral History Panel - See video below).

Hence I wrote the code of a CPU only to do addition, to multiple one had to write assembly which did a loop of additions!  I left the kids to write the assembly for division, which is why you never see it here in my code.

It worked, but I find so many commentators have missed this piece of computing history, have missed that machines used to NOT come with every function, you had to emulate some functions in software with the bare-set of commands present.

Some have confused this with the idea of RISC, this isn't what RISC is about, but I distinctly remember being taught about the RISC based machines at school (Acorn machines) and that RISC meant there were "less instructions".  Sofie Wilson herself tells us that this isn't the point of RISC...

Having just spoken to my friend about the possibility of presenting these ideas again to a class of kids, I'm wondering whether I need to clean up all my code here, to actually make-sense of all these disparate and separate sources and write one paper on the topic; histories of this which are readable by kids seem to be sadly lacking, or they start from the point of view of a child of my time, born in the late 1970's whom remembers a time when you have limits in computing.

Kids today see no such limits, and find it hard to relate to them, my own niece and nephews, whom are just turning 15, find it hard to fathom such limits, even when they can sit down with me in front of a 12K machine, or a 512K machine, they can't relate, these pieces of history, these things which previously one had to work around are alien to them.

They don't need to work around them, and this leaves me meeting modern graduates whom lack some of the lowest level debugging and problem solving skills.

Indeed, I see these great efforts to publish frameworks to make modern developers test and think about software, because new developers have never had to get things right the first time...

I did, I'm one of the seeming few, who had to get it right and first time.  This is not bragging, it's actually quite sad, as how do you prove your code is good?  Pointing to a track record counts for very little, especially when the person you are trying to persuade has no interest in you, just your skills.

My most recent anathema, Test Driven Development, seems to be the biggest carbuncle in this form of "modern development"... Write me some code... They might ask, and you can write the code, and show it's correct, or you can write the tests which test the range, the type, the call, the library... Then write the code?... One is quick, efficient, but requires faith in the developer... One is slower, aims to forge faith of the code out of the result... Both end up with the same result, but one requires a leap of faith and trust.

Unfortunately, bugs in code, over the history of development have destroyed that faith in the developer.  There are a precious few developers whom are trusted to act on their own initiative any longer.  I know I work in a part of my employers company where I am trusted to act on my own initiative; with temperance that I have delivered very many years of good working products.

But I'm seeing, and hearing, of so many other parts of companies around us which do not trust their developers, and I would argue, if these developers had had to struggle with some of the historical problems my own generation of developers had struggled with, then they would be trusted more, and be freer to act, rather than being confined and held-back by needing to check, recheck and double check their code.

Trust in one another, a peer review, and where necessary a sentence of text on the purpose of some function or other, should really define good development, the code itself can tell you it's purpose, not the tests, certainly not by just running the code employing observation.

I therefore propose I get off my pontificating bum, clean up all my "virtual CPU" stuff, document some of these issues, and we as part of the development community try to get new developers to challenge themselves against Old Computers... ComputerPhile already demonstrate this with their Crash Bug examples with the Atari ST...

My New Monitors - Research & Pricing

No game footage this evening, we have been playing, but we've also been working hard on the house.  Well, since its now a fortnight since my surgery, I've been forced out into the cold by the wife to get on with some jobs, the first of which has been to clip the rear conifers, they were getting... well I'd like to say out of hand, but that's an understatement, you know when you don't notice something?... Well we'd not really noticed they'd expanded at the base by 6 feet in diameter.

Clipping this excess away on the drive-way side has allowed us to move the junk from below them, and now fit the new van along with the estate car onto the drive way, result!

Next, I've been told to decorate the kitchen, this is on hold awaiting some tools I need (mate you know which ones I'm on about, hehe).

I also have to finish the plastering in the middle room and get on with painting it, so it's all go.

But, last night we spent a little over £114 at Ikea, we bought a new stainless steel standing lamp, the Klaab model, for the middle room, I got some LED down-lighters, and stuck them under the kitchen cupboards, to the kitchen is now lit at night not by the combines 120watts of overhead lighting, but just 0.6watts of LED lighting, and it's almost as bright at the worktop level, where we need the light of an evening.

We also have a new solid metal hat & coat stand, and I have a lovely new pillow for my office chair, which I'm sat on right now.

However, all this aside is not the exciting thing about the evening, no, for this evening I've had the green light to pick new monitors for my office...

My requirements here have been dual screen for a long long time, and I generally play on my Dell monitor and play video on my phillips monitor, they're both 1050p (no, that is not a typo, they're not even full 1080p).

Now, both of these screens are going to be retired, one will be kept as a spare, the other sold on ebay for a bare minimum.

But, the question is where do I go?... Now, I still need a VGA connector on one of these new beasts, and I need at least two... The rest is up in the air, I have dial DVI-D on my graphics card, a HDMI and a display port output, so I have the world of monitors at my behest....

Wait, wait, why VGA you ask?... Well, because I have to repair broken machines from other people, and I have a vested interest in older PC hardware.  All of which require a VGA port as a bare minimum for me.

This VGA requirement is most definitely not for my main screen, so lets ignore that for now and discuss more about what I require for my main screen.

MOOORRRREEEEE SCREEN SPACE!... Yes, it's as simple as that, with virtual machines, development pages, scripts and other junk open on the main screen; even with the second screen; I need more space in that my main work space, so I want a resolution of 2560 x 1440.  I'd also like the screen to minimum eye strain, so Low blue light, and a high view angle (IPS) would be good.

How big do I want the screen?... Well, the current screens are both 23.5 inch.  And we're upgrading... So lets say 27" as a minimum, now I want two of them, so that's a combined length of 54".  And looking at my screen any larger is not going to fit.

Right, our first milestone, we've picked a size... So, what have we got... Hitting the "Gaming Monitor" reviews, I want anything with a response time of lower than 5ms... I would say I'd love 144hz or 1ms but, to be honest, we running an nVidia 770 GTX card, so 144hz refresh rates at such high resolutions we'll have available are going to be impossible.

Now, searching, I got several options, my notes...

Asus seemed to be a top running brand, as does Acer, Benq and Samsung...

Samsung however, all seemed to be more expensive and less able, so I dropped them out of the mix.  This is a shame as I have all Samsung electronics screens for my TV's in the house, and I'm happy with them, but I'm not going to be paying a premium for lower spec screens here.

I did also, at this time, take a good look and have notes on 24 inch screens, and came across the Asus VX24AH, a 2560x1440 resolution 5MS IPS screen.  At only £200 this was a bargain, and is still a strong contender for my secondary screen, however, it's only 24 inches... 

I then considered three of these, in portrait mode, that would rock, even with the bezels in the way, however, the stand was not adjustable, it only provided tilt, so three of them was not going to be possible without also buying into a complete mounting system, but these desks could't support that, so I'd also have to be fitting to the wall, and the wall has old Victorian era plaster (yes 150 year old plaster!) which is about ready to come off.

So, quit the 24 inches, and look at Asus 27 inches... Ooo, ooo... I got a heavy high contender for the main screen... The Asus MX27AQ, it has ultra low blue light, IPS, it's 100M:1 ratio, 300cd/m2, 5ms response, 2560x1440 resolution and it has display port and HDMI, so can be driven easily from my card without need of a splitter or display port hub.  It come in at a little under £400....  Via amazon....That is very expensive, but I want to buy something of quality and then a lower priced utility second screen... However, I notice it's sold through Amazon by Scan, so what's their direct price... £375... Already £25 cheaper... I could potentially go pick this screen up too, that'd be £4.95 delivery saved... That's 5 litres of diesel paid for, which is more than enough to cover a 4 hour round trip... But, for now, we'll assume delivery from Scan at £4.95 on top, so we're at a price of around £380.

Next a secondary, the Asus appeal now is the small bezel, and this is going to be side by side, so what else do they offer... Well, in the MX series, there's the MX279H, a screen with rave reviews, AH-IPS, 300 cd/m2, it has VGA and 2 x HDMI, so is okay for my bare minimum connectivity, it's only 1920 x 1080 resolution, but it is 100M:1 ration, 5ms response time and AH-IPS.  It's a cost of £229 though, to very much too much with the main monitor included.  Though they'd look identical.

With Scan this second screen is £10 more than with Amazon, and with their delivery it's £14.95 more, so Amazon is the source there.  Two different screens from two deliveries, not ideal.... But, we're after cost here.  However, my budget for this is around £500, and I'm at a standing of  £609, that's definitively over budget.

However, in the Asus range I also spotted the VC279H, it's a much lower fidelity screen, 80M:1 ratio, I doubt from my old screens I'd see any difference, but it's a cost to performance challenge now, then the resolution is the same 1920x1080, and 5Ms response, the connectivity however is a little better for my needs, VGA, DVI and HDMI.  Costs, this is £172, that's bringing the main screen and this as an option in at £552, I think £52 over budget I can talk my way out of.

The question is with this lower priced VC series, is, "how different" is different looking?... And it seems, not very...

From the images I've looked at (which we can see above) the main differences are the bezel, on the main screen will be silver, whilst black on the secondary, and then the stand is a hollow sun dial style on the primary and a solid plastic on the secondary.

I think however, this is the end of my searching, and I'm going to the wife with a cost of £552.

In my defense, my current right hand screen is a little under 15 years old, whilst the second screen is around 7 years old.  I got both of these for around £125 each, so I've made that investment last... At this ratio, I need to make these new screens last well into 2022, and I think they'll do that with ease, I certainly see my needing to rebuild the whole PC before I buy anything newer than these screens.

Holey Hardware

I really like this story, doubt it's true, but a little part of me wishes it was...

/ net.rumor / sdcrdcf!dem / Mar 21, 1986 / 

This was told to me by a fellow co-worker who worked for another large main frame manufacture previously. It seems they delivered a new machine to an overseas site and during installation every time they applied power to one of the memory bays they blew every circuit breaker in the computer room.

After resetting the circuits they again applied power to the memory bay with the same results. Since this was a new machine they crated it up and shipped it back and got a replacement.

When they got the damaged memory bay back the started to tear it down to find the cause of the short. Well what they found was a small hole about 3/8 in. in diameter going from top to bottom through some of the memory arrays, which cause a very effective short.

After a lot of research they found the cause. It seems that after the memory had passed test and evaluation and quality assurance the bay was crated and put in the warehouse to await delivery. At some time during its storage an electrician was hired to do some work and since it was a secure building the security guard had to go with him.

The electrician at one point said that he had to go back down to his truck to get a drill and the guard asked why and the electrician said he needed to drill a hole right here (pointing to a spot on the floor). The guard then responded by pulling out his sidearm and proceeded to blow a hole at the appropriate spot which happened to be right above where the memory bay was being stored.

The last he knew the guard had been reprimanded and re-assigned to another of the security agency's customers.

Clean PC & OpenGL

Its been a long weekend, and a hard weekend, I've been doing a lot of code over the weekend, moving an important project from a most defiantly developmental footing to a much more mature footing.

But I've also been and finally had the car sorted, the clutch was never right after the last fixes it had, I've had a new clutch fitted, then was told to fit a new clutch cable, which I did; but still the drive was not right.  When I went to pick the car up a very sheepish mechanic said "Its only £30 for a new pressure plate and oil".. okay... Cool... Two days of labour, £30... What gives... Yes, it'd had a whole other new clutch...

It drives sweet as a nut now, but it does make me wonder how crap was the other clutch, it lasted from October 2013 to June 2014.  I mean, I know after market clutches are cheap tack, but this took the Michael it really did.

Anyway, that all done I was wired late last night, so decided with the project above delivered for feedback I could take some time to service my main PC.  It had been a little battered over time... 

You can see the basic chassis here: http://megalomaniacbore.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=Silent+Fans

And the first thing I did was give the whole brushed aluminium case a good clean, the fins at the top the grills on the front and the dust mesh points at the bottom over the air in takes.

Then I opened it up and cleaned the case fans, now as you can see I fitted them in 2011, so that's just shy of 3 years service.  They were dusty, but not terribly so.  A quick wipe was all they needed, the rear of the case also just a quick wipe.

The most dust was concentrated in the graphics card, and around the CoolMaster plastic funnel which has its own mesh dust cover, this was sodden with dust and I soon had the card out and dusted it clean before refitting.

My other task was to clean the Corsair Airflow...

http://megalomaniacbore.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/corsair-airflow-ram-cooler-getting-old.html

Now, this thing had been making a lot of noise, and when I disconnected it and brought it out into the mid-night light bulb glow it was utterly ditched.  Large foamy dust bunnies had formed on all the stanchions and as the whole machine is side mounted the upper sides of the support legs were thick with fir...

Really strange, considering that this is not the main cooler and that there's filtered grills all around this unit... But then it dawned on me, I connect this to the power fan header on the motherboard, and the Q-Fan profile does not include that header.  So this is the only fan set in the machine NOT being speed controlled against performance/heat.  So it was going to be noisy because of the small size of the fans.

Adding in the dust only added to the noise/turbulence.

Cleaned up and refitted tightly however and it is a lot quieter.  My Ram of course is also now being cooled better.

One other thing I'm taking a look at is how OpenGL performs from the libraries shipped with MinGW on CodeBlocks for windows:

http://megalomaniacbore.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/setting-up-codeblocks-on-windows.html

From the project menu you can easily create a Test OpenGL project and build it... I assume its running in Mesa/Software... But it runs...

Aside from this, I have Wednesdays Post for the Virtual CPU project done, it was actually written last week, but I've had some problems uploading the two videos for it to YouTube.  I hope with the machine tuned up to upload them this evening.  Even if the videos are not present, the post is scheduled to go... And it covers Interrupts.

Corsair Airflow (RAM Cooler) Getting Old

In my rig I have lots of silent fans (140mm silent fans, 120mm silent fans), I did a review fitting Knox silent  Fans a while back, as part of that same rig however I have a Corsair Airflot RAM Cooler:

I've never really liked this addition, but it does serve a good purpose, cooling my RAM significantly, but the fans are small and loud, very loud, as it has aged however, it is getting terrible.

I had heard some users mention this unit making noise, but they didn't have it fitted to Corsair ram, so I assumed it was just their unique problem.  Well I do have Corsair RAM, I purchased the RAM and cooler as a kit when I put the current Core i7 rig together myself

Over time, I've heard it making a bit more noise than normal, but last night whilst working, I had to actually open the case and pull the power cable on this, it was grinding, vibrating and generally grumbling like crazy, as I pulled the power on it my rig became almost silent instantly, and totally silent once I'd shut the case back up again.  This little fan had been causing such trouble.

I actually trouble shot this even more, and using my finger bravely, stopped the fan spinning (don't do that at home folks!), and figured out it was the fan to the top most position which was making all the noise, the other fan was silent...

I'm thinking after a server back up of my code, and doing some work on the house at the weekend, it might be time to strip the PC down and clean it, and see about replacing this fan unit.

Altair 8800 - Full Demo

Do you want an Altair like machine you've written yourself in C++?  Then try my newest post...

I've a guilty secret, and this is that I've been totally and utterly obsessed with watching these videos, I recommend you do too!

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB3mwSROoJ4KLWM8KwK0cD1dhX35wILBj

You can watch the whole series as a play list form the given link, or just the first video from the one I've embedded here.  But the series takes you through Altair assembler, CP/M, and other goodies.

Thor, Smaug & Computer Chess - Films

Last night the good lady and myself went to see Thor 2... I'd have to agree with Jingles when he called it "Loki 3"... Thor being Loki 1, the Avengers Assemble being Loki 2 and this film being Loki 3.

As adventure fantasy this is a really nice flick, its got some good laughs, though I had to question the recasting of Fandral, and also the changing they've made to Dr Erik Selvig post Avengers Assemble...

I also love how they kept the damage to London to a minimum... It's like, lets tear New York apart, but they darn't do it to London... As it should be.

The next film I plan to go see is Desolation of Smaug... 

However, I've also spotted this potential geek gem on the grape vine...

Though you can, with careful searching, find this whole film listed on YouTube already, not that I've yet taken a look.

Code::Blocks - A few Tips

I'm trying to set up a new Linux box to do some code (C++) in code blocks, now I do like how easy linking with multiple libraries is with code blocks - rather than fiddling with the command line or creating a make file which can obfuscate your build results...

But I'm not a huge fan of Code::Blocks, my biggest problems at the moment is I have a huge screen resolution, but no-matter how big it never feels like I've got enough workspace area available, it sort of feels hemmed in, this mainly comes from the poor way you can't layout editor windows side by side, or horizontally.  Forcing you to feel one file open at a time.

Then add to this that some of the editor settings pages - like "Settings->Environment" - full the whole height of the screen.  So you're there trying to edit the editor and you have this whole page filled with settings, and just as annoyingly you can't click off the editor settings back into the editor to look at something you've changed... You have to accept the settings, close the settings page and then you can see what you've done, this disjoints what you've changed from what you're viewing.

But I have a couple of tips to help you make things better.. First of all, pop into the View table and turn on the TODO list

Dock the panel for to-do items wherever you like...

And then you can add simple "// TODO MESSAGE" type items into your code to remind you what you're up to.

Another tip, if you want to maximise your coding area, you can close the messages windows - where the build output and messages go - but then getting them back open is a pain... To open them again, just press F2!

And finally, another one to maximise your working space, the editor tab showing the filename you're typing in.. Double click it... This will move into the maximised area version of the editor (by default) its a new theme called "Code::Blocks::Minimal".  If this is not setup then you can go into "Settings -> Environment" and then select the "View" (eyeball) on the right, and you're looking to make sure that this setting is selected:

Windows OS History - Francis at his Finest

You see Microsoft are well known to create a good OS, then a shit OS.... Now ignoring DOS, which has the same interface and API as CP/M *cough* Thieves! *cough*, as a company they've produced several Visual OS's... Windows 1, was shit never got out to us... Windows 2 was better... Windows 3.0 was broken, Windows 3.1 and 3.11 were okay and added... Windows 95 was dreadful... Windows 98 worked....

Are you seeing the pattern yet?

From windows 98 we have a bifurcation, Windows ME which utterly sucked and Windows 2000 which worked, but Windows 2000 was based on Windows NT (New Technology) which is Microsoft parlance for "rewritten" and by a different team, so it worked differently and was; I believe; intended to compete with the work station market then rules by Sun Microsystems and other Unix or Unix a-like systems like Silicon Graphics and SCO.

So, at one point they had two decentish systems Windows 98, and 2000.  But 2000 being so new it was shitter than 98 for games and the common man, so we'll just grass over this and say 98 good, ME bad!

Then came Vista... Windows Vista... Now I bought it, and it was utterly crap mainly because of driver issues and their first pass attempt at including a method of elevating the user from "normal" to "super" for installation or operation of high-level functions.  Us techno-aware knew this, but the Technofeebles were left to flap all alone because they'd installed their new OS and could not get the fucking network drivers to install to get back on the internet and ask "Why the fuck don't this thing work"?

I've only just recently got rid of Vista, in favour of affordable copies of Windows 7... Because after being stung for £120 for the Ultimate 64bit Vista I was not going to fork out for Windows 7, until I knew its pedigree was up to scratch.

And so, the bad good bad good cycle continued... Vista Bad... Windows 7 good....

This brings us to Windows 8... Well, I know a man who can say it better than me...

Frances Sings about Windows 8

Oh by the way, I'll just pass over the fact I had a Red had Linux installation in 1999 and flattened it in favour of Windows 2000... We all make mistakes okay... But, at the time I needed to code with Borland C++ Builder 3, and it was windows only, okay... okay... I'm sorry!

And before you all say I'm picking on Microsoft... Apple do it too...

Windows Reinstall Progress - Bowser Device?

Yeah, last night I started my windows reinstall, of course it started with a back up of lots of data.... Nearly 6,000,000 files later, I have moved a lot of stuff, I usually don't have this amount of files, but I had a server failure in 2011 and recovered the files to a folder creatively called "DesparateRecoveryNight"...

So, having spent hours copying these from the mail hard drive onto the two secondary drives I set about checking out why the system might be playing up, and I found a rogue piece of hardware, or at least a driver for something which I can neither say I own, nor identify...

This device was say in "Other Devices", listed as installed correctly and called "Bowser"...

No, not that Bowser - least I hope not, could he be after my 'shrooms? - but I don't have a device anywhere I remember coming in as Bowser... And of course searching the internet about it simply gives you references to the above dinosaur boss, or it gives you people whom have miss-spelt "browser", about which this was neither...

I disabled this device listing however, and a few (but not all) of the network problems I had been having stopped... And despite Windows all along reporting no use of network bandwidth, my router showed a 95% drop in out-going packets, I can only assume I've got a nasty at this point.

So I fire up a virus scanner - 1 result - but this was part of DirectX which always comes up as a false positive...

My plan going a heads is to scan all the other additional drives, reboot into my linux partition and back up that data, then reinstall Windows 7.

I'm on Vista 64bit so its time to retire it.  My laptop was the test for my new Windows 7 license, but its since been wiped over with Linux Mint... so my Windows 7 license is free for my mail gaming PC :)