Category: Evaluations

Zotac ZBox ID80

Zbox ID80

After getting the Alienware machine, I found myself with an extra 20″ monitor and noticed that the Blue Diamond box was getting a little long in the tooth. It has been running Ubuntu 10 and while it works, it’s very slow. Time for an upgrade.

The Zotac Zbox ID80 plus was about $300 from newegg, and while they have versions that are with and without HDD and memory, the one I got had 2GB of ram and a 320GB HD. I didn’t really need the HD since I had one of that size, but the price really tossed that in for almost free. I did get 4GB of RAM for it for an additional $21. Continue reading “Zotac ZBox ID80”

More DRAM with a Glitch

Corsair Vengeance 6GB

The Cyberpower System from November 2010, was ordered with 6GB of memory. An additional 6GB of memory is down to $39 with free shipping, so I went for it. Looks like I got the last one. ;) They are out of stock and don’t expect any more. But I’m sure that other similar memory packages are available for similar prices.

The memory arrived and installed with no problems, but then the system would not boot. Turns out that the RAID system had a problem on system restart. The RAID controller did not wait for drive spin up, so the BIOs reordered the drives in the boot menu, and after that the system would not boot automatically. I was able to boot it by selecting the RAID array from the BIOS boot menu.

Stopping in the BIOS and reordering the boot menu fixed the problem. The system  has an ASUS Sabertooth X58 Motherboard.

Another tip, you might want to consider whether DHL should be your shipper of choice. The memory was left in my mailbox out on the road, rather then at my door. For a couple of dollars, I could have had UPS deliver the memory, and it would have been dropped at my door, which I’ll do in the future.

Enjoy,

ww

VirtualBox – Ubuntu in Windows

VirtualBox

Virtual Machine systems have been popular for servers for a few years now. They save big time $$ when setting up server rooms since most of the server systems in an IT shop aren’t that busy. But recently VM has become popular for desktop users. Many of the reasons we used to use “Dual-Boot” systems are much better served using VM. There are several reasons why you might want to run VM on your system:

  • You have a windows system and want to run Ubuntu.
  • You have a Mac and want to run Windows occasionally.
  • You have Windows, or a Mac, and want to have a system where you can surf safely, for example to do your online banking.
  • You are doing development and want to have a “clean” system for testing.

One of the most functional, and easiest to deploy, VM systems is VirtualBox. Now inside Oracle, this system was originally developed at Sun and is Open Source, and free. Microsoft has Windows Virtual PC,  and you can run Windows XP or Ubuntu on your Vista or Windows 7 system. But of course, it has no support for Ubuntu or OS/X as a host, so why learn more than one system? I’m going to use Windows and Ubuntu systems as hosts, so I’ve chosen VirtualBox.

Continue reading “VirtualBox – Ubuntu in Windows”

New Fan Control / Media Slots

New Fan Control / Media Slots

The recent Cyberpower PC had a broken Fan Control / Media card slot device. The Media Card slots didn’t work. I have arranged to return the device to Cyberpower and have purchased another one from Frozen CPU. The Frozen CPU folks have the option of dressing the cables for another $20.

For a complete album of photos of my installation of the new device.

It works great, has 4 rather than 2 fan controls and a bright LCD display. Took about 4 hours to install since prudence called for a careful test it before completing the installation. The only odd thing about the new device is that you insert the SD card upside down in the slot.

– Windy

PhotoResizerQt – Simple Photo Resizer

Update: Update: Program fixed now. The problem was some plug-ins that process images. These DLLs were not supplied since the program finds them with a non-standard way if you have the Qt toolkit installed. The program and the installer is now fixed to install those plug-ins too.

Update: This program fails on Win XP Sp3. I’m investigating why this is, but it appears to be a bug in the QPixmap class of the Qt Library. I’ll fix the program as soon as possible. You can follow the discussion in this post.

Friends of mine have their digital cameras and need to resize their photos to send over email. All the programs I’ve found on the web are either too complicated with way too many options for a novice computer user or strange to use like the program that you rename to change the size of the photo and then drag and drop photos onto it to resize the photos. I have designed a very simple program to resize either one or several photos.

Resize a Photo

Continue reading “PhotoResizerQt – Simple Photo Resizer”

Modern Website Building

The Website Building Problem

As a consultant, I am continually looking for modern tools to help my clients build websites. Recently several web site builders have appeared that combine Hosting and Website construction in a single place and for a single small fee.

In the past few years I have come across more and more clients who have been held hostage to the old way of doing websites. The old way uses off-line tools like FrontPage, DreamWeaver or other tools that run on a desktop computer and then upload the website pages to the hosting service. Clients run into several problems when these tools are used.

  • These off-line site building tools are expensive [ several hundred dollars], require special training and must be upgraded over time.
  • Often the clients can’t find the person who built their site, or it costs too much or that person has lost vita information about the site because it has been months or years since they made any changes.
  • The hosting service may be going out of business or changing it’s terms and so the site expert needs to be contacted to move the site to a new hosting service. The client may not have the credentials or expertise to sign into the site to back it up to migrate to another hosting service.

Modern sites utilize a CMS or Content Management System. There are many out there, but only in the past couple of years have they started to appear that work for the novice user. A CMS separates the “content” of the site from its “Look”. The text and pictures are stored separately from the “Theme” which directs how the page is laid out on the browser page. Also sites using CMS’s are not built on your local computer and then uploaded. Rather they are built on the site itself, using the browser and software running on the site. So there are no expensive and separate tools to buy or learn to use.
Continue reading “Modern Website Building”

CoreHeaterQt Program

I recently wrote a program to test my new computer. I wanted to test the wattage range and cooling of the new processor so needed a program that would keep all the cores of the processor busy. The Core i7-950 is a 4 core processor with Hyper-Threading which means that there are a max of 8 threads. Since AMD provides server processors with up to 12 threads so the program has a maximum number threads of 32. I use the HWMonitor program to monitor temperatures and wattage if your processor supports it.

Continue reading “CoreHeaterQt Program”

Seapine Surround SCM – A First Look

I’ve been looking for a source control solution for some time. I used to use QVCS, but it costs money and you have to get the Enterprise version to get client/ server. At this point I have three, or four, development systems and they include both Windows and Linux.

I considered Bazaar, but after a couple of days I came up with more questions than I had answers. My reasons for not using Bazaar are here.

While there were a few glitches I was able to get going with Surround SCM in a single day. Surround SCM is easy to use, and supports client / server across Windows, Mac and Linux.

Continue reading “Seapine Surround SCM – A First Look”

Microsoft Security Essentials – Coming to a Computer Near You

Update: MSE is available now for everyone. On 3 October 2009, I have moved all my computers from AVG Free to MSE.

Microsoft has entered the business of AntiVirus software by simplifying and repackaging their Corporate Security suite for home users. The new program is called Microsoft Security Essentials. When this is released, it will be free for use by non-commercial users and will run on Windows XP, Vista and Version 7.

Currently the Beta is closed, but the program will be available later this year. Based on all the reviews I’ve seen – Security Now for example – this is a light weight, but very robust anti-virus.

When this comes out I will be installing it with an eye toward eliminating my use of Free AVG.

More news when it appears,

– windy