Back Into Service: Thinkpad 600E, Presario 2132EA

I put my old IBM Thinkpad 600E and Compaq Presario 2132EA back into service. Here are the specs on the machines:

IBM Thinkpad 600E:

Intel Pentium II 366MHz processor
64MB RAM
56kbps modem
1 USB port, 1 VGA port, 1 parallel port, 1 serial port, 1 PS2 port, 1 IrDA port
DVD-ROM drive (front-loading!!!)
External floppy disk drive
Crystal Audio

Compaq Presario 2132EA:

Intel Pentium III 1 GHz processor
384MB RAM
56kbps modem, 100Mbps network interface
2 USB ports (inaccessible), 1 VGA port, 1 parallel port, 1 PS2 port, 1 IrDA port
DVD/CD-RW drive
Internal floppy drive

The problem with the Thinkpad is that it's too slow and doesn't have enough RAM to run a web browser. I can, however, use the USB port to connect to my ADSL router which effectively turns it into a network interface. The Presario, on the other hand, can get onto the 'net and do all kinds of stuff but the power connector is loose so I have to keep a paperweight on it, which makes the USB ports inaccessible. Also, the Spacebar and the 'B' keys on the keyboard don't work. The batteries on both laptops no longer work.

My current setup has the Thinkpad running Windows 98 Second Edition. I've installed the Terminal Service Client for Windows, which enables me to connect to the Presario running Windows XP SP2 (I plan to upgrade to SP3 sometime soon). That solves the low resources problem of the Thinkpad as well as the keyboard and loose power connector problem of the Presario. I'm hoping to install a wireless USB interface on the Thinkpad so I'm not tied down to the ADSL router but that's a plan for later.

Kindle 2 announced

Kindle 2, the new ebook reader, has been announced with lots of new features over it's older version. It's got 2GB of storage, has text-to-speech capabilities and can run PC-free with a 3G Internet connection. Kindle 2 costs $359.

Seagate firmware upgrade wreaks havoc with 500GB HDDs

The firmware upgrade Seagate provides to fix the problem with 1TB Barracuda drives seems to work, except that when you've got the 500GB Barracuda, it bricks your disk.

It's yet another case of lack of testing... their test engineers probably weren't curious enough to think "What if we tried the firmware on a system that also has 500GB drives?" Unlike what many people imagine, test engineers are more than just script monkeys - they've got to figure out ways to break something that seems to work perfectly.

Seagate's 1TB Barracuda Bug

Seagate has been experiencing problems with the 7200.11 Barracuda terabyte hard drives (ST31000340AS, but not the ST31000333AS). A defective firmware is the cause of the failure and the replacement drives that Seagate ships out have the same problem.

On the Seagate website, they still have a banner up (saying "The Barracuda 1 TB Drive in action") advertising their 1 terabyte model instead of the 1.5 terabyte model, which isn't affected by the bug. I don't know about them, but if I had a bigger hard drive, I'd switch all my banners to advertise the bigger one especially if the smaller one had a bug.

2 Terabyte SD-XC card announced

The SDXC card format was announced today at the Consumer Electronics Show 2009. The new format would support capacities of up to 2 terabytes and a transfer rate of 300MB/s.

The SDXC specification will be published at sometime around March 2009. The SDIO and SDHC specifications will also be updated to enable higher data transfer rates.

CES 2009

The Consumer Electronics Show 2009 is on in Las Vegas and CNET has been covering the new products on its website.

Among the announcements are the CES are

BlackBerry Curve 8900 availability from T-Mobile

The light-weight device includes Bluetooth, GPS and WiFi capabilities but lacks 3G. It has a 3.2MP camera and supports microSD/SDHC cards of up to 16GB.

Asus Eee PC T91 announced

The Asus Eee PC T91 features a GPS receiver, TV tuner, and an FM transmitter mated with a 9-inch display, Windows XP and Intel's Atom processor.

HP Pavilion DV2 - the AMD Neo Debut

Hewlett-Packard brings about a new genre of portable computers, somewhere between netbooks and notebooks. This may be just another marketing gimmick to add a larger screen to a netbook, but it gives choice to the consumer and that's what the CES hopes to achieve.

Lenovo Adds Wii-Style Controller

Lenovo will be displaying it's new IdeaCentre A600 at the CES with a Wii-style controller. The controller will be used for more than just gaming though - you can also use it as a mouse. It can be configured with a terabyte of hard disk storage and a blu-ray DVD drive, but unfortunately it doesn't come with 8GB RAM as an option :-(

Apple Patents iGlove

Apple filed for a patent for a glove that you can use to operate a touch screen with it's electrical conductive layer.

I wonder why anyone would need one of those? A small hole in the glove on one of the finger tips would work just fine. I guess it's a matter of style over economy if you buy an iPhone, or buy anything from Apple for that matter.

I guess we're going to see iGloves popping up in Apple stores all over the world soon.

Lenovo 3000 Fan Replacement

My Lenovo 3000 N100 work laptop always had a noisy fan but over the past couple of days, its been pretty noisy and the overheating causes my laptop to turn off.

I got the tech support guy to give me a replacement, so he checked the inventory and they had another slightly-used Lenovo 300 N100. After swapping hard disks which was pretty simple, I wanted the 2x512MB RAM replaced with the 1x1GB, 1x512MB RAM from my former laptop so things went quite well till I discovered the "k" key on the keyboard wasn't working.

Then, we decided to get the hard drive and RAM back to the laptop that I started off with and transplant the cooling fan. There was a tiny connector on the motherboard for the fan along with a couple of screws - they have a case panel to replace the fan too! There was a pretty big gang of dust bunnies covering the air vent, preventing air flow - no wonder it was overheating! After getting rid of the dust, transplanting the new fan in place and getting the case closed, I'm back in business.

AMD Phenom II Reaching Shelves As Early As Next Week

The AMD Phenom II was made available to retailers this week so you can expect to see them on store shelves as early as next week. The processors are AMD's answer to Intel's Core i7, both of which are quad-core. The Phenom II offers slightly less performance than the Core i7, but costs roughly half as much which makes it quite attractive to system builders.

Intel Moves Away From NVidia Ion

NVidia has been looking to pair up its chipsets with the Intel Atom processor, however Intel doesn't seem to want to play along. Intel has recently sent around a memo indicating that the Atom processor should only be used with it's i945GSE and i945GC chipsets.

That ought to turn NVidia toward Via and AMD for a netbook processor.

There still is a webpage from NVidia that says "NVidia GeForce 9400 plus Intel Atom". I guess the PR guys at NVidia didn't get Intel's message :-P

Pick a Different CPU Core

If you use CPU core affinity to keep one application from affecting other application on your server, you would be in for a surprise while benchmarking your application with a different core.

Researchers from Virginia Tech have published a research paper indicating that not all the cores on a CPU offer the same performance. Often, interrupts in a CPU are handled by a single core, thus reducing the performance of the applications running on that core.

If you aren't using CPU affinity, you might run into cases where the data that you need is cached with one core (each core has it's own L1 cache) while the software is running on a different cache.

You can get a copy of the research paper here.

Abit To Shut Down On 31-December-2008

Abit, a computer motherboard and graphic card manufacturer, will be shutting down at the turn of the year on 31st December 2008.

Following the 2006 sale of the Abit brand to Universal Scientific Industrial, sales began to decline due to which the company pulled out of the graphic card industry and finally made the decision to pull the plug from its motherboard manufacturing business.

Universal Scientific Industrial intends to focus on the manufacture of other electronic devices.

Lenovo's latest addition to the Thinkpad W700

Lenovo announced their latest addition to the Thinkpad W700 - a second LCD display!

The primary LCD display is a 17" WUXGA supporting 1920x1200 while the secondary LCD display is a 10.6" WXGA supporting 768x1280. The secondary LCD display would unfold/swing to open next to the primary display providing an extended desktop.

Also in the W700, Lenovo's flagship and the ultimate mobile workstation, is a WACOM digitizer on the palm-rest, and color calibration.

The new model would be available in January 2009.

UPDATE: Here's a YouTube video of how the second screen is integrated into the unit

Panasonic ToughBook Q.A.

Panasonic has a pretty simple solution for quality assurance of its ToughBook laptops. Before the laptops go into final inspection, they place them on a table and use a back massager to vibrate the table to see if any components shake themselves loose. Check out the video below to take a look at it:


Panasonic Toughbook Y7 Aging from geekdotcom on Vimeo.

Thinkpad X200 Tablet Spotted

There has been no word from Lenovo about a tablet version of the Thinkpad X200, but there have been rumors and speculations. Finally, there's been a picture posted of the Lenovo Thinkpad X200t indicating that we could hear from Lenovo sometime soon announcing specs, pricing and, possibly, an availability date.

Killer Thinkpad to be announced

The coolest Thinkpad yet will soon be announced by Lenovo. It features a 17" WUXGA display with an integrated camera, 8GB DDR3 memory, Intel Core 2 quad core processor, 2 200GB RAID hard disks, BluRay DVD, Fingerprint reader, 7-in-1 card reader, WLAN 802.11n/Bluetooth/WiMAX, NVidia Quadro FX3700M, a Wacom digitizer and a numeric keypad.

(Source: Geek.com, Gizmodo.com)

Ugly Messages on Thinkpad Recovery

I have an IBM Thinkpad T60 that I got about 2 years ago and I just used the Recovery CD to get a clean environment. It reminded me of the errors that I got the last time I used the Recovery CD:

C:\temp\{36948~1 - The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.
Memory size: 526757888
Return code: 502
Winxp pro 512
The system cannot find the file specified.

Now, if a normal user sees those messages and the system waits on the screen, he or she would think the recovery did not work. I wonder why they don't just give me a regular Windows disk. If they do want to get stingy, they might as well give me Linux instead of Windows. The "No warranty on software" policy is just another reason why people resort to piracy - if they've paid for it, they might as well use it one way or another.

Westinghouse in favor of universal power adapter

Westinghouse has just announced last week that they would be building a universal power adapter called the Green Plug to enable all of your devices of the future to draw DC electricity through a single adapter. The aim is to create an adapter that won't end up in the landfill along with the obsolete gadgets.

It's not likely for them to get support from a lot of electronics manufacturers because many of them earn additional revenue from the sale of adapters as spares. HP sells it's adapters for notebook PCs at roughly $80 a piece and that's pretty much the norm among notebook PC vendors.

Info on New Thinkpads Is Out

Information on the new Lenovo Thinkpads is out. Changes include naming conventions - in the X series, 12" screen models will be numbered X200s, 13" screen models will be numbered X300s and so on. The new models feature the Centrino 2 processors and DDR3 RAM.

You can download all of the slides at:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=63144