Last year when I built a new machine I purposefully built the machine with lots of power so that I could have multiple different environments and insulate myself from the loads of crap-ware that inevitably ends up on my machine.

Virtual machines allow me to download and try some utility in a sandbox where I know I can return to a previous state.

I opened one of my virtual machines and saw the screen posted on the right.  If this were on my host machine I think I'd need a new pair of underwear.  I don't have the time to rebuild a machine and so screens like the one of the right scare me.  However that is a virtual machine that had the ASP.NET MVC Framework Preview 2 on it.  So, am I going to try and diagnose?  Nope.  Just create another...it's beautiful.

 

 

 

 

 

I finally got my printer working, several hours later.  I thought about simply updating my previous post however I wanted to document the steps I took in the likely event that I'll need to do it again.

1. Download 64-bit driver package and extract. (Dell AIO 922 x64 download)
2. Plug in printer via USB.
   • When prompted, decline to install driver (their "Recommended" driver does not work).  You may be prompted twice, decline any "help" each time.
   • You also may get an error about devices not being installed properly, that's ok.   We're overriding what Vista wants for a driver and supplying our own, correct version.
3. Go to the Control Panel and select "Printers"
4. Right click somewhere in the window and click "Server Properties"
5. Go to the "Drivers" tab and click "Add..." to launch the "Add Printer Driver Wizard"
6. Follow the wizard, selecting the appropriate processor architecture if not already selected.
7. When presented with the "Printer Driver Selection" page (very Windows 98-esque) click "Have Disk..."
8. When prompted for the location, point to the the inf file for your particular install.  For my All-In-One installation the correct location was C:\dell\drivers\R151379\drivers\Win_XP2K.  Why is my Vista x64 driver stored under an XP/2000 folder?  Quite frankly, I don't know.
9. Allow the driver to install.
10. After the install, exit/ok your way back to the "printers" area.
11. Now select "Add Printer"
12. Select "Local Printer"
13. Select your USB port from the existing ports, which is a virtual port.
14. Repeat steps 7-9
15. When asked to replace or use the current driver, opt to use the current driver.  Remember we set it up manually back in step 8.
16. Name your printer
17. At this point, the Dell printer software took over and I had to agree to some EULA.  Click/Navigate your way through these selecting optional items such as Sharing and default printer along the way.

That's it!  Only 17 long, arduous steps.  There may have been other steps/processes that would've worked, however a number of obvious ones failed miserably, such as simply clicking "Add Printer" or running Dell's installation software.

 

I'm currently on putting the finishing touches on my new computer.  I used the excellent guides provided by Jeff Atwood (Parts I, II, III, and IV) and some, albeit severely diminished, historical knowledge to build the PC from components.  A few weeks ago I posed the question of dual-core or quad-core.  Jeff left a comment on the post:

"Do you *really* expect to be using this same machine 2 to 4 years from now?

I think that's a stretch.. buy for the next year, and let the future sort itself out later. You always end up upgrading the mobo / memory / CPU together anyway."

Though his comments carry a lot of weight, I decided to not heed Jeff's advice and to run with the quad-core processor.  As much as I hope to buy new hardware more often, my own history would prove otherwise.  I simply don't buy new hardware that often, despite Jeff's warning.

There is one other reason I opted for the quad-core.  I want to set this PC up to use virtual machines for development.  I was bitten last week by having Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 installed on the same machine.  In a virtual environment I could have a 2005 virtual machine and a 2008 virtual machine.  Having four cores then allows me to assign a virtual PC to run on specified cores.

Will the choice to go quad-core pay off?  We'll never know, cause I don't purchase hardware often enough to buy a dual-core to compare.  I'm curious about the drop in performance between a host machine and a virtual machine.  I ran some benchmarks on the new machine running Windows XP on the host and will run the same benchmarks with Windows XP running as a virtual machine.  I will report back when I have more data.

 

I'm on the cusp of purchasing parts for a new computer.  My mouse is hovering on the "Checkout" button on newegg.com.  As I'm going over the parts of my computer I'm agonizing over the choices I've made.  Most of the parts are inspired from lists that were put out by Scott Hanselman and his ultimate developer rig post as well as Jeff Atwood and his "Now It's Your Turn" post.

The question right now is Quad Core vs. Dual Core.  It's been questioned how much is really gained by going from two to four cores.  Graphs and benchmarks show that there isn't much to be gained right now with going to a Quad core.  Sure there isn't a difference now, but what about the future.  Multi-core systems are the norm now, but a few years ago that wasn't the case.  As programs start building for multi-core desktops I would imagine that more cores would be better.  So I'm curious, though a quad core machine today offers a neglible benefit, what about the future, two or even four years from now?

What do you think?

Tim

 

In my introductory post in this series, I expressed my desire to fix up my old computer an get it running in tip-top shape.  I was curious in cleaning up my PC, how much dust and cabling played into the interior head of a system.  For those of you unlucky souls who are the "computer guy" in your family you know you've seen some serious dust bunnies in computers.  I buy canned air and on occassion will clean out my system.  Is that doing any good?  Let's find out.

In thinking about this beforehand I had decided that I wanted to be somewhat scientific in my approach to determine how much dust played in temperature of the computer.  As Jeff said in his recent post on overclocking your computer:

"CPU temperatures are the enemy of speed-- all other things being equal, the higher the CPU temperature, the less likely it is your system will be stable. (This is also why extreme overclockers use water cooling and liquid nitrogen.) That's one reason why we have a fancy aftermarket CPU cooler." - Jeff Atwood

Dusty Interior

If you remember back to my last post, I mentioned that my current system sits with the side of the case open.  In peeking around my case I noticed that there was a lot of dust. 

Gathering Data

Setting the Baseline (Test #1)

As you can see from the pictures, my CPU is dusty.  I decided to get a baseline temperature before goign to town cleaning using PC Alert (note that CoreTemp, as recommended Jeff didn't work in my AMD).  Here's the baseline:

• CPU Temperature - 45-53 degrees
  
• System Temperature - 41 degrees

Load Testing the Baseline (Test #2)

Next, I ran the Prime95 torture test on my PC for about 10 minutes.  I watched the temperatures rise to the following:

• CPU Temperature - 60-64 degrees
  
• System Temperature - 45-46 degrees
• Observations - much hotter CPU and system temperatures.
  

Load Testing the Baseline + Fan (Test #3)

I wanted to see what the effect of a house fan blowing directly onto the case would be.  I placed a small house fan directly blowing on the motherboard and ran the torture test again, this time for only 5 minutes.  I only ran the test for 5 minutes because the impact of the fan was obvious nearly immediately.  The results were:

• CPU Temperature - 51-55 degrees
  
• System Temperature - 30 degrees
• Observations - The CPU still remains warmer than baseline by a significant margin.  What amazed me though was the system temperature dropping to 30 degrees.

Baseline with the Case Closed (Test #4)

I mentioned in my last post that I leave the case open to facilitate air movement and cooling.  I thought I would test to see how hot the system gets.  To establish a temperature to compare with the original, I let the computer sit idle and cool down before putting the case back together.  I was astonished by what I saw.  When I closed up the case entirely in the still dusty system I saw the following:

• CPU Temperature - 50-53 degrees
  
• System Temperature - 36 degrees
• Observations - The CPU temp is nearly the same, however the system temp dropped by 13%.  This was shocking to me.  In the years that I've left my case open "helping" my system, I was actually putting more stress on the system in terms of heat.  If you take nothing else away from this article, please get this point; That closing your case actually helps airflow and thus keeps your PC cooler.

Making Some Changes

Having satisfied myself that I had gathered enough points of data, I set out to cleaning the PC.  I was going to pay attention to three very specific things.

• Dust

The dust in the system was bad.  I remove dust from components.  I remove parts/components where necessary to facilitate better cleaning. I even cleaned the heatsink.

• Cable routing

Gamers swear by this but I often wonder how much it helps.  I thought while I'm in the system, it wouldn't hurt to clean up some cables. 

• Routed longer cables along the edge of the case and secured with electrical tape. 
  
• Used 8" cable ties to cinch up the the main strands of cables that were hovering above the CPU. 
  
• Removed unneccesary cables/wires such as my Audigy Remote control cable which I never use.
  

• CPU Cooling

To facilitate cooling I reapplied a silicone thermal compound the heatsink.

Running the tests again

Cleaned System with the Case Closed (Test #6)

Again, I let my PC cool and get back to a normal temperature.  With my desktop up and minimal programs running I watched the temperature.  Not surprisingly I saw a huge drop.

• CPU Temperature - 39 degree
  
• System Temperature - 31 degrees
  
• Observations - Simply by cleaning the dust, routing some cables and reapplying thermal paste I saw roughly a 22% drop in CPU temperature and a 21% drop in system temperature over the original, open-case dusty numbers.

Cleaned System with the Case Closed Under Load (Test #7)

The final test, where the rubber meets the road.  Here I ran Prime95 for lengthy period just to make sure the system didn't revert back to higher temperatures.  After the reductions in temperature, there was no surprise here:

• CPU Temperature - 47-49 degree
  
• System Temperature - 35-36 degrees
  
• Observations - The CPU is now operating cooler under the "torture test" than it previously was in test #1 when it was simply idling.  The CPU temperature is 23% lower and the system temp is 24% lower the than the same test performed in test #2.  This test was the greatest increase in cooling among any of the tests.

 

Jeff Atwood owes my computer an apology.  Never has one man inspired so much poking and prodding into a computer system.  Though I've never met the guy, I am a regular reader of his blog.  His posts are extremely thourough and span bloth software and hardware.  If my bloglines reader is showing a new post, I'm salivating to read it.

Awakening a Sleeping Giant

Jeff's recent series on How to Build a PC (Part I, Part II, Part III) has awakened my desire to have a new computer.  Once an avid computer builder, I've not played with hardware/building in many years.  My current computer is going to be six years old in a few months and is starting to show it's age.  The once bleeding-edge, costly technology now probably wouldn't fetch more than 150 bucks on eBay.  Since I'm not in the market for a new computer right now (read: I can't afford it) I have decided see what I could do to my aging system in terms of maintenance and speed to allow it to perform up to its potential.

The Root Cause

In the past year my computer has been somewhat flaky.  I used to after every "fix it" session put the case back together and all drives back in their bays.  My frequent diagnostic trips into the case drove me to leave my PC open for easy access. My system's outward appearance has since deteriorated to power connectors and IDE cables strewn about.  As unsightly as it is I tell myself that in addition to easy access it also allows my PC to cool more effectively (more on that in Part II).

A Cause For Intervention

Over the next few days I'm going to dig in my 6 year old computer and see if I can't find some benchmarks and interesting stuff worth sharing.  While the majority of us enjoy new technologies and tinkering, many of us simply can't afford to buy the latest and greatest every new release.  I hope to:

• Get back into my machine, reaffirming my familiarity and knowledge of the system
• Get comfortable again working with hardware in tight spaces in preparation for building my next PC.
• Share semi-scientific information/data with readers of this post.
  

Current PC Specs

While my computer is nearly 6 years old it still does it's job. Mainly because I purchased top end components literally days after they were release to the public, paying hundreds of dollars more for a 100MHz bump in CPU speed.  The summary of the specs of the computer are as follows:

• CPU - AMD Athlon XP 1900+ (Clock speed is 1.6GHz)
• Ram - 1.5 GB of Ram (3 Sticks - 1GB, 256MB, 256MB) - Upgrade - The original system only had the two 256MB sticks.
• MotherBoard - some MSI mother board - Upgrade? - The original system had a Gigabyte motherboard that died.