Finally bought a Solid State Drive
As an early Christmas present to myself, I took the plunge and finally bought two small 2.5" 60GB solid state drives. They were quite a bit smaller and lighter than I imagined. But in terms of performance, there's quite a difference.
I normally run everything RAID-1, but since everything important is now stored on RAID-1 backed NAS if not Amazon's S3, I figured I could take a little risk for the desktop and run the SSDs in RAID-0. I did some benchmarks to compare. An old 300GB ATA drive did around 50MB/s. My previous 1TB SATA RAID-1 setup performed somewhat better at around 70MB/s. The RAID-0 SSD setup wins by a long shot, with around 320MB/s.
This setup reduces my desktop drive space quite a bit, but that's a good thing. Perhaps it'll be more of an incentive to keep everything neatly on the NAS devices.
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HTC Evo 4G: How to turn off the Sense UI
Sprint's HTC Evo 4G is my first Android phone, and it's been a fantastic experience so far. But as fancy as the Sense UI is, I actually like the vanilla Android look. It also helps improve battery time a little bit. Turning off the Sense UI is fairly easy.
Tap Menu and select Settings, Applications, Manage Applications. Scroll down and tap on HTC Sense. Scroll to the Launch by default section and tap the Clear Defaults button. This will "unbind" HTC Sense as the default application launcher. It's still running, however, so now, directly below in the Controls section, tap the Force Stop button, and press OK.
Now when you tap the Home button, you'll be prompted for an application to handle the request. You can either select Launcher, or go back to HTC Sense. Check the box to set your choice as the default option.
If you decide you don't want the regular Launcher anymore, and would like get the Sense UI back, the process is similar: Go back to into the Menu, drill down to Manage Applications, but this time scroll down to Launcher, tap Clear Defaults, and Force Stop. Now when you tap the Home button, you'll be prompted again.
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My Computer is Still Fast!
The MHz race is so over. In the recent years, CPU speed really hasn't increased much, has it?
In 2007 I bought a L1N64-SLI board with 2 x FX-74 (3GHz) CPUs and 8GB RAM. Dual core CPUs were already popular at that time. Intel had the Core 2 Duo and AMD had the Athlon X2. But in an attempt to offer a better value, AMD stepped it up a bit. They reused their Opteron architecture to introduce a fast workstation platform for "enthusiasts" (e.g. early adopters that tend to spend way too much money on cutting edge technology based on company promises, but I'm not jaded or anything). This was the FX platform. Essentially a rebranded, cheaper Opteron CPU this architecture allowed for having more than one CPU on a motherboard, something the X2 couldn't do.
At the time 4 cores (two dual cores) was rather bleeding edge, but AMDs promise was to deliver a quad core Athlon FX CPU, which would have made for an awesome eight core (dubbed 4×4) setup. That is, until AMD canceled it to focus on the X2 socket which was most likely much more cost effective for them. ಠ_ಠ
So now, three years later, I'm trying to figure out what my options are and a potential upgrade path might look like for me. But even though I could buy a new computer, they're not really all that much faster it seems.
I'd like to cling to my dead FX architecture for a little while longer. I've known for a while that there are unofficial bios hacks that enable the use of Opteron (server) CPUs on my board, which would allow for eight cores, and a recent search turned up fairly simple instructions. Basically flash the bios, make sure you have ECC RAM, and then throw two Barcelonas on that thing. Wait, ECC RAM? Okay, so that's an additional expense. I'd be looking at roughly $500 for the CPUs and $200 for ECC RAM. Never mind. Not only more expensive, but the more interesting aspect is the speed of the Opteron. It's slower. The ones I found are clocked at 2GHz. So I end up with 8 x 2GHz cores instead of 4 x 3Ghz cores. It's still a net win if, and only if, programs actually take advantage of the architecture. A single threaded application will run slower, whereas a multi-threaded application will (hopefully) spread its load across all the cores and get things done in parallel and therefore quicker.
Hmm, I think I'll stick to my computer as it is for a little while longer.
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New PC
I hadn't built a PC in a while. The last one I put together in 2007 was a rather expensive beast (at around $1600) and consisted of 2 x Athlon FX-74 on a ASUS L1N64-SLI WS, GeForce 8800GTX (which was a $600 space heater), 8GB RAM, 4 x 300GB drives later upgraded to 4 x 1TB drives (RAID1), and a SoundBlaster X-Fi all in a solid Lian Li full tower with 12 drive bays. The unfortunate part is that Athlon FX (based on the Opteron) is deprecated.
This time around I bought an eMachines ET1161-05, on TigerDirect for $200 two weeks ago or so.
I replaced the weak sauce single core Athlon LE-1620 with a dual core Athlon X2 5000+ I had laying around, disabled the onboard GeForce 6150SE and bought a $100 GeForce 9800 GT, replaced the slow 160GB hard drive with two of my 300GB drives in RAID1, replaced the 2GB RAM with 4GB I had laying around, replaced the 215W power supply with a 450W Antec power supply, took out the modem PCI card and replaced that with a Linksys wireless card. Ahem, so I guess what's left is the original case, motherboard, and DVD drive.
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HP Mini 1000 - Where is the VGA Adapter?
I've been eying netbooks for a while now. In particular, the HP Mini 1000 seems to be a good candidate. I've seen it in person and I like it. It has a decent keyboard, full size right-hand shift key, it's pretty to look at, and the price is about right. But there's one thing stopping me; the VGA adapter.
Although HP has advertised the ability to connect an external display via the VGA adapter add-on cable, that cable is nowhere to be found. There are all sorts of discussions going on, and this thread pretty much sums it up. There's no adapter yet, and a number of folks who've already bought the HP Mini are waiting for it impatiently.
That's also the deal breaker for me. As soon as I can order the vga adapter, I'll consider getting an HP Mini 1000, unless we're already looking at the next generation of netbooks, perhaps with built-in HDMI.
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