Give That Computer A Bath....You'll Feel Better

Just like we do after a long hard day, a "bath" (shower, whatever) restores the computer. I routinely do a reload on my computers on a pretty regular basis. The laptop gets it about once a year, and the desktop workstation about every 6 or 8 months. I know that sound's a little excessive and maybe even crazy, but hear me out on this. 

First of all, let me start by saying that I get this information straight from the "horse's mouth", or the horse's other end for those of you who are anti-M$. Some years ago, when I was working in IT and was kind of a "one man shop", I got to not only spend lots of time loading computers, but also lots of time on tech support with all manner of companies ranging from Adobe, to.....you guessed it.....Microsoft. Anyway, while spending about 4 hours of one day on the phone straightening out an ODBC call issue with MS Access, I had lots of time to chat with the software engineer on the other end (while the machine was rebooting, loading, what-not). Anyway, it turns out that he started his MS career as a Windows support guy and of course we swapped "stupid user" stories, and eventually conversation turned to keeping Windows machines running well. After listening his tips and cautionary tales, I related to him that I found that I could keep machines running reasonable well by doing a "clean reload" about once a year.....to which he responded that, that was pretty much the only way to  do it (for a daily work machine), and that if everybody did that, they'd have a lot less problems.

Around these parts, I have a bit of a reputation as a tech guy. I don't advertise, but word of mouth keeps me in enough "fix-it" business to pay for my hobbies. I'll have to say that at least 75-80% of the time, when a client brings me a machine, it just needs a bath! Both literally and figuratively. These poor things have often been sitting under a desk for 5+ years sucking in dirt and dust-bunnies and silently plugging away. Their owners went out to Best Buy, or got online with Dell and bought these things expecting them to work for ever like an old TV. Unfortunately a more accurate analogy is that they are like a car. If you don't maintain them, they'll just up and die one day! In most cases, they just need an overhaul, which in the computer business is a reload. Sometimes that involves a new hard drive since after 5 years or so, they are old or just too small. But in most cases, that simple reload will set things right again for another 2-3 years at least, when the actual hardware is so old it's not worth it to keep the machine going.

In my case, it's not like I'm an immaculate housekeeper of PCs. In fact, I'm almost the exact opposite. I'm constantly finding new software applications to try out and new locations to get them. Of course that comes with risks, so I'll blow up my load on a regular basis and need to start over. That's why I have a server to back up my critical files and a separate "scratch" drive to keep the files that I'm working on as well. Then when things happen like my Mushkin SSD dying suddenly, all I have to do is unhook the Hitachi mechanical drive, install a replacement boot SSD and give it a bath! Right now, my desktop workstation has just gotten reloaded on the new Samsung 256Gb SSD and the machine feels like it's just gotten a nice hot shower after a long hard day at work!

Oh yeah: when I do a major rebuild on a computer involving replacing drives, etc. I also take the time to actually "clean the case as well. This time, I took out the dust filters and washed those too. It really helps my state of mind.

Evolution of the "Blackbird"

Yes, that's right....my desktop computer is named for the famed SR-71 "Blackbird" of Lockheed's "Skunkworks" fame. Actually, all my computers have network names from military aircraft, mostly because they are the coolest things ever and the people who fly/flew them are America's unknown superheros! 

There was in fact a commercial pc version by that name when in late '07, early '08, HP brought out their super gaming computer. It was equipped with the then new, Intel QX6800 "Extreme" version of the Core 2 Duo Quad processor. It sold for between $6500 and $7000. I couldn't afford one.....actually, I couldn't even afford to buy the processor by itself.

So this is what I did. A little over 2 years ago, I started to build a desktop that would function as my photo-editing, music ripping, video transcoding, all-singing/all-dancing computer. So I started by finding a case that would last through several generations of rebuilds and still not look old. That means unobtrusive, big enough to handle anything that I wanted to put in it and rugged. I used the Cooler Master Centurion 5, which essentially has an all mesh front. The first thing I did was to get rid of the drive blank-bay cover with the logo. It needed to look stealth!

Lets just say that I spent lots of time reading every site and magazine under the sun to find a motherboard and processor to suit my needs. This led me to a package deal on eBay for an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 mounted on a Gigabyte EP43 board. The processor was basically what I wanted (within reason) since it was considered to be one of the finest affordable processors at the time, but the board wasn't exactly what I was after. I really wanted the EP45, which was then pretty new and just too expensive. So I settled for the little brother. I then grit my teeth and bought Mushkin RAM, and a 1Tb Seagate drive. I'm not terribly fond of Seagate, but it was on sale, so in it went. The other stuff isn't terribly relevant or interesting so I'll skip it, other than my one weird-o legacy thing, which is my Fujitsu Magneto-Optical drive that lives in it to this day.

 

So, things went along fine for awhile; that is until I came across my friend Pat's old "MythTV"/HTPC build that had been abandoned. One trade later (through a third party), it was mine and inside the case, that computer contained the coveted Gigabyte EP45 board! So a board switch later, "Blackbird" had the MB that had always been planned for it AND I had a home theater PC to boot (albeit with the lesser EP43 MB)! I also bought more Mushkin RAM (Blackline this time) and now I was up to 4Gb in the workstation.

Around this time, I was able to buy a Mushkin Callista 60Gb SSD and "Blackbird" received it's first reload, and let me tell ya....it was fast! A few months down the road, I came across a ATI Radeon 6700 on Craig's List that was selling for $50 so I upgraded from the HIS Radeon 4850 that had been in there.

In the meantime, I also went through a series of upgrades involving the monitors. I had started with my old Acer 20" LCD that was clone of their Acer/Ferrari F20 panel, but I wanted better performance and higher resolution. As luck would have it, I came across a local Craig's List ad for an IBM ThinkVision 17" LCD monitor at $23. Thinking that it would make a good "side/secondary" monitor, I had a friend on that side of the Metroplex pick it up for me. I figured; how bad of a deal can it be for $23! Let's just say that I was a little stunned when he brought it over and the ad turned out to be wrong.....very wrong.....but in a good way! It was a 20" L200p high-res (1600 x 1200) LCD that was top of the line in it's day....wow! Some months later, after being spoiled by the L200p, I started looking for a replacement for the Acer. I'm a little weird with regard to monitors, in the I'll take higher resolution over more size any day, AND I'd really much rather have a better IPS or S-PVA panel to the typical TN as well. After weeks of looking, I found a Lenovo ThinkVision L220x for about $85 shipped. This is where research shows it's importance in frugality. During those weeks of looking, I learned that there weren't a lot of "good" panels out there. Each manufacturer had just a few (sometimes 1 or 2) in their line. The L220x was not only a S-PVA (far superior to TN) panel, but an unusually high resolution for the size (1920 x 1200 in 22"). In general, you have to go to a 24" monitor to get that much real estate. For me, this was perfect since I share office space with my wife and don't have the liberty to go to a really big screen. On top of that bonus, I was able to sell my old Acer for $50 afterward, so the upgrade only cost me about $35 total.I can't emphasize how important it is to upgrade the things that you touch and look at on a computer! 

This state of affairs went along happily for about a year, then this spring I got the itch again when I noticed that the market for SSDs had taken another dip and I could get into one twice the "size" of what I had for the same money. Around the same time, I was able to pick up a Quad core Q6600 as part of package of parts I needed for another build. So reload 2012 occurred with an upgrade in CPU, SSD and more RAM (up to 8Gb). 

This summer the last of the upgrades occurred when my distrust of Seagate drives came to fruition in the form of the 1Tb "scratch-drive" starting to "click" and have write issues. One RMA later, it came back as a new drive, but it went into another (non-frontline) machine. Around that time, Micro Center was having a sale on Hitachi Deskstar 1Tb/7200rpm drives for $79, so I bought one to take the place of the demoted Seagate. Then the Coup 'd Grace arrived in the form of an Intel Core 2 Duo, Q9550 quad core CPU, also bought in a bundle of other parts for a different build. For those who aren't familiar with the entire Core Duo/Core 2 Duo line, the last of the quads known as "Yorkfield" are generally considered special. They much like the C2D, "Wolfdale" E8xxx line, run fast, run cool, are VERY over-clock friendly, plus have very large cache(s) onboard. The "Yorkfield" quad are essentially 2 "Wolfdale" cores on the same die! My "Windows Experience Index" went from 4.6 to 7.2 (out of a possible 7.9) with just that one change in to the system! These chips routinely benchmark within shouting distance of the first generation i5/i7 processors without even overclocking them!

So, essentially, I'm finished. There's really no more progression to upgrade to for Socket 775 motherboards and this machine will be expected to last until some point in the future when I make the jump to the "Ivy-bridge generation". I guess, at that point, the "Blackbird" will fly into the sunset like it's namesake.

Buy the Best

For someone who spends very little (relatively speaking) on his technology, this sounds kind of crazy doesn't it? Here's the issue: when you buy used (most of the time), you can't afford to buy "cheap". There's a huge difference between "inexpensive" and "cheap". It's my philosophy that one of the major problems with modern American society is the "Walmart-ization" of the consumer model, which is not to say that there's anything wrong with shopping at Walmart per se, but that we've come to "buy into" buying cheap and new. This unfortunately leads us into buying "more" (since it breaks and can't be fix economically) vs. better quality. Of course, we aren't the only nation in the world guilty of this as Target (Dayton-Hudson/French) and Ikea (Swedish) are more than willing to participate in this business model as well!

......but enough with the soap-box! Today, I'm here to talk about buying quality at a great price. As most folks are well aware, if you really want to take it to an extreme, you can always buy a Mercedes and keep it for 20-25 years and 500,000 miles plus. However, this blog is about about the typical consumer electronics and office type products we use daily and buy regularly so I'll concentrate on those and discuss why I buy what I do.

What started this started this whole thought process was, of all things, some bad RAM! Of course, buying this sort of thing on eBay is a risky proposition to start with, but there are benefits to this type of risk-taking. One of the areas that I don't compromise is the RAM that I use in my personal machines. I tend to use Mushkin as much as I can. Mushkin is a small outfit out of the Denver area that originally made their name by making upgrade memory for Macs. Their high-end (it's all high-end, just a matter of degrees) stuff is considered ultra-reliable and stable. I've been using it for a number of years now and have never been disappointed. However, it tends to be pricey, even used. So I bought some a month or so ago to upgrade my desktop to 8Gb and for my XP box build-up. Both sets came in with problems! I contacted them and after some tech support to try a couple of things it was determined that what I already knew....they were bad. So I was given the RMA and shipped them off to their Pfugerville, Texas support facility. Less than a week later, I got back a replacement (4Gb) pair for the "Blackline" RAM, but since the "Silverline" (1Gb) pair has been long-since out of production, they sent me 2 (4Gb) pairs of their current model for that spec! That's 8Gb vs. the 2Gb that I sent them! I'm currently running 12 sticks of their RAM and 2 SSDs in my machines. You think they might very well have kept this customer for a while longer!?!

While on the subject of Macs (at least peripherally), I've always had people ask me why I don't use them. And the fact of the matter is that they are outstanding products (other than that accursed touchpad of course)! Everything they produce from computers, to iPods, to the iPad have excellent design, outstanding engineering and generally top-notch build quality. So, what's the issue? The fact is that they just don't sell enough of them to drive the the price to a level I'm willing to pay on the used market and given their fanatically fan-boy following, that keeps the price up even higher. However, some of their products are some dominant that they've become common in the used market and make great deals. We have a whole fleet of iPods of various types around the house and use them regularly. The "Classic" is such a great product for the price it's hard not buy them and use them for both music as well as portable storage. 

We'll start with the ThinkPads that we use in our house. Back when I started working in IT about 15 years ago, it was not a given that virtually all products would work relatively well, right out of the box. Those were the days when a basic desktop PC would run you $2000-2500 and laptops routinely cost $3000-3500+. Furthermore, if you made the mistake of buying a Packard-Bell, CTX or Acer, chances were good that it didn't work well and were very difficult if not impossible to update. Then as now, I wanted to have both a desktop and a laptop computer and certainly couldn't go out and just buy both. With the help of my brother, I built a clone 486 cpu based desktop and bought a used laptop. In those days, very few people owned laptops and they tended to be a little difficult to work with. Of course, I further exacerbated the issue, by getting an "ultra-portable" which commonly for that time, had very few features built in. I had fallen in love with the amazing design and engineering of the IBM ThinkPad 701c "Butterfly". They were already old and kind of obsolete at the time, but the one I found was still under warranty. So for the next year IBM ThinkPad product support patiently worked with me on everything from driver installation of various peripherals to reloading of operating systems and communications set up. In the process, I learned to work on computers and created a future career for myself in IT. Over the years, I learned that there was a huge difference not only in how companies built their products, but also supported them as well. As an example, I found the not only was IBM willing to work with me for hours on end to resolve a problem, they'd even do it when it involved connecting to someone else' product (like my Panasonic CD-ROM drive). Let's just say that not all companies behave this way. I could of course go on about this for hours, but lets get down to other specifics.

In my home theater, I have a number of products made by Onkyo. Many are branded Integra which is their premium line (like Lexus vs. Toyota), but made by Onkyo nevertheless. I once sold their products in a former life and found that they embodied what I would call a great "bang for the buck" product. They sold slightly above the Best Buy range, but rarely if ever failed and offered performance far superior to their modest (typically $500-1500) price-point. 
They are far less "known" by the general public than the more popular Japanese competitors such as Sony, Pioneer and Yamaha, but offer a more neutral sound and better cost-build quality ratio. My plan is to eventually move up to the level of good separate made my Rotel, but that's essentially the same story with a British accent. And of course it is a brand that isn't well-known by the general public either.

The line that makes up the core of my other main hobby (photography via digital SLRs) is the exact opposite. There is probably no other company that has the brand recognition in photography quite like Nikon. Yes, I'm aware that there's higher pedigree (among cogniscenti) like Leica or Zeiss, but I'm discussing the general population here and certainly not "nose-bleed" prices either! My main draw to Nikon isn't so much the brand as it is the consistent commitment to quality and non-obsolescence. To one degree or another, the same could be said of Canon, Pentax or even Sony (Konica-Minolta), but I'm happy with my choice. There are simply an unbelievable number of lenses out there that will fit the mount going back to the 1960s.  And because they've been an industry leader for so long, there's a wide variety of models that have been produced and now occupy price-points ranging from $150-200 all the way up into the thousands on the used market. And of course the other half of the equation is that their quality is such that purchasing a used Nikon DSLR isn't a risky proposition. The buyer can generally expect it to last somewhere around 100,000 shutter actuations or more. The typical buyer of these cameras new, usually put on less than a quarter of that number before they upgrade. Great for frugal buyers everywhere!

My last example today was the subject of the last post; my new office chair...the Aeron by Herman Miller. Here's what happened to lead to this acquisition. I was actually VERY happy with a chair that was left to me by a previous co-worker when he left. It was a simple, but decent chair with nylon mesh upholstery vs. the more typical cloth. I tend to get hot sitting and wanted something that would breath, so I was pretty excited to have it! However, as it aged, the foam started to wear out and lose the support it used to have. Plus, one of the things common to inexpensive office chairs is the they tend to just simple bolt to the base, meaning that there is something like 1/4" or so of the actual bolts that extends into the seat. That's all fine of good when the chair/foam was new, but cheap padding tends to loose it's support quickly and now I easily feel the ends of those bolt poking me in the nether regions any time I'm in it for more than about 10 minutes! So, I've been on the lookout for a replacement. As I said in the previous post, I thought I found it in another Herman Miller chair that I fixed up, but it went to my wife with the bad back. This of course set the stage last month for my eBay find of the year; the $135 Aeron chair in Amarillo. 

And this perfectly highlights my point in this post. Generally, you can get away with picking up a used product and get satisfyingly good results from it if it was an excellent well-built product to start with.....however, this is almost never the case with "cheap" poorly-made products from the beginning. All manufactured product are designed and constructed to a useable lifespan. Cheap products have a relatively short one, even for non-professional use, but well-built products often wear like iron long after the other has broken. Furthermore, the better products are often made to be repaired and can be at a fairly low price for the part, plus a little labor. A perfect example is the Aeron chair I bought with a gas cylinder needed replacement. It's a $35 part and 20 minute project, but there's not a good way to fix the padding on my "pain-in-the-A**" cheapo office chair it replaced!

It's Summer!

Well; it's not actually not quite summer yet, but it's close enough. Close enough for a Frugal Propellerhead to plan for the summer. For a teacher, summer means quite a bit more time on our hands to do what we want, and of course for me, that would mean working on all things having to do with computers, home audio AND photography. Unfortunately that can also mean spending money, lots of it and that's something that can't happen. So a satisfying Propellerhead summer takes a little planning.

First of all, we need to take a look at what needs to be done, then we can talk about how to deal with that in planning. First of all, my daughter's custom lavender ThinkPad X30 is a little long-in-the-tooth. It specs out as a PIII (Tualatin) processor with 1Gb of RAM running XP! Although the size, and operating system is fine for her, the hardware is past due for an update. Fortunately, the X30 is built on the same chassis as the X31 which was a whole generation (if not more) forward in technology. It's built on the Pentium "M" (Banias) platform which completely skipped the hot running P4 series. Being built on the same chassis, I can simply move the lavender lid/screen assembly straight over. I will have to repaint a new keyboard bezel which was a different part, but that's not a big deal. Maxing the RAM out to a full 2Gb will have Katie all set for another couple of years! 

The trick here is that I didn't wait to buy it this summer when I have the time. Several months ago, I came across an ad for an X31 barebones-"base" (w/o LCD assembly) on the ThinkPad Forum for a song....so I bought it and stuck it in a cabinet.

 A few months ago I started seeing 128Gb, 1.8" SSDs selling for a very low price ($125). I was working on my "Ark" project at the time and bought one for it; then I started thinking about it and realized that I should probably pick up another one to upgrade my X300 since the load on it was getting a little old and would need a reload soon anyway. This second 128Gb SSD actually came in at just below $100 so into the cabinet it went as well. 

 Around that same time, the next generation of Sandforce SSD controllers came out and I ran across a special on the 128Gb Mushkin Chronos SSD for less than the price that I gave for the 60Gb Mushkin Callista SSD a little over a year ago. 

 The next project waiting in the wings is a Windows Home Server 2011 upgrade from the original WHS that I'm running now. I can't really claim good planning for this one, but rather it's the result of good fortune! I was having an email discussion with my brother last week about some projects that he's been working on and he described several machines that he's upgrading from the older Intel socket 775 line to the more current "Sandybridge" i3/i5/i7s. One of these project was a WHS 2011 machine, so I replied by telling him about the WHS file server that I cobbled together from free and traded-for parts. The upshot is that he offered to send me his left-over 775 boards, CPUs and misc parts! Although, the socket 775 may seem old to him, it's plenty new enough for me, and with a dual core processor on board, I'll be able to upgrade to the WHS 2011 as well since it's a 64-bit operating system. 


He also sent me a few other parts which have gone into upgrading the my XP computer, my regular workstation as well as the HTPC which will be receiving the 60Gb SSD that was in the workstation. So; things are lining up to be a busy summer ahead!