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• How can I keep the cpu temp low?

  - by Newton

  I have an HP pavilion dv7, I'm using ubuntu 12.04 so the overheating problem with sandybridge cpu is a lot better. However my laptop is still becoming too hot to keep on my legs. The problem is that the fan wait too much before starting, so the medium temp is too hight. When I'm using windows 7 the laptop is room-temperature cold, I've absolutely no problem. On windows the fan is always spinning very low & very silently so the heat is continuously removed, without reaching an unconfortable temp. How can I force the computer to act like that also on ubuntu? PS The bios can't let me control this kind of thing, and this is my experience with lm-sensors and fancontrol al@notebook:~$ sudo sensors-detect [sudo] password for al: # sensors-detect revision 5984 (2011-07-10 21:22:53 +0200) # System: Hewlett-Packard HP Pavilion dv7 Notebook PC (laptop) # Board: Hewlett-Packard 1800 This program will help you determine which kernel modules you need to load to use lm_sensors most effectively. It is generally safe and recommended to accept the default answers to all questions, unless you know what you're doing. Some south bridges, CPUs or memory controllers contain embedded sensors. Do you want to scan for them? This is totally safe. (YES/no): y Module cpuid loaded successfully. Silicon Integrated Systems SIS5595... No VIA VT82C686 Integrated Sensors... No VIA VT8231 Integrated Sensors... No AMD K8 thermal sensors... No AMD Family 10h thermal sensors... No AMD Family 11h thermal sensors... No AMD Family 12h and 14h thermal sensors... No AMD Family 15h thermal sensors... No AMD Family 15h power sensors... No Intel digital thermal sensor... Success! (driver `coretemp') Intel AMB FB-DIMM thermal sensor... No VIA C7 thermal sensor... No VIA Nano thermal sensor... No Some Super I/O chips contain embedded sensors. We have to write to standard I/O ports to probe them. This is usually safe. Do you want to scan for Super I/O sensors? (YES/no): y Probing for Super-I/O at 0x2e/0x2f Trying family `National Semiconductor/ITE'... No Trying family `SMSC'... No Trying family `VIA/Winbond/Nuvoton/Fintek'... No Trying family `ITE'... No Probing for Super-I/O at 0x4e/0x4f Trying family `National Semiconductor/ITE'... Yes Found unknown chip with ID 0x8518 Some hardware monitoring chips are accessible through the ISA I/O ports. We have to write to arbitrary I/O ports to probe them. This is usually safe though. Yes, you do have ISA I/O ports even if you do not have any ISA slots! Do you want to scan the ISA I/O ports? (YES/no): y Probing for `National Semiconductor LM78' at 0x290... No Probing for `National Semiconductor LM79' at 0x290... No Probing for `Winbond W83781D' at 0x290... No Probing for `Winbond W83782D' at 0x290... No Lastly, we can probe the I2C/SMBus adapters for connected hardware monitoring devices. This is the most risky part, and while it works reasonably well on most systems, it has been reported to cause trouble on some systems. Do you want to probe the I2C/SMBus adapters now? (YES/no): y Using driver `i2c-i801' for device 0000:00:1f.3: Intel Cougar Point (PCH) Module i2c-i801 loaded successfully. Module i2c-dev loaded successfully. Next adapter: i915 gmbus disabled (i2c-0) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 gmbus ssc (i2c-1) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 GPIOB (i2c-2) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 gmbus vga (i2c-3) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 GPIOA (i2c-4) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 gmbus panel (i2c-5) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Client found at address 0x50 Probing for `Analog Devices ADM1033'... No Probing for `Analog Devices ADM1034'... No Probing for `SPD EEPROM'... No Probing for `EDID EEPROM'... Yes (confidence 8, not a hardware monitoring chip) Next adapter: i915 GPIOC (i2c-6) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Client found at address 0x50 Probing for `Analog Devices ADM1033'... No Probing for `Analog Devices ADM1034'... No Probing for `SPD EEPROM'... No Probing for `EDID EEPROM'... Yes (confidence 8, not a hardware monitoring chip) Next adapter: i915 gmbus dpc (i2c-7) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 GPIOD (i2c-8) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 gmbus dpb (i2c-9) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 GPIOE (i2c-10) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 gmbus reserved (i2c-11) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 gmbus dpd (i2c-12) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 GPIOF (i2c-13) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: DPDDC-B (i2c-14) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Now follows a summary of the probes I have just done. Just press ENTER to continue: Driver `coretemp': * Chip `Intel digital thermal sensor' (confidence: 9) To load everything that is needed, add this to /etc/modules: #----cut here---- # Chip drivers coretemp #----cut here---- If you have some drivers built into your kernel, the list above will contain too many modules. Skip the appropriate ones! Do you want to add these lines automatically to /etc/modules? (yes/NO)y Successful! Monitoring programs won't work until the needed modules are loaded. You may want to run 'service module-init-tools start' to load them. Unloading i2c-dev... OK Unloading i2c-i801... OK Unloading cpuid... OK al@notebook:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/module-init-tools restart Rather than invoking init scripts through /etc/init.d, use the service(8) utility, e.g. service module-init-tools restart Since the script you are attempting to invoke has been converted to an Upstart job, you may also use the stop(8) and then start(8) utilities, e.g. stop module-init-tools ; start module-init-tools. The restart(8) utility is also available. module-init-tools stop/waiting al@notebook:~$ sudo service module-init-tools restart stop: Unknown instance: module-init-tools stop/waiting al@notebook:~$ sudo service module-init-tools start module-init-tools stop/waiting al@notebook:~$ sudo pwmconfig # pwmconfig revision 5857 (2010-08-22) This program will search your sensors for pulse width modulation (pwm) controls, and test each one to see if it controls a fan on your motherboard. Note that many motherboards do not have pwm circuitry installed, even if your sensor chip supports pwm. We will attempt to briefly stop each fan using the pwm controls. The program will attempt to restore each fan to full speed after testing. However, it is ** very important ** that you physically verify that the fans have been to full speed after the program has completed. /usr/sbin/pwmconfig: There are no pwm-capable sensor modules installed Is my case too desperate?

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• What would make a noise in a PC on graphics operations on a passively-cooled system?

  - by T.J. Crowder

  I have this system based on the Intel D510MO motherboard, which is basically an Atom D510 (dual-core HT Atom w/built-in GPU), an Intel NM10 chipset, and a Realtek Gigabit LAN controller. It's entirely passively cooled. I noticed almost immediately that there was a kind of very, very soft noise that corresponded with graphics operations, sort of the noise you'd get if you had a sheet of flat paper and slid something really light across it — but more electronic than that. I wrote it off as observation error and/or disk activity triggered by the graphics operation (although the latter seemed like a lot of unnecessary disk activity). It isn't. I got curious enough that I finally did a few controlled experiments, and here's what I've determined: It isn't the HDD. For one thing, the sounds the HDD makes (when seeking, when reading or writing, when just sitting there spinning) is different. For another, I used sudo hdparm -y /dev/sda (I'm using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS) to temporarily put the disk on standby while making sure that non-disk graphics op was happening in a loop. The disk spun down, but the other sound continued, corresponding perfectly with the timing of the graphics op. (Then the disk spun up again, but it takes long enough that I could rule out the HDD.) It isn't the monitor; I ensured the two were well physically-separated and the sound was definitely coming from the main box. It isn't something else in the room; the sound is coming from the box. It isn't cross-talk to an audio circuit coming out the speakers. (It doesn't have any speakers.) It isn't my mouse (e.g., when I'm trying to make graphics ops happen); the sound happens if I set up a recurring operation and don't use the mouse at all, or if I lift the mouse off the table slightly (but enough that the laser still registers movement). It isn't the voices in my head; they never whisper like that. Other observations: It doesn't seem to matter what the graphics operation is; anything that changes what's on the screen seems to do it. I get the sound when moving the mouse over the Chromium tab bar (which makes the tab backgrounds change); I get it when a web page has a counter on it that changes the text on the page: I get it when dragging window contents around. The sound is very, very slightly louder if the graphics op is larger, like scrolling a text area when writing a question on superuser.com, than for smaller operations like the tick counter on the web page. But it's very slight. It's fairly loud (and of good duration) when the op involves color changes to substantial surface areas. For instance, when asking a question here on superuser and you move the cursor between the question box and the tag box, and the help to the right fades out, changes, and fades back in. (Yet another example related to the web browser, so let me say: I hear it when operations completely unrelated to the web browser as well.) It doesn't sound like arcing or anything like that (I'd've shut off the machine Right Quick Like if it did). Moving windows does it. Scrolling windows (by and large) doesn't. I have the feeling I've heard this sort of thing before, when all system fans were on low and such, with other systems — but (again) written it off as observational error. For all the world it's like I'm hearing the CPU working (as opposed to the GPU; note the window scroll thing above) or data being transferred somewhere, but that just seems...unlikely. So what am I hearing? This may seem like a very localized question, but perhaps other silent PC enthusiasts may be interested as well...

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• IBM Server Config questions

  - by Joel Coel

  I have a few questions on a potential server setup. First, the situation: Last year we bought an IBM x3500 server with 2 Xeon E5410's, 9GB RAM, 6 HDDs. The original intent for this server was to replace the old exchange e-mail server. It was brought in, set up, and then shortly after we switched to gmail. Shortly after that my predecessor left for greener pastures, and finally I was hired. So this nice server is now sitting (mostly) idle. This year I have budget again for one server, and of course I want to put this other server to work. I'm thinking about the best use for the two server, and I think I finally have a plan for what I want to do with them. The idea is to use the two newer servers as a pair of VM hosts. I will set up each server with the same 8 VMs, but divide up the load so that only 4 are active per physical host. That means I've normally got 2GB RAM + 2 cores per host. I've done some load testing to pick out what servers to convert to virtual, and chose them so that each host will be capable of handling the entire set of 8 by itself in a pinch with 1 core and 1GB RAM, but would be very taxed to do so. This should take our data center from 13 total servers down to 7. The "servers" I'm replacing are mostly re-purposed desktops, so I'm more than happy to be able to do this. Now it's time to go shopping for the new server. I'd like my two hosts to match as closely as possible, and so I'm looking at IBM again. It also helps that we have some educational matching grant money from IBM that I need to use to help pay for this system (we're a small private college). So finally, (if you're not bored already), we come to my questions: Am I missing anything big or obvious in this plan? I'm a little worried about network performance since the VM hosts will only have 4 nics total where 8 used to be, but I don't think it will be a problem. Is there anything else like this I might be overlooking? Am I making it even too complicated? IBM no longer has a good analog to last year's server. If I want to match the performance (8 cores, 9GB RAM, 1333mhz front side bus, 6 spindles), I have to spend quite a bit more than we paid last year: $2K+, or nearly a 33% cost increase. This only brings a marginal increase in performance. The alternative to stay in budget is to take a hit on the fsb down to 800mhz or cut the number of cores in half, neither of which is attractive. The main cost culprit is the processor. IBM no longer offers the E5410. It's listed as a part, but not available in any of the server configs I've looked at. I'm considering getting the cheapest 800mhz fsb dual core xeon I can configure and then buying the E5410's separately. That's still an extra $350 I wasn't counting on, but that's better than $2K. I want to know what others think of this - will it work or will I end up with the wrong motherboard or some other issue? Am I missing a simple way to configure the server I really want? I don't really intend to do this, but one option to save some money back is to omit the redundant power supply. Since my redundancy plan for these system is to switch over to a completely different host, the extra power isn't fully necessary. That said, it's still very helpful to avoid even short downtimes while I switch over VMs. Has anyone done this?

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• Strange Upload Problem on Hyper-V

  - by Ring0

  Hi, This one is driving me totally nuts. I have being trying to upload a file to www.virustotal.com (its a harmless exe I have since found out - DiskWipe.exe from diskwipe.org). Using IE8. From Win 7 and Win 2008 R2 Datacenter (which I select to boot from vhd's) onto my main machine hardware, and also on another Win 7 PC elsewhere on my network, when I upload the file to virustotal.com it works perfectly. So, using my native NIC's everything is fine. Using another machine also perfect. Right. OK, from my boot menu the default is my main development machine - the one I'm typing on now. This runs on the metal and has Hyper-V role and I have some guests. All guests are not running. Amazingly, from my console (root partition to be exact) or any guest OS 2003 /XP / 2008 R2 etc. My upload to virustotal.com slows at 32% then HANGS at 38.something% & never finishes!! Here is the kicker. I have another box (my main server) running Hyper-V on the metal and three live guests. Identical H/W to my main dev machine in another room. (Except OS is Datacenter - Mine is Enterprise). If I try and upload from its bare metal console or any guest this file to virustotal.com using IE8 it stops exactly in the same place!! As for "steps I have tried etc." are kind-of blown out of the water as my server box is doing the precise same thing as the machine in my room here. OK, comonalities: Mobo: Gigabyte GA-X58-UD5, 12GB Kingston RAM, Corei7 920 4 cores hyperthreading = 8 & Realtek RTL8168D/8111D Family PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet NIC's. All 3 machines have this same motherboard - revision F11 Bios, all have 12GB RAM, all have the Realtek Nic's. All x64 by the way as I mentioned before I have a Win 7 box also with the UD5 m/Board, 12 GB RAM - bit of an overkill. :-) All these machines when NOT running Hyper-V can upload this file. Perhaps you may like to try it on a Hyepr-v (2008 R2) yourselves with IE8 and the desktop experience is on. See if it works or fails for you. Root OS or any guest. So, looking like its the NIC + Hyper-V = Cannot upload this file (any file I must add.) Realtek Nic is Ver 7.002.1125.2008. Using IE8 I see in the nic settings there are the usual parameters for Jumbo frames / Checksum offloading etc. several others. Should I fiddle with these? I ran Netmon 3.3 in a guest and the TCP session halted as the upload failed. I suppose I could study that further. I dont have Netmon on the root partition machine (yet)! All OS's fully patched - including todays defender files. My box running Office 2007 - but identical server in another room is not. Also, if I fire up a VPN to a distant client and do the upload it works! Of course its a different network path. Suggestions welcome please. If I left out anything important - please yell at me. Many Thanks,

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• Windows 8 Launch&ndash;Why OEM and Retailers Should STFU

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  Microsoft has gotten a lot of flack for the Surface from OEM/hardware partners who create Windows-based devices and I’m sure, to an extent, retailers who normally stock and sell Windows-based devices. I mean we all know how this is supposed to work – Microsoft makes the OS, partners make the hardware, retailers sell the hardware. Now Microsoft is breaking the rules by not only offering their own hardware but selling them via online and through their Microsoft branded stores! The thought has been that Microsoft is trying to set a standard for the other hardware companies to reach for. Maybe. I hope, at some level, Microsoft may be covertly responding to frustrations associated with trusting the OEMs and Retailers to deliver on their part of the supply chain. I know as a consumer, I’m very frustrated with the Windows 8 launch. Aside from the Surface sales, there’s nothing happening at the retail level. Let me back up and explain. Over the weekend I visited a number of stores in hopes of trying out various Windows 8 devices. Out of three retailers (Staples, Best Buy, and Future Shop), not *one* met my expectations. Let me be honest with you Staples, I never really have high expectations from your computer department. If I need paper or pens, whatever, but computers – you’re not the top of my list for price or selection. Still, considering you flaunted Win 8 devices in your flyer I expected *something* – some sign of effort that you took the Windows 8 launch seriously. As I entered the 1910 Pembina Highway location in Winnipeg, there was nothing – no signage, no banners – nothing that would suggest Windows 8 had even launched. I made my way to the laptops. I had to play with each machine to determine which ones were running Windows 8. There wasn’t anything on the placards that made it obvious which were Windows 8 machines and which ones were Windows 7. Likewise, there was no easy way to identify the touch screen laptop (the HP model) from the others without physically touching the screen to verify. Horrible experience. In the same mall as the Staples I mentioned above, there’s a Future Shop. Surely they would be more on the ball. I walked in to the 1910 Pembina Highway location and immediately realized I would not get a better experience. Except for the sign by the front door mentioning Windows 8, there was *nothing* in the computer department pointing you to the Windows 8 devices. Like in Staples, the Win 8 laptops were mixed in with the Win 7 ones and there was nothing notable calling out which ones were running Win 8. I happened to hit up the St. James Street location today, thinking since its a busier store they must have more options. To their credit, they did have two staff members decked out in Windows 8 shirts and who were helping a customer understand Windows 8. But otherwise, there was nothing highlighting the Windows 8 devices and they were again mixed in with the rest of the Win 7 machines. Finally, we have the St. James Street Best Buy location here in Winnipeg. I’m sure Best Buy will have their act together. Nope, not even close. Same story as the others: minimal signage (there was a sign as you walked in with a link to this schedule of demo days), Windows 8 hardware mixed with the rest of the PC offerings, and no visible call-outs identifying which were Win 8 based. This meant that, like Future Shop and Staples, if you wanted to know which machine had Windows 8 you had to go and scrutinize each machine. Also, there was nothing identifying which ones were touch based and which were not. Just Another Day… To these retailers, it seemed that the Windows 8 launch was just another day, with another product to add to the showroom floor. Meanwhile, Apple has their dedicated areas *in all three stores*. It was dead simple to find where the Apple products were compared to the Windows 8 products. No wonder Microsoft is starting to push their own retail stores. No wonder Microsoft is trying to funnel orders through them instead of relying on these bloated retail big box stores who obviously can’t manage a product launch. It’s Not Just The Retailers… Remember when the Acer CEO, Founder, and President of Computer Global Operations all weighed in on how Microsoft releasing the Surface would have a “huge negative impact for the ecosystem and other brands may take a negative reaction”? Also remember the CEO stating “[making hardware] is not something you are good at so please think twice”? Well the launch day has come and gone, and so far Microsoft is the only one that delivered on having hardware available on the October 26th date. Oh sure, there are laptops running Windows 8 – but all in one desktop PCs? I’ve only seen one or two! And tablets are *non existent*, with some showing an early to late November availability on Best Buy’s website! So while the retailers could be doing more to make it easier to find Windows 8 devices, the manufacturers could help by *getting devices into stores*! That’s supposedly something that these companies are good at, according to the Acer CEO. So Here’s What the Retailers and Manufacturers Need To Do… Get Product Out The pivotal timeframe will be now to the end of November. We need to start seeing all these fantastic pieces of hardware ship – including the Samsung ATIV Smart PC Pro, the Acer Iconia, the Asus TAICHI 21, and the sexy Samsung Series 7 27” desktop. It’s not enough to see product announcements, we need to see actual devices. Make It Easy For Customers To Find Win8 Devices You want to make it easy to sell these things? Make it easy for people to find them! Have staff on hand that really know how these devices run and what can be done with them. Don’t just have a single demo day, have people who can demo it every day! Make It Easy to See the Features There’s touch screen desktops, touch screen laptops, tablets, non-touch laptops, etc. People need to easily find the features for each machine. If I’m looking for a touch-laptop, I shouldn’t need to sift through all the non-touch laptops to find them – at the least, I need to quickly be able to see which ones are touch. I feel silly even typing this because this should be retail 101 and I have no retail background (but I do have an extensive background as a customer). In Summary… Microsoft launching the Surface and selling them through their own channels isn’t slapping its OEM and retail partners in the face; its slapping them to wake the hell up and stop coasting through Windows launch events like they don’t matter. Unless I see some improvements from vendors and retailers in November, I may just hold onto my money for a Surface Pro even if I have to wait until early 2013. Your move OEM/Retailers. *Update – While my experience has been in Winnipeg, similar experiences have been voiced from colleagues in Calgary and Edmonton.

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• Local DNS server (bind) and the router DHCP

  - by Luca

  I just set up an internal http server for internal use (I set up Redmine), in a small network (30 or so PCs). I set up the http server on a virtual box ubuntu, that runs also the DNS server (bind). In the DNS lookup I added the Redmine server name (redmine.engserver <- 192.168.1.14) and as forwarders the outside ISP DNS IP adresses. I am using a small wi-fi router (ASUS RT-N66U) as DHCP (and as gateway). In the DHCP config page I set up as DNS the ubuntu server IP (it is fixed 192.168.1.14). Now when I connect a new PC to the network, the DHCP router issues its new IP and as DNS servers it issues: primary: 192.168.1.14 (ubuntu machine) and seconary 192.168.1.1 (the router itself). ipconfig /all Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1 DHCP Server . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1 DHCPv6 IAID . . . . . . . . . . . : 248539109 DHCPv6 Client DUID. . . . . . . . : 00-01-00-01-17-15-AA-3F-D0-67-E5-49-A7-EF DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.14 192.168.1.1 NetBIOS over Tcpip. . . . . . . . : Enabled Before changing the DHCP setting on the router, I would always get only one DNS server: 192.168.1.1 (which uses probably DNS forwarding to external public DNS services). The problem is this: If in my browser I type www.google.com, it works all the time. If in the browser I type http://redmine.engserver/ it works most of the time, but sometimes it ends up with a yahoo page search or something else. In the DNS cache it shows as (Server not found). ipconfig /displaydns I looked with wireshark and it seems like sometimes the client PC interrogates the secondary DNS (192.168.1.1) instead of the first 192.168.1.14. Obviously this one is a public domain and it does not have the redmine.engserver entry. What is wrong in this configuration? Is it even legitimate to have 2 DNS (one internal and one forwarded by the router) which are inconsistent? Is there another way to have a local name service in a small office network? Why is the router DHCP issuing itself as DNS?

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• HTG Explains: Should You Build Your Own PC?

  - by Chris Hoffman

  There was a time when every geek seemed to build their own PC. While the masses bought eMachines and Compaqs, geeks built their own more powerful and reliable desktop machines for cheaper. But does this still make sense? Building your own PC still offers as much flexibility in component choice as it ever did, but prebuilt computers are available at extremely competitive prices. Building your own PC will no longer save you money in most cases. The Rise of Laptops It’s impossible to look at the decline of geeks building their own PCs without considering the rise of laptops. There was a time when everyone seemed to use desktops — laptops were more expensive and significantly slower in day-to-day tasks. With the diminishing importance of computing power — nearly every modern computer has more than enough power to surf the web and use typical programs like Microsoft Office without any trouble — and the rise of laptop availability at nearly every price point, most people are buying laptops instead of desktops. And, if you’re buying a laptop, you can’t really build your own. You can’t just buy a laptop case and start plugging components into it — even if you could, you would end up with an extremely bulky device. Ultimately, to consider building your own desktop PC, you have to actually want a desktop PC. Most people are better served by laptops. Benefits to PC Building The two main reasons to build your own PC have been component choice and saving money. Building your own PC allows you to choose all the specific components you want rather than have them chosen for you. You get to choose everything, including the PC’s case and cooling system. Want a huge case with room for a fancy water-cooling system? You probably want to build your own PC. In the past, this often allowed you to save money — you could get better deals by buying the components yourself and combining them, avoiding the PC manufacturer markup. You’d often even end up with better components — you could pick up a more powerful CPU that was easier to overclock and choose more reliable components so you wouldn’t have to put up with an unstable eMachine that crashed every day. PCs you build yourself are also likely more upgradable — a prebuilt PC may have a sealed case and be constructed in such a way to discourage you from tampering with the insides, while swapping components in and out is generally easier with a computer you’ve built on your own. If you want to upgrade your CPU or replace your graphics card, it’s a definite benefit. Downsides to Building Your Own PC It’s important to remember there are downsides to building your own PC, too. For one thing, it’s just more work — sure, if you know what you’re doing, building your own PC isn’t that hard. Even for a geek, researching the best components, price-matching, waiting for them all to arrive, and building the PC just takes longer. Warranty is a more pernicious problem. If you buy a prebuilt PC and it starts malfunctioning, you can contact the computer’s manufacturer and have them deal with it. You don’t need to worry about what’s wrong. If you build your own PC and it starts malfunctioning, you have to diagnose the problem yourself. What’s malfunctioning, the motherboard, CPU, RAM, graphics card, or power supply? Each component has a separate warranty through its manufacturer, so you’ll have to determine which component is malfunctioning before you can send it off for replacement. Should You Still Build Your Own PC? Let’s say you do want a desktop and are willing to consider building your own PC. First, bear in mind that PC manufacturers are buying in bulk and getting a better deal on each component. They also have to pay much less for a Windows license than the $120 or so it would cost you to to buy your own Windows license. This is all going to wipe out the cost savings you’ll see — with everything all told, you’ll probably spend more money building your own average desktop PC than you would picking one up from Amazon or the local electronics store. If you’re an average PC user that uses your desktop for the typical things, there’s no money to be saved from building your own PC. But maybe you’re looking for something higher end. Perhaps you want a high-end gaming PC with the fastest graphics card and CPU available. Perhaps you want to pick out each individual component and choose the exact components for your gaming rig. In this case, building your own PC may be a good option. As you start to look at more expensive, high-end PCs, you may start to see a price gap — but you may not. Let’s say you wanted to blow thousands of dollars on a gaming PC. If you’re looking at spending this kind of money, it would be worth comparing the cost of individual components versus a prebuilt gaming system. Still, the actual prices may surprise you. For example, if you wanted to upgrade Dell’s $2293 Alienware Aurora to include a second NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 graphics card, you’d pay an additional $600 on Alienware’s website. The same graphics card costs $650 on Amazon or Newegg, so you’d be spending more money building the system yourself. Why? Dell’s Alienware gets bulk discounts you can’t get — and this is Alienware, which was once regarded as selling ridiculously overpriced gaming PCs to people who wouldn’t build their own. Building your own PC still allows you to get the most freedom when choosing and combining components, but this is only valuable to a small niche of gamers and professional users — most people, even average gamers, would be fine going with a prebuilt system. If you’re an average person or even an average gamer, you’ll likely find that it’s cheaper to purchase a prebuilt PC rather than assemble your own. Even at the very high end, components may be more expensive separately than they are in a prebuilt PC. Enthusiasts who want to choose all the individual components for their dream gaming PC and want maximum flexibility may want to build their own PCs. Even then, building your own PC these days is more about flexibility and component choice than it is about saving money. In summary, you probably shouldn’t build your own PC. If you’re an enthusiast, you may want to — but only a small minority of people would actually benefit from building their own systems. Feel free to compare prices, but you may be surprised which is cheaper. Image Credit: Richard Jones on Flickr, elPadawan on Flickr, Richard Jones on Flickr     

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• Are Chromebooks the New Netbooks, and What Does That Mean?

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Netbooks — small, cheap, slow laptops — were once very popular. They fell out of favor — people bought them because they seemed cheap and portable, but the actual experience was lackluster. Most netbooks now sit unused. Windows netbooks have vanished from stores today, but there’s a new super-cheap laptop — the Chromebook. Chromebook sales numbers are impressive, but their usage statistics tell a different story. Are Chromebooks just the new netbook? The Problem With Netbooks Netbooks seemed appealing, especially in an age before tablets and lightweight ultrabooks. You could buy a netbook for $200 or so and have a portable device that let you get on the Internet. The name “netbook” spelled that out — it was a portable device for getting on the ‘net. They weren’t really that great. The original netbook was a lightweight Asus Eee PC that ran Linux alone and had a small amount of fast flash storage. Netbooks eventually ran heavier Windows XP operating systems — Windows Vista was out, but it was just too bloated to run on netbooks. Manufacturers added slow magnetic hard drives, bloatware, and even DVD drives! They couldn’t run most Windows software very well. The build quality was poor and their keyboards were tiny and cramped. People liked the idea of a lightweight device that let them get on the Internet and loved the cheap price, but the actual experience wasn’t great. Chromebook Sales Chromebook sales numbers seem surprisingly high. NPD reported that Chromebooks were 21% of all notebooks sold in the US in 2013. If you combine laptop and tablet sales into a single statistic, Chromebooks were 9.6% of all those devices sold. That’s 2/3 as many Chromebooks sold as iPads in the US! Of Amazon’s best-selling laptop computers, two of the top three are Chromebooks. These definitely look like successful products. Unlike netbooks, Chromebooks are taking off in a big way in the education market. Many schools are buying Chromebooks for their students instead of more expensive Windows laptops. They’re easier to manage and lock down than Windows laptops, but — more importantly for cash-strapped schools — they’re very cheap. Netbooks never had this sort of momentum in schools. Chromebook Usage Statistics Here’s where the rosy picture of Chromebooks starts to become more realistic. StatCounter’s browser usage statistics show how widely used different operating systems are. For example, Windows 7 has the highest share with 35.71% of web activity in April, 2014. The chart doesn’t even show Chrome OS at all, although there is an “Other” number near the bottom. Click the Download Data link to download a CSV file and we can view more detailed information. Chrome OS only accounted for 0.38% of web usage in April, 2014. Desktop Linux, which people often shrug at, accounted for 1.52% in the same month. To its credit, Chrome OS usage has increased. Chromebooks were widely mocked back in November, 2013 when the sales numbers came out. After all, they only accounted for 0.11% of web usage globally in November, 2013! But Chrome OS numbers have been improving: Nov, 2013: 0.11% Dec, 2013: 0.22% Jan, 2014: 0.31% Feb, 2014: 0.35% Mar, 2014: 0.36% Apr, 2014: 0.38% Chrome OS is climbing, but it’s definitely still in the “Other” category. It isn’t as high as we’d expect to see it with those types of sales numbers. Chromebooks vs. Netbooks Chromebooks are more limited devices than traditional PCs. You can do quite a few things, but you have to do it all using Chrome or Chrome apps. Most people won’t be enabling developer mode and installing a Linux desktop. You don’t have access to the powerful desktop software available for Windows and even Mac OS X. On the other hand, these Chromebooks are less compromised than netbooks in many ways. They come with a lightweight operating system designed for portable, mobile devices. They don’t come packed with any bloatware, like the bloatware you’ll find on competing Windows PCs and the original netbooks. They’re cheaper because the manufacturer doesn’t have to pay for a Windows license. There’s no need for antivirus software weighing the operating system down. They’re larger than the original netbooks, with many of them being 11.6-inches instead of the original 8-inch bodies many older netbooks came with. They have larger, more comfortable keyboards and fast solid-state storage. Really, Chromebooks are what netbooks wanted to be. People didn’t buy netbooks to use typical Windows software — they just wanted a lightweight PC. Of course, for many people, the real successor to netbooks is tablets. If all you want is a portable device to throw in a bag so you can get online, maybe a tablet is better. Where Does This Leave Chromebooks? So, are Chromebooks the new netbooks? It’s a bit early to answer that question. Chromebooks are definitely not out of the competition — their sales look good and their usage share is increasing. On the other hand, Chrome OS is still pretty far behind. They’re not catching fire like tablets did. Maybe netbooks were just before their time and Chromebooks were what they were always meant to be. Just as Microsoft’s Windows XP tablets failed, Windows XP netbooks also failed. Tablets took off with a more refined operating system on better hardware years later. “Netbooks” — or Chromebooks — are now taking off with a more purpose-built operating system on better hardware, too. It’s hard to count Chromebooks out because they provide a much better experience than netbooks ever did. If you’re one of the people who wants to use old Windows desktop apps on your portable laptop, you may think netbooks were better — but most people don’t want that. But maybe people either want a full desktop PC experience or a full mobile tablet experience. Is there a place for a laptop with a keyboard that can only view websites? We’ll have to wait and see. Image Credit: Kevin Jarret on Flickr, Clive Darra on Flickr, Sean Freese on Flickr

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• Can't sync filesystem without reboot

  - by Fabio

  I'm having an issue with a linux server. Once a week the running mysql instance hangs and there is no way to fully stop it. If I kill it, it remains in zombie status and init does not reap its pid. The server is used for staging deployments and some internal tools, so it's not under heavy load. The only process constantly used id mysql and for this I think that it's the only process which suffer of this issue. I've searched system logs for errors and the only thing I found is this error (repeated a couple of times) in dmesg output: [706560.640085] INFO: task mysqld:31965 blocked for more than 120 seconds. [706560.640198] "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this message. [706560.640312] mysqld D ffff88032fd93f40 0 31965 1 0x00000000 [706560.640317] ffff880242a27d18 0000000000000086 ffff88031a50dd00 ffff880242a27fd8 [706560.640321] ffff880242a27fd8 ffff880242a27fd8 ffff88031e549740 ffff88031a50dd00 [706560.640325] ffff88031a50dd00 ffff88032fd947f8 0000000000000002 ffffffff8112f250 [706560.640328] Call Trace: [706560.640338] [<ffffffff8112f250>] ? __lock_page+0x70/0x70 [706560.640344] [<ffffffff816cb1b9>] schedule+0x29/0x70 [706560.640347] [<ffffffff816cb28f>] io_schedule+0x8f/0xd0 [706560.640350] [<ffffffff8112f25e>] sleep_on_page+0xe/0x20 [706560.640353] [<ffffffff816c9900>] __wait_on_bit+0x60/0x90 [706560.640356] [<ffffffff8112f390>] wait_on_page_bit+0x80/0x90 [706560.640360] [<ffffffff8107dce0>] ? autoremove_wake_function+0x40/0x40 [706560.640363] [<ffffffff8112f891>] filemap_fdatawait_range+0x101/0x190 [706560.640366] [<ffffffff81130975>] filemap_write_and_wait_range+0x65/0x70 [706560.640371] [<ffffffff8122e441>] ext4_sync_file+0x71/0x320 [706560.640376] [<ffffffff811c3e6d>] do_fsync+0x5d/0x90 [706560.640379] [<ffffffff811c40d0>] sys_fsync+0x10/0x20 [706560.640383] [<ffffffff816d495d>] system_call_fastpath+0x1a/0x1f When this happens the only way to make everything working again is a full reboot, but in order to do that I'm forced to use this command after I've manually stopped all running processes echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger otherwise normal reboot process hangs forever. I've tracked reboots script and I've found out that also the reboot process hangs on a sync call, this one in /etc/init.d/sendsigs (I'm on ubuntu) # Flush the kernel I/O buffer before we start to kill # processes, to make sure the IO of already stopped services to # not slow down the remaining processes to a point where they # are accidentily killed with SIGKILL because they did not # manage to shut down in time. sync I'm almost sure that the cause of this is an hardware issue (the RAID controller???) also because I've other two machines with the same hardware and software configuration and they don't suffer of this, but I can't find any hint in syslog or dmesg. I've also installed smartmontools and mcelog packages but none of them did report any issue. What can I do to track the cause of this issue? Today is happened again, here is the status of system after triggering a reboot init---console-kit-dae---64*[{console-kit-dae}] +-dbus-daemon +-mcelog +-mysqld---{mysqld} +-newrelic-daemon---newrelic-daemon---11*[{newrelic-daemon}] +-ntpd +-polkitd---{polkitd} +-python3 +-rpc.idmapd +-rpc.statd +-rpcbind +-sh---rc---S20sendsigs---sync +-smartd +-snmpd +-sshd---sshd---zsh---sudo---zsh---pstree +-sshd---sshd---zsh---sudo---zsh And here is the status of sync process # ps aux | grep sync root 3637 0.1 0.0 4352 372 ? D 05:53 0:00 sync i.e. Uninterruptible sleep... Hardware specs as reported by lshw I think the raid controller is a fake raid. I usually don't deal with hardware (and for the record I don't have physical access to it) description: Computer product: X7DBP () vendor: Supermicro version: 0123456789 serial: 0123456789 width: 64 bits capabilities: smbios-2.4 dmi-2.4 vsyscall32 configuration: administrator_password=disabled boot=normal frontpanel_password=unknown keyboard_password=unknown power-on_password=disabled uuid=53D19F64-D663-A017-8922-0030487C1FEE *-core description: Motherboard product: X7DBP vendor: Supermicro physical id: 0 version: PCB Version serial: 0123456789 *-firmware description: BIOS vendor: Phoenix Technologies LTD physical id: 0 version: 6.00 date: 05/29/2007 size: 106KiB capacity: 960KiB capabilities: pci pnp upgrade shadowing escd cdboot bootselect edd int13floppy2880 acpi usb ls120boot zipboot biosbootspecification *-storage description: RAID bus controller product: 631xESB/632xESB SATA RAID Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1f.2 bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.2 version: 09 width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: storage pm bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=ahci latency=0 resources: irq:19 ioport:18a0(size=8) ioport:1874(size=4) ioport:1878(size=8) ioport:1870(size=4) ioport:1880(size=32) memory:d8500400-d85007ff

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• XFS disk becomes unavailable after a while

  - by Guard

  Ubuntu 12.04 (but the same was on 11.10 before upgrading) WD MyBook, 2TB, no RAID (or RAID0, not completely sure, anyway no mirroring, both 1TB disks are in use, mounted as a single device). Formatted to XFS, normally used for big movie files. Connected to Firewire 800. At some point the LED started going up and down as when constantly reading/writing. The device gives access error. When unplugged (cable, then holding the power button for a while, then unplugging the power) and re-connected becomes available. xfs_check with no results. xfs_repair did something, but looks like didn't fix any error. Then after a massive read (checking 1.5GB torrent file for integrity) becomes unavailable again. Any ideas what's wrong? Drives? Cables? Motherboard? OS? UPD: not sure how relevant this is, but here are dmesg output [14380.632816] SGI XFS with ACLs, security attributes, realtime, large block/inode numbers, no debug enabled [14380.633356] SGI XFS Quota Management subsystem [14421.812220] firewire_core: phy config: card 0, new root=ffc1, gap_count=5 [14441.890596] firewire_core: phy config: card 0, new root=ffc1, gap_count=5 [14441.896858] firewire_core: phy config: card 0, new root=ffc1, gap_count=5 [14453.895347] firewire_core: created device fw1: GUID 0090a99500a35518, S400, 9 config ROM retries [14453.904818] scsi6 : SBP-2 IEEE-1394 [14453.905014] scsi7 : SBP-2 IEEE-1394 [14454.139993] firewire_sbp2: fw1.0: logged in to LUN 0000 (0 retries) [14454.158769] scsi 6:0:0:0: Direct-Access WD My Book 1015 PQ: 0 ANSI: 4 [14454.159251] sd 6:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0 [14454.162391] firewire_sbp2: fw1.1: logged in to LUN 0001 (0 retries) [14454.167453] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] 3907017568 512-byte logical blocks: (2.00 TB/1.81 TiB) [14454.178822] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is off [14454.178826] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 10 00 00 00 [14454.186830] scsi 7:0:0:1: Enclosure WD My Book Device 1015 PQ: 0 ANSI: 4 [14454.186995] scsi 7:0:0:1: Attached scsi generic sg4 type 13 [14454.190078] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Cache data unavailable [14454.190087] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through [14454.202176] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Cache data unavailable [14454.202185] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through [14454.239940] sdc: [mac] sdc1 sdc2 sdc3 sdc4 [14454.271262] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Cache data unavailable [14454.271270] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through [14454.271354] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI disk [14454.272149] ses 7:0:0:1: Attached Enclosure device [14606.090024] XFS (sdc3): Mounting Filesystem [14612.048343] XFS (sdc3): Starting recovery (logdev: internal) [14620.697636] XFS (sdc3): Ending recovery (logdev: internal) [14748.120957] e1000e: eth0 NIC Link is Up 100 Mbps Full Duplex, Flow Control: Rx/Tx [14748.120963] e1000e 0000:00:19.0: eth0: 10/100 speed: disabling TSO [14752.568382] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.0: PCI INT A disabled [14752.568579] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.1: PCI INT B disabled [14752.568738] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1a.7: PCI INT C disabled [14752.568779] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1a.7: PME# enabled [14752.584526] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.1: PCI INT B disabled [14752.584689] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.2: PCI INT C disabled [14752.680079] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1a.7: BAR 0: set to [mem 0xe4641000-0xe46413ff] (PCI address [0xe4641000-0xe46413ff]) [14752.680104] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1a.7: restoring config space at offset 0xf (was 0x300, writing 0x30b) [14752.680136] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1a.7: restoring config space at offset 0x1 (was 0x2900000, writing 0x2900002) [14752.680170] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1a.7: PME# disabled [14752.680182] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1a.7: PCI INT C -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 18 [14752.680190] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1a.7: setting latency timer to 64 [14752.710334] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16 [14752.710342] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.0: setting latency timer to 64 [14752.749186] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.1: PCI INT B -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 17 [14752.749194] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.1: setting latency timer to 64 [14752.790231] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.1: PCI INT B -> GSI 22 (level, low) -> IRQ 22 [14752.790239] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.1: setting latency timer to 64 [14752.829170] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.2: PCI INT C -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 18 [14752.829178] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.2: setting latency timer to 64

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• How to Identify Which Hardware Component is Failing in Your Computer

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Concluding that your computer has a hardware problem is just the first step. If you’re dealing with a hardware issue and not a software issue, the next step is determining what hardware problem you’re actually dealing with. If you purchased a laptop or pre-built desktop PC and it’s still under warranty, you don’t need to care about this. Have the manufacturer fix the PC for you — figuring it out is their problem. If you’ve built your own PC or you want to fix a computer that’s out of warranty, this is something you’ll need to do on your own. Blue Screen 101: Search for the Error Message This may seem like obvious advice, but searching for information about a blue screen’s error message can help immensely. Most blue screens of death you’ll encounter on modern versions of Windows will likely be caused by hardware failures. The blue screen of death often displays information about the driver that crashed or the type of error it encountered. For example, let’s say you encounter a blue screen that identified “NV4_disp.dll” as the driver that caused the blue screen. A quick Google search will reveal that this is the driver for NVIDIA graphics cards, so you now have somewhere to start. It’s possible that your graphics card is failing if you encounter such an error message. Check Hard Drive SMART Status Hard drives have a built in S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) feature. The idea is that the hard drive monitors itself and will notice if it starts to fail, providing you with some advance notice before the drive fails completely. This isn’t perfect, so your hard drive may fail even if SMART says everything is okay. If you see any sort of “SMART error” message, your hard drive is failing. You can use SMART analysis tools to view the SMART health status information your hard drives are reporting. Test Your RAM RAM failure can result in a variety of problems. If the computer writes data to RAM and the RAM returns different data because it’s malfunctioning, you may see application crashes, blue screens, and file system corruption. To test your memory and see if it’s working properly, use Windows’ built-in Memory Diagnostic tool. The Memory Diagnostic tool will write data to every sector of your RAM and read it back afterwards, ensuring that all your RAM is working properly. Check Heat Levels How hot is is inside your computer? Overheating can rsult in blue screens, crashes, and abrupt shut downs. Your computer may be overheating because you’re in a very hot location, it’s ventilated poorly, a fan has stopped inside your computer, or it’s full of dust. Your computer monitors its own internal temperatures and you can access this information. It’s generally available in your computer’s BIOS, but you can also view it with system information utilities such as SpeedFan or Speccy. Check your computer’s recommended temperature level and ensure it’s within the appropriate range. If your computer is overheating, you may see problems only when you’re doing something demanding, such as playing a game that stresses your CPU and graphics card. Be sure to keep an eye on how hot your computer gets when it performs these demanding tasks, not only when it’s idle. Stress Test Your CPU You can use a utility like Prime95 to stress test your CPU. Such a utility will fore your computer’s CPU to perform calculations without allowing it to rest, working it hard and generating heat. If your CPU is becoming too hot, you’ll start to see errors or system crashes. Overclockers use Prime95 to stress test their overclock settings — if Prime95 experiences errors, they throttle back on their overclocks to ensure the CPU runs cooler and more stable. It’s a good way to check if your CPU is stable under load. Stress Test Your Graphics Card Your graphics card can also be stress tested. For example, if your graphics driver crashes while playing games, the games themselves crash, or you see odd graphical corruption, you can run a graphics benchmark utility like 3DMark. The benchmark will stress your graphics card and, if it’s overheating or failing under load, you’ll see graphical problems, crashes, or blue screens while running the benchmark. If the benchmark seems to work fine but you have issues playing a certain game, it may just be a problem with that game. Swap it Out Not every hardware problem is easy to diagnose. If you have a bad motherboard or power supply, their problems may only manifest through occasional odd issues with other components. It’s hard to tell if these components are causing problems unless you replace them completely. Ultimately, the best way to determine whether a component is faulty is to swap it out. For example, if you think your graphics card may be causing your computer to blue screen, pull the graphics card out of your computer and swap in a new graphics card. If everything is working well, it’s likely that your previous graphics card was bad. This isn’t easy for people who don’t have boxes of components sitting around, but it’s the ideal way to troubleshoot. Troubleshooting is all about trial and error, and swapping components out allows you to pin down which component is actually causing the problem through a process of elimination. This isn’t a complete guide to everything that could likely go wrong and how to identify it — someone could write a full textbook on identifying failing components and still not cover everything. But the tips above should give you some places to start dealing with the more common problems. Image Credit: Justin Marty on Flickr     

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• first install for windows eight.....da beta

  - by raysmithequip

  The W8 preview is now installed and I am enjoying it.  I remember the learning curve of my first unix machine back in the eighties, this ain't that.It is normal for me to do the first os install with a keyboard and low end monitor...you never know what you'll encounter out in the field.  The OS took like a fish to water.  I used a low end INTEL motherboard dp55w I gathered on the cheap, an 1157 i5 from the used bin a pair of 6 gig ddr3 sticks, a rosewell 550 watt power supply a cheap used twenty buck sub 200g wd sata drive, a half working dvd burner and an asus fanless nvidia vid card, not a great one but Sub 50.00 on newey eggey...I did have to hunt the ms forums for a key and of course to activate the thing, if dos would of needed this outmoded ritual, we would still be on cpm and osborne would be a household name, of course little do people know that this ritual was common as far back as the seventies on att unix installs....not, but it was possible, I used to joke about when I ran a bbs, what hell would of been wrought had dos 3.2 machines been required to dial into my bbs to send fido mail to ms and wait for an acknowledgement.  All in all the thing was pushing a seven on the ms richter scale, not including the vid card, sadly it came in at just a tad over three....I wanted to evaluate it for a possible replacement on critical machines that in the past went down due to a vid card fan failure....you have no idea what a customer thinks when you show them a failed vid card fan..."you mean that little plastic piece of junk caused all this!!??!!!"...yea man.  Some production machines don't need any sort of vid, I will at least keep it on the maybe list for those, MTBF is a very important factor, some big box stores should put percentage of failure rate within 24 month estimates on the outside of the carton for sure.  And a warning that the power supplies are already at their limit.  Let's face it, today even 550w can be iffy.A few neat eye candy improvements over the earlier windows is nice, the metro screen is nice, anyone who has used a newer phone recently will intuitively drag their fingers across the screen....lot of good that was with no mouse or touch screen though.  Lucky me, I have been using windows since day one, I still have a copy of win 2.0 (and every other version) for no good reason.  Still the old ix collection of disks is much larger, recompiling any kernal is another silly ritual, same machine, different day, same recompile...argh. Rh is my all time fav, mandrake was always missing something, like it rewrote the init file or something, novell is ok as long as you stay on the beaten path and of course ubuntu normally recompiles with the same errors consistantly....makes life easy that way....no errors on windows eight, just a screen that did not match the installed hardware, natuarally I alt tabbed right out of it, then hit the flag key to find the start menu....no start button. I miss the start button already. Keyboard cowboy funnin and I was browsing the harddrive, nothing stunning there, I like that, means I can find stuff. Only I can't find what I want, the start button....the start menu is that first screen for touch tablets. No biggie for useruser, that is where they will want to be, I can see that. Admins won't want to be there, it is easy enough to get the control panel a bazzilion other ways though, just not the start button. (see a pattern here?). Personally, from the keyboard I find it fun to hit the carets along the location bar at the top of the explorer screen with tabs and arrows and choose SHOW ALL CONTROL PANEL ITEMS, or thereabouts. Bottom line, I love seven and I'll love eight even more!...very happy I did not have to follow the normal rule of thumb (a customer watching me build a system and asking questions said "oh I get it, so every piece you put in there is basically a hundred bucks, right?)...ok, sure, pretty much, more or less, well, ya dude.  It will be WAY past october till I get a real touch screen but I did pick up a pair of cheap tatungs so I can try the NEW main start screen, I parse a lot of folders and have a vision of how a pair of touch screens will be easier than landing a rover on mars.  Ok.  fine, they are way smallish, and I don't expect multitouch to work but we are talking a few percent of a new 21 inch viewsonic touch screen.  Will this OS be a game changer?  I don't know.  Bottom line with all the pads and droids in the world, it is more of a catch up move at first glance.  Not something ms is used to.  An app store?  I can see ms's motivation, the others have it.  I gather there will not be gadgets there, go ahead and see what ms did  to the once populated gadget page...go ahead, google gadgets and take a gander, used to hundreds of gadgets, they are already gone.  They replaced gadgets?  sort of, I'll drop that, it's a bit of a sore point for me.  More of interest was what happened when I downloaded stuff off codeplex and some other normal programs that I like, like orbitron, top o' my list!!...cardware it is...anyways, click on the exe, get a screen, normal for windows, this one indicated that I was not running a normal windows program and had a button for  exit the install, naw, I hit details, a hidden run program anyways came into view....great, my path to the normal windows has detected a program tha.....yea ok, acl is on, fine, moving along I got orbitron installed in record time and was tracking the iss on the newest Microsoft OS, beta of course, felt like the first time I setup bsd all those year ago...FUN!!...I suppose I gotta start to think about budgeting for the real os when it comes out in october, by then I should have a rasberry pi and be done with fedora remixed.  Of course that sounds like fun too!!  I would use this OS on a tablet or phone.  I don't like the idea of being hearded to an app store, don't like that on anything, we are americans and want real choices not marketed hype, lest you are younger with opm (other peoples money).   This os would be neat on a zune, but I suspect the zune is a gonner, I am rooting for microsoft, after all their default password is not admin anymore, nor alpine,  it's blank. Others force a password, my first fawn password was so long I could not even log into it with the password in front of me, who the heck uses %$# anyways, and if I was writing a brute force attack what the heck kinda impasse is that anyways at .00001 microseconds of a code execution cycle (just a non qualified number, not a real clock speed)....AI is where it will be before too long, MS is on that path, perhaps soon someone will sit down and write an app for the kinect that watches your eyes while you scan the new main start screen, clicking on the big E icon when you blink.....boy is that going to be fun!!!! sure. Blink,dammit,blink,dammit...... OPM no doubt.I like windows eight, we are moving forwards, better keep a close eye on ubuntu.  The real clinch comes when open source becomes paid source......don't blink, I already see plenty of very expensive 'ix apps, some even in app stores already.  more to come.......

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• Windows 7 sometimes boots in VGA mode

  - by TuxRug

  I have an Asus G50VT-x5 laptop with nVidia GeForce9800M-GS graphics. Normally, Windows boots normally, but about 20% of the time (rough estimate), it will boot with the fallback VGA driver, maxing out at 800x600 with no Aero. I've checked the system logs and there is nothing indicating an error loading the nVidia driver. It even specifies in the logs that the Nvidia Display Driver service started successfully, even though it has booted in safe graphics mode. This has been happening for a while, but it's happening a little more often now than it was before. Since the first time my system exhibited this behavior, I have updated my graphics driver a handful of times. I used System Information for Windows to check for problems there, but the only thing that stood out was the following: Core Temperature 4486449 °C (8075639 °F) Shaders Temperature 1171513530 °C (2108724330 °F) I know this reading is incorrect, because my laptop is nowhere near the surface of the sun and my desk has not burst into flames. When it's opererating normally, I get a sane reading like [Core Temperature 58 °C (136 °F)] with no Shaders Temperature listed. All I have to do to resolve the issue is reboot. I have seen no stability issues with the graphics or anything else. A long time ago, I had an issue with this computer where my framerate would suddenly drop during a 3D game from 40fps to <1fps, but after looking at the temperature readout immediately after quitting a game, I removed the bottom panel and blew the dust out of the vent and heatsink. Since then I have no drops in framerate under any situation. I have uploaded a zip containing the SIW reports for when the problem is occurring and when the computer is operating normally. I don't have a paid account so it can only be downloaded 10 times, so please only download the reports if you think you can use them. If you try to download the reports and they are no longer available, please comment and I will re-upload them. If you want to look at the files, they are on Rapidshare. EDIT It happened again, and I looked a little deeper into the System logs. When this happens, there are a lot of errors about other device drivers unable to start. All of these errors are for PnP drivers. Also, my USB keyboard and mouse take a few moments before they actually start working, although this happens sometimes the first normal boot as well. I am quite sure this is related, so I am adding the pnp tag. Also, CHKDSK will not run on boot. Even if a check is scheduled or a volume is manually set as dirty, CHKDSK will be skipped entirely, not even leaving an entry in the System logs. I tried running CHKNTFS /D, which did not work. I then manually changed my HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager BootExecute value to the default listed on Microsoft's website. That did not work either. I ended up booting to repair mode and running CHKDSK there, which found a number of minor inconsistencies on my system drive, but none on my data drive. I have no idea if this is related. Some more information for those who don't download my SIW report file: Antivirus and Firewall are ESET Smart Security I have three different virutalization programs installed: VMware Player, Windows Virtual PC, and VirtualBox. The network adapters for these show up in the log of failed device starts. EDIT 2 I tried running sfc /scannow, which reported that it found corrupted files that could not be fixed. The CBS log is extremely cryptic. I tried booting to my install disk, launching repair mode, and doing an offline sfc from there, which produced the same result.

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• md/raid:md2: cannot start dirty degraded array, kernel panic

  - by nl-x

  After having made use of a remote power switch, my server did not come back online. When I went to the datacenter and reboot the computer on the spot I see the server booting (I see the centos progress bar with running almost all the way to the end) and eventually giving the following messages: md/raid:md2: cannot start dirty degraded array. md/raid:md2: failed to run raid set. md: pers->run() failed ... md/raid:md2: cannot start dirty degraded array. md/raid:md2: failed to run raid set. md: pers->run() failed ... Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init! Pid: 1, comm: init not tainted 2.6.32-279.1.1.el6.i686 #1 Call Trace: [<c083bfbc>] ? panic+0x68/0x11c [<c045a501>] ? do_exit+0x741/0x750 [<c045a54c>] ? do_group_exit+0x3c/0xa0 [<c045a5c1>] ? sys_exit_group+0x11/0x20 [<c083eba4>] ? syscall_call+0x7/0xb [<c083007b>] ? cmos_wake_setup+0x62/0x112 The server runs CentOS and has software raid, and I don't have backups of the raid settings. The only backup I have is of /home and the database dumps. (Glad to at least have those though.) Since the server is an old Dell PowerEdge 1750 with no CD-ROM drive, I have no way of booting the machine from a boot disk. I also remember in the past that the server also wouldn't boot from a bootable USB disk. So the only way I know how to boot the server is to go to the datacenter, pick up the server and take it to the office. Screw open the server. Attach a cdrom drive to an IDE slot on the motherboard. And then boot it. I am hoping you guys could help me avoid this. I have looked a bit through the boot options and I found the following boot options. When CentOS is about to boot and interrupt the boot-countdown: CentOS (2.6.32-279.1.1.el63.i686) CentOS Linux (2.6.32-71.29.1.el6.i686) centos (2.6.32-71.el6.i686) I think the first configuration is the default one, because choosing that gets me to the above mentioned kernel panic. The other ones end with something like "Sleeping forever". I can press 'e' to edit boot commands, press 'a' to modify kernel arguments and press 'c' for grub command line. The command line gives a grub prompt. But I have no idea how to get the system to boot without (trying to) access the dirty partitions. What I want to do is off course: - boot the machine - check hard drive for errors - mark the drive as clean

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• krb5-multidev, libk5crypto3, libk5crypto3:i386 package dependency

  - by TDalton

  Using Ubuntu 12.04 Asus U43F I can no longer update, install or remove packages via software center because of package dependency errors. sudo apt-get install -f reads the following: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Correcting dependencies... Done The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: libunity6 libqapt-runtime libboost-program-options1.46.1 akonadi-backend-mysql libqapt1 shared-desktop-ontologies libntrack0 ntrack-module-libnl-0 libntrack-qt4-1 Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them. The following extra packages will be installed: krb5-multidev libk5crypto3:i386 libkrb5-dev Suggested packages: krb5-doc krb5-doc:i386 krb5-user:i386 The following packages will be upgraded: krb5-multidev libk5crypto3:i386 libkrb5-dev 3 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 325 not upgraded. 11 not fully installed or removed. Need to get 0 B/213 kB of archives. After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y dpkg: error processing libk5crypto3 (--configure): libk5crypto3:amd64 1.10+dfsg~beta1-2ubuntu0.3 cannot be configured because libk5crypto3:i386 is in a different version (1.10+dfsg~beta1-2ubuntu0.1) dpkg: error processing libk5crypto3:i386 (--configure): libk5crypto3:i386 1.10+dfsg~beta1-2ubuntu0.1 cannot be configured because libk5crypto3:amd64 is in a different version (1.10+dfsg~beta1-2ubuntu0.3) dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libkrb5-3: libkrb5-3 depends on libk5crypto3 (>= 1.9+dfsg~beta1); however:No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already Package libk5crypto3 is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing libkrb5-3 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libgssapi-krb5-2: libgssapi-krb5-2 depends on libk5crypto3 (>= 1.8+dfsg); however: Package libk5crypto3 is not configured yet. libgssapi-krb5-2 depends on libkrb5-3 (= 1.10+dfsg~beta1-2ubuntu0.3); however: Package libkrb5-3 is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing libgssapi-krb5-2 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libgssrpc4: libgssrpc4 depends on libgssapi-krb5-2 (>= 1.10+dfsg~); however: Package libgssapi-krb5-2 is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing libgssrpc4 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libkadm5srv-mit8: libkadm5srv-mit8 depends on libgssapi-krb5-2 (>= 1.6.dfsg.2); however: Package libgssapi-krb5-2 is not configured yet. libkadm5srv-mit8 depends on libgssrpc4 (>= 1.6.dfsg.2); however: Package libgssrpc4 is not configured yet. libkadm5srv-mit8 depends on libk5crypto3 (>= 1.6.dfsg.2); however: Package libk5crypto3 is not configured yet. libkadm5srv-mit8 depends on libkrb5-3 (>= 1.9+dfsg~beta1); however: Package libkrb5-3 is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing libkadm5srv-mit8 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libkadm5clnt-mit8: libkadm5clnt-mit8 depends on libgssapi-krb5-2 (>= 1.10+dfsg~); however: Package libgssapi-krb5-2 is not configured yet. libkadm5clnt-mit8 depends on libgssrpc4 (>= 1.6.dfsg.2); however: Package libgssrpc4 is not configured yet.No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already libkadm5clnt-mit8 depends on libk5crypto3 (>= 1.6.dfsg.2); however: Package libk5crypto3 is not configured yet. libkadm5clnt-mit8 depends on libkrb5-3 (>= 1.8+dfsg); however: Package libkrb5-3 is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing libkadm5clnt-mit8 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of krb5-multidev: krb5-multidev depends on libkrb5-3 (= 1.10+dfsg~beta1-2ubuntu0.2); however: Version of libkrb5-3 on system is 1.10+dfsg~beta1-2ubuntu0.3. krb5-multidev depends on libk5crypto3 (= 1.10+dfsg~beta1-2ubuntu0.2); however: Version of libk5crypto3 on system is 1.10+dfsg~beta1-2ubuntu0.3. krb5-multidev depends on libgssapi-krb5-2 (= 1.10+dfsg~beta1-2ubuntu0.2); however: Version of libgssapi-krb5-2 on system is 1.10+dfsg~beta1-2ubuntu0.3. krb5-multidev depends on libgssrpc4 (= 1.10+dfsg~beta1-2ubuntu0.2); however: Version of libgssrpc4 on system is 1.10+dfsg~beta1-2ubuntu0.3. krb5-multidev depends on libkadm5srv-mit8 (= 1.10+dfsg~beta1-2ubuntu0.2); however: Version of libkadm5srv-mit8 on system is 1.10+dfsg~beta1-2ubuntu0.3. krb5-multidev depends on libkadm5clnt-mit8 (= 1.10+dfsg~beta1-2ubuntu0.2); however: Version of libkadm5clnt-mit8 on system is 1.10+dfsg~beta1-2ubuntu0.3. dpkg: error processing krb5-multidev (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libkrb5-dev: libkrb5-dev depends on krb5-multidev (= 1.10+dfsg~beta1-2ubuntu0.2); however: Package krb5-multidev is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing libkrb5-dev (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libkrb5-3:i386: libkrb5-3:i386 depends on libk5crypto3 (>= 1.9+dfsg~beta1); however: Package libk5crypto3:i386 is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing libkrb5-3:i386 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libgssapi-krb5-2:i386: libgssapi-krb5-2:i386 depends on libk5crypto3 (>= 1.8+dfsg); however: Package libk5crypto3:i386 is not configured yet. libgssapi-krb5-2:i386 depends on libkrb5-3 (= 1.10+dfsg~beta1-2ubuntu0.3); however: Package libkrb5-3:i386 is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing libgssapi-krb5-2:i386 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured Errors were encountered while processing: libk5crypto3 libk5crypto3:i386 libkrb5-3 libgssapi-krb5-2 libgssrpc4 libkadm5srv-mit8 libkadm5clnt-mit8 krb5-multidev libkrb5-dev libkrb5-3:i386 libgssapi-krb5-2:i386 E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) I have tried to fix the broken dependencies via synaptic package manager, but it returns with an error: E: libk5crypto3: libk5crypto3:amd64 1.10+dfsg~beta1-2ubuntu0.3 cannot be configured because libk5crypto3 E: libkrb5-3: dependency problems - leaving unconfigured E: libgssapi-krb5-2: dependency problems - leaving unconfigured E: libgssrpc4: dependency problems - leaving unconfigured E: libkadm5srv-mit8: dependency problems - leaving unconfigured E: libkadm5clnt-mit8: dependency problems - leaving unconfigured E: krb5-multidev: dependency problems - leaving unconfigured E: libkrb5-dev: dependency problems - leaving unconfigured I haven't gotten help from ubuntuforums.org on this issue. Please help, obi-wan

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• Choice of an OS for a home ZFS NAS

  - by OlafM

  I am preparing a home NAS with an old Athlon 64 X2 3800+, 4 GB ECC RAM, Asus M2V MX motherboard, and a single 3 TB WDC Green (another one as mirror may be installed in the future). It's the cheapest solution I found that includes ECC memory and the higher energy consumption is offset by the lower (zero) cost of acquisition. The system will be used for: music storage and stream to other desktop computers; storage of the scanned dia slides (3-4k slides, 180 MB TIFF each one plus reduced quality JPEG version); stream of these photos to a local iPad 2 (maybe Plex App? not yet sure); (one additional) remote backup via rsync/ssh or ZFS send/receive. It will be controlled via remote ssh, maybe VNC, no monitor attached. Absolute requirement is a reliable ZFS solution, plus the ability to easily install packets/software/virtual machines and to update remotely (I will be the admin and I don't live near the NAS). I have mainly three options: NAS4free/FreeNAS OpenIndiana Solaris Express 11 (yeah yeah I know the license requirements, I will write a perl script on it to count it as development machine). Problems: NAS4free/FreeNAS (I tested only NAS4free) required embedded installation for remote upgrading, but full install for easy addition of software packets. Since I need at least AirVideo Server (linux/win) and Plex App (win/linux) to stream the photos and some videos to iPad (they both require virtualbox), but I cannot be there to install updates, NAS4free/FreeNAS are excluded. http://www.nas4free.org/general_information.html explains the issue: embedded can be remotely updated, full cannot. Solaris has also another advantage: Crashplan client supports Solaris and I'm already using it for other backups. I would like to leave the option open, even if I will be doing backups probably through zfs send/receive. NexentaStor was left out because zfs send/receive are not included in the free version. The question is now Solaris 11 Express over OpenIndiana. To ease the management, I will be using http://www.napp-it.org Which one would you suggest and why? I found lots of informations and it's difficult for me to decide. I think (from the napp-it manual) that Solaris has some additional options for SMB shares, but are they really needed at home? I think I won't even use ACLs, since normal unix-style permissions are enough. OpenIndiana has maybe more frequent updates (Solaris offers only security updates between releases), but again, do I need them? I don't think so. Moreover, this is a NAS that has to work and nothing else, I cannot risk having problems that require me to access the server. Isn't OpenIndiana a bit more... cutting edge (in the Solaris world)? I'm just asking, no need to focus on this for the answer :-) I would limit myself to these two options (SE11.1/OI) also because I will be making a NAS for me in the future (where high performances with Mac shares are also required) and Solaris has kernel support for AFP. I will use this server to gather experience as well. After this long question, thanks in advance! If you need additional info, let me know and I will update this post.

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• My computer freezes irregurarly

  - by Manhim

  My computer started to freeze at irregular times for 3 weeks now. What happens My computer freezes, the video stops. (No graphic glitches, it just stops) Sound keeps playing up to some time (Usually 10-30 seconds) then stops playing. Sometimes, randomly, the screen on my G-15 keyboard flickers and I see caracters not at the right places. Usually happens for about 1-2 seconds and a bit before my computer freezes. I have to keep the power button pressed for 4 seconds to shut my computer down. I still hear my hard drives and fans working. Sometimes it works with no problems for a full day, some other times it just keeps freezing each time I restart my computer and I have to leave it for the rest of the day. Sometimes my mouse freezes for a fraction of a second (Like 0.01 to 0.2 seconds) quite randomly, usually before it freezes. No errors spotted by the "Action center" unlike when I had problems with my last video card on this system (Driver errors). My G-15 LCD screen also freezes. What I did so far I have had similar problems in the past and I had changed my hard drive (It was faulty), so I tested my software RAID-0 array and it was faulty so I changed it. (I reinstalled Windows 7 with this part). I also tested with unplugging my secondary hard drive. My CPU was running at about 100 degree Celsius, I removed the dust between the fans and the heatsink and it's now between 50-60. I ran a CPU stress-test and it didn't freeze during the tests (using Prime95 on all cores) Ran a memory test (using memtest86+) for a single pass and there were no errors. Ran a GPU stress test with ati-tools and furmark and it didn't freeze during the tests. (No artefacts either) I had troubles with my graphic card when I got it, but I think that it got fixed with a driver update. I checked the voltages in my BIOS setup and they all seemed ok (±0.2 I think). I have ran on the computer without problems with Fedora 15 on an external hard drive (Appart that it couldn't load Gnome 3 and was reverting to Gnome 2, didn't want to install drivers since I use it on multiple computers) I used it to backup my files from the raid array to my 1TB hard drive for the reinstallation of Windows. (So the crashes only happenned on Windows) [The external hard drive is plugged directly on a SATA port] I contacted EVGA (My graphic card vendor) and pointed them on this question, I'm looking for an answer. Ran sensors on Fedora 15 and got this output: http://pastebin.com/0BHJnAvu When it happens When I play video games (Mostly) When I play flash games (Second most) When I'm looking at my desktop background (It rarely happens when I have a window open, but it does, sometimes) Specs Windows Seven x64 Home Premium Motherboard: M2N-SLI Deluxe CPU: AMD Phenom 9950 x2 @ 2.6GHz Memory: Kingston 4x2GB Dual Channel (Pretty basic memory sticks) Hard drives: Was 2x250GB (Western digital caviar) in raid-0 + 1TB (WD caviar black), I replaced the raid array with a 750GB (WD caviar black) [Yes I removed the array from the raid configurations] 750W Power supply No overcloking. Ever. There have been some power-downs like 4-5 weeks ago, but the problem didn't start immediately after. (I wasn't home, so my computer got shut-down) My current to-try list Change the thermal paste on my CPU. Change my graphic card with a temporary one and stress the computer. Change my power supply. In this situation, how can I successfully pin-point the current hardware problem? (If it's a hardware problem) Because I don't really have the budget to just forget and replace everything. I also don't really have hardware to test-replace current hardware.

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• How to diagnose and solve an erratic "HDCP Support Required"?

  - by Jom Orgstrom

  I am playing a digital tv broadcast on Windows Media Center for Windows 7. I built this system so it works with HDCP, and in fact I have been able to watch tv and bluray before with this same computer. However, I suddenly started getting an "HDCP Support Required" error from WMC. The entire message is as follows: HDCP Support Required High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) may not be supported by the current video card. Use an HDCP-compliant display, video card, and video driver. Or, connect using an analog connection such as component or VGA. Relevant specs are: CPU: Ivy Bridge Core i7-3770 Motherboard: Asus P8H77-I Memory: 16GB DDR3-1600 Graphics: Radeon HD 7850 (Driver by AMD, version 8.982.0.0 built on 2012/07/27) Display: Acer P243w connected by HDMI Sound: Roland Quad-Capture (It complains even when I use the bundled VIA HD Audio) TV Tuner: I-O Data GV-MC7/HZ3 OS: Windows 7 Professional SP1, Windows Update enabled. All patched and up to date. As you can see, there is nothing weird or old about my setup. I am also not doing anything strange, not doing any overclocking, weird system changes and so on. One thing that does happen from time to time, is that the display goes black for a few seconds (sometimes when watching media contents, sometimes when just using photoshop or Visual Studio). This happened with my previous setup as well, so I'd be inclined to think it is a display or cable issue (apart from the BD drive, these are the only things I kept from my previous setup to this one). But being a digital transfer, as far as I know, these things either work or not. Never erratically or with decreased quality. The thing is that sometimes I can watch the TV, sometimes not. This happens with recorded programs as well, so it's not a per-program thing. Sometimes rebooting helps, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes unplugging and plugging back the HDMI connector helps, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes doing so doesn't even turn the screen back on, so I have to reboot. Unfortunately, WMC's error message is quite unhelpful. I'd like to know exactly where the problem is, so I can solve it. I don't want to buy a brand new display just to then find out it was a registry setting that was misconfigured. I've tried looking at the system event viewer, but these errors don't show up at all in there. Other people who have this problem seem to have a setup that is not HDCP compliant, so I turn to you guys here. Anybody knows how to diagnose this problem? Edit: So I got the Cyberlink Blu-ray disc advisor. I ran it and told me everything was okay, except for the Video Connection Type, which showed as "Digital (without HDCP)". I then proceeded to unplug the power cable from the monitor, plugged it in again, ran the tool again, and now it's "Digital (with HDCP)". Needless to say, I can watch my TV and recorded programs on WMP again. I'm guessing that at some point, something may be slightly wrong with the HDCP setup, and Windows decides to reset the entire content protection path (which leads to the screen blanking out). Usually the reset succeeds, but sometimes it doesn't, so Windows defaults to turning HDCP off. There's no way to turn it back on, except by doing a hard reset of the display. I really want to know what the exact error was, so I can fix it. Is it the cable? is it the display? is it the video card? the driver? Also, is there any other way to try and turn HDCP on again without having to hard reset the display? Oh, questions, questions...

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• How do I reset/update my BIOS for Optiplex GX280?

  - by Sam Langlhey

  So far this has been a nightmare for me, which has been frustrating me constantly. I am using Dell Optiplex GX280 with Windows XP home edition, which is running a BIOS version A04. Recently, i've rebooted the pc to find out that its not booting. It will get to the Windows boot up screen with the progress bar but only to restart to the same process again, over and over. Frustrated that I am, i've inserted the Windows recovery CD to at least either repair of reinstall the operating system to find out that was not possible. I hit F8 to have the boot options, each of the boot option that I've selected gave me an error saying: "Selected boot device is not available." Right after that, I went to the BIOS setting and did a diagnostic test, which recognized all the Boot devices onboard. Now, I cannot even repair of reinstall Windows XP, because the system is not booting from none of the boot devices. The surprise is when I removed the hard-drive from the computer and loaded it on into another computer successfully; that's right, there is nothing wrong with the hard drive. After that I was totally puzzled. I found a few pointers online saying that the BIOS start-up block might be corrupted itself and I might need to flash/update the BIOS. I found the detailed instruction on how to create a Boot up disk by downloading the BIOS firmware from the manufacture's website. I did exactly as instructed below: Download the latest version or your choose version of BIOS file for your computer or motherboard from the manufacturer’s support site. Rename the downloaded file to AMIBOOT.ROM. Copy the file to a floppy disk. Insert the floppy disk to the floppy drive. Turn on the system. After I did that and powered on the PC to boot from the floppy drive, it gave me this error message: "Non-System Disk or Disk Error. Replace and Strike any key when ready." I did all that, and I kept on pressing [Ctrl]+[Home] to force it, but it did not did any satisfying result. Desperate as I am, my next attempt is to try the instruction below. Since I want to be ready, in the event it does not work, do you have any solution that you can provide? Please keep in mind that I cannot boot from any of the devices at this moment. My only hope now is to come on with a solution that will work through the Floppy drive, since that's the only drive that affected. Thank you very much for your advice and support in advance. To create a Windows startup disk, insert a floppy disk into the drive of a similarly configured, working Windows XP system, launch My Computer, right-click the floppy disk icon, and select the Format command from the context menu. When you see the Format dialog box, leave all the default settings as they are and click the Start button. Once the format operation is complete, close the Format dialog box to return to My Computer, double-click the drive C icon to access the root directory, and copy the following three files to the floppy disk: Boot.ini NTLDR Ntdetect.com

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• Using different SSDs types (not only SATA based) as system drive

  - by Hubert Kario

  Currently I have a Thinkpad X61s and want to make it both a bit faster and a bit more power efficient. For that reason I thought that adding SSD drive would make most sense. Unfortunately, because of financial reasons, buying SSD of over 200GB capacity is out of reach for me (not only it would be worth more than the rest of the laptop, but also I currently have a 500GB drive in it, so even such a drive would be kind of a downgrade for me). During preliminary testing with a cheap Transcend 4GB Class 6 (14MiB/s streaming, 9MiB/s random read) card I experienced boot times to be reduced by half so putting the OS only on it would already would be an improvement. Unfortunately, my system now is about 11GiB in size so anything less than 16GB would be constraining. In this laptop I can connect additional drives on at least 5 different ways: using SATA-ATA converter caddy in the X6 Ultrabase using internal mini PCIe slot using integrated SDHC slot using CardBus (a.k.a PCMCIA or PC Card) slot using USB Thankfully, because I use only Linux on this PC the bootability of them is irrelevant as I can put the /boot partition on internal HDD and / on any of the above mentioned Flash memories (as I already did for the SDHC test). From what I was able to research and from my own experience those options come with rather big downsides or other problems: SATA-ATA caddy It has three downsides: I have to carry the Ultrabse with me at all times (it's not really inconvenient, but those grams do add) and couldn't disconnect it when I want to disconnect the battery It makes the bay unusable for the optical drive and occasional quick access to other hard drives the only caddies I could buy have rather flaky controllers in them so putting my OS on it would hamper its stability Internal mini PCIe slot This would be an ideal solution, if only I could find real PCIe SSDs, not only devices that could talk only SATA or ATA over PCIe mechanical connection (the ones used in Dell Mini or Asus EEE). Theoretically Samsung did release such devices but I couldn't find them in retail anywhere. Integrated SDHC slot It's a nice solution with a single drawback: the fastest 16GB SDHC card on the market can only do around 35MiB/s read and 15MiB/s write while still costing like a normal 40GB SATA SSD that's 10 times faster. Not really cost-effective. CardBus (a.k.a PCMCIA or PC Card) slot Those cards are much faster than the SDHC option (there are ones that can do well over 50MiB/s read in benchmarks) and from what I could find the PCMCIA controller in my laptop does support UDMA so it should be able to deliver comparable speeds. They still cost similarly to SD cards but at least they provide streaming performance comparable to my current HDD. USB That's the worst option. Not only is it limited to 20-30MiB/s by the interface itself the drive would stick out of the laptop so it's a big no no. The question As such I think that going the "CF in a CardBus adapter" route will be the best option. My question is: did anyone try using CF cards in CardBus adapters as system drives with Linux on Thinkpad laptops? Laptops in general? What was the real-world performance? I don't have any CF cards so I can't check how well does it work with suspend/resume, or whatever it's easy to make it work in initramfs (I'm using ArchLinux and SD card was trivial — add 3 modules in single config line and rebuilding initramfs) so any tips/gotchas on this are welcome as well.

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• Where is my VMware-ws FreeNAS CIFS(ZFS) bottle-neck?

  - by maka

  Background: I'm building a quiet HTPC + NAS that is also supposed to be used for general computer usage. I'm so far generally happy with things, it was just that I was expecting a little better IO performance. I have no clue if my expectations are unreal. The NAS is there as a general purpose file storage and as a media server for XBMC and other devices. ZFS is a requirement. Question: Where is my bottle-neck, and is there anything I can do config wise, to improve my performance? I'm thinking VM-disk settings could be something but I really have no idea where to go since I'm neither experienced with FreeNAS nor VMware-WS. Tests: When I'm on the host OS and copy files (from the SSD) to the CIFS share, I get around 30 Mbytes/sec read and write. When I'm on my laptop laptop, wired to the network, I get about the same specs. The test I've done are with a 16 GB ISO, and with about 200 MB of RARs and I've tried avoiding the RAM-cache by reading different files than the ones I'm writing ( 10 GB). It feels like having less CPU cores is a lot more efficient, since the resource manager in Windows reports less CPU-usage. With 4 cores in VMware, CPU usage was 50-80%, with 1 core it was 25-60%. EDIT: HD ActiveTime was quite high on SSD so I moved the page file, disabled hibernate and enabled Win DiskCache both on SSD and RAID. This resulted in no real performance difference for one file, but if i transferred 2 files the total speed went up to 50 Mbytes/s vs ~40. The ActiveTime avg also went down a lot (to ~20%) but has now higher bursts. DiskIO is on ~ 30-35 Mbytes/s avgs, with ~100Mb bursts. Network is on 200-250Mbits/s with ~45 active TCP connections. Hardware Asus F2A85-M Pro A10-5700 16GB DDR3 1600 OCZ Vertex 2 128GB SSD 2x Generic 1tb 7200 RPM drives as RAID0 (in win7) Intel Gigabit Desktop CT Software Host OS: Win7 (SSD) VMware Worksation 9 (SSD) FreeNAS 8.3 VM (20GB VDisk on SSD) CPU: I've tried 1, 2 and 4 cores. Virtualisation engine, Preferred mode: Automatic 10,24Gb ram 50Gb SCSI VDisk on the RAID0, VDisk is formatted as ZFS and exposed through CIFS through FreeNAS. NIC Bridge, Replicate physical network state Below are two typical process print-outs while I'm transfering one file to the CIFS share. last pid: 2707; load averages: 0.60, 0.43, 0.24 up 0+00:07:05 00:34:26 32 processes: 2 running, 30 sleeping Mem: 101M Active, 53M Inact, 1620M Wired, 2188K Cache, 149M Buf, 8117M Free Swap: 4096M Total, 4096M Free PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME WCPU COMMAND 2640 root 1 102 0 50164K 10364K RUN 0:25 25.98% smbd 1897 root 6 44 0 168M 74808K uwait 0:02 0.00% python last pid: 2746; load averages: 0.93, 0.60, 0.33 up 0+00:08:53 00:36:14 33 processes: 2 running, 31 sleeping Mem: 101M Active, 53M Inact, 4722M Wired, 2188K Cache, 152M Buf, 5015M Free Swap: 4096M Total, 4096M Free PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME WCPU COMMAND 2640 root 1 76 0 50164K 10364K RUN 0:52 16.99% smbd 1897 root 6 44 0 168M 74816K uwait 0:02 0.00% python I'm sorry if my question isn't phrased right, I'm really bad at these kind of things, and it is the first time I post here at SU. I also appreciate any other suggestions to something, I could have missed.

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• Rosewill RSV-S5 and it's transferespeeds

  - by DoomStone

  I have just bought a Rosewill RSV-S5, I have installed 5x1,5Tb Western Digital Green disks in it. After that have I created a Raid5 on them all with the software that followed with the hardware. Not the raid it self works fine, but it is SLOW, I can only obtain a maximum of 25 MB/s, and if SABnzbd+ is downloading with 5 MB/s is it having a hard time streaming a normal DIVX (700 mb) movie. Is this normal or is there something wrong? Edit: should be able to handle 3 Gbps = 384 megabytes / second Edit 2: As you can see am I only downloading with 3,76 MB/s and I'm trying to watch V s02e08 (720p), but it is completely unwatchable, as I can see 30 sec, and the it buffers for 20 sec. Edit: Other information there might be required I'm running Windows Server 2008 R2, optimized for program performance. Windows is installed on a 60GB SSD. I have a 50 Mb/s internet connection and a 1 Gb/s LAN, all connected with Cat6 Ethernet cables. The MCE is using a Gigabyte EP35C-DS3R motherboard with 2 GB DDR2 ram. Edit 3: I have used chunk sizes for 128 KB Edit 4: I found this on newegg Pros: Enclosure for 5x2TB hard drive is fine. This is basically a rebranded San Digital TR5M-B product. For support Rosewill tells you to contact San Digital. No direct support from Silicon Image for the computer raid card. Cons: Includes computer Silicon Image 3132 raid card, extremely slow raid 5 write (our tests ~10MB/s). Compare to regular internal local drive write 30-60MB/s. We basically dumped the Sil3132 card and replaced with High Point RocketRaid 622 card for extra $69.99. Note for RR622, turn off ECRC (end to end CRC check) for card to work on IBM xserver. What took 12hrs to copy now took 2-3hrs. San Digital realized the problem and has the newer model TR5M-BP TowerRaid Plus that comes with High Point RocketRaid 622 card. Rosewill should discontinue this product and go with TR5M-BP. Could not get Silicon Image raid management software to work with complicated 2008R2 server with 10 NICs, application doesn't know how to talk to localhost port with all those NICs. No updates from Silicon Image and support from San Digital ignored. Gave up on Sil3132 card. Save yourself from a lot of headaches, get the RR622 card too if you are going to buy this product. Other Thoughts: The newer model is TR5M-BP TowerRaid Plus, comes with High Point RocketRaid 622 raid card for the PC instead of Silicon Image Sil3132. According to San Digital, raid 5 performance for Sil3132 read 80MB/s write 19MB/s, and RR622 read 154MB/s write 149MB/s. Our RR622 tests gave (8TB raid 5) write ~80-110MB/s copying 40GB file took 8mins. So I have now ordered a HighPoint RocketRAID 622 2P ext SATA III and hopes that it will solve my problems.

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• BSOD Code 16, artifacts all over the place (gtx 260)

  - by belinea

  I have a following, quite dated rig E8400 Core 2 Duo cpu Intel Dragontail Peak DP35DP motherboard on Intel Bearlake P35 chipset 4GB ram Geforce 260gtx Corsair 650W PSU Windows 7 64 bit The following things has happened in the last few days. I first decided to update my Nvidia drivers to the latest version. That was 4 days ago. PC worked fine for 2 days and I was able to play few games as well without any problems. Then 2 days ago a first crash happened while playing the new XCOM game. BSOD code 16. Just the blue screen, no artifacts. PC rebooted and worked well again, I continued playing this game for another 2 hours and went to sleep. Next evening I tried to play some BF3 multiplayer (use to play on LOW settings). Approx. 10 minutes into the game red/pink-ish artifacts appeared on the screen and game quit to desktop. Restarted the game and another 3-4 minutes afterwards another crash to desktop but this time followed shortly by BSOD Code 16. From that moment I started to seeing artifacts on random startups, including Windows loading screen and the BIOS itself. Windows would still load but soon enough it would BSOD on a simple task like opening a Internet browser. Today I get tons of artifacts (little small red dashes all over the screen) on BIOS, loading screen, normal Windows mode as well as safe mode. I suspect it wouldn't be drivers but I tried removing and sweeping them entirely in the safe mode. PC would still start with artifacts all over the place but would load the normal mode, just without the driver, in the default lowest resolution. As soon as proper Nvidia drivers are installed though and PC rebooted, Windows doesn't load at all as BSOD now appears on loading screen. However, again, if I go to safe mode and remove drivers, normal mode launches fine. So obviously crash happens only on high resolution. I opened my machine this morning and gave it a proper cleaning even though it wasn't heavily dusted. It didn't help and number of artifacts seems to increase with every PC restart. I write these words in safe mode, which works, but I have to look through all the red dots and dashes. I don't have built in GPU chipset so I can't try removing my Geforce card nor can I borrow A GPU from anyone else. What are my options? I was looking into getting a completely new rig around Christmas so I'm not freaking out about this. If everything points to hardware issue I may simply decide to get the new machine earlier and don't bother with fixing this one. However it would be great to learn more if this is indeed situation that has slim chances of getting sorted. I realize BSOD Code 16 is rather popular topic online but every story seems a bit different and there can be number of issues with it. Hence a new thread.

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• Choice of an OS for a home ZFS NAS

  - by OlafM

  I am preparing a home NAS with an old Athlon 64 X2 3800+, 4 GB ECC RAM, Asus M2V MX motherboard, and a single 3 TB WDC Green (another one as mirror may be installed in the future). It's the cheapest solution I found that includes ECC memory and the higher energy consumption is offset by the lower (zero) cost of acquisition. The system will be used for: music storage and stream to other desktop computers; storage of the scanned dia slides (3-4k slides, 180 MB TIFF each one plus reduced quality JPEG version); stream of these photos to a local iPad 2 (maybe Plex App? not yet sure); (one additional) remote backup via rsync/ssh or ZFS send/receive. It will be controlled via remote ssh, maybe VNC, no monitor attached. Absolute requirement is a reliable ZFS solution, plus the ability to easily install packets/software/virtual machines and to update remotely (I will be the admin and I don't live near the NAS). I have mainly three options: NAS4free/FreeNAS OpenIndiana Solaris Express 11 (yeah yeah I know the license requirements, I will write a perl script on it to count it as development machine). Problems: NAS4free/FreeNAS (I tested only NAS4free) required embedded installation for remote upgrading, but full install for easy addition of software packets. Since I need at least AirVideo Server (linux/win) and Plex App (win/linux) to stream the photos and some videos to iPad (they both require virtualbox), but I cannot be there to install updates, NAS4free/FreeNAS are excluded. http://www.nas4free.org/general_information.html explains the issue: embedded can be remotely updated, full cannot. Solaris has also another advantage: Crashplan client supports Solaris and I'm already using it for other backups. I would like to leave the option open, even if I will be doing backups probably through zfs send/receive. NexentaStor was left out because zfs send/receive are not included in the free version. The question is now Solaris 11 Express over OpenIndiana. To ease the management, I will be using http://www.napp-it.org Which one would you suggest and why? I found lots of informations and it's difficult for me to decide. I think (from the napp-it manual) that Solaris has some additional options for SMB shares, but are they really needed at home? I think I won't even use ACLs, since normal unix-style permissions are enough. OpenIndiana has maybe more frequent updates (Solaris offers only security updates between releases), but again, do I need them? I don't think so. Moreover, this is a NAS that has to work and nothing else, I cannot risk having problems that require me to access the server. Isn't OpenIndiana a bit more... cutting edge (in the Solaris world)? I'm just asking, no need to focus on this for the answer :-) I would limit myself to these two options (SE11.1/OI) also because I will be making a NAS for me in the future (where high performances with Mac shares are also required) and Solaris has kernel support for AFP. I will use this server to gather experience as well. After this long question, thanks in advance! If you need additional info, let me know and I will update this post. UPDATES Given the first answers, I will strongly suggest the person paying the hardware to insert a second HD. Better 2x2TB than 1x3TB (3 TB is oversized anyway). I was trying to keep the initial costs down to spread them over a longer period, but better having something good from the beginning.

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• My 3D Games crashing in these scenarios

  - by desaivv

  I have a situation here which I am unable to solve. I bought a PC last year March, here are my specs: Intel Core i3 550 @ 3GHz 4 GB RAM @400 MHz XFX GeForce 9500 GT graphics card 1GB @550MHz 500 GB HDD Lately as soon as I load my save game of Skyrim, it crashes. I have been playing Skyrim since I joined Gaming.SE site. Crashes as in the entire scene gets red lines. I can not ALT + TAB back or even CTRL + ALT + DEL either. My only recourse is a hard reset via the power button. Can not take a screen shot either. I have the latest Forceware 296.10 drivers also. This has been happening since the last 2 weeks. I always use Driver Sweeper to clean my old drivers, since that is what XFXForce recommends before installing new drivers. I installed MSI Afterburner lately to see my GPU temperature. My GPU is default, never over-clocked it. In MSI's Afterburner, I can not adjust fan speed. It is greyed out. Also in settings there is no fan tab. With normal Internet browsing it stays at 51 C. Ran Memtest86 over night with level 11. Took about 13 hours, but no errors in my RAM. I even re-installed my OS, with just the 296 drivers. The fan for the GPU does come on. I can play Diablo 2. I can not get past Warcraft 3's menu selection. There WAS some dust in my machine, but I always try and keep everything clean, since in my home town dust is an issue. Always keep cool my entire PC cabinet. My friend came with his functioning graphics card, we bought our PCs at the same time with exact same specifications. His card did not work either. Same problem with the scene freezing with red lines. I did do my research before posting here. That is how I was able to learn about MSI Afterburner, Driver Sweeper, SpeedFan etc. I followed posts on Tom's Hardware too regarding people that had similar problems. One person suggested and was followed by worked as well the suggestion to "Bake the card in an oven". Since I bought it, played Diablo 2 for months, Starcraft 2 campaign for months and Skyrim recently for months. Bought ME3 also. I am at my wits end. I do not know what else to do. I can go out and buy a card, but my friend's card did not work either. I can use the machine for Eclipse or VS2010 development just fine. Just not with 3D gaming. I originally posted this question on Gaming.SE But I was directed here. I have browsed the SU database for my problem and found this, this, and this. But none of these cover my question. My machine is only one year old. Can some experienced superuser(s) shed some light on this scenario? Is it a 3D graphics card problem? Will a brand new card work? What else can I try to pin point the problem? Can it be the Motherboard? Thanks.

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