Computer Upgrade Plan [2]

Well doing the specs and it looks like the lowest spec CPU is going to be a Core i3. It looks like SLAT (which Intel calls Extended Page Tables or EPT) is part of VT-x by default now, but I will have to do some more research on that. The cheapest of this CPU is around $190 at current prices, the model in question being the i3-2120 which is 3.3 GHz and comes in a box with a fan. It has on-board graphics which is all I would need. 

The next question is to find a suitable board. The most likely models so far are:

• DB75EN - 4x memory slots up to 32 GB, 1600 MHz memspeed, 2x PCI slots, 1x PCI-e x1 slot, 1x PCI-e x16 slot, onboard VGA/DVI, 8x USB2 ports, 4x USB3 ports, 1x eSATA port, $129

• DH77EB -  4x memory slots up to 32 GB, 1600 MHz memspeed, 3x PCI-e x1 slot, 1x PCI-e x16 slot, 1x PCI-e Mini Card slot, onboard DVI/HDMI, 10x USB2 ports, 4x USB3 ports, 1x eSATA port, onboard RAID, $163
• DZ77SL-50K - 4x memory slots up to 32 GB, 1600 MHz memspeed, 3 PCI slots, 1x PCI-e x1 slot, 1x PCI-e x4 slot, 1x PCI-e x16 slot, 1x PCI-e Mini Card slot, onboard HDMI, 10x USB2 ports, 4x USB3 ports, 1x eSATA port, onboard RAID, $177

Points to note:

• Although Intel has quite a range of models I decided to make my choices simpler at this stage by limiting to the B75/H77/Z77 chipsets which support 1600MHz memory, and rule out the 1333MHz chipsets. 
• The DH77EB is probably the best combination all round if you don't need PCI slots. I would rather have more PCI-e slots these days. But it is a tough call as I have a separate RAID-1 controller card which is PCI and might choose to keep using it to increase the number of SATA ports. And then that DB75EN might be a slightly better choice. 
• Three PCI slots is a bit of an overkill these days so the DZ77SLK-50 apart from only having the HDMI graphics connector onboard, might not be so desirable apart from the highest price. 
• All of these boards have a gigabit network adapter and some form of onboard sound. 
• They all have five internal SATA ports, one of which supports eSATA, and these ports are various combinations of 3Gbps and 6Gbps. I haven't focused too much on that because even SATA 1.5 Gbps will keep up with most average hard drives, and the RAID controller only has 3Gbps ports that will easily be fast enough, anyway the Caviar Blacks only support 3Gbps. 
• As I stated the board has to have 4 memory slots and therefore support plenty of memory, there are boards around that can only do 8 GB max, and plenty of models that only have 2 slots. Due to my bad experience last time of choosing a board that could effectively support only a maximum of 4 GB, I have made a special focus of this specification this time around.

And how much will 8 GB of memory cost? Probably about $75. This pushes our total price to around $400 which is not too bad for essentially a brand new computer. Assuming the chassis and PSU are up to it.

A reasonable SSD is going to cost around $180. Its main claim to fame is a fast startup time. At the moment this isn't important enough and that would be better spent on a Caviar Black. So the boot drive would be the Barracuda 7200.12 250GB drive I currently have. For my personal stuff I have the two Caviar Black 1 TB drives in the RAID-1 array. And then 4th disk drive quite possibly in a removable cartridge bay, maybe 500 GB, or for work purposes I might borrow one of theirs whenever it is needed.

Computer Upgrade Plan, Mobile Phone Plan

OK so now I have decided at last what I am going to do upgrade-wise, and it will be implemented over the rest of this year, I hope. The plan is simply to upgrade in that Foxconn TS001 chassis by replacing the mainboard, CPU and RAM. I will possibly buy a SSD and maybe replace the 4th HDD with a bigger one. There are a number of different options I can have, but for working on server builds, Windows 8 has Hyper-V built into it, which offers enough functionality to build and maintain servers if you wish, or you could dual boot to Windows Server on the same machine and run Hyper-V on that. The big problem I just discovered with my current PC is that the CPU, while it is 64 bit capable and has VT-x built in, does not support SLAT, which is now the minimum standard for Hyper-V on the latest edition of Windows. Therefore while this computer can run Windows 8 OK it is not much use for anything else and doesn't really have enough RAM to do Hyper-V while Windows 8 is running. Therefore I'm going for the cheapest upgrade option, which I will get prices for and then implement by buying the components needed over coming months. The current plan for the old board, CPU and memory is to scrounge an old desktop chassis from somewhere and have an actual physical computer running Windows 8 at one of my workplaces to work with instead of a thin client remotely logging in. It turns out that SLAT wasn't introduced until the Intel core i7 desktop CPU. I hope that the CPU is not going to be too dear, but when I set up this computer a couple of years ago, LGA1155 looked too dear overall which was why I went for LGA775, now that is obsolete.

At the moment I am without broadband at home and this will continue probably for several more days. In the block of flats I am in, the phone cable goes through the ceilings of other flats to get to mine. Apparently someone has damaged or cut through the cable in one of the other flats, probably when repairs were being done over the last few days. Chorus have to be able to get into those other flats to be able to fix the cable before they can get my broadband on which could take several days to organise. I found that my phone can be used as a mobile wireless access point which saved me a lot of inconvenience last evening, but the data is quite expensive. As my current mobile plan expires soon it's time to start looking for something else and perhaps I should be going onto a Vodafone plan instead of Telstra, as they are the same thing now anyway. Probably the best option will be $55 naked broadband and $40 basic mobile smart plan together. This only gives 250 MB a month which is slightly more than what I get now. Going onto their broadband will have to wait until the Telstraclear contract period under which the modem was supplied free, expires, unless they allow me to transfer it. The next option up for data is $70 per month for 1 GB, or alternatively, buying extra data casually when needed. The same sort thing can be done by buying a Vodem, the latter has the advantage that it doesn't tie up the phone and run its battery down and will work on any computer. It might be worth buying a Vodem and using it on prepay for those times when broadband fails, especially good option if I don't have a landline any more. These days we have lots more options for when power fails and so on, so in the event of another big earthquake I would have the ability to do a lot more things than I could before, but of course we always hope such a thing never happens.

Meanwhile, here’s Windows 8…

While I haven’t yet figured out whether to buy a new computer or whatever, the old one is getting packed to the gills with everything I can do with it to make it more useful. So, today, I decided I could make it dual boot Windows 7 with Windows 8, just until I figure out if I can do everything I need on Windows 8. That meant putting in another hard drive, along with the 4 port USB3 card which I bought recently and which arrived yesterday. So the computer now has every slot filled and every bay filled and the biggest mess of cables you could imagine inside. The Foxconn TS001 chassis isn’t especially spacious, with three 5 1/4” external bays, two 3.5” external bays and two 3.5” internal bays. At the moment this computer has four hard drives and two DVD writers and a card reader filling up every single bay. And the DG41RQ motherboard has only two PCI slots which have the modem and RAID-1 controller in them (with two of the disks in an array), and one PCI Express x16 slot, which has the USB3 card in it. The biggest issue up until now has been a shortage of USB ports. This board has four on the back and connectors on the board for four more. The case has two on the front with cables to connect to that board. However I decided I would rather have two more on the back with a slot socket pair, and the other two connections are used by the card reader although it does bring out a USB port on its front panel. So putting in that 4 port card will give me enough ports, and even better, they will be USB3 ports, as for some reason even though this board isn’t very old it doesn’t have any USB3 functionality. The USB peripherals I do have now are external drive enclosures. I have three so far and am buying another one next month, although that will be three in use with a flimsy plastic one being kept just as a spare. USB3 means the backups that I do on two of them will be quite fast hopefully. The third one is going to be in an eSata enclosure for work related use as quite a few of our work laptops these days have eSata ports and that should make it nice and quick when transferring data.

Anyway I burned Windows 8 onto a DVD at work and brought it home. This doesn’t seem to be a bootable DVD so I had to boot the computer off a 64 bit Windows PE pen drive I use at work, and then run setup.exe off the DVD, which was perfectly satisfactory. Some screenshots are below.

This is what Windows 8 installation screen looks like. Not much different from 7.

The progress screen during the installation. Just different ways of saying the same thing.

This is the Windows 8 boot menu. For some reason this graphical menu seems to be quite slow to come up compared to the text based menu, which you can still have if you make Windows 7 the default OS.

This is part of the initial setup and is a good example of the way it has all been graphically focused.

This photo was taken earlier at work and it shows the basic Start screen. It took me a while to figure out how to get from here to the regular desktop. In fact, all you have to do is click on that Desktop tile at the lower left. Obviously one of the things that is hard to get used to is the lack of a Start button – instead put the mouse into the bottom left corner and one pops up. Put the mouse into the bottom right corner and you get what they call the “charms bar” which has things like the start screen button, search and settings on it. I had a play with the Mail app but pretty soon I went to the regular desktop to install Windows Live Mail (along with Writer, which I am using to write this). As you can see from photo timestamps the installation only took about 15 minutes to complete all up. That was about two hours ago and since then I have been installing device drivers and the Windows Live suite. Tomorrow I’ll look at other software.

Well – it’s an interesting OS. Very different from Windows 7 of course. Has to be in order to be both slate and desktop compatible. I think that all things considered, MS has made a credible effort to bridge that gap, and of course they are doing something no one else has really tried – even Apple has separate OSs for the mobile and desktop markets. If it can run every single bit of software that I was using on 7 then I will be switching to it pretty quickly and leaving 7 behind. It is available in 32 and 64 bit installs. I chose 64 bit as my computer has 4 GB of RAM. However at that amount the potential for improvement is pretty hard to realise because there is overhead from running the 32 bit subsystem for most applications and this has an effect on overall performance.  This is no different than Windows 7 of course – I was well aware of this, still I have decided to go with 64 bit as it will be easier to migrate to the new computer which will have more RAM in it.

At this stage I’m not spending any more money on hardware for this computer. I considered buying a new hard disk but ended up putting in an older one to run Windows 8. As I would rather put the money towards an SSD. But that will probably be in the next computer, not this one.

New computer or slate or phone or … ?

About three weeks ago I wrote that I planned to build up a new computer. Since then a few other options have come to the fore. Windows 8 and the Surface RT slate are being released at the end of October and Windows Phone 8 is being released shortly thereafter. This brings up the options of buying a slate and/or a phone, or both.

Whether I buy a new phone will depend on whether a model equivalent in price to the current Nokia Lumia 710 ($399) comes in. At the moment Nokia have the 820 and 920 coming out. The current models 800 however is priced at $899 which is far too much to pay for a phone. The sort of plan that would fit me would shave $100 off any handset price. If Microsoft wants their phones to be competitive then manufacturers will have to produce models that are in the $399 range which is competitive with the lowest iPhone model currently on the market. Samsung like Nokia have a current model in a similar price range to the 710 which is available in NZ, and like Nokia they have just released new Windows Phone models. It remains therefore to be seen what will come out for that sort of a price when 8 is released. A suitable phone plan would be around $40 and would be similar to my current (free) plan from Telstraclear (which is actually in fact subsidised by my home line cost) and knocks around $100 off the phone’s price. This sort of plan will give me only 250MB of data which is what I currently get for an extra $20 on Telstra. However in that Telstra plan I pay 19c per minute for most calls. The $45 plan would give me free minutes so it could be much of a muchness really.

Supposing the cheapest Surface comes in at the equivalent of US$199 which some are suggesting it will sell for in the States. It depends on whether it is mobile or Wifi only. If it has a USB socket then you could plug in a Vodem which will cost $30 for each 512MB of data bought casually. This is a substantial cost, so I can understand why many people have chosen to buy Wifi only devices which are a lot cheaper to run. I would probably look at the mobile option but prefer Wifi within sites like everyone and be on a casual data plan rather than a monthly one. Tethering to a mobile is an interesting option if it is possible and allows the data to be shared.

The costings for a new computer or the parts thereof on the other hand probably come in at about $700 but will need to be nailed down. I can buy it gradually a part at a time.

So at the moment a lot depends on a lot of things and I haven’t really shifted my priorities much, we will have to see how things pan out over the next 8 weeks or so.