Windows 10, yay :)

One year after ditching Windows 10 I have bitten the bullet and put together a new system to run it. It becomes more difficult as time goes on, for various reasons, to buck the shift to Win10, but having had to take this challenging step, it still won't be the main computer that I do most of my work on everyday. And having made that decision to have it as the operating system for the token Windows computer in the household, the question has then naturally been whether to keep running it on a crippled low-spec system or to find something better. 

That something better is a new Gigabyte GA-H110-S2H Skylake motherboard with the low-end Intel H110 chipset, a low-end Pentium G 4400 dual core CPU, and 8 GB of DDR-4 RAM. I have put into it one of the existing NVidia NV210SL low cost dual head graphics cards that I had for my computers; and although it uses a low spec chipset it is still capable of having 32 GB of RAM installed. So having mentioned previously that there was this problem with a computer called a DG41RQ that I built about five years ago, I obviously wanted to be sure this computer wasn't going to have the same limitations as that lemon. The pair of GA-E350s that I bought have been limited as well, but I had more of an appreciation of their restrictions at the time when I purchased them. They have achieved a lot considering they were just put together to give me a basic system I could use as a remote access client and some other low demand stuff at work. Unfortunately it has turned out that they don't support virtualisation properly and that has always been an important issue. There is no way in the last 10 years I would have bought a system that didn't support virtualisation because these days most hypervisors of any sort (including software based systems like VirtualBox and VMWare, as well as baremetal hypervisors like Hyper-V) require it installed especially for 64 bit clients. There is also the issue that AMD has dropped support for the video chipset in the E350s - having phased the chipset out of production they stopped making new drivers as quickly as they could.

So with this new system I expect it will be good for 10 years because I don't like forking out for new hardware when there are plenty of better things to spend money on and having three computers on my desk, when they all have relatively high specs, is hard enough to justify. Because the Intel H110 chipset and the Pentium G CPUs may be considered somewhat low spec (and certainly low in cost) but in actuality have heaps of performance, especially with 8 GB or more of RAM installed. It's running Windows 10, which is more efficient with hardware resources than some of its predecessors. And it won't be running a lot of intensive demanding software because those kinds of tasks happen on my main PC with its 24 GB of RAM. The choice of the H110 chipset and Pentium G are based on my contention that the pricing for a lot of computer hardware such as Core i3, i5 or i7 CPUs is outrageously high for the extra performance they supposedly bring, and lots of people are conned into paying for these models of CPU that they will never use the extra power of. 

The Win10 edition is Pro, and that is what I will use for the long term. Installation was quite pain free, and it is the latest release version, so it hasn't had to put in many updates so far. It will take me a few days to set everything up on it and transfer the data from the old Win8.1 installation. But it looks good already.

Android desktop options

So after my last post I have had a play with Android x86 on the Linux PCs with very mixed results. Quite why Facebook finds it difficult to support the desktop / browser based version of Instagram with the ability to post images is hard to fathom considering how well they have made Facebook work on the browser (better than a lot of apps) and clearly the only reason Facebook bother continuing to support Instagram is to ward off competition in the mobile app marketplace.

The biggest issue with Android x86 is that the developers have given it a landscape orientation by default and Instagram will auto rotate this into portrait which means you actually have to have a screen you can physically rotate or have hotkeys to turn the screen sideways itself. That is partly the reason I have wanted to run it on Windows where the hotkeys are well supported. I am not sure about Linux support for screen rotation hotkeys. Androidx86 has some hotkeys that will sometimes rotate the screen, sometimes not. So turning the screen or pressing the screen rotation hotkeys seem to be the only realistic options.

The other option is if the developers come up with something that will allow you to choose a landscape orientation by default. I have also tried this with changing video modes but wasn't able to find something that the version of Android itself could cope with so I guess I will be talking to them to see what can be done. Obviously I am quite keen to be able to post in Instagram from my PC without all this having to switch to a handheld to post on IG. But there are pros and cons to the different approaches and I have got around it up to now by composing the posts in Google Docs and then pasting that on the phone. And that approach does have its advantages particularly as you can review the document's character count which has to be held under 2200.

At any rate upgrading the Windows PC will go ahead, and I think putting Windows 10 on it is a highly likely outcome as well. Having Windows 10 means I will also have to buy a Pro license for it sooner or later since I have to migrate off using schools' licenses at some point. Whether the Windows computer when upgraded is going to be good enough with Androidx86 is something still to be tested out. Right now I am going to be probably keep using a handheld with Google Docs composition on the PC which has been very productive (and transferring images using Bluetooth). It is not really that hard and almost makes it unnecessary to have Androidx86 considering the hassle involved with that platform.

Android emulation options

A little while back I wrote about trialling a couple of Android emulators. BlueStacks and LeapDroid were the Windows ones that I tried out, Leapdroid being better. I then decided a tablet was a better option for Android and also reinstalled Windows to discover Leapdroid had been pulled by its developers and can no longer be downloaded.

There is a third option and that is a package called Android-x86, which is an open source effort to produce a version of Android that can run on x86 hardware. It is generally recommended that it be run only on virtual machines, but it does have a number of issues with things like screen rotation that make it easier to run on a second (or in my case third) computer because the easiest way to resolve the screen rotation issue is simply to physically rotate your screen and in fact until recently I actually had the Windows computer's screen rotated into Portrait mode all the time. 

The problem with that computer is that it is too slow. I bought several years ago, a pair of Gigabyte Mini-ITX boards (GA-E350) as a cheap way of getting some extra computers I could use to do my work. These have an integrated AMD "Bobcat" E350 CPU which is probably really a Geode or MediaGX or something under the hood, a low power onboard chip with a small fan. They do quite well for basic use of web browsing or whatever but have turned to be really slow at a lot of other things. I am now discovering their limitations on a daily basis. Whilst one of these computers would be powerful enough to run the Android emulator, the problem is that the Bios doesn't support x64 hardware virtualisation properly (it might be able to fix it with a Bios update, but I know I updated one of them and still couldn't get it to detect properly) which means VirtualBox has to run VMs in slower KVM paravirtualisation and this seems to be extremely slow (the VM first time boot was left running for at least half an hour and never actually completed).

So I will look at upgrading this system to a low-end Skylake board and Pentium G CPU. I could get these both together for about $200. Then 8 GB of DDR4 memory would come in at about $100, so with all the bits I have lying around, upgrading that system for about $300 looks like a reasonable proposition. It's disappointing I have these computers that just aren't powerful enough any more. The two E350s have both had 8 GB of RAM put in them to try to get them to go faster, and this is one of the few times this option didn't work. I would say that made almost next to no difference in fact. The case for upgrading this computer will take a while to justify but I think it will happen in a few months from now, but it will give me a computer with at least five years of useful life. In fact apart from disks or other things wearing out, my guess is I wouldn't need to spend any more money on computers over the next three years.

Video conversion with Handbrake

When it comes to video conversion then Handbrake has to be up there as a FOSS package that is produced for a variety of platforms. Although it doesn't have a wide range of output formats (just MP4 and MKV) it is a high quality product that I have had no hesitation about installing on Windows and Linux and getting into for, in the first instance, converting a ripped DVD into something I can play on Linux easily.

The software is of a high standard and has had little trouble in outputting MKVs from VOBs without difficulty although you need to choose the right format and options because some of the encoding options can take a long time to operate. Identical settings (H.264 MKV 1080p 30) on a computer running Windows 8.1 on a Brazos embedded CPU and a Xubuntu 16.04 Pentium G dual core without hyperthreading (disabled in these low end Pentiums) resulted in a huge disparity in the encode time (even after adjusting for the hardware differences) and I can't help but wonder if the Linux version has some inherent performance advantages.

As some reviews note a strong feature of Handbrake is the presets that enable you to produce various output formats including phones and tablets, which is great if you are looking to produce videos that can be optimised for smaller formats, without wasting space. I may yet play with this to get more of the video clips I enjoy watching onto my tablet for the mobile worship experience that was really valuable last month when I was on holiday.

The initial task I gave to Handbrake with the DVD was set at the highest quality settings for MKV and did indeed excel at producing a great result and quite a lot smaller than the VOB that I fed into it. Great software and part of a growing number of free software packages of high quality for multimedia production on Linux.

Firefox quality still too variable

If you had seen my series of earlier posts on browser choices, you'd have seen that at one stage I was recommending Chrome over Firefox. Then later, I changed to recommending Firefox. Stability in Firefox for me has been in two areas:

1. Crashes of individual tabs

2. Websites failing to load completely or being very slow to load.

Mozilla seems to have trouble making a release of Firefox that doesn't have either of these problems. A new release will come out and every tab will start crashing on just about every website. Then another new release will come out and tab crashes stop, but now it keeps freezing when loading websites. This is hard to understand because I have tested the non-developer edition of Firefox with literally hundreds of tabs open, and it never missed a beat. Yet the current edition of Firefox Developer, which is supposed to be better (which in a lot of cases it is) than the regular edition of Firefox, struggles at times with only a dozen tabs, and that's when you know it's time to restart the browser.

When I adopted Firefox Developer as my core browser it was so I could run it across multiple PCs, some of which are resource constrained, and know there would be a reasonable user experience on the slower computers. Like a lot of people I am finding Chrome is a huge resource hog (and this is written on my gruntiest PC running Xubuntu with 24 Gigs of RAM). There have been a couple of times when I have wanted to switch back to Chrome because of the variable experience Firefox has offered. At the moment it is just hanging in there. Best thing at the moment is on this PC it can update (being the version from Ubuntu Make). Worst thing is not being able to install it on anything else running Linux at the moment and get an updateable version, because Ubuntu Make people haven't bothered updating their software for months.

UPDATE 01/2019: Firefox Quantum has become a lot more stable and is now my main browser. If I install it into my home directory, there is no problem with permissions for updating itself, the best part is I don't need to reinstall each time I reinstall Linux. On mainpc I'm using it with multiple user profiles.