The new Dell Studio 15 arrives

Today I just got my new Dell Studio 15. I always had meant to document what is was like using Ubuntu for the summer, but I never really got around to it. So what I'm going to do is document what it takes to get this Dell into a usable state. If something is really glaring, I will try and contrast it to Ubunto/Linux.

The machine came with a nice large stack of disks for reinstalling the OS/Drivers and anything else you can think of. It also had a little insert that instructed the user to head over to http://support.dell.com to update the existing files and drivers. So after turning on the machine and answering a couple of question and then waiting and waiting for the inital configuration, I point the browser to the support address. Now as many people have mentioned before, Vista has a really annoying habit about asking you before it does almost anything. And the Dell site in particular gets this message all of the time. Worse yet, after follow the instructions, you just get a list of a bunch of different drivers and programs. It doesn't even tell you which ones need to be updated. Huh? Score one for Linux on this one. Most programs are easily update via a simple command. I decided to skip this step for now.

This is not really a how to, but more of a reminder to me if I have to do this again.

Time elapsed: 40 minutes. Jeez.

Next time to install useful software and ditch some of useless MS programs.

1. Download and install Firefox
   
2. Install my favorite extensions: Firebug, Flashblock
3. Download and install Thunderbird (not the greatest email program but better than some)
4. Lightening extension for Thunderbird and provider_for_google. This does a real nice job of syncing up all of your calendars. I guess windows live supports this as well, but I am still trying to stay away from proprietary S/W when possible.
5. Copy profile data from linux to vista. Vista puts things in an oddball place, but basically you copy ~/mozilla/.firefox/*.default to /home/{user}/AppData/Roaming/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles. You then need to edit profile.ini to point to your mailbox. whew! For some reason my calandar didn't really come over correctly, so I had relink those with my Google calanders.
   
6. Do the same for firefox.

That's it for today. 2 1/2 hours plus typing this list. Just for that!

1. Install Stock Trading program - gotta be able to work tomorrow am!
   
2. Install Backup/Restore Program
   
3. Start Transfering Movies & Photos - I just let that run overnight.

That's it for now.

The Ubuntu Experiment - 3 months later

Well, I give up on my Ubuntu based Inspiron 6000. I tried to be good. I spent hours chasing down obscure work around to all of my problems, but in my line of work you almost have to have a PC. Why you ask? Here are a couple of reason's:

1) Most engineering programs only run on a PC now (and emulation by wine or VMWare is too much of a pain, I know, I tried).
2) I use many USB based emulators and interfaces that only run on a PC. This is even harder to get around than #1. Sometime even VWWare doesn't quite work.

Seriously, I can work around most of the problems, but sometime Ubuntu is just not co-operative. The other day my video driver just got really, really slow for some reason. Painfully. I spent way too much time chasing down the issue (It was related to going in and out of presentation mode).

So, I broke down and just went ahead and bought a new PC. I know it comes with Vista (yuck), but I get a free update to Windows 7 next month when it comes out. The final choice a Dell Studio 15 with a processor upgrade that supports virtulization (now I can virtualize Ubuntu). I expect the upgrade process is going to take way too much time.

The Ubuntu Experiment

For the third time since I bought this system, the hard drive has been corrupted to a state where I can not boot the system. This time I decided to take it to the local PC gurus to see if they could find out was wrong. No luck what so ever. However, I was able to use a Ubuntu USB stick to boot the computer and access all of my files.
Windows XP is just seriously broken. If my only solution is to completely reinstall the entire OS every 3 months, then I think it is time to look for a different OS. My only caveat is that I don't really want to buy a new PC at this time. Heck my existing PC is plenty powerful. So, I have decided to go ahead and install Ubuntu on my Dell Inspiron 6000. No PC, No Mac, just pure open source. I wonder how it will go?

Spring Cleaning

Boats Decay - constantly. The constant motion of the wind, tide and waves causes boats to disintegrate at an alarming rate.
When I first bought my boat, I had high ambitions to install all kinds of cool electronics gizmos on her. After all, we do what we know, and electrical engineers, which I am, like electrical gizmos. I was going to install a cool stereo with cockpit speakers and maybe a flat screen TV plus a cool chartplotter. And what about that wireless NMEA repeater I was going to design? That was five years ago.
Since I purchased her, I have been fighting a never ending battle against entropy. I've replaced the head (yuck) and replaced the head discharge hose (really yuck). I've replaced batteries, chargers, bits of wire, pins, flares, sails, rigging, furlers, zincs, raw water strainers and hot water heaters. I even manage to scratch one item off my wish list and replaced my busted stereo. All in all, I have a list of 127 items that I've futzed with.
In May of 2007 I quit updating the list. It's not that I've quit doing projects, I've just quit keeping track of them. I mean, what's the point when the list is infinite and growing? I was once stripping old varnish off of my bow sprit at the dock, and this couple walks by. She says to her companion, "I would just love to own a boat. I would just lie around and read all day." Sure.
Each year I've been trying to do a non-maintenance project. Last year I installed a furnace (which is awesome - it has really extended the boating season). During this process, I finally installed a circuit breaker for the windlass. Only I didn't hook it up (got busy) until this year when I started my annual spring boat projects. Now these projects have a little more urgency. My insurance company required me to get a boat survey. A boat survey is where you pay a guy to tell you all of the things that you already know are wrong with your boat. Then the insurance company sends you a nice note telling you that you really ought to fix the items on the survey or you won't be covered. You have two months. This may seem like a long time, but how big of a dent can you make in an infinite list in two months? Most of the items in the survey list are not on my list. Items such as #12: No Bell - required for vessels of 12 meters or more. Okay, my boat isn't over 12 meters, so what is the problem? Or how about #13 - No Day Shape. For those that don't know, a sailboat is required to fly a conical day shape, apex downward when under power (72 COLREGS Rule 30) & a vessel at anchor shall exhibit where it can be seen an all-round white light or one ball. I don't know about you, but I have never seen either of these shapes outside of a coast guard rule book. Next time you are at the book store, check out your sailing magazine. See any day shapes. And why is this a condition of insurance?
I digress though.
This year's non-maintenance project was to hook up the hot water heater to the engine. Imagine nice hot showers while at anchor. I did hook up the heater and found yet another problem - a broken motor mount. No one else noticed it, and I suspect it is more important than that inverted cone. After I fix that, I'm going to work on those speakers.

From 2009_03_20 - Boat Works

CDROM Blues

As I get older, I keep on leaning closer and closer to my monitor trying to look at the tiny little letters. Now my laptop has 1920x2000 resolution on a 17” screen, so these letters are pretty darn small. My solution was to buy an external monitor. After a little research I bought a new monitor, a Samsung BW245BW. Of course, I went overboard and bought a huge 24” monitor for my desk. Did I mention that this thing is huge? I think I was unprepared as to how big this puppy was. Now I have to sit back about 5 feet just so I can see the whole thing.
But I digress. What I really wanted to talk about was what happened when I tried to install the supplied software. I dropped the CD into the CDROM drive and the drive stared spinning and making a really nasty grinding noise. Bzzz, click, click. “Uh ho,” I thought, “dead drive.” After trying this a couple of times and even rebooting my system, I decided to inspect everything a bit more closely I realized that the CDROM was warped. You don’t see this everyday; however, I did not despair and went to Samsung’s website and downloaded all the necessary files. All is good … or so I thought. A couple of days later I am trying to play a DVD on my computer and my PC is barely able to playback the DVD. In fact the PC is running very, very slowly. Okay, maybe a virus or something. Reboot, do some scans … nothing. Hmm, what else could it be? After digging around a bit, I check on the DMA settings for the CDROM and boom it is set at PIO (Programmed I/O). This mode uses the computer’s processor to move the data and is extremely slow. Why did this happen? Well it turns out Window’s XP will change the DMA setting to PIO if it has lots of DMA failures on the CDROM. The bummer is that you can’t change it back without going through some hoops.

How to tweak your DMA

First see if you are in PIO mode. You will want to open the device manager. There are lots of ways to do this. One way is to select Start->My Computer then right click and select properties. You will get the following window.



Select the Hardware tab and then Device Manager.



Next expand the IDA ATA/ATAPI controller item and pick the IDE channel that your CDROM is on. On most systems this is on the Secondary channel. Right click and select properties.



Now select Advanced settings and Make sure that the Transfer mode says DMA if available. If it says DMA then this channel is probably okay and you can check the other channel if you like. If it is stuck on PIO only and cannot be changed then you have to fix things. Go ahead and hit the cancel button.



Again, there are a couple of ways to fix this, but since you have the Device manager up and running, you can just right-click on the Secondary IDE Channel leaf again and select uninstall. After you uninstall the device, then you reboot your system. Windows auto-discovery will find the CDROM and DMA channel again and should reset everything. You can re-open the Device Manager to verify that everything is working.

Just gotta love windows.

Cloning is not all it is cracked up to be

Well I finally gave up on the clone. I mean, there was just too much damn junk on that drive. After about two years, windows just gets cranky and I think the best thing to do is just reinstall it from scratch. My version of windows didn't have any problem trying to access my 180GB drive. The biggest down side is that it took forever to download all of the updates. Most updates needed a reboot, so this process took several hours. After windows was loaded I had to go through the same procedure with Office. Fun. Next I tried getting all of my email settings up and running while also restoring my outlook.pst file. This was a bit of a pain in the ass, and required me to reinstall my old hard drive and run the Microsoft Office Save My Settings Wizard. This application is buried in the Microsoft Office Tools directory. The application created a file that I was able to import into my new version of Office. This mostly worked, except when I click on the To.. button when I try to send an email I get an error message. I haven't debugged that quite yet. Really, It is on the list.
The Dell Inspiron 6000 that I bought had a bunch of pre-installed software on it as well. There is really no way to recover these applications. Dell puts all of these applications on an install partition. In the future I will keep a copy of this partition. However, I wouldn't be surprised if they changed this method for Vista. Most of the software can be downloaded from their web site. There a couple of things that you can't get, but It is not really a big deal.
My next step has been to slowly reinstall applications. For drivers, I usually download the latest from the web and install that instead of the original disk. So far the biggest pain has been quicken. Unfortunately, I upgraded quicken via some wonky online mechanism, so I don't have the original disks. There is a way to do this by calling quicken if you registered. It is really a pain. This is probably a good time to look at other alternatives again.
In general, I am only reinstalling a program if I need it. So far, the system is running much faster and seems to be happier.

Hard Drive Upgrade

Ahh, it is that time of year again, the snow is falling, the wind is blowing and my Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop's hard drive seems to be full. So after continually removing junk files, compressing stuff that I didn't need, and watching my system just get slower and slower, I decided to upgrade my drive from 80 MB to something larger.

The Drive
I checked out several drives but decided on a 160GB drive from Samsung to replace my existing Fujitsu drive. Some older posts suggest that this drive is too large for Windows XP, but if you read around a bit, any install with SP2 or greater will support this drive. Even if you have an older install disk, you can still install Windows XP on it, upgrade to SP2 and then use a repartition tool to resize the disk to 160GB. Before you start go ahead an get a USB hard drive enclosure. Do your self a favor and spend the extra $20 for a nice one. I chose a USB/Firewire combo drive from Macallay: The Macally Firewire/USB enclosure

To Clone or Not to Clone
I have had this drive for a couple of year, so it has a bunch of junk on it. Plus it has been attacked at least a couple of times by spyware. So I was thinking that I wanted to do a brand new install of Windows XP from scratch. Now the Del Inspiron 6000 that I had did not come with any system disks. It had a system disk builder that I used to create a cdrom with a full windows installation. So after removing the new 160 GB drive from the USB enclosure and swapping it for my old 80 BG drive in the laptop, I was ready to go. Now I start the installation process ... ho hum. This really takes a long time ... almost an hour! Yikes. But we aren't done yet, because now we have to load 68 updates. This takes another several hours of just waiting and then rebooting and download some more and rebooting. Okay, the OS is now installed, but wait, not everything I really wanted was there. Some of the old utilities that came bundled with the system are long gone. Hmm. Okay, no problem just go out to there web site and download them. So I download and downloaded. Install update, reboot. I think I'm about 5 hours into the process and the system looks okay. Now I have to install Office and a bunch of apps. Jeez this is taking forever. Now to restore the data (did I mention that I actually back up all of my data?). This takes another hour since the data is on a backup server. Hey, my backup software requires a key to make it work. Where the heck did I put that key. Oh, I think it is in an email on my backups. So I put the old 80 GB drive back in the sytem, boot it and retrieve some information that I needed, like keys. Okay, swap the drives around. Boot again. Now everything should be cool. Right? For some reason I couldn't restore Outlooks mail server settings. All of the email was there, but no settings. Where does Outlook store that? The hell with it I will just reenter the 10 mailboxes that I have set up. Damn, can't find the password for one of them. I guess I will do it later. Now that seems like it is happy. Hmm, maybe I want to watch a video over Netflix tonight, the video is all Technicolor on me.
Okay, at this point I am really rambling on. I've already wasted two days on this stupid project and the system still isn't the way I like it. I have restored systems from scratch before, but this time it is really a big pain in the ass.

Just Clone It
Now I am just tired of futzing with the damn thing. Next step is just to clone the damn thing and get back to work. So now I move the 80 GB drive back to the laptop, the 160 GB drive back to the enclosure and download a copy of XXCLONE. This slick little utility creates a bootable clone from from your system drive to a second drive. Just install the software, pick the USB drive as your target disk and let it fly.