Posts Tagged ‘hardware’

SATA 3.0 Standard Official

The Serial ATA International Organization has made its third generation of the SATA standard official. SATA 3 boasts a 6Gbps theoretical transfer rate from the storage controller to the storage device. Hardware manufacturers have already implemented some of the draft versions of the standard, so real world support should be soon to follow. While this new SATA standard doubles the amount of throughput on the line, traditional drives aren’t nearly fast enough to make use of this newly found speed. The new standard does contain a newer implementation of NCQ to allow SATA devices to make use of queuing optimizations, but the biggest improvement will be in drives with higher RPMs or solid state disks.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : May 27th, 2009

A Little Taste of What It’s Like

Converts from Windows Vista to XP may be getting a bit of a taste of what it has been like to be a Linux user. I heard a story from an acquaintance the other day of how his laptop didn’t run Windows Vista very well, so he decided to downgrade to Windows XP. Unfortunately, the drivers for the disk controller weren’t included in Windows XP and were only included with Vista. That isn’t a huge problem, one can usually get drivers for machines directly from the manufacturer’s site (in this case HP). Unfortunately, to install the drivers at Windows installation time, one needs to throw the driver onto a floppy drive and this was a laptop. The only solutions that I could come up with were 1) buy or borrow a USB floppy (not sure if that would work or not), or 2) slipstream the driver into the Windows XP installation CD. I’ve done step 2 and know for a fact that it will work, but it’s also a lot of work to do. Plus, one needs a working Windows installation to do it. Thus, begins a long, complex process just to get a fresh installation of Windows XP working on a laptop. My, how the tables have turned..

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Apr 28th, 2009

Sharing Printer from Ubuntu to Mac OS X

Quite often we read about how small things are so much more complicated on Linux than on Windows. I set out on a journey today to add a printer via USB to my Ubuntu desktop and share it out to my MacBook at my new apartment. If there’s one thing in this sick, twisted world that I hate, it’s printers.

Given that background, I was shocked at just how easy it was to setup the printer, share it out, and connect to the shared printer using my Macs and other Linux machines on my home network. The printer that I worked with was just a cheap inkjet – an HP Deskjet D2330. I had a heck of a time with the driver for OS X directly connected, so I wasn’t expecting much. I plugged in the USB cable and voila, my Ubuntu desktop popped up a message that the printer was ready to rock. I opened up OpenOffice.org and printed out a doc just to make sure my desktop wasn’t just playing with my heartstrings. Sure enough, it printed my doc just fine.

Now, on to sharing. Doing a little poking around in the GUI, I found the printer configuration at System -> Administration -> Printing. Under the policies, the “Shared” check box was checked, so I popped open the System Preferences on my MacBook and tried to add a printer. I couldn’t find the printer in any of the discovered list. A quick Google search reminded me that the CUPS configuration web GUI could be found at: http://localhost:631 when CUPS was installed and running. I navigated to the page and found the check box called “Share published printers connected to this system”. I checked it and clicked “Change Settings”. When prompted to authenticate, I used my desktop login username and password.
cups-config

When I flipped over to my MacBook, I opened up System Preferences again, added a printer and there my printer was. I clicked add and it was ready to go within moments.
add-shared-printer-osx

After my successes on my MacBook, I decided to press my luck just a bit more by adding my Linux laptop as well. On my laptop, I run Xubuntu 9.04 and it was almost as easy to setup. I just opened the printer configuration window via Applications -> System -> Printing and clicked on the new printer button. The Xubuntu machine scanned for printers on the network, discovered my printer and added it. I can’t say I’ve had nearly that smooth of an experience adding any sort of printer to Windows.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Apr 27th, 2009

Mac vs. PC: How Well Does It Age?

Yesterday I took a look at a ridiculous study sponsored by Microsoft which supposedly showed how PCs had a much lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than Macs. The study was completely unfair towards the Mac, but there’s another factor that wasn’t taken into consideration either: how well the computers held their value when they aged. The writer of the study assumed that the PC and the Mac could be useful for 5 years before being replaced. However, do Macs and PCs age just as well?

It only took me a few minutes to think about 5 year-old machines that I and others that I know use. Five years ago, I started college and was issued a Gateway M275 laptop. The laptop is a tablet PC and at the time its retail value was estimated at $1600. The laptop now is somewhat usable, though it leaves quite a bit to be desired. Most of my problems with it are cosmetic, though the hard drive and processor speed is pretty limiting. It runs Windows XP all right, and the lighter Linux distros pretty good.

I also have a friend who owns an iBook G4, which was made around the same era. One can track this via MacTracker, and the value of the machine when it was made in early 2004 was $1099. The laptop runs OS X Tiger, which is a release newer than the OS that it originally shipped with, unlike the PC. The laptop does plenty for what this person needs to be able to do.

While both do fairly well for really basic tasks like e-mail, web browsing, etc., the resale value of these computers is drastically different and a factor in calculating the TCO of the computers. The best price I could find for a used Gateway M275 was on eBay with a “Buy it now” price of $225. For an iBook G4, a used iBook G4 at 800Mhz on Amazon, the same as the 2004 model, at a price of $357. That’s 14% of the original retail value of the PC and 32% the original price of the Mac. That has to be taken with a grain of salt, since I’m comparing only two very specific models, but it does seem to be the trend that older Macs are worth much more at resell time than older PCs. While the cause of the drop in value could very well be a much larger supply of used PCs, the reality is that the value seems to be higher.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Apr 16th, 2009

Mac vs PC: A real comparison

Microsoft is revving up its FUD engine once again. This time in the form of a whitepaper that supposedly outlines some of the TCO differences between Macs and PCs. The comparison was done by a Microsoft consultant and is laughably flawed in its comparison. There’s several flaws, including the absence of antivirus software on the Windows PC, the inclusion of MobileMe every year (an optional service), and the inclusion of the cost of Office for Mac as well as Quicken in the Apple computers’ costs, but not for the PC. The machines were also not sized appropriately to compare.

I tried to even up the score as much as possible, though there are lots of variables that one has to take into consideration. I’ll avoid the apples to oranges jokes, but it really is tough to compare the two. I modified the spreadsheet that Mr. Kay created to accommodate for the following: using appropriate software to compare the platforms (i.e. iWork on the Mac and Office on the PC), evened up the warranties, and took out some extraneous hardware upgrades (in my opinion). Keep in mind through this comparison that I’m comparing a single pair of specific models of computers to each other. This may change drastically if one changes vendors, I simply chose the same vendors as the original study.

The laptops compared in the original study were a baseline MacBook with a Dell Inspiron 15. The Inspiron 13 was much closer to the specs of the MacBook as well as the same screen size. I had to modify RAM on both (the Windows PC offered 3GB of RAM while the MacBook didn’t), upgraded from Vista Basic to Home Premium, added a webcam to the Dell and upgraded the hard drive on the MacBook to match up. After they were brought to similar specs, the Dell was still significantly cheaper, but rose a lot more than the MacBook in price. The Inspiron left a lot to be desired in the graphics card, but Dell didn’t offer an upgrade for that model.

For the desktop, the Mac Pro really didn’t stack up to the same price as the HP. I chose to use the bottom-end iMac. It has a 20-inch screen with a 2.66 Core 2 Duo, the same processor as the HP. I upgraded the desktop to match the specs of the iMac and had to go to 4GB of RAM to compare as well as 640GB hard drives as that was the lowest common value for each model. I also had to add a 20-inch widescreen monitor to the HP to account for the fact that the iMac comes with a monitor built-in.

Since they are trying to do a true “Mac vs. PC” comparison, I decided to use Microsoft Office Standard for the PC and Apple iWork on the Mac for a productivity suite. I also assumed that Office and iWork both update once in the 5 years, the same as the study suggests (only we must have pirated Office for the PC in the original study).

On the PC side, I added NOD32 antivirus. I spent $60 every two years for subscriptions and $40 for the last year. Antivirus doesn’t change much in price unless you go with a free antivirus, but that was the vendor I chose. I also assumed an OS X upgrade family pack as well as two copies of Windows Vista Home Premium upgrades as well.

Here’s what I came up with:

mac-vs-pc-chart1

I also included the graph for comparison (orange is Mac, blue is PC):

mac-vs-pc-graph1

One thing that I did take out of consideration was an upgrade to the video card after a few years. A huge limitation of the iMac is that the video card is built-in and there’s no upgrading. If you are a hardcore gamer, then the iMac is probably not for you. In fact, a five-year-old PC probably isn’t salvageable, either.

Conclusion

I was actually quite surprised by how close the two prices actually were. According to the two brands that I compared, the TCO wasn’t much different between the two after 4 years, but with the assumptions that were made, the TCO starts looking much better for the Mac after 5 years. Of course.. thanks to Dilbert, we all know how accurate estimates like these are..

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (3) : Apr 15th, 2009

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