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February 6, 2010 Budget Performance? Two words that seldom go together. We'll see. The story begins when Man Child's computer took a powder. A formerly decent running rig born with an AMD Athlon64 3800+ and a gig of memory, it is now found well beyond yesterdays news. Dropped on the bench with the simple words, "it died", the problem wasn't power supply, memory, video or drive so that left mainboard or cpu. For whatever experience counts, I'd lean towards mainboard but with no signs of life there was really no telling. It was truly dead. Moreover I no longer have a compatible CPU or mainboard to test against not that it mattered, replacement parts are unavailable save perhaps other peoples problems found on E-bay. One stop shopping at NewEgg found a just released E3400 2.6Ghz Intel Dual Core Celeron on the block for $60 and free shipping. I matched that with a freshly minted Asus P5KPL-AM mainboard at $55 and free shipping. Since the board supports dual channel memory configurations, I added two Kingston 1066Mhz HyperX 1GB DDR2 memory modules at $55... and free shipping. If you suspect I'm a sucker for free shipping you're right.  I didn't need to buy the memory. His old 1GB stick would have worked at its slower 667Mhz rating and I could have paired it with an identical module if 2GB total was desired and still obtained dual channel goodness. If money was all that tight I could have saved him $55. The operating system is Windows XP Media Center Edition that had always run well in a Gig. Man Child surfs the web and manages his portable media player via I-Tunes so any computer found in his employ lives a fairly stress free life. The kicker to this collection of parts is the amount of performance one gets for the money these days. NewEgg only listed a small smattering of dual core processors, the rest bastardized AMD tri-cores but mainly everything sold is quad-core now, with six and eight core either available for a price or right around the corner. Anyway, I have no problem with AMD although in this instance the cheap meat was based on Intel's 45 Nanometer process, is a stripped down Core2 design and overclocks big time, hence the memory modules. No word on the E3400 yet, but last years E3300 cranks to 3.4Ghz on stock cooling and 4.4Ghz with aftermarket (but still air) coolers so I'm told. Now I'm no big fan of overclocking and am generally dismissive, but a $60 dual core CPU that can be pushed to such speeds with so little effort is indeed compelling. For the record these are not your fathers Celerons. The Asus mainboard is not an over-clockers absolute favorite but does meet the basic requirements and indeed has a bios feature that lets you select predefined amounts up to 20% with the board taking care of the details. Beyond that you have to tickle individual settings yourself but 20% pushes the CPU over 3Ghz with memory speeds still within stock 1066 parameters. The front side bus of the E3400 like all in the E3000 series is 800Mhz which means we will push to 960 at +20%. The memory choice leaves lots of headroom as HyperX can also be pushed well beyond ratings. The Kingston HyperX memory modules where also on the Asus qualified vendors list meaning that SPD specified voltages and timings will be properly detected and set. At 5-5-5-15 stock, those settings can be reduced to 4-4-4-12 reliably enough, although in this instance I'm not sure it's worth the bother. Something to look at though. Time will tell if the repaired and upgraded system hits the door overclocked. Since Man Child is family from my own loins, I give myself more leeway to experiment than I do with paying customers. But beyond that, the overclock is hardly necessary since the (almost) cheapest processor we can buy today is 3X faster than the one being replaced. I haven't found a Passmark score on the E3400 yet, like I said it's brand spanking new but the E3300 sets the bar at 1693 while the AMD Athlon64 3800+ put up a comparative lowly 587. I'd guess the E3400 comes in about 1850 and the easy 20% OC pushing that over 2000 would indicate 4X improvement being obtainable. What is a bit sobering is how slow my collection of Turion's, Duron's, Sempron's, Celeron D's, P4's and Pentium M's are comparatively. About half of Man Child's Athlon64 CPU performance on average and some of the stuff I run here is in double digits, a couple pieces don't even rate. Hey, if it ain't broke don't fix it, but seriously. This shit doesn't even buy geek cred at the old folks home anymore. Sans video transcoding, the computers do what I ask acceptably enough and the video work is spread over three machines so it's not like I'm deprived or anything. Still, an ultra low power Intel 'Atom' 230 nails a Passmark score of 314 while the Atom 330 dual core variant hangs up a 631. Granted, these are not 'system' numbers but the only family fun box in the house that would come close to that is dead! Ok, I'm depressing myself. UPS says the parts arrive next Tuesday. • • • • • January 31, 2010 Updating Windows Live Messenger part II "Me So Horny" Microsoft, Busted After Non-Consensual Browser Sex! From part I After updating my older version of Microsoft Windows Live Messenger and specifically telling the installer that "NO" I do not want my default search engine to be Bing, or my homepage set to MSN, the program went ahead and made the changes anyway. And a bit more as I later found. Noteworthy that none of the changes noticeably took immediate effect although the changes were clearly evident on the next restart of Firefox. Effectively a browser hijack, it's hard to miss a homepage changed to MSN.  In the Firefox option tab I found this redirect. http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=69157 Then I noticed the default search engine had been changed to Bing.  But then I found Microsoft had gone one better and replaced the location bar default with Bing also. Now a mistyped address goes straight to Bing, overriding any previous operational functionality. The installer failed to mention this possibility.  Next we see that Microsoft has installed their "Choice Guard" plugin in Firefox. The purpose of this plugin is to disallow changes to Microsoft's reconfigurations. In this instance it would be considered an Anti-Choice Guard. If a person had actually opted for this, it would probably be the last such choice ever made in their browser. Considering that I specifically told Microsoft's Live Messenger updater/installer NOT to do this, I find it's inclusion rather specifically insidious.  As found it was set to uninstall on next reboot which it did, but none of the changed settings were restored to their previous state. We are left to wonder why this plugin was foisted upon the browser and an unwilling user in the first place. The location bar hijack was found inserted in the Firefox main configuration file.  Here we see where Microsoft reconfigured Firefox to intercept failed DNS lookups and redirect those to Bing as a search term, noted below: keyword.URL; http://www.bing.com/search?FORM=IEFM1&q= The Firefox default was Google. Below is the key restoration text. keyword.URL; http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q= In all candor, while this behavior by Microsoft is morally disgusting, it is not surprising. To the contrary it is all rather pervasively expected just as the legalese of their click through "Service Level Agreement" will contain language permitting or indemnifying such deceptive activity. In other words, we agreed to permit Microsoft to do this even when presented with choices to the contrary. I am reminded however, that just because a service level or end user license agreement may contain such language does not necessarily make it legal in fact. That is a matter for the court to decide if and when tested. My thinking in consideration comes down to a matter of trust. Could, our should we ever "trust' a corporation who would do such a thing to it's client base simply to inflate the usage statistics of that company's fledgling internet properties. Of course we have to ask ourselves if it would make any greater difference should the reasoning be found any less squalid. It doesn't. Microsoft is a company best represented by its actions, not its words. • • • • • January 30, 2010 Updating Windows Live Messenger Was chatting with Kenny B on the celly when the conversation turned to voice chat instead of burning minutes and batteries since the average conversation runs about an hour and a half depending, sometimes longer. Then today as I was clicking out an e-mail, remembered the voice chat item from the previous evenings conversation, clicked the link to Windows Live Messenger which was set up last I knew. As it turned out, the required upgrade process was logged in the email, multitasking being what it is. Below is the relevant part of that running commentary. That said, I do have Windows Live Messenger installed and working. ... Scratch that. I just started the program (been a while) and it says: "A newer version is available. You must install the newer version to continue. Would you like to do that now? [yes] [no]" with yes preselected, followed by [OK] and [What's New]." Of course this is not the end of the story, and yes, as it turned out there was sex involved. Stay tuned for part two, the continuation and conclusion. Hopefully. • • • • • January 29, 2010 Charter credits our account? As sent to the billing department via IM. On 12-19-09 I made a service request due intermittent internet connectivity. Maria accepted the explanation and removed the charge from our current bill, to be posted as such within 24 hours. It is refreshing not having to struggle with things like this. I don't know how routine such matters are for Charters billing department, but I certainly feel fortunate having noted the external maintenance and then being able to equate that to immediate improvement here, for it made the sequence of events easier to describe. That said, we are not out of the woods yet having already paid the bill that Maria has removed the charge from. Hopefully Charter will note the overpayment and credit that amount against February's statement. Something we need verify on the next bill as ample room for error remains dear prudence. So far, so good. • • • • • January 29, 2010 In Reference to Charter's Phone Service Does Charter Telephone® use Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology? But this does not necessarily mean that Charter doesn't use the same network connection and share bandwidth with the internet service. It's not clear. We could be talking VLAN for all I know. I'm also inclined to discount the "does not require an internet connection" statement. Internet is minimally HTTP protocol over a network connection and a cable modem is essentially a media converter and router. In similar vein, a Charter voice modem would be setting up a network connection even though it may use a different protocol to communicate. I would consider the voice system separate only if it used other frequency portions of available spectrum. As in a different channel allotment in this case. The fundamental question in my answers quest; was losing the cable internet equated to losing the telephone too? • • • • • January 28, 2010 Comments on the latest Firefox version 3.6 In addition to earlier comments, Firefox has been several days running without a reboot although the last couple days I've been hitting the browser as normal which is pretty hard. There was some slowness that creeps in when the machine gets low on resources that would normally require a reboot to clear. In that regard I'm happy to observe this latest version doe not fall off the cliff when challenged and while slow, has managed to stay responsive enough to be usable while finishing up open projects. Plus 1 Mozilla. Even better, a significant amount of performance has been restored by restarting the browser rather than a complete machine restart. This I would suggest, the result of much improved memory management such as the ability to recover from memory fragmentation that occurs when other programs reserve and release memory blocks in conjunction with the dynamic allocations the browser makes. Additionally, it does seem the new version uses less memory overall. I've read that out of process code is more intelligently buffered to disk now. For what has been done, it seems to have worked. The occasion of the browser restart was an alert stating that one of my previously non-functional since the upgrade extensions - "It's All Text" - had itself been updated and would become functional on the next restart. On a whim I downloaded a fresh copy of "Tab Mix Plus" and now that is also working again. In fact it recovered all the tabs that went missing when I installed the new version of Firefox. Outstanding! While picking up Tab Mix Plus, I did check for any bookmark sorting extensions available in the repository and found "SortPlaces" which seems the likely candidate. I've yet to try it and actually am now settled on the utility of my own design, but sorting bookmarks within Firefox looks like a problem already addressed by the community. So far Firefox 3.6 is meeting expectations and appears a worthwhile upgrade. • • • • • January 27, 2010 Saginaw Michigan Buys Carlton Jenkins This was going to be a good news day regardless since Apple was set to intro their new iPad touch screen tablet at the shareholders meeting, but then the Daily Snooze hit the porch and it got even better. Carlton Jenkins is leaving town! Such is our loss, the ever expectant miracle that is Carlton Jenkins has been promoted to Superintendent of Michigan's Saginaw School District. It's still a bit tentative since contract negotiations remain, but Jenkins sounds eager to meet and greet the greater challenge that we all trust Saginaw affords. Way to go Carlton!  Apple iPad: A Comprehensive Guide
3G Model Shown • • • • • |
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