More screen real estate

I decided to purchase a new monitor to go with my new graphics card (see last month's post). My DELL 19" standard aspect screen was nice, but with the prices of the 22" widescreen models dropping to the £150 mark, it was too tempting. The reviews (Pcpro and online) indicated that the DELL 22" E228WFP Widescreen LCD Black Flat Panel Monitor was a wise choice even when priced much higher.

Anyway it arrived yesterday and a small monitor shuffle took place and the loser was an old DELL 15" LCD that I used of my test system (already sold for £50). The new monitor is impressive and I don't notice any decrease in frame rates when playing games even though it must me moving more pixels around. The big difference is the increase in screen real estate! The Windows Sidebar is now really off to the side and my two columns of desktop items seem almost lost on the left hand side. Great display too,

Measuring responsiveness 2

Two things reminded me about computer responsiveness recently, one from a long time ago and the other just today. Over 30 years ago, I used to program real-time flight simulators being responsible for fuel, electrical and hydraulics systems. There was no operating system to speak of, just an ‘executive’ program that controlled the time-slices in milliseconds that each program had to compute its results within. If you didn’t finish within your allocated time-slice too bad; you were just cut off. So if your fuel calculation wasn’t completed and the fuel gauges weren’t updated, the engines never ran out of fuel and the aircraft weight remained constant. Ultimate responsiveness, you moved the flight control and the aircraft moved precisely as it should in the real world without any hesitation. No mice to click on, or cursors to watch, it just happened!

I had to edit a home video today. I chose my powerful gaming computer but quickly realised that for all its powerful processor, great memory capacity and cavernous hard disk the editing session was stuttering and painful. Something was going wrong here, but I couldn’t be bothered to find out what it was. I suspected the video card drivers, but they worked well with the 3D games I played, so I was reluctant to change them. I moved the video clips to the small HP server (see previous blogs) and sure enough every thing worked quickly and responsive. Even though the system specification was below the gaming system, apart from the striped RAID hard disks.

In both these examples it was the environment and the task that determined the responsiveness of the system, not the performance and capabilities. So why are some systems so much more responsive if raw performance and resources have nothing to do with it? And how can you measure this?

Measuring responsiveness 1

I'm interested in trying to measure the responsiveness of computer systems. This was because I'm amazed at the apparent quickness of my old DELL Dimension 4550 (2.53GHz Pentium 4, 1Gb DDR memory with Windows XP SP2)which I use for email, web browsing, Word, Excel, Sage bookkeeping, web designing and other administrative tasks. Yes, I know it is over five years old and needs replacing but it still works well and seems reallyresponsive often with many windows open and applications running.

I install quite a few new DELL systems with various configurations and you have to beef them up a bit with the faster Core 2 Duo processors and at least 2Gb of memory before they appear to be just as responsive as my old DELL. So I started to research how to measure responsiveness and discovered very little in the way of research or benchmarks. The closest is Futuremark's PCmark which at least simulates normal use of a computer and times the various operations. However, it still seems very CPU oriented.

Thirteen years ago I had an Intergraph TD-3 workstation with two Intel Pentium 90MHz processors and a SCSI disk drive running Windows NT. That was a very responsive system. You could even continue to work on it while it was printing or formatting a floppy disk. Today multi-core processors seem essentially linked to fast response. This means that when you double click a desktop icon the first time a window opens immediately with the respective application's menu structure and your document or data displayed within it, ready for your attention. A slow response gives three blank windows (because you ended up hitting the icon three times), the hard disk light comes on continually and the system grinds away trying to fill in the boxes.

Wedding

The lack of recent posts to this blog is for a real good reason. Just over a week ago my son got married in Holland to a wonderful girl. It was a really enjoyable time and everything was perfect. They were married in a famous Dutch castle which is in the village where we once lived. He was born, raised and schooled the the village so it was great to back and see him married there. The receptions were in the bride's village and then in a chateau nearby.

Weather was beautiful, just right for the photos and to drive the open-top Aston Martin car that he used for the day. The families got on really well, had a great dinner together and then partied until the early morning. We stayed a few days as well and even watched Holland lose at football to the Russians in Euro 2008.

Since getting back, I've obviously been very busy, but will start to think and write about my experience in this blog.

PSUs do matter

I've had a busy week and one of the many things I had to do was upgrade a gamer's graphics card. An hour later I received a telephone call that the PC had 'blown up' with a load bang, tripped the domestic circuit breaker and caused the owner to spill his cup of coffee.

I'd checked that the card was acceptable for the 350W power supply as stated on the box, but obviously with the 3.4GHz Pentium 4 and two WD Raptor drives had taken more power than was available. I'd replaced the PSU in the last year so it wasn't old and filled with dust. Luckily, further investigation had shown that the other components had not suffered in the massive electrical trauma.

I installed a 500W quality PSU that cost almost three times the original one, and I trust that the gamer will continue to play for many happy hours. He certainly likes the new graphics card, but wishes that the explosions were not so close. So I'll remember to upgrade the PSU as well, when I upgrade the graphics.

That HP server that could

Following my disappointment at trying to create a gaming system from a cheap HP Proliant ML115 server, I've persevered in trying to improve the system. So I have removed 512Mb from my new DELL server to increase the HP's memory to 1.5Gb, installing a Creative Audigy SE sound card and finally adding a proper gaming graphics card, the Sapphire Radeon HD3850. Plenty of room in the small chassis to fit these and plenty of power from the PSU as well.

Amazingly this has improved the potential somewhat. The quiet graphics card has not increased the noise level which though not silent, is subdued for a games PC. The graphics performance of this card are also great for a mid-price model. The disk RAID sub-system performance is now increased to over 110Mb/s. The computer is much more responsive and able to handle today's games such as Crysis, Company of Heroes and Flight Simulator X.

Altogether it gives a quality feel. A small box which can handle most games that you throw at it and has become something that I can sell with confidence. Not as cheap as I originally envisaged but fair value for money and a configuration that I'm happy with.

Thank you AVG

Grisoft's recent announcement to end support and updating of AVG Free 7.5 has lead to a surge of business for me. For years now I've been loading AVG Free on people's computers (and also removing Norton in its many guises), telling them that it is better and free as well. So now they are all calling me asking what they should do.

To be fair, I've been emailing instructions on how to remove the old version then download and install the new version (with telephone support), pay the upgrade cost to the complete version or arrange an appointment for half an hour to do it for them. Most people have taken the later option causing me to travel around Basingstoke for many short appointments. Saying that of course when you are there I can also fix the printer, email, broadband, slowness, etc.

So thank you Grisoft, and I'd appreciate it if you don't make this occurrence happen too often as it creates a lot of work for me. Good money though, even for you as quite a few have taken the complete upgrade solution.