Dual core systems

Spending the time as I do fixing people's systems, it is amazing how often these slow, old PCs are considered adequate for what they want to do. Typically an old Intel Pentium 4 class computer with just 512Mb memory and full 80Gb hard disk drive running Windows XP SP2 is a system that I have a half an hour to wave a magic wand and make it a speed demon.

Usually the adding some more memory, stopping all the programs starting up and removing old programs and temporary files is enough to make a noticeable improvement and a happy customer, who calls me back six months later to do it all over again. Doing this all day I then go back to my 'lean and mean' modern dual core CPU system which is immediately responsive and instantly reacts to my every click together with Virgin Media's 20Mbps broadband connection speed make me realise what modern computing is all about.

It seems that adding an extra CPU core or more plus 4Gb of memory and Windows 7 makes for a really responsive system the purchase price for which can be about £300+. A really impressive replacement of a five year old computer. It is difficult to describe and persuade people that in today's multitasking environments this is what they need.

The rise of the low-end graphic card -- Part 3

Continuing my quest to achieve stunning graphics performance for not much money, I have two more cards to report on. An XFX Radeon HD4650 (£39, 512Mb DDR2, 2,580 3Dmark06) and a Powercolor Radeon HD4770 (£55, 512Mb GDDR5, 12,400 3Dmark06). One a real duffer and the other a star!

The XFX HD4650 is a total under performing failure despite the company's claims that this is in fact an overclocked version. Their customer support was totally useless in determining the cause or offering to replace it. I usually buy this company's graphics cards, but not anymore.

I then tried the Powercolor HD4770 and what a difference; fast and quiet. It has replaced my previous favourite the PNY nVidia 9600GT (£45, 512Mb DDR3, 10,000 3Dmark06) as it is slightly faster and definitely quieter when not on full load. The thermostatically controlled cooling fan on the Powercolor HD4770 wins it for me.

DELL's fabulous XPS 8000

I was tasked by my nephew to choose a new gaming PC. Given the budget and performance objectives, I went about configuring various DELL models and even considered the 'build it myself' option. We decided on a DELL XPS 8000.

It arrived yesterday and was duly unpacked and tested. What a performer! A real 'bang for the buck' gaming system. The specification is:
- DELL XPS 9000 Studio
- Intel i7 860 2.8GHz quad core CPU
- 4GB 1333MHz DDR3 memory
- 640Gb 7,200rpm SATA hard disk drive
- DVD+/-RW optical drive
- nVidia Geforce GTX 860 with 896Mb GDDR5 memory graphics card
- DELL 20" widescreen monitor
- Logitech X230 2.1 speaker set
- Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium

Even though it is a relatively small mini-tower case with a conservatively rated 350W power supply, I still managed to shoehorn in and power the large nVidia GTX860 graphics card. The massive heatpipe cooled heatsink with dual fans keep the card cool and very quiet even under load.

The performance of the whole system is amazing, totally responsive and a gamer's dream system. I recommend it to anybody who wants a great PC gaming machine.

My real Microsoft Windows 7 arrived early!

The two copies of the genuine full version of Microsoft's new Windows 7 Home Premium that I pre-ordered from PCworld for just £45 each, arrived this morning! Three days early.

I certainly didn't expect them so soon as there is a threatened postal strike later this week and they were scheduled by Royal Mail, I expected them mid next week, if I was lucky!

I immediately opened one of the packages to see what was inside, and then to install the 64bit version on my chosen Windows 7 system:
- Chieftec Mesh case with 350W power supply
- Asus P5KPL-AM motherboard
- Intel's latest Pentium E6300 CPU overclocked to 3.2Ghz
- 4Gb Crucial PC6400 memory
- 500Gb Seagate 7200.12 SATA hard disk drive
- PNY nVidia GeForce 9600GT 512Mb DDR3 grahpics card
- DVD writer and DVD-ROM

Installation was a breeze with everything detected and working. I'll report what happens after a few days.

The rise of the low-end graphic card -- Part 2

Continuing my experiences with low-end 3D gaming graphic cards, it was time to raise the stakes slightly. I was tempted by the offer of an nVidia 9600GT card at a really low price.

The PNY Geforce 9600GT (£45, 512Mb DDR3, 10,000 3Dmark06) was on sale at PCworld for a short time so I grabbed one. A revelation when introduced as the true successor to the classic 6600GT it had great reviews. To me it offered almost twice the performance of my previous winner the nVidia 9500GT (£37, 512Mb GDDR3, 5,875 3Dmark06) for just £8 more.

It is a larger size card that requires an additional 6-pin power connection. It was almost silent, certainly quieter than the 9500GT. I discovered however that not all was as it seems. This version was a derivative of the original two year old design. An eco or lower power version that has a clock speed of just 600MHz instead of the original's 650MHz. Also the shaders and memory was clocked slightly lower. This obviously leads to lower benchmark figures, but still impressive for a cheap graphics card.

DELL's data saviour

A little known fact about the DELL Vostro 220 minitower PC is that is includes a very effective hardware RAID controller that can be configured to protect your data from hard disk failure.

This is very effective in providing small businesses with some measure of data protection at a minimum cost. For just the price of a second hard disk drive in fact. And no software costs at all.

To configure this order your DELL Vostro 220MT with dual hard disk drives of the same capacity or install a second SATA disk drive yourself. Before you install Windows XP or Vista, go into the BIOS setup (F2 key), select Standard CMOS Features and then change the SATA Mode option from AHCI to RAID. Save and exit, and then continue the Windows installation as normal.

When Windows is up and running, install the Intel Matrix Storage Application from DELL's Application and Driver CD or download the latest version from Intel's website. Reboot and run this application. You should be able to select the Data protection option which will setup the two hard disks in RAID 1 (mirror) and after a couple of hours will copy all your data over to the second drive. Of course you can also select Performance which will setup RAID 0 (striped) for a higher performance disk subsystem without any data protection.

DELL's salespeople and website fails to inform you of this fact that for the cost of an additional disk drive provides an essential data security feature. In fact DELL charge a ridiculous amount for that second disk drive often over £100 even for low capacity models. Remember as well mirroring disk drives with RAID 1 is no substitute for a full backup.

HAL is missing

No this is not a reference to the errant HAL9000 computer from 2001 A Space Odyssey, but the failure of Windows XP to boot with the following message: "Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: windows\system32\hal.ddl. Please re-install a copy of the above file."

Now when a customer gets this and the usual chkdsk doesn't fix it, it usually means a re-install of Windows over the existing version or a complete disk format and reload of the whole systems software and appplications. Both mean a fair amount of work, which is often difficult to justify on an old computer. So I looked for another solution.

This worked: boot the system into the Recovery Console and then reset the file attributes of boot.ini, if it exists so that you can delete it.
C:> attrib -h -r -s boot,ini
C:> del boot.ini

Then re-create it using the following:
C:>bootcfg /rebuild
selecting the Windows installation, give it a name and /fastdetect as the usual option. Finally reload the hard disk boot block with:
C:>fixboot

This will usually create a working boot.ini and the system will reboot normally. If not try to replace hal.dll from the Windows Setup CD-ROM by:
C:>expand d:\i386\hal.dl_ c:\windows\system32\hal.dll

In my case the boot.ini file was being repeatedly deleted by malware, so running Malwarebytes' Antimalware program fixed that too.

So that's how to open the pod bay doors!