July 20, 2022
New and improved benchmarks
While replacing the system battery in my HP Slimline 290, I added a 4 GB stick of Crucial DDR4 2400 MHz RAM and a 500 GB Samsung 980 NVMe SSD. The whole thing, including a CR2032 battery, an M.2 screw kit, and a Torx driver cost a little over $100 from Amazon (and Home Depot).
With 8 GB of RAM installed, memory usage while running all of my basic programs (Chrome, Word, Notepad++ and JWPce) fell in half to around 40 percent. More importantly, thanks to the dual-channel architecture, filling both banks of DDR4 RAM doubled memory throughput.
Doubling the RAM noticeably improved the overall performance of the system. But switching to an SSD is like upgrading from floppy disks to a HDD back in the day. Over ten times faster right off the bat.
With 8 GB of RAM installed, memory usage while running all of my basic programs (Chrome, Word, Notepad++ and JWPce) fell in half to around 40 percent. More importantly, thanks to the dual-channel architecture, filling both banks of DDR4 RAM doubled memory throughput.
I cloned the HDD drive using the Samsung Data Migration tool. After taking the recommended precautions—running chkdsk, deleting temporary files, and shutting down extraneous programs—it completed without a hitch. All I had to do was select the new boot drive in BIOS and I was ready to go.4 GB DDR4 RAM (2400 MHz CL17) Novabench 13015 MB/s WinSat 13313 MB/s 8 GB DDR4 RAM (2400 MHz CL17) Novabench 24106 MB/s WinSat 26737 MB/s
Doubling the RAM noticeably improved the overall performance of the system. But switching to an SSD is like upgrading from floppy disks to a HDD back in the day. Over ten times faster right off the bat.
500 GB Toshiba DT01ACA HDD (SATA 7200)
Write Read
Novabench 128 MB/s 133 MB/s
WinSat 115 MB/s
500 GB Samsung 980 SSD (PCIe 3.0 NVMe)
Write Read
Novabench 1467 MB/s 1047 MB/s
WinSat 1499 MB/s
500 GB Toshiba DT01ACA HDD (SATA 7200)
Write Read
Sequential 158 MB/s 158 MB/s
Random 216 IOPS 179 IOPS
500 GB Samsung 980 SSD (PCIe 3.0 NVMe)
Write Read
Sequential 1564 MB/s 1651 MB/s
Random 100341 IOPS 147705 IOPS
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Labels: computers, slimline, technology
July 13, 2022
Speeding up the Slimline
Doubling the RAM to 8 GB and adding a 500 GB SSD costs less than $100. Budget-wise, it's a no-brainer. Except I mostly run Chrome, Word, Notepad++, and JWPce (a Japanese text editor). With the unnecessary screen effects and background apps turned off, Windows 10 is surprisingly snappy.
(The first half of this video explains how to lighten the load with the standard Windows settings. The second half using the recommended utility didn't make as big a difference, perhaps because I'd already disabled many of the startup processes.)
The computer only bogs down noticeable when editing high-resolution cover art in Paint Shop Pro 2019. I don't do that very often so I wasn't in a hurry.
But then the system battery on the motherboard died, which resulted in a Groundhog Day moment. One day when booting up, I glanced at the login screen and said to myself, "Huh. I thought today was Friday." A minute later, the OS pinged the timeserver and it was indeed Friday.
YouTube comes in handy for jobs like this. HP has a how-to guide and David Noble did a how-to on the same model as mine. The one major obstacle, the drives cage, has to be removed to access the battery, RAM, and M.2 slots. The only unexpected variable here turned out to be the three Torx 15 screws.
As it turns out, Torx screws actually are easier to work with than Phillips ("plus") screwheads. Though I'd recommend adding a little piece of tape to the Klein driver to keep the bit from falling out of the holder.
Not counting dropping stuff (I forgot about the WiFi keyboard dongle and it popped off too), the whole job took less than 20 minutes. Honestly, the hardest part was replacing the battery. The RAM snapped right in as did the SSD. I did need this M.2 screw kit as one doesn't come pre-installed.
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Labels: computers, slimline, tech history, technology
July 06, 2022
The state of the solid state
Since the dawn of the PC era, the easiest way to give a consumer PC a boost (short of swapping in a clock-doubled CPU, as I did with my old Windows 95 machine) has been to add more RAM and a hard disk drive (HDD).
Though the technological world has completely changed in the past 40 years, that is still the case, except that HDD upgrade is now a solid-state drive (SSD).
The first IBM PC shipped with 64K of RAM and two full-height floppy disk drives, which ran at the blazing speed of "slow as mud." When buffering a print job, the floppy drives in my Kaypro II sounded like a washing machine in spin cycle.
The IBM XT released in 1983 was equipped with 128K of RAM and a 10 MB HDD. The 4.77 MHz 8088 CPU was the same, but the hard drive made a big difference. You could upgrade to 640KB of RAM but there weren't many options if you wanted a bigger HDD.
Unless you were willing to spend several boatloads of money. The 18 September 1984 issue of PC Magazine featured a 350 MB external hard disk system that could be yours for a mere $14,900 or approximately $50/MB.
That was actually a good deal. Two years earlier, Corona advertised a 10 MB HDD for $2495. By the end of the 1980s, the typical consumer HDD was 30 MB and prices had fallen to $10/MB, a respectable though linear decline in costs.
But in the decade that followed, something astounding happened. The capacity of the typical consumer hard disk drive rose to 20 GB while the cost fell a full three orders of magnitude to $.01/MB. That's a factor of 1000.
And then it happened again! A decade after that, 1 TB consumer hard drives were commonplace at $.0001/MB, two more orders of magnitude.
What happened was the discovery of giant magnetoresistance (GMR) in 1988 by Albert Fert and Peter Grunberg, for which they won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics. Their work led to the application of what became known as spintronics to HDD technology.
IBM began manufacturing MR HDD read/write heads in 1990 and GMR read/write heads in 1997.
As with CPU clock speeds, the "spinning rust" of the HDD is reaching its practical limits as a low-cost consumer technology. Over the last ten years, HDD prices have fallen only half an order of magnitude, stabilizing at about $.04/GB. About the cost of assembly.
I imagine that without the GMR revolution, the SSD would have evolved much faster. Like the internal combustion engine and the cathode ray tube, the amazing thing about the HDD is that it works at all, let alone as well as it does.
Even so, next-generation heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) and microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) hard drive technologies are being rolled out, guaranteeing the HDD will live on in data centers and the cloud.
As Jeffrey Burt puts it, the hard drive is the Mark Twain of technology. "Reports of its death are greatly exaggerated."
A comparable SSD costs around $.08/GB, about twice that of a HDD but still dirt cheap. So while the SSD is standard in portable devices, slapping a 500 GB HDD into a low-end PC like mine is still an easy way to increase the profit margin.
Then again, I recall the day I walked into Walmart and all the tube TVs were gone. Microsoft reportedly wants to hurry the process along and is pushing manufacturers to install an SSD as the boot drive in all PCs starting in 2023.
The day soon will come when, aside from the fan, the only moving parts left in the humble PC will be the DVD or Blu-Ray drive, until they too are relegated to the same niche as turntables and vacuum tube electronics.
Though the technological world has completely changed in the past 40 years, that is still the case, except that HDD upgrade is now a solid-state drive (SSD).
The first IBM PC shipped with 64K of RAM and two full-height floppy disk drives, which ran at the blazing speed of "slow as mud." When buffering a print job, the floppy drives in my Kaypro II sounded like a washing machine in spin cycle.
Unless you were willing to spend several boatloads of money. The 18 September 1984 issue of PC Magazine featured a 350 MB external hard disk system that could be yours for a mere $14,900 or approximately $50/MB.
That was actually a good deal. Two years earlier, Corona advertised a 10 MB HDD for $2495. By the end of the 1980s, the typical consumer HDD was 30 MB and prices had fallen to $10/MB, a respectable though linear decline in costs.
But in the decade that followed, something astounding happened. The capacity of the typical consumer hard disk drive rose to 20 GB while the cost fell a full three orders of magnitude to $.01/MB. That's a factor of 1000.
And then it happened again! A decade after that, 1 TB consumer hard drives were commonplace at $.0001/MB, two more orders of magnitude.
What happened was the discovery of giant magnetoresistance (GMR) in 1988 by Albert Fert and Peter Grunberg, for which they won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics. Their work led to the application of what became known as spintronics to HDD technology.
IBM began manufacturing MR HDD read/write heads in 1990 and GMR read/write heads in 1997.
As with CPU clock speeds, the "spinning rust" of the HDD is reaching its practical limits as a low-cost consumer technology. Over the last ten years, HDD prices have fallen only half an order of magnitude, stabilizing at about $.04/GB. About the cost of assembly.
Even so, next-generation heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) and microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) hard drive technologies are being rolled out, guaranteeing the HDD will live on in data centers and the cloud.
As Jeffrey Burt puts it, the hard drive is the Mark Twain of technology. "Reports of its death are greatly exaggerated."
A comparable SSD costs around $.08/GB, about twice that of a HDD but still dirt cheap. So while the SSD is standard in portable devices, slapping a 500 GB HDD into a low-end PC like mine is still an easy way to increase the profit margin.
Then again, I recall the day I walked into Walmart and all the tube TVs were gone. Microsoft reportedly wants to hurry the process along and is pushing manufacturers to install an SSD as the boot drive in all PCs starting in 2023.
The day soon will come when, aside from the fan, the only moving parts left in the humble PC will be the DVD or Blu-Ray drive, until they too are relegated to the same niche as turntables and vacuum tube electronics.
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Labels: computers, slimline, tech history, technology
July 18, 2019
From XP to X (benchmarks)
Some chassis guides I reviewed prior to purchase suggested that the HP Slimline 290-p0043w had an external power brick. It came with an internal power supply. HP's own product specs list six USB ports. It has eight. I suspect that some of the spec sheets for the Slimline weren't updated from the nearly identical Celeron G3930 model.
The HP 290-p0043w sports a Celeron G4900 under the hood, the Toyota Corolla of CPUs. It does what it has to do as long as you don't ask it to tow a boat.
First off, I went through Add/Remove Programs and got rid of everything I didn't want and didn't need, including the McAfee trial version software. As I said, a Toyota Corolla runs fine as long as you're not trying to tow a boat, and one such boat is a heavy-duty antivirus program. I rely on Windows Defender and uBlock and scan all downloads with Jotti.
Late model Celeron processors approach earlier Core i3 benchmarks (newer i3s match older i5s). The technological improvements are reflected in the benchmarks. With one dramatic exception, there's about a fifteen fold improvement in performance at the hardware level, and that's comparing what was a mid-range business laptop with a very basic system.
Prime95 is a freeware app that searches for Mersenne prime numbers. It includes a benchmark function based on running batches of Fast Fourier Transforms. It runs in Windows XP, making possible an apples-to-apples comparison. As you can see from the following samples, Prime95 has the Celeron G4900 running around 15 times faster than the Pentium M.
The Pentium M has a Passmark CPU benchmark of 414, versus 3262 for the Celeron G4900. DDR4 RAM and the PCI Express bus run about twenty times faster. But perhaps the most dramatic changes are in the GPU.Intel Pentium M @ 1.70 GHz 1 core Timings for 2048K FFT length 179.35 ms @ 5.58 iter/sec. Timings for 4096K FFT length 376.32 ms @ 2.66 iter/sec. Timings for 8192K FFT length 708.85 ms @ 1.41 iter/sec. Intel Celeron G4900 @ 3.10 GHz 2 cores Timings for 2048K FFT length 12.00 ms @ 83.33 iter/sec. Timings for 4096K FFT length 23.67 ms @ 42.24 iter/sec. Timings for 8192K FFT length 51.66 ms @ 19.36 iter/sec.
The ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 in the ThinkPad T42 has a G3D benchmark of 4. That's four. The onboard Intel UHD Graphics 610 has a G3D benchmark of 784, a 200 fold improvement in performance for a low-end integrated GPU. This revolution in GPU design is why a $30 Roku Express can output 1080p HD video. For ten dollars more, the Roku Premiere handles 4K video.
Wi-Fi had only reached the 802.11g standard when my old ThinkPad shipped, giving me a maximum download speed of 17 Mb/s. The 802.11n Wi-Fi in my Fire tablet tops out at 44 Mb/s. The HP Slimline delivers twice that. Unfortunately, upload speeds improved only 10 to 20 percent, but that's on Comcast. At least I'm getting the download speeds I'm paying for.
Someday I'll get around to doubling the RAM and installing an SSD (both for less than $100).
The mouse that ships with the HP is pretty good. The keyboard is meh. It's a full-sized keyboard in a workspace built for a laptop so it doesn't really fit. I replaced it with a Logitech K360. The K360 combines the number pad and cursor keys, saving four inches in width. It's wireless, eliminating a set of cables. It has a unifying receiver so I could add a mouse later.
I use Sharpkeys to reassign the Caps Lock key to Ctrl and Scroll Lock to Caps Lock, and Autohotkey to map a bunch of keyboard macros. It's been fairly easy to approximate the look and feel of XP without using one of those Start Menu apps. In fact, having gotten rid of the live tiles and populated the Taskbar with my shortcuts, I've grown to like the Windows 10 UI.
In any case, OneDrive integration makes the upgrade very much worth it. OneDrive installs with 5 GB of free storage, which is more than enough to back up my critical files without having to think about it.
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Labels: computers, slimline, tech history, technology
July 11, 2019
From XP to X (hardware)
I'm no technological Urashima Taro (or Rip van Winkle). Windows 10 won me over, especially once I figured out that you can access "Recent Documents" by right-clicking on an app in the Taskbar (though I still prefer the fly-out list in Windows XP). I skipped right over Windows 8.
I stuck with Windows XP for the same reason I still drive a 1995 Ford. It works. Aging web browsers, not so much. Once the updates stop, they are quickly rendered incompatible and insecure. And slow. Technological life comes to a screeching halt without a fully functional browser.
Someday when I have a lot of time on my hands, I'll install Linux on my old ThinkPad so I can at least run an up-to-date browser on it.
Nevertheless, switching away from a platform in which I have invested almost a decade and a half (that's 90 in computer dog years), a RAM upgrade, a replacement keyboard, and a replacement heatsink and fan unit, was a sentimental big deal.
I don't have money to burn and don't need a lot of horsepower. I spend most of my time in Chrome, Word, and text editors (I'm not a gamer). A basic system driving a 1600 x 900 monitor (a much higher resolution than the 1024 x 768 display in the ThinkPad T42) suits my needs just fine.
In the end, I got a low-end PC from Walmart. The HP Slimline 290-p0043w is an inexpensive desktop PC powered by a Celeron G4900 CPU (4GB DDR4 500GB HDD), with 8 USB ports (4 USB 3.1 no C) and a DVD drive. It's about the size of two T42 ThinkPads stacked on top of each other.
The case can be positioned as a "tower" or horizontally. But with the tower's feet on the right and the front USB ports and switch at the top left (my preference), the DVD drive—the whole motherboard, actually—is upside down. That doesn't appear to affect the reliability or performance at all.
The DVD drive is the flimsy snap-in kind used in laptops so discs can be loaded upside down. Once I rip my CDs and install a few old programs, I'll probably never use it again.
As for my first impressions, granted, I started with low expectations, but the HP 290-p0043w has exceeded them by a wide margin. The other benefit of being a late adopter is that just about any new thing will feel like a vast improvement.
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Labels: computers, slimline, technology