While researching Small Form Factor (Desktop) PCs, I came across a number of interesting ones. Here are two I thought were worth mentioning:

The Dell Inspiron 530s has a Small Form Factor which is also referred to as a mini tower. The configuration which appealed to me was the 2.2GHz Intel Pentium Dual-Core E2200 Processor, 2GB DDR2 RAM, 250GB Hard drive, DVD Writer, and a 19 inch LCD Monitor. I’d definitely do something about the Windows Vista Home Basic, either upgrade it to Windows XP, or Vista Home Premium .

The second Dell is one I have mentioned previously; the Dell Studio Hybrid Desktop. It has quite a unique Form factor - definitely small - which reminds me of an external vertical DVD Drive. This unique system comes without a monitor, so a monitor should be factored into the price. My preferred configuration was with an Intel Core 2 Duo T5800 processor at 2.0GHz with a 800Mhz Front side bus and 2MB cache,  3GB RAM and a 160GB Hard Drive. The Hybrid Desktop comes standard with a Slot Load CD / DVD Burner and DVI and HDMI video out ports. VGA is not supported, so any monitor which is going to be connected to this system needs DVI (or similar) input.

At the end of my last blog entry, I was stuck with a dead monitor. After a family meeting (not “the family“!), it was decided that I could get a replacement monitor due to the exceptional circumstances.

Unfortunately I did not just need a new monitor - I needed one or more cable(s) which would connect the PlayStation 3 to an LCD monitor. If I got a monitor with DVI input, then I could get a HDMI to DVI Cable, as the PlayStation 3 has HDMI output. However, since DVI does not carry sound, I would need an audio cable. Whatever LCD monitor I bought. I would have to buy additional cables. A replacement LCD monitor plus cables would work out at a little over $200.

Then I noticed something. Small HDTVs, that is ones with screens of 19 inches or so were not much more expensive than LCD monitors. The HDTVs had multiple inputs, ranging from HDMI to VGA. Finding a small HDTV which had a VGA input and a component AV input was relatively easy. The switching between the inputs would be done on the TV itself. The main advantage was that I didn’t have to buy any additional cables.

There was a 19 inch HDTV on sale at a Best Buy within 10 miles, one similar to the Coby TF-TV1913 19 inch LCD TV. Two hours of post Christmas Day shopping later we had the HDTV.

Setting the HDTV up to work both as a computer monitor and a PS3 display was relatively easy.

Continuing from yesterday, I thought a description of the YPbPr to RGBHV VGA Box might be helpful:
It is a small box, only about 3 inches long by 1 inch wide, and less than a 1/2 inch thick. At one end is a VGA input adapter, and at the other end a VGA output adapter. At the bottom are three inputs that are labeled Pr, Y and  Pb and colored red, green and blue, into which a standard AV cable like the Belkin Component Video Cable could be plugged. Finally there is a switch that toggles between VGA input and AV cable input.

I had tried connecting it to my primary monitor going from VGA in to VGA out, and for some reason it did not seem to remember the settings and made the picture quite dull.

Before hooking up the PlayStation 3, I decided to use my secondary monitor – which is a smaller LCD monitor hooked up to Desktop PCs I don’t use that much. My Xbox 360 was also connected to it, so I had to disconnect all its cables first. When I hooked up the VGA box to my secondary monitor, it also made the picture quite dull.

It was then that I should have stopped. Of course I didn’t. I connected the PlayStation 3 to the VGA input. When the PlayStation 3 started, something flashed on the screen, a message about reducing resolution to 16xx by – I could not make out the rest of the message. After that the LCD monitor was blank, even though it was on. The On Screen menu did not display. I connected the LCD monitor up to a Desktop PC. Nothing, it was dead.

This Blog Entry was going to be called A Christmas Story - more with the irony of Jean Shepherd than the true Christmas Story, but one needs to be politically correct in these times.

So, I got my Christmas present (”Holiday/Seasonal Gift?”) and spent some time figuring out how I was going to hook it up to my LCD monitor. Unlike the Xbox 360, for which you can buy a VGA adapter cable, the Sony PlayStation 3 has no similar simple solution. About 18 months ago, when I was choosing a gaming console, my first choice was the PlayStation 3, until I came up against this problem of no VGA adapter cable being available. Then I chose the Xbox 360, this time I chose the PlayStation 3. I had found the “YPbPr to RGBHV VGA Box”, which supposedly takes YPbPr (component input, that is from the PlayStation 3) and converts it to RGBHV (Monitor, LCD, TV) output.

First I connected the YPbPr to RGBHV VGA Box to my current LCD monitor and two desktop PCs setup. Something wasn’t right. Not only was my Windows Desktop on both machines duller and harder to read, but every time I booted on of the PCs I had to fiddle with the LCD monitor’s onscreen menu to get it to auto adjust. Okay, just a minor problem, I thought…

 (to be continued)

Any port in a storm refers to a ship on the high seas. It definitely doesn’t apply to input and output ports on PCs.

Most of the legacy ports have been around so long I’m pretty used to them. Mouse and keyboard (both the PS/2 type ports and the newer USB ports), VGA for the monitor, the fast disappearing parallel printer port, serial port (are there still any serial devices?), audio in and audio out port (and some ports I’ve probably missed).

My Dell Inspiron 530 threw me with another port, a DVI port. There were also two cables for the Dell SE198WFP LCD monitor, a standard VGA cable, and a DVI cable.
DVI is “a digital connector which is the ideal way to connect to an LCD monitor.”
DVI-I (Integrated) can carry both a digital and an analog signal to support VGA monitors, and DVI-D (Digital) provides only a digital signal. DVI was intended to replace VGA.

HDMI is backward compatible with DVI. HDMI carries both digital video and audio signals in a single cable. Most gamers would know about HDMI as the Xbox 360 Premium began shipping with a HDMI port last year.

They say that you can never have too much memory (in your PC), but with 32-bit Windows XP and Vista you can.

On machines with more than 3GB of RAM, Windows XP and Vista will report total System memory (RAM) of less than 4GB, often considerably less.

So why is this? Oversimplified, ranges of physical memory are shadowed to support devices in a PC, and above 3 GB larger chunks of memory are used. Daniel Rutter explains it quite well on his Blog “Dan’s Data” in the article “Ask Dan: What’s with the 3Gb memory barrier?“.

The Microsoft knowledge base article No 929605: “The system memory that is reported in the System Information dialog box in Windows Vista is less than you expect if 4 GB of RAM is installed” explains how memory above 3GB is used. Naturally Vista Service Pack 1 has a fix - knowledge base article no 946003: “Windows Vista SP1 will report 4 GB of system memory (RAM) on systems that have 4 GB of memory installed“. Of course this is “a reporting change only“, so the actual amount of RAM is reported corrected, but large chunks above 3GB are still used in the same way.

Basically what this all boils down to is that on a 32-bit Operating System, more than 3GB of RAM is a waste. So the HP (Hewlett-Packard) Pavilion dv9810us Notebook with 3GB of RAM has enough RAM, not too much.

Usually people only buy a new computer after their old computer gets too slow or crashes. I seem to have done it the other way round. My old eMachines Desktop computer just died about a week ago. It had been playing up for well over a year now. It would just suddenly cutout like the power had gone. After unplugging and re-plugging the AC power cord, it would work again. At first I though it was a power supply problem, but it was just too erratic. More research found some possible hard to fix problems. It wasn’t overheating, as it would sometimes cutout just after I switched it on, but work after that. Sometimes it did this once, sometimes twice. Occasionally I had to wait for half an hour before trying it again. Since I couldn’t trust it I bought cheap Compaq desktop computer on special, and used the eMachines Desktop as a secondary machine. I only used it occasionally, mainly for an important application which I intended to move off the eMachines Desktop.

When it happened, the eMachines Desktop wouldn’t turn on, no matter how many times I tried. I left it for an hour, then a day. Eventually I gave up: it was dead, never to boot up again. Of course the software I meant to move off was still on it.

One of the reasons I had kept the unpredictable machine around for so long was that up until a few weeks ago, it had the largest hard drive of any of my computers; 160GB. That doesn’t sound like much now, with 1 Terabyte hard drives available, but in 2005 when I bought it that was a lot of space.

Now I’m thinking of removing the hard drive and turning it into an external hard drive with a kit like the AcomData 2163 External 3.5 inch Hard Drive Enclosure. That saves me from trying to figure out how to erase the data on the hard drive in a machine which won’t boot.

(Pardon the title, somehow my first choice “PS/2 + USB <> KVM” really seemed too geeky.)

This week I was very fortunate to get my birthday present early, especially since it is a relatively expensive one. It was partly as a result of two of my blog entries (”XP still outsells Vista” and “Buying a PC with XP“) as I had decided on a Desktop PC with Windows XP. The problem was that Windows XP PCs may be hard to find when my birthday comes around. So now I have a shiny new Dell Desktop PC (well, not really shiny, but new).

There is a major problem though. Even though I knew that the latest Dell machines don’t have PS/2 ports for mouse and keyboard, but instead supply a USB mouse and keyboard, which take up two of the numerous USB ports , I had not really thought it through. Somehow I thought that it would be possible to connect to the existing PS/2 KVM with just two USB to PS/2 adapters. After looking at the Dell PC I realized that what I actually needed was a PS/2 to USB adapter like the Cables To Go USB To PS/2 Adapter. After some research it appeared that this might not even work. Just to get two PCs working I used an “old-fashioned” manual VGA monitor switchbox (which shares one monitor between two desktop PCs), and for the moment I’m using two sets of mice and keyboards. It looks like the best solution would be a USB KVM and a USB to Dual PS/2 Keyboard Mouse Adapter to connect my newest old PC to the USB KVM.

Of course the PS/2 I refer to above is the “PS/2 connector, an interface standard for PC mice and keyboards” not the Sony “PlayStation2″ (from Wikipedia)

I’ve been dealing with a cartoonist lately for one of my jobs. He’s got a nice style — loose and simple. But he works in hard copy. As in, ink and paper. And since he’s in one state and I’m in another, this has posed some challenges for shuttling work, particularly since he doesn’t seem to own his own scanning device. (These days, I thought scanning devices were so common as to be handed out in cereal boxes.)

I’ve mildly suggested that he consider getting a software application to handle his work so that the digital copy of his art could be emailed to me, but there’s something about pen on paper that appeals to this guy.

But I’m thinking that maybe I need to present him with cool toy to spark his “inner geek.” Specifically, I have my eyes on the little Wacom Bamboo Digitizing Tablet. Priced comparable to the nicest Etch-a-Sketch you could ever buy, this device lets the user touch a pen tip to the tablet to write notes, mark up digital documents, create a digital signature and best of all, make quick sketches.

It works with Microsoft Windows Vista and Office 2007 or the OS X-built-in Mac Ink and connects to the computer via USB cable, which is detachable.

PriceGrabber reviewers love it. “My favorite aspect of this tablet is its texture,” writes anvilfactory. “When you press the tip of the pen onto its active area, it resembles the feeling of a pen against paper!”

“Compared to what my conventional method used to be, instead of having to scan my sketches and then redrawing solid lines with the mouse, I can now draw directly on the computer, as if I was drawing on paper,” writes shmps.

“This is the best for the bang tablet that made by a well known vendor and the only tablet that doesn’t use batteries!,” writes pcdoctor01 from GA. (The power draws through the USB connection from the PC — standard operating procedure, apparently, for Wacom products.)

Hmm. Maybe it’s time for me to put aside my keyboard and find my inner artist…

Today, in my quest to understand just what could make a computer cost $30,000, I’m going to drill down on the processor that PC World editors have chosen for their dream machine.

That would be the Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad Processor QX9975. The plan is to put two of these into the system.

This processor has four processing cores (whatever they are) and a 45 nanometer lithography, which is small. (I know what that means.) The processor speed is a blazing 3.2 gigahertz. If that were typing performance, I’m pretty sure your fingertips would catch fire.

Although descriptions of this chip say that it’s great for multi-threaded games and multimedia applications, it’s probably best suited for server operations — where a whole bunch of processes are hitting the computer for data access or processing power all at the same time. How could a lone human being sitting at a keyboard be that needy? OK, so I’m not a gamer and I don’t do high-end GPS mapping work. Maybe you could be that needy.

Of course, even as PC World was putting in its quad-core order, Intel was announcing that it expects to ship a six-core processor later this year, according to Computerworld.

The story quotes a senior VP and general manager of Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group as saying, “The big cache and six cores will give customers a nice bump in performance.” Plus, it keeps Intel ahead of the speed game compared to AMD, which just announced it is shipping a triple-core processor as part of its Phenom series.

I suppose that if you’re spending $1,500 to get a custom paint job for the box that holds the computer components as PC World is, you don’t want to be putting in a little $300 processor — or even two of them. You want to go with what’s newest, fastest, and priciest. In that regard, the magazine has done it again!