{"id":1225,"date":"2010-02-19T05:08:16","date_gmt":"2010-02-19T09:08:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/w4kaz.com\/qth\/?p=1225"},"modified":"2010-12-22T09:22:26","modified_gmt":"2010-12-22T13:22:26","slug":"new-blogbox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/w4kaz.com\/qth\/?p=1225","title":{"rendered":"New BlogBox"},"content":{"rendered":"

Surfing over to the Dell Outlet<\/a> last week resulted in a moment of weakness.\u00c2\u00a0 There were several bargain buys on Inspiron 537’s, 545’s, and 546’s.\u00c2\u00a0 I settled on a nice Inspiron 545s<\/a>, boasting 4gig of ram, 64 bit install of Windows 7, and a Dual Core Intel CPU.\u00c2\u00a0 No extra “flufware” was installed on the system by the folks in Austin.\u00c2\u00a0 The 545s is a low profile slimline system, so there not much room to add junk into it later, but at the Outlet price it solved an itch that has been begging to be scratched for a couple of years.<\/p>\n

New Hotness.<\/p>\n

After almost 10 years, the old Dimension 4300<\/a> is really dragging on normal day-to-day usages.\u00c2\u00a0 So it is well past time where it should be put to pasture.\u00c2\u00a0 It runs Ubuntu Linux well enough, but I have a lot of windows applications I use frequently, so XP has been king.\u00c2\u00a0 The 4300 has a 1.6Ghz P4, but it is memory constrained at 512Mb max.\u00c2\u00a0 PC133 memory(its that old).\u00c2\u00a0 XP runs a lot of things well enough despite the system constraints, but is hard pressed to run the modern antivirus\/firewall packages and be able to run a modern internet browser with all of todays’ superfluous and gratuitous\u00c2\u00a0 visual content.\u00c2\u00a0 Bloated OS, bloated security, bloated browsers, bloated web content.\u00c2\u00a0 Itty bitty memory.\u00c2\u00a0 Not conducive to a good user experience.<\/p>\n

Old-n Busted.<\/p>\n

So the Dimension 4300 is going to be a great file server, Linux experimentation platform, and all around backup contest logging box. Just in case the really old and busted CPU in the shack croaks…<\/p>\n

It is hardly a shock to find that the New Hotness is pretty damn nice.\u00c2\u00a0 Everything is relative.\u00c2\u00a0 Windows 7 is taking some mental adjustments.\u00c2\u00a0 Ten years of XP have worn big habitual ruts in the gray matter.\u00c2\u00a0 But there are a few nice surprises under the hood of Win7. Anybody using\/administrating Windows 7 should goog up “GodMode”<\/a>, a nifty but undocumented control panel quick-list.\u00c2\u00a0 The MS-geeks should have made it a documented feature.\u00c2\u00a0 Also, the whole system is just blazing fast in comparison to the old.\u00c2\u00a0 The on-board graphics are quite sharp, and seem fast enough for daily use.\u00c2\u00a0 Probably not a video gamer’s box, but certainly fine for general usage.\u00c2\u00a0 Ten years from now – who knows?<\/p>\n

One quirk that took a moment to adjust to was finding the directory being used for storing program data.\u00c2\u00a0 Many XP applications defaulted to storing program data in the program’s directory.\u00c2\u00a0 Under Win7, the application’s program directory is protected.\u00c2\u00a0 To get around that, data files used by an older application are shunted into a directory under the current user. A bit of head scratching and cussing later, the location of that directory was found to be defined by the environment variable “appdata”.\u00c2\u00a0 After a bit more head scratching it became clear the “appdata” folder was indeed under the user account, but it is a hidden directory.\u00c2\u00a0 To get to it directly you can hit ‘Start’ and type %appdata% into the run\/search box.\u00c2\u00a0 Or you can just enable the file explorer to see hidden files.<\/p>\n

Grrrr.\u00c2\u00a0 Not sure why it ever made sense to RedmondGeeks to hide the application data……<\/p>\n

So far I’ve only run into a couple of minor problems installing software on the 64 bit OS.\u00c2\u00a0 I decided to define a separate admin account, and set up user accounts for everybody as users without admin privileges.\u00c2\u00a0 General applications can be installed by running the install as an administrator.\u00c2\u00a0 This worked well for most applications.\u00c2\u00a0 Two glaring exceptions to that generalization: Security software, and Google’s browser.\u00c2\u00a0 The security software is understandable – that is best installed by the administrator directly.\u00c2\u00a0 But there’s no legit reason Google’s browser should be such a pain in the ass.<\/p>\n

And pain in the ass it is.\u00c2\u00a0 Running the install of Goggle’s browser as a user with “run as administrator” resulted in no visible installation.\u00c2\u00a0 The install program runs, then ends without any messages\/ warnings\/ errors.\u00c2\u00a0 Backing off on that, the install was run directly from the admin account.\u00c2\u00a0 In that instance the install succeeds – almost.\u00c2\u00a0 After that installation, the browser was available under the administrators log-in, but not to any users.\u00c2\u00a0 The install did not offer an option to choose users.\u00c2\u00a0 Somewhat less than satisfactory.<\/p>\n

So for the moment, Google has been kicked from the New Hotness.\u00c2\u00a0 Banished.\u00c2\u00a0 Shunned. Deposed. Rejected.<\/p>\n

What with IE\/Firefox\/Opera\/Safari all working properly, its not like there are no options.\u00c2\u00a0 On the browser front, it has been nice to be able to get back to using Firefox regularly.\u00c2\u00a0 Firefox had become really bloated since\u00c2\u00a0 I first used it – it is a real performance pig on the old-n-busted 4300.\u00c2\u00a0 Having adopted Firefox early on, it was really disappointing to see it become fatter and slower than IE. Over the last 18 months Opera has been the preferred browser.\u00c2\u00a0 Opera has been an off-and-on affair over the years, since it has in many cases been the most innovative of the browsers.\u00c2\u00a0 In previous incarnations rendering of web pages was not always as reliable as the others, but it has always been the fastest of the group. Since the more recent editions of v9.xx and now v10, it is both fast and consistent.<\/p>\n

The Firefox performance issues on a low resource system seem to be a script related problem, although the sites with a ton of images are always slow too.\u00c2\u00a0 All of that probably relates to the memory constraints, system paging, thrashing, and the intrusive nature of modern antivirus applications.\u00c2\u00a0 Running without the AV software speeds it up in some cases, but the hardware limitation is a bigger problem.\u00c2\u00a0 The 4300 box at idle uses almost half the available memory in that system.\u00c2\u00a0 The New Hotness zips right along.\u00c2\u00a0 Sweet.<\/p>\n

The New Hotness can support up to 8gig of ram.\u00c2\u00a0 I expect to stuff it to the limit to allow room for tinkering with virtualization(VirtualPC<\/a>, Sun’s VirtualBox<\/a>, etc.), and maybe a bit of low end graphics card upgrade, if a decent low profile card is available at a bargain price.<\/p>\n

Set for another decade – maybe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Surfing over to the Dell Outlet last week resulted in a moment of weakness.\u00c2 There were several bargain buys on Inspiron 537’s, 545’s, and 546’s.\u00c2 I settled on a nice Inspiron 545s, boasting 4gig of ram, 64 bit install of Windows 7, and a Dual Core Intel CPU.\u00c2 No extra “flufware” was installed on the system by the folks in Austin.\u00c2 The 545s is a low profile slimline system, so there not much room to add junk into it later, but at the Outlet price it solved an itch that has been begging to be scratched for a couple of years.<\/p>\n

New Hotness.<\/p>\n

After almost 10 years, the old Dimension 4300 is really dragging on normal day-to-day usages.\u00c2 So it is well past time where it should be put to pasture.\u00c2 It runs Ubuntu Linux well enough, but I have a lot of windows applications I use frequently, so XP has been king.\u00c2 The 4300 has a 1.6Ghz P4, but it is memory constrained at 512Mb max.\u00c2 PC133 memory(its that old).\u00c2 XP runs a lot of things well enough despite the system constraints, but is hard pressed to run the modern antivirus\/firewall packages and be able to run a modern internet browser with all of todays’ superfluous and gratuitous\u00c2 visual content.\u00c2 Bloated OS, bloated security, bloated browsers, bloated web content.\u00c2 Itty bitty memory.\u00c2 Not conducive to a good user experience.<\/p>\n

Old-n Busted.<\/p>\n

So the Dimension 4300 is going to be a great file server, Linux experimentation platform, and all around […]<\/p>\n

Continue reading New BlogBox<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[13,27,11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w4kaz.com\/qth\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1225"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w4kaz.com\/qth\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w4kaz.com\/qth\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w4kaz.com\/qth\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w4kaz.com\/qth\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1225"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/w4kaz.com\/qth\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1766,"href":"http:\/\/w4kaz.com\/qth\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1225\/revisions\/1766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w4kaz.com\/qth\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w4kaz.com\/qth\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w4kaz.com\/qth\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}