Posts Tagged ‘Desktops’

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Five tips for deciding when to replace an aging PC

October 21st, 2010
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One of the sad facts of life is that even the most high-end PCs eventually become obsolete.

If you have invested a lot of money into a system, you might be reluctant to retire it even though the writing is on the wall.

Very often, it boils down to deciding whether to repair or upgrade the PC (again) or to replace it with a new one.

Thankfully, there are some signs that will tell you when it is time to retire an old PC. Here are a few tips on what to watch for.

1: Parts become difficult to find

You may have no choice but to replace an aging computer if it becomes difficult to find the parts that are required to keep the machine running. I ran into this situation in a big way a few years ago.

I work out of my home, so I have to pay for all of my own computer hardware. I had one particular network server that was getting old, but it still met my needs so I had no plans for retiring it.

The fact that this particular server was the most expensive computer I have ever purchased made me all the more committed to squeezing every last bit of life out of it.

One day, the computer’s power supply died. Unfortunately, the computer used a power supply that is now extinct.

Even though the power supply was the only thing wrong with the computer, I had no choice but to replace the system because of the unavailability of parts.

One thing made me feel better, though: Technology had improved in the years since I had purchased that computer.

The replacement system was more powerful and cost less than a thousand dollars.

2: The PC doesn’t work well with newer operating systems

Sometimes, you may find that an aging PC won’t work correctly with newer operating systems.

For example, I have a PC in the attic that was considered extremely high end about eight years ago.

My guess is that the machine would probably have sufficient memory and CPU resources to run a 64-bit version of Windows 7.

However, I can almost guarantee that no Windows 7 drivers exist for the system because of its age.

When you can’t even get drivers for your hardware, it may be time to move on and get something new.

The only exception is that when a new operating system is released, it can sometimes take the hardware manufacturers six months to a year to create drivers for legacy hardware.

If you are having trouble finding drivers for a brand new operating system, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your PC is outdated. It may just be that the drivers are still being developed.

3: Ongoing maintenance costs are becoming excessive

Another sign that it is time to replace your aging hardware is that maintenance costs are becoming excessive.

A few years ago, I had one PC that was just a lemon. I’m pretty sure I ended up replacing every part in the PC at least once.

Eventually, it dawned on me that I could have bought a new computer with all of the money I had spent on replacement parts.

The next time the computer broke down, I decided to cut my losses and replace it with a new one.

4: The PC is affecting productivity

It may be time to replace an aging PC when it starts compromising productivity. In my own organization, for instance, I produce a lot of video-based IT training products.

Video editing is extremely CPU intensive and can take a long time on an outdated PC.

Last year, I replaced the system I used for video editing because it was taking up to three hours to compile an hour’s worth of video.

The three hours I spent waiting on the compilation process could have been better spent recording the next video in the series.

After I replaced the computer, I instantly became more productive because I was able to compile videos in less than half the time.

5: The PC does not support 64-bit

If you have a PC that does not include a 64-bit CPU, it is time to replace it.

Right now, it is still possible to find 32-bit operating systems and 32-bit applications, but that won’t be the case for long.

here is wide speculation that Microsoft is going to release Windows 8 as 64-bit only.

If this seems unlikely, remember that almost all of the Microsoft server products that are being released will run only on 64-bit platforms.

Source:http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/five-tips/?p=359

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Amd to offer two fusion zacate processors for desktops.

September 26th, 2010
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Advanced Micro Devices plans to release two versions of its code-named Zacate processors for desktop computers later this year. The parts will have similar thermal design power (TDP), but different amount of x86 cores based on Bobcat architecture.

For low-power desktops, which are often called nettops, and thin clients AMD will offer dual-core Zacate E350 and single-core Zacate E240 microprocessors with integrated DirectX 11 graphics core with UVD 3.0 video engine, single-channel PC3-10600 (DDR 1333MHz) memory controller and 18W TDP, according to sources familiar with AMD’s plans.

The chips will come in BGA FT1 package and will be soldered to mainboards.

AMD Brazos platform for desktops will consist of AMD Fusion accelerated processing unit (APU) code-named Zacate as well as code-named Hudson D1 fusion controller hub, which will connect to processor using PCI Express 2.0 x4 bus and will support 4 PCIe x1 ports, PCI bus, 6 Serial ATA-300 ports, 14 USB 2.0 ports as well as integrated clock-generator.

The part does not support RAID, Gigabit Ethernet and other capabilities, hence, Brazos platform will hardly be suitable for commercial desktops without additional chips.

It is noteworthy that at present AMD itself still calls its forthcoming APUs based on the Ontario design with code-names and does not announce official clock-speeds for CPU and GPU cores despite of the fact that it had already set their model numbers.

Such secrecy very likely confirms that the Sunnyvale, California-based company plans to introduce a new brand-name for its Zacate and Ontario microprocessors.

AMD plans to ramp up production of Ontario and Zacate microprocessors later this year and plans to launch the Brazos platform supporting both central processing units early next year.

It is also expected that AMD partners will introduce the first devices powered by the new technology early in 2011.

Source:http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20100923122046_AMD_to_Offer_Two_Fusion_Zacate_Processors_for_Desktops.html

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Intel and Amd cross swords over integrated graphics

September 18th, 2010
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Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) are about to see their competitive relationship heat up further as they prepare to roll out new processors that include on-chip graphics technology.

Intel executives put their upcoming Sandy Bridge second-generation Core architecture on centre stage during the Intel Developer Forum.

The 32-nanometre chips, which should start appearing in systems in early 2011, will offer the CPU and graphics processing unit (GPU) on a single piece of silicon.

The move is designed to improve tasks such as high-definition video, 3D rendering, gaming, social networking and multimedia.

Removing the discrete graphics card and putting those capabilities on the die with the CPU will also lead to space savings and greater energy efficiency.

AMD Chips In At IDF

In a hotel suite near the IDF event at the Moscone Centre in San Francisco, AMD showed off one of its upcoming Accelerated Processing Units (APUs), AMD’s name for chips with integrated GPU capabilities, called the Zacate. At the demonstration company officials said it showed their chip running significantly faster than Intel’s current Core i5 processor.

The AMD Zacate processor is an 18W chip for notebooks and desktop PCs. For netbooks and smaller form factors, there will also be a 9W chip called Ontario. Both are part of what AMD is calling the Brazos APU platform and systems built around them will appear next year.

Bob Grim, AMD’s director of client platform marketing, said the APU chips are the culmination of a vision the company had four years ago when it bought ATI. Last year, CEO Dirk Meyer announced that AMD was essentially combining its CPU and GPU businesses as it marched toward an integrated platform.

Just last month, AMD said it was phasing out the ATI name so that all their products would be identified with the AMD brand.

AMD has been criticised by some analysts for being late with its APUs, which were first expected to appear in 2008, and allowing Intel to catch up. In an interview with eWEEK, Grim said that while systems with AMD’s APUs would be coming out about the same time as those with Intel’s Sandy Bridge, there were some key differences, including the positioning of the processors.

Grim said the expectation is that Sandy Bridge will appear in high-end PCs first and then cascade down to the midrange later. In contrast, Zacate will appear in systems in the $500 range.

“We’re bringing it in at the heart of the mainstream market,” he said. This will enable a large number of customers, looking for a high-performing, energy-efficient system with high-end graphics capabilities, to buy one immediately as an AMD-powered system, he added.

In the demonstrations, AMD ran a Zacate chip against a 2.4 GHz Core i5 from Intel. Grim would not disclose details of the Zacate chip, not even its speed.

In one demo, using the video game “City of Heroes” from NcSoft, the frame rate on the Zacate chip was about double that of the Core i5. Using a beta version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 browser, Zacate’s speed was about three times that of the Intel chip when running the Amazon Shelf performance test.

In a third test showing a spinning wheel of colour, Zacate again beat the Intel chip.

Grim conceded that the Zacate processor was running against an existing Intel chip that did not have the strong integrated graphics of Sandy Bridge, but noted that while the system with the Core i5 processor sold for about $800 on the market, a faster Zacate-based PC would come in at around $300 less.

In a research note regarding Sandy Bridge, Charles King, an analyst with Pund-IT Research, noted the promise that the integrated graphics capabilities held for Intel but pointed out the competition it faced.

This will come not only from AMD but also the likes of discrete graphics vendor Nvidia and Qualcomm with its Snapdragon processors based on ARM designs.

Source:http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/news-desktops-notebooks/intel-and-amd-cross-swords-over-integrated-graphics-9786

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Put your PC through its paces with dacris benchmarks

August 6th, 2010
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Dacris Benchmarks ($35, 10-use free trial) will make your computer do 50 laps around the field, then tell you how well it did. It executes a series of performance tests (which can be done on individual systems, such as RAM, disk, or video, or all at once), then provides a 1-10 rating for each section, as well as providing suitability for various tasks, such as programming or games.

The interface is straightforward. Simply launch Dacris Benchmarks, select the systems you wish to test (or test them all), and wait. During the test process, it’s recommended you not do anything else. For one thing, straining your system with other processes will give a false reading. For another, Dacris Benchmarks will fling up windows full of 3-D graphics to test certain system functions, which can be a problem if you’re trying to do anything else. It’s best to just get a cup of coffee or read a newspaper, if you can find one.

When running undisturbed, the testing took only a minute or two to complete on my relatively speedy PC, but the speed will depend on your system.

Giving both the technical and the evaluated data, Dacris Benchmarks displays the results in an easy-to-understand format. Raw benchmark numbers for various systems, such as TTP/s (Trillions of triangle pixels per second) for 3D video rendering, are given. Another tab rates performance overall on a scale of 1 to 10, and even identifies the weakest part of a system.

Dacris Benchmarks can be used on up to 10 PCs by a single user, and the utility here is that you can export the results from one system and compare them side-by-side. This can tell you if your laptop is going to be able to do the job when you take it on the road, or justify to your spouse or employer why you need a new top-end system. In office environments, it can be used to insure that desktop systems are up to date or that systems which should be very close in speed are not highly divergent due to hardware or software problems.

Although Dacris Benchmarks is not an expensive program, it is a bit on the high side for something most users will run fairly infrequently. However, if you regularly upgrade systems, buy or refurbish systems, or maintain a network, Dacris Benchmarks might come into play often enough to be worth it.

Source:http://www.pcworld.com/article/202522/put_your_pc_through_its_paces_with_dacris_benchmarks.html?tk=hp_blg

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Desktops losing market?

July 31st, 2010
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Are desktops passé? Forget the ‘tablet’ revolution in gadgets, the sale of laptops, notebooks and netbooks, too, has been on the rise globally. In India too, computer-users are trading their desktops for ‘on-the-move’ mobile computing devices that allow them to carry their work and data and digital belongings wherever they go.

Here’s the proof. Sales figures for mobile computing devices, mainly laptops, have grown by 65 per cent during 2009-2010, beating the staid old desktop which registered five per cent growth. A survey by India’s hardware companies’ consortium, Manufacturers’ Association for Information Technology (MAIT), reveals that 80.3 lakh computers were sold.

About 55 lakh units out of the total 80.3 lakh computers sold were desktops. Twenty-five lakh notebook/netbook units were sold.

The survey also reveals that the notebook growth is primarily driven by the household segment which accounts for 56 per cent of the total sales. Even establishments and businesses showed a preference (perhaps driven by cost-cutting) for mobile PCs.

Source:http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/article544760.ece

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Paragon go virtual simplifies cloning windows desktops

July 23rd, 2010
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Want to use your Windows machine when you don’t have it with you, but there’s another computer available? Or try some software, documents, or URLs you don’t trust to be malware/bug-free on your own production system, without worrying about the productivity toll of creating a restore image, being sure it really works, and potentially doing that re-install?

One of the various possible solutions is to create a Virtual Machine (VM) image of your system’s hard drive — a copy of the OS, applications, configurations, and specified data — known as a P2V (Physical to Virtual) image, and then run it, as a VM, under one of the many available hypervisors like those from Microsoft, VMware and Oracle. Many hypervisor vendors offer “players” with a limited feature set, suitable for running existing VM images.

The VM player runs as an application alongside other applications, e.g. adjacent to FireFox and Microsoft Office; the virtual machine image running under the player is running the OS that the cloned system had, looking like a copy of the user’s original machine.

For many users, P2V cloning of a Windows system’s hard drive(s) to a virtual machine image can be a daunting task.

Paragon Software Group recently announced versions for a free version of its Go Virtual program. Free for non-commercial use. Paragon Go Virtual is intended to simplify the P2V process. According to Paragon, the free version (versions, technically — one for 32-bit Windows, and one for 64-bit) of Go Virtual works with all desktop versions of Windows since Windows 2000.

(Users will have to separate download a virtualization application to run the VM image under — many free ones are available — such as Microsoft Virtual PC, VMware Workstation, VMware Fusion, VMware Player or Oracle VirtualBox.)

Why would anyone want to do create and run a P2V VM clone?

Several reasons, according to Paragon: One, to bring your desktop environment — the version of Windows you’re using, along with its configuration and settings; additional applications you’ve installed; and data — with you, to run on another computer, as an application, rather than trying to reboot it with your configuration.

The cloned image of your Windows system can also be run on non-Windows machines, as long as there’s a corresponding hypervisor or VM “player” (a hypervisor just for running VMs) available, like, on MacOS, Parallels. Paragon is working on support for Xen, according to Koka Sexton, manager of business development, Paragon.

Two, for doing things that might potentially damage your OS and files, compromise security, or simply avoid the hassle of a difficult uninstall, like testing a new application or version, or browsing potentially unsafe web sites. Malware or other threats are confined within the virtual machine, they can’t ‘escape’ onto the host machine, just like Dell KACE’s recently-announced free Secure Browser does for a web browsing session. When done, simply terminate the session (after saving any files you’ve created or updated that you do want to keep, to a location outside the virtual machine.)

Three, to “migrate” to a new machine, or new OS. (Not as the primary OS, but as a way to test out the new hardware and/or software.) And four, to provide a full-system backup which can be run on another machine, rather than needing to be installed or restored.

For example, if you put the player and your P2V image on a USB flash drive, you can run it, and get what acts like your computer, on a computer elsewhere in the company, or at a hotel business center, library, or other facility — assuming, of course, that this other computer is set to allow applications to run from external media.

“I’ve been trying Paragon Go Virtual, and it does what’s claimed,” reports computer/network consultant David Strom. “It is definitely useful, for opening up unknown software and files. The interesting feature that Paragon has in this version is that, unlike with some of the other free tools, you can make some adjustments to your disk image.”

The free version of Go Virtual does not allow incremental saves, like changes made to a virtual machine, such as software updates or patches, configuration changes, or additional applications, Sexton notes. These features are available in the Professional version (MSRP $69.95). (However, while the VM is running, you can do backups, like of new data files, to an external drive.

Also, the free version of Go Virtual only works on desktop versions of Windows; Paragon offers a separate version for servers.

“There are around a dozen of P2V tools available, from VMware and other companies, like InstallFree, MokeaFive and ZInstall,” says Strom. “Go Virtual does what it says it does, and can be useful, but there are other tools which may better suited to some use cases.”

Also, in general, Strom notes, “The biggest limit of these tools is that you need a lot of storage, and a relatively fast network, to move the files. they’re usually several gigabytes in size.”

Source:http://www.informationweek.com/news/smb/hardware_software/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226200112&subSection=News

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Repair Lcd monitor

June 24th, 2010
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Do you have a desktop? Do you have a laptop? In the event you can answer both questions in the affirmative, you have quite a bit of experience learning the unique features of each, in terms of portability and features.

Desktops typically have the monitor and keyboard in separate units from the CPU. You can place your keyboard anywhere you like, and it can be more comfortable to type thanks to the built in stands on the back.

Laptops do not give you that luxury. Those of you who have to type for hours on end know this all too well. It can be truly dreadful. An HP docking station could be the solution.

With an HP docking station, you will experience the comfort of a desktop computer while using a laptop computer. You put the laptop on the stand, which will lift it at an angle, providing your keyboard with ergonomic support, just like when you use your desktop keyboard. Not only that, the HP Docking Station does so much more.

Overheating can also be a large issue with laptop users, and one that many desktop owners do not have to experience. It can often be hard to get proper air circulation under your laptop, causing the bottom to heat up to the point where it’s even felt on the keyboard. With an HP docking station, your laptop fans have more space to circulate the air, giving it a better chance to keep the laptop cool.

There is much more that can be provided by the HP station. If you purchase this innovative device, you will be able to set your laptop in the same place every time. You will find it much easier to plug external devices into your laptop, as you will have it in the same place and in a convenient position for connection to your devices.

You can plug an external mouse and keyboard, or even monitor, through the docking station. With the HP docking station, you even get USB and Ethernet ports – all the stuff that was missing from your laptop before.

Port replicators are used to prevent you from needing to continually plug in your cords and prevents all that hassle involved in unplugging them when you want to move. You can connect all of your devices at once without having to switch things out.

In the event you have quite a bit of hardware to connect to, you can accomplish that task with the help of an HP docking station, regardless of what you might need to do. You can make your laptop more comfortable and more functional at the same time. The connectivity of a desktop is there, and you can alleviate the pain on your wrists and the overheating problems with the help of this handy invention.

All things have their downsides, however. It can cost you quite a bit. There are docking stations that cost up to $100. While the price may seem a bit exorbitant, it’s absolutely worth it to experience the convenience and benefits that an HP docking station can provide. You won’t have any more laptop related issues to worry.

Source:http://www.booshnews.com/2010/06/23/repair-lcd-monitor/

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