Posts Tagged Dell

Taking the Netbook Plunge

Posted by JJT in Blogging on March 29, 2009

In a fit of consumerism I finally made the purchase of a Dell Mini 9.  In order to let my parental houseguest use the Internet and not have use my desktop.  Since I am running Windows 7, I would rather not play help desk for my mother.  Thus, the netbook purchase. 

I went with a 16 GB SSD and the minimum 512MB of RAM.  I can always upgrade it later, as it will pretty much be a fixture of my living room.  For its purposes, though, it should be more than adequate for now. 

I will make sure to get a longer review up once it arrives.  I am debating reinstalling Windows on it when it arrives just to have XP Professional as opposed to XP Home. 

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3 Comments

Object of My (Geek) Desire

Posted by JJT in Blogging on September 4, 2008

Behold, the mini-notebook I have been lusting after lately after all the coverage at Engadget and BoingBoing Gadgets:

Running Ubuntu, with 1GB of RAM, and a webcam at around $400.  There is only one thing to say: DO WANT.

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2 Comments

Dell Latitude C800 Display Problems with Ubuntu

Posted by JJT in Blogging on August 25, 2008

My old and aged Dell Latitude C800 has just finished some needed maintenance.  For the most part, the laptop is being used by the proprietor of my local coffeehouse.  I received a frantic email from her last week complaining that Ubuntu's updates had failed and she was unable to login to her machine.

I picked up the laptop this evening to resolve the problem, and when I booted the machine I was able to see what the problem was immediately.  I had not had the problem for some time, primarily since it had been a while since I had built the machine.  Essentially, when the machine is booted, the display looks similar to the image below:

The display is garbled and useless.  It took some bit of Googling to refresh my memory, but the problem had to do with a misconfiguration of the xorg.conf file that drives the xserver settings for my laptop.  My Googling turned up the following post: Help with screen resolution on Dell Inspiron 8000.  The problem has to do with how the graphics card in my laptop identifies the driver, an ATI Mobility M4.  Adding the lines in the above post helped correct my problem.

Finally, once I was able to successfully boot into my profile, I was able to easily adjust the resolution of the display panel to 1600x1200.  Nonetheless, I am including the xorg.conf I am using below that appears to be working just as expected.

PLAIN TEXT
CODE:
  1. # xorg.conf (X.Org X Window System server configuration file)
  2. #
  3. # This file was generated by dexconf, the Debian X Configuration tool, using
  4. # values from the debconf database.
  5. #
  6. # Edit this file with caution, and see the xorg.conf manual page.
  7. # (Type "man xorg.conf" at the shell prompt.)
  8. #
  9. # This file is automatically updated on xserver-xorg package upgrades *only*
  10. # if it has not been modified since the last upgrade of the xserver-xorg
  11. # package.
  12. #
  13. # If you have edited this file but would like it to be automatically updated
  14. # again, run the following command:
  15. #   sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg
  16.  
  17. Section "InputDevice"
  18. Identifier  "Generic Keyboard"
  19. Driver    "kbd"
  20. Option    "XkbRules"    "xorg"
  21. Option    "XkbModel"    "pc105"
  22. Option    "XkbLayout"   "us"
  23. EndSection
  24.  
  25. Section "InputDevice"
  26. Identifier  "Configured Mouse"
  27. Driver    "mouse"
  28. Option    "CorePointer"
  29. EndSection
  30.  
  31. Section "InputDevice"
  32. Identifier  "Synaptics Touchpad"
  33. Driver    "synaptics"
  34. Option    "SendCoreEvents"  "true"
  35. Option    "Device"    "/dev/psaux"
  36. Option    "Protocol"        "auto-dev"
  37. Option    "HorizEdgeScroll" "0"
  38. EndSection
  39.  
  40. Section "Device"
  41. Identifier  "ATI Technologies, Inc. Rage Mobility M4 (AGP)"
  42. Driver    "ati"
  43. BusID      "PCI:1:0:0"
  44. Option    "AGPMode"  "4"
  45. Option    "AGPSize"  "32"
  46. Option    "EnablePageFlip"  "true"
  47. Option    "Display"  "BIOS"
  48. Option    "SWCursor"        "true"
  49. Option   "CCEusecTimeout" "20000"
  50. EndSection
  51.  
  52. Section "Monitor"
  53. Identifier  "Configured Monitor"
  54. HorizSync   31-82
  55. VertRefresh     40-110
  56. EndSection
  57.  
  58. Section "Screen"
  59. Identifier  "Default Screen"
  60. Monitor  "Configured Monitor"
  61. Device    "Configured Video Device"
  62. EndSection
  63.  
  64. Section "ServerLayout"
  65. Identifier  "Default Layout"
  66. Screen    "Default Screen"
  67. InputDevice "Synaptics Touchpad"
  68. EndSection

I spent way too much time than I needed on this, so this should save my (and someone else's) bacon in the future.

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29 Comments

Catharsis

Posted by JJT in Blogging on July 20, 2008

  • As another week ends and a new one begins, I find that my weekend was absorbed with work.  Again.  Some unexpected outages and a planned outage wound up taking up most of my time yesterday.  For some strange reason, the last two weeks have been full of too much work.  Today was delightfully uncomplicated by work, but I still had a conference call to take care of this afternoon.  Once that was done, the CrackBerry was silent for most of the day.  For that, I am most appreciative.
  • The new grill cover for my Weber is (finally) on its way from Amazon.  I need to plan a large end-of-summer cookout, so look for that to happen soon.
  • I am finally done with the work on my nephew's laptop.  I had to rebuild his laptop based on his hard drive going bad.  Fortunately, when I bought the laptop I bought the three-year warranty for parts.  Thus, his hard drive was replaced for free.  I spent most of the week reinstalling programs and such.  His AC adapter was also malfunctioning, and I also am getting a replacement part shipped out for that.  I have a new found appreciation for the online chat for Dell Technical Support.  It makes getting replacement parts so much easier.
  • I updated the blog (and some other blogs) to WordPress 2.6.  All is well on that front, and there are some nice management tweaks that have been done.  Take a look at "Plugins" compared to WordPress 2.5.x.

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6 Comments

Replacing the Home PC

Posted by JJT in Uncategorized on October 23, 2007

I finally got around to replacing my home PC last week after much procrastinating on my part.  I had hemmed and hawed about getting a new desktop, partly on account of money and on the need for one with my laptop.  I finally decided to bite the bullet again since I missed having a desktop to work on for stretches in my home office.  I also wanted to have a machine in the house running Windows XP to run some applications that just will not run on Windows Vista.

I decided to order another desktop from Dell, and here are the specs of the machine:

  • Intel Core2 Duo CPU E6550 (2.33GHz, 1333FSB 4MB L2)
  • 1GB DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz, Dual Channel DT
  • Dell 20 inch Wide E207WFP Analog Flat Panel Monitor
  • 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT 2DVI
  • 160GB Serial ATA Hard Drive 7200RPM, 8MB Cache
  • 48x Combo Drive
  • 16x DVD+/-RW Drive

With the time I spent home working remotely this weekend, I was able to build my machine the way I wanted it.  I plan on buying some more RAM from Crucial, simply because getting up to 3 GB of memory in this machine is so much cheaper than getting the machine to ship with it.

Finally, I want to get back to gaming on my PC again.  The one thing that you will never be able to do on most laptops is play a FPS-style of game.   I have a fairly decent graphics card, so I am trying to figure out what games to acquire.  To date myself, I haven't played any decent games since Medal of Honor:Allied Assault, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and Doom 3.  Of the three, MOHAA was fun, RtCW was nostalgia (since I played Wolfenstein 3-D in college), and D3 was somewhat tedious but visually good.

As for my laptop, I was thinking what to do with it.  I have an older laptop running Linux I can use around the house when I am lazy.  All it really needs is a PCMCIA wireless adapter, and it is good to go.  I am probably going to give my laptop to my nephew as an early gift of sorts from the family.  He gets something he can use for a while through high school and possibly college.  I just need to make sure he knows to take care of it and to not "show it off."  I think it will be a good thing to get a laptop in his hands, even if it is much earlier than I ever did.

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10 Comments