New Computer Season - An Experience Journal

[BobLfoot 301]

I work for a Fortune 500 concern where it is policy to issue new computer hardware every 3 to 4 years to avoid issues of obselecnce and such. My four year point is approaching this fall so I recieved a new laptop last week. This posting is to share with others my experiences for good or bad. 1. The change in a nutshell was an Hp Compaq 6230 1.86 GHZ CPU with 1 GB ram and 60GB Hard Drive and ATI Mobility Radeon X300 display adapter for a newer HP Elitebook 6930 2.40 GHZ Duo Core with 3GB ram and 160 Gb Hard Drive and ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3450. 2. The losses - 2a. No Built in Serial Port. My IS department solved this by issuing me a Port Replicator. It works but is a little clunky in the field and plugging in and out of it is hairy at times. I may check out the RA approved USB to Serial Adapter I've read about. I also have a 1203-USB for Drives. 2b. No PCMCIA Slots just an Express/34 and Express/54 slot. My IS department has no solution for this. I've read the postings about the Duel adapter and such from 2006, but the jury seems still out on that technology. I am looking at the U2DHP cable also. 3. The gains - 3a, Speed is lightning. The four apps I launch every morning {Outlook, Word, Excel and IE} apepar ready for use as fast as I can mouse over the 4 icons and click in succession might even put them back in the startup. The old machine took 5 mintues after clicking the four before any was ready. 3b. Hi Def 3D capable display. may rent an HD DVD jsut for checkout sake. That's it for starters - I'll add more as time permits and goes on.

[Nathan 7]

Does it have a Blu-Ray player?

[JesperMP 2]

Ho hoo :DFor every problem there is a solution - and a price to pay. Just wait for when IT finds out the U2DHP cable costs more than your swanky new PC ! You may find that they give you back your old machine ;)

[DwalterE 0]

Thank you for sharing your experience. We'll look forward to your future posts. You don't mention operating system. Would it be safe to assume you've gone from XP to Vista?

[BobLfoot 301]

Heavens no - the corporate images are all Windows XP SP3 and I'm running RA Software so Vista would be a so so anyway.

[BobLfoot 301]

Day off work today so I played with my new baby and a stopwatch. From Power Button push to the CTRL-ALT-DEL to login window 1 mintue 12 seconds. From Login Mouse Click to hourglass stops with all drivers apparently loaded another 1 mintue 8 seconds. Total from Power On to Usable 2 mintues 20 seconds KWEL Beans. OH and Load of Outlook, Excel, Word and IE takes only another 10 seconds. Dang I'm getting spoiled. Device Manager says Optiarc DVD RW AD-7561S The printing on the side says DVD Multiwrite and Lightscribe. HP.com lists some models with blu-ray, but I don't think mine is.

[Clay B. 1]

Well if you use the lightscribe. Have something else to do in the mean time. Its real cool for labeling disks but takes forever. I still use it though. I can give my customers a disk with a label that doesn't come off.

[paulengr 44]

I just received a new machine earlier this week. Went from a 2.something GHz 64 bit Athlon to a Merom Intel dual core at 2.2 GHz with 4 GB RAM and a 250 GB hard drive, and the newer Intel onboard graphics (forgot the name), loaded with Vista. Aside from the constant requests to confirm that I wanted to do what I just said I did and the constant problems with devices, it ran about as slow as the now 4 years old machine. I finally gave up and dumped Vista for Ubuntu Linux with Wine for any needed DOS/Windows applications. Boot up time is roughly 20 seconds, recovery from sleep is about 5 seconds. Every app I throw at it except for something really piggy such as Netbeans boots in 1-2 seconds. Same with any other app. Problems with drivers, compatibility, etc., are simply non-issues compared to Vista. The user interface blows Aero away in terms of fancy animations. I haven't really seriously screwed with Vista before but this has me thoroughly convinced that Vista was a secret plot with Intel to sell more hardware. So far it seems that although I might have to adjust a configuration here or there, I can simply forget about compatibility issues. Installation was a non-issue. Other than the fact that the laptop as-built from Dell absorbed almost every available primary partition so I had to creatively rearrange things, installation took all of about 10 mouse clicks. Haven't tried anything really strange such as XenServer yet to dual-boot simultaneously but so far I haven't had the need. This is a 100% change from going on 10 years ago when Linux systems had a very high geekiness factor involved.

[paulengr 44]

Another followup. I couldn't get Rockwell software to install under Wine so I had to punt and run a virtual machine. I installed XP Pro on a VirtualBox virtual machine and I'm unable to detect anything really different about it. Performance is pretty decent. It's kind of like doing server work via RDP or Dameware MRC. The standard for Ubuntu for this kind of thing is to use KVM. But KVM requires hardware virtualization support. I paid for an extra speed upgrade but failed to notice that I lost VT support when I actually got around to buying the machine, so I'm unable to run KVM. No matter...VirtualBox will run either in trapped kernel version or in hardware virtualized support.