A problematic Dell

Once in a while we get a machine into the workshop for repair that turns out to be a real head scratcher. One such unit was collected from a customer last week and it has taken a while to get to the bottom of it. It was a Dell Inspiron 530 that failed to post when powered up. The fans would spin and the power light would remain steady amber indicating a problem with either the power supply unit or motherboard.

We first swapped out the PSU for a known good one, but the symptoms remained the same. Since the PC was 2 1/2 years old the customer and the customer did not want to spend much on the repair we figured that a replacement motherboard would be outside the customer's spend. Just to be on the safe side we checked the warranty status with Dell by entering the unit's service tag number in their support site and we were pleasantly surprised (as was the customer) to find that there were 155 days remaining of a three year warranty. So we called in Dell to do the repair.

A Dell contract technician arrived with a replacement motherboard, swapped the old one for the new one and, voila, the same symptoms persisted. The technician contacted Dell again and it was deemed that the problem was a faulty input/output panel switch which was duly ordered. The next day the technician reappeared with the part, fitted it and, again no change in the symptoms. At this stage he started to suspect the power supply but I told him that we had already checked with a known good PSU. He asked if I had a good PSU we could try so we hooked one up and, lo and behold, the unit posted. So the technician concluded that both the original PSU and motherboard had failed simultaneously - a reasonable conclusion under the circumstances.

To update service tag number associated with the new motherboard the technician needed to reboot the unit and enter the BIOS. Unfortunately, as soon as he rebooted the original symptoms returned. A this point he surmised that the PSUs were blowing due to a possible short in the motherboard/case. However, I brought the PSU that was connected and the original PSU still in the case and mounted them in a Dell Dimension on the work bench - in both cases the unit booted without problems, ruling out the PSU as a problem.

At this point there was, understandably, much head scratching going on and DELL HQ was again contacted by the technician. The conclusion was that another new motherboard and a new PSU would be dispatched in an attempt to resolve the problem. And they duly arrived this morning along with Tony the technician who replaced the parts and, much to his dismay, the same problem arose. The only thing that hasn't been changed at this point is the processor. So Tony (we're on first name terms now) called in again to Dell and the next step is they are taking it in to their repair facility next Monday for a 6-8 day stay. I'll take  the hard drive out before they collect it to make sure the customer's data stays intact. Will keep you posted on progress.

Speaking of Harvey Norman...

We have a regular customer who recently needed a new all-in-one printer with fax and went to Harvey Norman in Nutgrove where they came away with a HP model that cost in the region of €250. They got PC Medic to install it which only took half an hour and all seemed fine. A few days later they called us to say that the printer was mysteriously going offline at random times. After much digging about we found that this was a documented problem with this model of printer and that while a few different solutions were proposed, none of them worked in our case.

So the printer was packed up and brought back to Harvey Norman and the manager there had no hesitation in replacing it for a slightly dearer Brother model at no extra cost. It was great to see a retailer taking their responsibilities to consumers seriously when a problem arises with goods. Needless to say we now point our customers to Harvey Norman's for printers and such like when the opportunity arises. Go Harvey Norman Go!

Great value printer

We came across Brother's DCP-195C all-in-one printer in Harvey Norman's in The Park, Carrickmines a few days back and bought one fo a customer who needed a new low cost printer. For €75.00 this was a real bargain. Easy to install, quiet and includes scan and copy functions, PictBridge to allow printing directly from a camera and memory card slots - this is a bargain. Not the fastest printer in the world but good quality output and a small footprint. We like it.

Dropbox - Simple Data Backup and Synchronisation

If there is one thing that customers tend to put on the long finger it's data backup. Time and again we've come across cases of lost data through crashed hard drives where the user has an external hard drive for six months that they just never got around to setting up. Now we've spoken before of how we like to use Cobian Backup with our external hard drives to automate our backup. But if your backup requirements are simple consider Dropbox.

Dropbox is an internet file back up/sharing system that gives you 2.0GB of backup storage for free - over that amount and you have to pay for it at a reasonable price. The mechanics of using it are simple.

1. Create a Dropbox account
2. Download and install the Dropbox installer
3. Copy the files you want to back up to the Dropbox folder created by the installer.

And that's it. Files copied to your Dropbox folder are uploaded automatically to Dropbox's servers for safe storage. But there's more. If you have a second desktop or laptop you can synchronise the files between your two PCs. Simply run the Dropbox installer on your second PC, login to your drop box account and the files in your first PC will appear in the Dropbox folder on your second PC. Thereafter, files added to either Dropbox folder will automatically replicate to the other, keeping your files synchronised between the two PCs.

Not recommended for backing up your 30GB music or photo collection, but if you want to keep those important Word and Excel files safe you'll be hard pressed to find a simpler solution.

Bogus Telephone Support

Three of our customers have recently reported to us that they have received phone calls purporting to be from a company called Online PC Care, which appear to have originated in an Indian call centre. The caller will try to persuade you that your computer is either suffering from a series of errors (they will ask you to open the Windows EventViewer to show you that such errors exist) or they will try to convince you that your PC is overloaded with junk files. They may try to persuade you to allow them to take remote control of your PC to address the issues they have highlighted. They will proceed to try to get you to sign up for a service contract. While there may be a legitimate company called Online PC Care, the callers our customers spoke to would appear to be operating a scam to collect money and/or credit card details from customers who fall for the scam. One customer reported that the caller became abusive when she refused to sign up for a subscription and the caller repeatedly called back every half hour for an afternoon. The caller reported the number to Eircom but was told that, although there were other reports of complaints against the number there was nothing Eircom could do as the calls originated outside Eircom's jurisdiction.

If you receive a call similar to the one described above we would recommend that you terminate the call at the earliest opportunity - the longer you engage them the harder they will try to persuade you. Under no circumstances should you allow them to take control of your PC remotely, nor should you give them credit card details.

Update: A customer has today notified us that a company calling itself Virtual PC Doctor contacted them and that their modus operandi was identical to that described above for Online PC Care. Be aware that they may operate under a number of different guises.

O2 Mobile Broadband Solutions

PC Medic is currently in the process of trialling mobile telecoms provider O2's range of mobile broadband solutions and so far the results of our trials are very promising. So much so in fact that we are in the process of signing up as resellers for O2's range of mobile broadband devices and we hope to be in a position to offer these products to our customers in the next week or so.

To date we have been trialling three different 3G-based mobile broadband devices: the Huawei 1752; the Sierra Wireless 302; and the Qualcomm GlobeSurfer III. Both the Huawei and Sierra Wireless modems are USB dongle devices that are both easy to set up and use. Like all hardware devices that are to be used with a computer both a software driver and interface utility must be installed before the device will work. This is where installation of the dongles is an absolute breeze. When you plug the dongle into a USB port on your computer (either Windows or Apple) the installation procedure begins automatically. This makes it so easy for even the most reticent computer user to get up and running. Within 80 seconds of plugging the device into a USB port you're all set to access broadband.

So how do these 3G-based dongles compare to fixed copper (Eircom) or fibre-based (UPC/NTL) lines. Well, like most things in life, that depends. And what it depends upon is (mainly) your proximity to a mobile telephone mast. This is because this system of mobile broadband is based on the same technology used for mobile voice telephony. So what kind of broadband speeds can you expect? Well, where we are located is just "OK" for mobile phone reception. Nonetheless, we have been able to achieve download speeds of 3.72 MBit/S for the Sierra model and 3.28 MBit/S for the Huawei model. While the theoretical maximum download speed is 7.2 MBit/S it is highly unlikely that you will achieve this unless you have an O2 mast on your chimney and are in a low contention area. However, if you currently have a 3 MBit/S service from, for example, Eircom, you will probably be lucky to get 2.5 MBit/S on average. So in this regard the dongle can perform as well as fixed line broadband.

I say "can" because depending on you exact geographic location, and the prevailing weather conditions, your speed may drop off considerably. In fact the dongles allow a number of different data transmission protocols to be used for communication and will automatically select the best available at any point in time. These are, in order of best to worst, HSDPA, UMTS and EDGE. If your signal only allows use of the EDGE protocol you are down to maximum download speeds of 384 KBit/S. At these download speeds it feels more like dial-up than broadband, but you are still able to get on-line.

The product that we really like is the GlobeSurfer III. This is a 3G mobile wireless modem router that can be plugged in anywhere that there is a power socket and multiple PCs or laptops can simultaneously access the internet. In addition, the unit has two ethernet ports for wired connections to PCs or games consoles, a USB port for shared printers or external storage device, and has voice telephony and SMS options that we haven't yet got around to exploring. Potentially this device could replace your fixed-line (copper or fibre) service, providing you are in a good reception area. You can unplug the unit from the wall in your home, throw it in your weekend bag and bring it with you to your hotel/B&B/holiday home and have wireless internet access as soon as you plug it into the power at your destination (subject to signal reception).

Because you don't know whether you are in a good reception area or not you might be reluctant to sign up for a fixed term contract for one of these devices, and that's understandable. Because O2 has generously provided PC Medic with a number of trial devices of each unit described above, we are in a position where we can provide all our existing customers with these units to try at their leisure for a week or two before deciding if they provide a solution for them. All our customers will receive an e-mail in the coming weeks giving more details of this program.

Disc Slow Down for XP Users

Tactics used to make new hard drives more efficient could cause problems for Windows XP users. It may mean any new drive bought after next year could be noticeably slower to use on the operating system.
The issue involves the way hard drives are broken down into individual sectors. Until now, it has always been standard for hard drive sectors to be 512 bytes in size. However, not all of each sector is used for storing data. Instead, there is a marker to denote the start of the sector: a space used for codes which are used to check if there is any error with the sector and its contents, and a space between each sector. (Source: arstechnica.com)
The larger the drive, the more sectors there are, and thus the more space unavailable for data storage. While this wasn't a problem in the past, with today's larger drives it has become a significant issue.

512 Byte Sector Limit Scrapped Next Year
The International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association (IDEMA), the global body for drive manufacturers, has now agreed that all drives produced after January next year will use sectors which are 4 kilobytes, which is 8 times larger in size than the standard 512 bytes.
The 4 kilobyte sectors have two beneficial effects: first, it cuts down the amount of disk space used simply for spaces between sectors by seven-eighths (87.5%). Second, it allows more space in each sector to be used for error correction codes. This should drastically increase the reliability of drives.

XP Users Could See 10% Dip in Performance
The problem comes from the fact that while Vista and Windows 7 were both designed with 4K sectors in mind, XP was created long before the industry had decided it would eventually be a standard successor to 512 bytes.
XP can work with a 4K sector based drive, but will simply treat it as if it used 512 byte sectors. This will be fine for reading information, but will introduce an adjustment step when writing to make sure the data fits the sectors correctly. Though this will only take an additional 5 milliseconds, that works out as a decrease in speed of up to 10%, which is likely to be a noticeable deterioration, especially with many files stored on the drive.

Later Systems Unaffected
In addition to Vista and Windows 7, all versions of Apple's OS X system from Tiger (released in 2005) onwards will work fine with the new drives. Most modern Linux based systems should be OK and, being open source, it's much easier to upgrade those which aren't. (Source: bbc.co.uk)
For XP users, it may be a judgment call as to whether the problem is disruptive enough to justify updating to a later operating system at the same time as getting a new drive.

New Dell Vostro Laptops

We have been a big fan of the Dell Vostro 1520 since it's release a couple of years ago and any of our customers that we supplied with it have been happy campers. So we were sorry to hear that the 1520 (and the 17" screened 1720) are being discontinued in favor of the newly released Vostro 3000 series. The 3500 will be the replacement for the old 1520, with the 3300 and 3700 replacing the 1320 and 1720 variants.

The 3500, which interests us the most, comes with Intel Core i3 and Core i5 options. The Intel Core i3-330M is a lower-middle class dual core CPU for laptops and clocks with 2.16 GHz. The difference to the Core i5-430M is the lacking Turbo Boost overclocking and the slower core speed. Each core is based on the Nehalem (Westemere) micro-architecture. Hyperthreading enables the Dual Core CPU to handle 4 threads at once (for a better usage of the pipeline).

The Intel Core i5-430M is a fast middle class dual core CPU for laptops and clocks (due to the Turbo Mode) from 2.26 to 2.53 GHz. Each core is based on the Nehalem (Westemere) micro-architecture. Hyperthreading enables the Dual Core CPU to handle 4 threads at once (for a better usage of the pipeline). Compared to the faster Core i7-620M, the 430M only has 3 MB Level 3 Cache, missing VT-d, Trusted Execution, and AES features and a lower clock speed.

The new 3300 models seem to tick all the boxes, with built in webcam, 802.11n wireless, Windows 7 in 32 and 64 bit flavours, 3-4 GB Ram as standard, good sized hard discs and good looks (see the picture above). We have ordered our first 3500 with an Intel Core i5-430M processor, 3GB RAM and Windows 7 Home Premium 32-Bit and will post a review when we have it in the workshop.

Cobian Backup

Need a good backup solution? Then you should try out the open source Cobian Backup that we have been using for over a year now. One of the issues that we have had with most proprietary backup programs, such as Genie Pro, Acronis, and Norton 360 is that they save the backup files in a compressed proprietary format. While this may save you some time and space it means that if your file becomes corrupt during encoding you won’t be able to recover it. We have had this exact problem in the past and because of this we insist that all backups are now in the native un-encoded file format.

Cobian allows us to do either full, incremental or differential backups using the native file format and can be set up to run as a service, allowing fully automatic backups to be performed. It is flexible, simple to use and, in our experience, very reliable. Oh, and did I mention that it’s free? Check it out.

Blacklisting

We had a problem sending e-mail from an Outlook account on one of our laptops last week and discovered that the problem was due to our IP address being blacklisted by one of the Blacklist services used by our ISP UPC. The problem was due to a customer's PC that was in the workshop which was infected by spamming software and which we connected to our network. Once you are blacklisted you have to make a delisting request directly to the Blacklist service provider, not to your ISP (UPC in our case). This can take up to 24 hours before it happens, leaving one without outgoing e-mail on SMTP-based mail clients e.g. Outlook for that period (Gmail and other web-based mail is not affected).

This is the second time that this has happened since we moved to UPC - it never happened us during the 12 years we were with Eircom - perhaps Eircom don't utilize Blacklist services.

Anyway, all is well again and to prevent a recurrence we have blocked port 25 on our router for all IP addresses except the one assigned to our PC using Outlook. Any customer's computer that is infected with spamming malware will now be blocked from sending via SMTP on the blocked port.

Here is the description of blacklists from www.blacklist.ie where you can check your own blacklisting status.

Blacklists are created and managed by anti-spam organisations and are seen as an effective way of punishing known spammers.
Some of the most widely checked blacklists are Spamcop, MAPS blacklist, and SPAMHaus - blacklist.ie checks against these and many more. These organisations publish blacklists of IP addresses that are known spammers. Blacklists are used by thousands of ISPs as part of their defense against spam. A legitimate email system can also end up being blacklisted, resulting in mail delivery problems and subsequent costs for business.
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) subscribe to blacklists in order to filter out spam sent across their network or to their subscribers. If you are listed and an ISP checks against the list, your message will not be delivered.

What a Bargain!

Clearance sale of second-hand PC from our workshop. This Dell 4700 has been freshly reinstalled with Windows XP SP3 and all updates. It comes with OpenOffice , Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash, Google Chrome and Avast Anti Virus. The unit has 512MB RAM, 2.8GHz Pentium IV CPU, 8 USB ports, Ethernet socket, 80GB Hard Disc, Integrated Video and CD/DVD RW. Comes with 6 months hardware warranty. A lovely quiet machine ideal for all home duties (not suitable for playing games - apart from games included with Windows XP). Price without monitor is €205. Price with 17" monitor is €295. Free delivery to Dublin's Southside. Call 086-8178678 and mention blog deal. Mouse mat not included in the price but available from here!

SlingBox Solo

The SlingBox is a gizmo that allows you to access TV media from your own TV hardware across the internet. And why might you want to do that I hear you ask. Well, consider someone who has a second house in Spain and wants to watch Fair City live and not miss an episode of the Late Late Show while they are away. Or, indeed, if you are going on holidays to Italy for two weeks but can't bear not cheering your team on in the Sunday Game live then a SlingBox might be for you.

I was aware of the SlingBox from reading reviews of it in the past but had never been up close and personal to one until a customer recently asked if we could set one up with his Sky system. Yesterday I dropped over to the customer and picked up his SlingBox and brought it home to familiarize myself with it's setup.

We have a UPC HD cable box at home that has a SCART socket with composite video-out. I connected the supplied SCART to RCA adapter to the UPC box and connected this to the SlingBox with the supplied Composite A/V cable. Next step was to connect the supplied remote control IR cable to the SlingBox and position the LED to shine on the UPC box IR receiver. Before powering up the box all that remained was to connect the SlingBox to my Netgear router via the supplied ethernet cable. So, everything we needed to make the physical connections is supplied in the box.

Once the hardware is installed it is a case of logging onto Slingmedia's dowload site to download the most up to date version of their SlingPlayer software - this is the application that allows you to watch your TV remotely - I downloaded it onto a Dell netbook running XP on an Atom processor.

When the software is installed it's time to create a SlingBox account and configure your SlingBox to talk to your cable box and your router. This is handled through a step-by-step wizard and I had no problem finding my cable box and router in the configuration options. The only slightly technical step is setting port forwarding on the appropriate port on the router, but the step-by-step wizard holds your hand for this.

Once completed I was able to receive all my TV channels on the laptop and had access to a virtual remote control that mimicked the real one, even down to volume, on/off and programme guide. I tested the picture quality when streaming within my local network and via the internet and there was a significant difference in picture quality between the two, with internet streaming being significantly poorer. This may in part be due to the fact that my upload bit rate is max 256 kbit/s - a higher upload bit rate may provide a better picture. If the picture was viewed in a small window, as opposed to full screen a sharper smoother picture resulted.

During setup I had a couple of issues that held me up. Firstly, positioning the remote control LED was problematic and I finished up using both supplied control LEDs instead of a single one in order to get the virtual remote working properly. Secondly, the UPC cable box we use is connected to our tv with a HDMI cable and, for reasons I don't fully understand, you cannot have HDMI and SCART output simultaneously. This necessitated disconnecting the TV from the cable box while I was using the SlingBox - not SlingBox's fault but less than ideal nonetheless.

The SlingBox is currently available from Amazon.co.uk for £105 and does what it says on the box. However, I feel that this is version 1.0 of this type of media extender and that in a few years we will probably have the type of features offered by the Slingbox built into our TVs and or routers. Until then, Coronation Street on the Costas anyone?

End of a Classic?

Word on the forums is that the Logitech Squeezebox Classic is being discontinued to be replaced by the Squeezebox Touch. As a Classic user I will be very sorry to see this very stable incarnation of the Squeezebox discontinued and might just pick up another while they are still available on Amazon.co.uk

Do You Really Need Office?

A lot of our customers who purchase a new PC want to get Microsoft Office at the same time and normally pay in the region of €90 for MS Office 2007 Home and Student Edition. In many case MS Works 9.0 is already bundled with the PC but customers feel that they must have Word for their word processing and Excel for their spreadsheets (most home users don't use Powerpoint).

What you should be aware of is that MS Works 9.0 now allows you to open Word and Excel .doc and .xls files and also allows you to save documents and spreadsheets in those formats. So why do you need to spend an extra €90 when you have all the software you need bundled with your PC? The answer, in most cases, is you don't unless you need advanced features like macros and pivot tables.

So before you rush out to buy Office give Works a run around the block. It may be all that you need. And if you do need more horsepower in your office productivity software, there is always OpenOffice.

Music on the Move

Here's a shot of the X-mini speaker attached to an ipod mini. Music systems don't come more portable than this!

ReadyNAS Duo

We recently deployed a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo (NAS = Network Atttached Storage) in our workshop for general data backup duties. The unit is equipped with 2 x 500GB SATA drives set up in a redundant X-RAID configuration (more information on X-RAID here). The reason we have configured the unit in X-RAID rather than RAID 5 is that we also use the unit for media streaming, which X-RAID is particularly efficient at doing.

Data backup is handled by the open source Cobian Backup 9 program running on the various network computers. We like Cobian because it is free, flexible and allows backups in native file formats with or without compression.

The ReadyNAS Duo is particularly adept at media streaming as it incorporates Logitech's (formerly Slimdevices's) Squeezecenter music streaming software, as well as iTunes Server software. Note that this NAS is really a stripped down computer with 256MB of RAM running Sparc Linux. Access to Squeezcenter is via a web browser on any attached network computer. The only downside is that the web browser is relatively unresponsive, but this does not impact on streaming performance. The NAS is serving music to two Squeezeboxes and a Squeezebox radio and response time via the Squeezebox interfaces is only marginally slower than a PC-based Squeezeserver. The ReadyNAS Duo can happily serve different music to each Squeezebox or synchronize the music on any two or all three units.

We're big Squeezebox fans so more on that anon.

For Sound on the Move

Santa was good enough to bring me a very cool device to allow me to hear my music on the move and good goods do come in small packages. The item in question is the X-mini mark II. This is a speaker smaller than a pool ball that screws apart to reveal, believe it or not, a bass unit. Suffice to say that it is the best mobile speaker unit that I have found to date, and at a great price. Details here. If you are in Ireland you can get it from pressieport.ie.

Back on the Blog Trail

For various reasons it has been difficult to keep up this blog over the past months and you can see that there has been a significant gap since my last blog. I hope to rectify that and, as they say in the TV industry, "normal service has been resumed". I look forward to sharing with you some of the cool things that we have come across over the past while as well as our usual commentary on what's happening in the world of home computing. Keep in touch.

Beware the €449 Notebook

A lot of our customers are excited by advertisements that they see for Inspiron notebooks priced at €449 from Dell and similar priced offers from PC World and Harvey Norman. The good news is that, yes, you can buy a new notebook PC for less than €500. The bad news is that you'll probably regret it almost straight away as the performance of such a notebook will be very disappointing.

Question: How do you get a notebook down to €449? Answer: By cutting back on the hardware. The following are things you should note when assessing a potential purchase.

The Processor:
Most bargain basement notebooks use an Intel Celeron or AMD Semperon processor which come from their manufacturer's "value range" of processors. This means that they are cheaper but significantly slower than full-priced processors such as the Pentium and Athlon/Turion processors. Also, you will find that these are generally single-core processors rather than the now standard dual-core processors offered in higher priced models. Dual core processors beat single core processors every time when it comes to speed.

Memory:
We see bargain basement notebooks fitted with 1 GB RAM trying to run Vista Home Premium Edition. Yes, it will run, but like a snail. You cannot get a meaningful experience running Vista Premium on machines with less than 2GB of RAM and for Vista Basic you need 1 GB RAM. Saving money on memory is just mean in our book as memory was never as cheap as it is currently.

Hard Disc:
Budget machines will have budget hard discs, typically 80GB discs running at 5400rpm. In this day and age 80 GB will fill up fast if you have a digital camera or are interested in music and you won't get the performance form a 5400 rpm disc that you would from a 7200 rpm one.

Software:
Many customers who purchased a PC 5 or 6 years ago are horrified to discover that Microsoft Office is no longer bundled "for free" with current models and baulk at the fact that they have to pay extra for it (about €120 for the Home and Student edition which cannot be used in a commercial environment). But pay you must if you want Office.

When you include a faster dual core processor and add extra RAM and a bigger, faster hard disk, Microsoft Office, plus include some of the other options that aren't standard on the budget-priced model, such as built-in webcam, or coloured lid cover then you are looking at closer to €800 to €1000. However, spending this amount gets you a notebook that you will be happy with for some years, rather than a lemon that will leave a sour taste in your mouth.

Windows 7

While Vista may appear to be a new product to many people upgrading their 2+ year-old PC or notebook, it could already be in the golden years of its product life cycle. Word has it that Microsoft may bring the shipment of Windows 7, codenamed Vienna, forward from 2010 to next year. While Vista hasn't exactly bombed, there is a broad consensus that it has failed to deliver the goods when compared to XP. Bloatware is a term frequently used when discussing Vista and the fact that it requires a more powerful PC to run more slowly than XP bears out its lumbering code. Less than 10% of businesses have converted to Vista and its sales success is down to new PC sales to the home and SoHo market. Rumor has it that one key objective for the Windows 7 development team is to slim down the kernel to make it a leaner, faster operating system. Whether this will be achieved remains to be seen, but it would certaily be a welcomed accomplishment.