I have an HP 6715B Laptop which is powered by the AMD Turion 64 X2, features the ATI’s Radeon Xpress X1250 and one of the great features of this 15.4 inch laptop is the fact the display runs at 1680 x 1050 which is equivalent to a 20″ display right. Now the Laptop is getting on a bit these days and HP laptops in my own experience tend to suffer badly with mainly the graphics failing. My Problem is that upon switching on the Laptop, the BIOS Screen with sit there for a good while, maybe 5 minutes or more? Once it got past that it booted and worked fine.

Dealing with the issue

The first thing I did was reset the internal battery and even went into the BIOS and did various checks, none of this sorted the problem. The other thing I noticed was how noisy the laptop was, seems the fan was running high all the time. It was a shame the laptop was doing this as I had planned to sell this on at work if possible but there was no way I could give them a laptop that took forever to get out of the BIOS screen.

Cleaning inside

I got some compressed air also called Air duster and got to work on the laptop. Unscrewing three screws on the bottom marked keyboard symbol, flipping it over and pressing the latches on top of the keyboard (4 of them) to allow the keyboard to be removed. I used the Air Duster to Blast out any crap and gave it general clean.

Will it now work?

The first boot was the same but later that same day and it went through the BIOS quick (as it should do) and the other bonus was now the laptop was very quiet indeed. When I was testing it for streaming and the CPU was like 95%, then I noticed it was loud again. I will carry on to make sure it is fixed before I dare sell it to someone.

Bonus Clean 

I used theAir Duster on my Dell XPS 435MT, I could here it pulsating as if the fan was struggling to keep a constant pace. Once I had blown out every scrap of dirt in there, the Dell was now silent, I recommend a can of this stuff even though it does not last that long, already half of the can is used up on just two cleans. 

I have been pondering on buying one of these super large Apple iMac machines for a little while now, before I was waiting until they refreshed the range and once they did refresh the range, I was unsure as to which one to buy. I went out yesterday to look around the shops, to see what they had on offer (the prices do not change for apple products) and have a general play around. I spotted some reduced price models but they were not only last year models but shop used (ex-display) and the saving to be honest were not that great. In my mind I was unsure to buy the Core i5 2.7 Model, the faster (only slightly) Core i5 3.1 model but had a better graphics card or wait until a decent refurb hit the store.

The New models

The main features of the new models were simply Thunderbolt, the New HD iSight Camera and a faster graphics Card (ATI 6770M or ATI 6970M). Now while thunderbolt sounds a great idea, I do not see myself buying anything that will plug into this thing – I already have various NAS Drives so I wont be buying an external Thunderbolt drive. As for the Webcam, this is a nice update but I have various Webcam’s anyhow and I much prefer the flexibility of a seperate movable webcam. This leave the graphics card – it is always better to have the best there is when dealing with an all-in-one type machine as you cannot upgrade this.

How much is too much?

I looked at the New models and £1399 & £1649 seemed to be a lot of money to chuck down, this was holding me back to be honest as I had some money set aside but not enough to clear the whole amount. I did not want to get financing as I felt that this added even more money to the cost of the machine in the long run.

Refurbished

I already know about this section of the apple store and often have a look there but there is not that many 27 inch models for sale. Today I went there and there was a selection of 4 models to choose from:

• Core i3 3.2Ghz, ATI 5670 512MB ram (2010 Model) – £1,049
• Core i5 2.66GHz, ATI 4850 512MB Ram (2009 Model) – £1,099
• Core i5 2.8Ghz, ATI 5750 1Gig Ram (2010 Model) – £1,189
• Core i7 2.93GHZ, ATI 5750 1Gig Ram (2010 Model) – £1,289

If we ignore the i3 Model and the 2009 Model, this leave a choice of two machines to go for – the Core i5 or the Core i7 – this is were the benchmarks come into play.

We can see the 2010 i7 Model sits second in that list while the 2010 i5 model sits about 10th – so the last year core i7 is still quite a performer. We can also see by the pricing that for an extra £100 – we get a jump in CPU basically. I jumped straight onto the buy it now page and went ahead and completed the transaction – it should arrive by Tuesday (5th July).

What about all the other machines you own?

I have a few machines scattered about that I got by way of upgrades along the way and just put them to use as you get next to nothing for a second hand windows box these days. My plan is simple enough, I can sell my Laptop for say £200-250 (I checked e-bay for the value), I plan to sell this at work as it is easier to get rid of and get the money quickly. As for the desktop machines, I maybe will also try and sell them as well at work but I am not sure how viable selling a desktop is – I may only get a small amount of money and it may be better to carry on using the machines for odd tasks as I am doing now. The problem is I do not have the space for 2 major machines along with the rest to fit on one desk. 

Ready for HD

• GPU decoding on Windows Vista and 7, using DxVA2 for H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2
• GPU decoding on GNU/Linux, using VAAPI for H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2
• DSP decoding using OpenMax IL, for compatible embedded devices
• Improved support for MKV HD, including seeking fixes, and 7.1 channels codecs
• Support for new codecs, like Blu-Ray subtitles, MPEG-4 lossless and VP8

Extensions

New add-ons and script framework so one can personalize its vlc.

• Written in lua
• 2 main types of scripts:
  • content add-ons, integrated in the playlist
  • functionnalities extensions, like metadata searching on the web, or subtitles look-ups
• Very Simple

Web improvements

• Support for WebM decoding and encoding
• Improved web plugins
• Better streaming capabilities

Better Audio experience

• Integrated playlist in the Qt4 interface
• Multiple views (like album art) in the playlist in the Qt4 interface
• Support for AMR-NB, Mpeg-4 ALS, Vorbis 6.1/7.1, FLAC 6.1/7.1 and WMAS
• CDDB and CD-Text works now on the Windows port when listening to CD-Audio
• Support for DVD-Audio files (.aob)
• Improved meta-data and album-art support

Faster, Lighter

• Faster decoding, with up to 40% speed-ups, in HD resolutions
• First part of the Video Output core rewrite
• Removal or rewrite of dozens of modules, code simplification and tens of thousands of lines of code removed
• Some functionalities that are less used are now moved to extensions
• More assembly optimizatinons, especially SSSE3/SSE4 and ARM Neon
• Fewer threads used

Better for developers

• Simplified and improved libVLC, removal of exceptions for better C integration
• New phonon-backend for Qt applications, on all platforms
• New C++ bindings

Grab it at VidoLan

Every once in a while it is good to make sure you have the latest software running and today was a good point in question in that there is a few programs that have been updated and worth posting about in case anybody missed them. If you are already way ahead of the game – then no worries, nothing lost here but the one’s that I have seen so far are WordPress Updating to V3 and ATI getting to 10.6 on the Drivers fron as well as NVidia if your sporting a GeForce Card.

WordPress 3.0

Normally I throw caution to the wind and press Update but this time I went into my FTP and grabbed the entire site as well as download the MySQL Databases. The update went without a hitch and the nice new light look along with telling me all the things that needed updating at once was nice. If you run WordPress then on your site, I Suggest you upgrade as soon as.

ATI Catalyst™ 10.6 Suite

Released on the 16th June (two days ago) it introduces some new feature and many fixes:

New in Version 257.21

• Adds support for Blu-ray 3D with NVIDIA 3D Vision technology. Learn more about the hardware and software requirements here .
• Increases performance for GeForce GTX 400 Series GPUs in several PC games. The following are examples of some of the most significant improvements measured with GeForce GTX 480. Results will vary depending on your GPU and system configuration:

• • Up to 14% in Aliens vs. Predator (1920×1200 noAA/AF – Tessellation on)
  • Up to 4% in Batman: Arkham Asylum (1920×1200 4xAA/16xAF PhysX=High)
  • Up to 5% in BattleForge (1920×1200 4xAA/16xAF – Very High settings)
  • Up to 5% in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (1920×1200 4xAA/16xAF)
  • Up to 4% in Crysis: Warhead (1920×1200 4xAA/16xAF – Enthusiast setting)
  • Up to 24% in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (1920×1200 no AA/AF)
  • Up to 9% in Far Cry 2 (2560×1600 8xAA/16xAF)
  • Up to 25% in Just Cause 2 (2560×1600 no AA/AF – Concrete Jungle)
  • Up to 7% in Metro 2033 (1920×1200 no AA/16xAF – Tessellation on)
  • Up to 40% in Metro 2033 with SLI ((1920×1200 4xAA/16xAF – Tessellation on)
  • Up to 8% in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (1920×1200 no AA/AF – Day)
  • Up to 110% in Stone Giant with SLI (2650×1600 – Tessellation on, DoF on)
  • Up to 6% in The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Athena (2560×1600 no AA/AF)
  • Up to 9% in Unigine: Tropics (2560×1600 no AA/AF – OpenGL)
  • Up to 5% in 3DMark Vantage (Performance and Extreme Presets)
  • Up to 19% with Transparency AA (1920×1200 4xTrSS – measured in Crysis)

• Upgrades PhysX System Software to version 9.10.0223.
• Adds support for OpenGL 4.0 for GeForce GTX 400 Series GPUs.
• Adds support for CUDA Toolkit 3.1 which includes significant performance increases for double precision math operations. See CUDA Zone for more details.
• Adds support for new extreme Antialiasing modes for 3-way SLI PCs, including up to SLI48x AA for GeForce 200 series GPUs and up to SLI96x AA for GeForce GTX 400 series GPUs.
• Adds support for a new ‘Quality’ mode for NVIDIA’s Ambient Occlusion control panel feature.
• Adds a new NVIDIA Control Panel setup page for SLI and PhysX for ultimate control over multi-gpu configurations.
• Adds a new NVIDIA Control Panel feature for ultimate control over CUDA GPUs, allowing the user to effectively choose which GPU will power each CUDA application.
• 3D Vision customers can download the v257.21 3D Vision drivers here.
• Includes numerous bug fixes. Refer to the release notes on the documentation tab for information about the key bug fixes in this release.

I ordered this thing last Wednesday and when they said 3-5 days to get here, they were not kidding, it arrived with the Mail this morning at 10am (what happened to the days when the postman used to deliver very early??). Why the 4670, Why ATI? Why the Heat-pipe Version – Read on and find out more..

I had in my machine the GeForce 7600GT, I bought this a LONG time ago as it was the only one that did not require a hefty power supply, got the best bang for the buck and was sitting on a shelf in the local PC hypermarket. This served me very well indeed and as it was both loud and hot, I had put in there the 7600GS (not as powerful). I spotted and read reviews about this ATI card and the fact it never need me to buy a 1000W Powersupply was a good feature, I had the Seasonic 450W which did the job well anyhow. The technology was new unlike the very increasing “re-naming” of the GeForce range and the heat pipe version (pictured) was silent – perfect.

I see nothing major wrong with ATI Cards, I knew Wirecast would not work on this for example but the Bangs per Bucks are very good – this is a very cheap card and supports as you can see VGA, HDMI and DVI. I have not done any benchmarks – there is plenty out there should you need to compare this with anything else on the market – I know I played Battlefield 2 @ 1360×1024 with everything switched on full to the max and it played fine.

If your gaming does not extend to the like of Crysis with 30” Screen and want it all on max – then this will suit you and as a benefit, no fans = Silent Machine – gets a 5 Star Rating to me.

While I do order things online now and then, sometimes I am happier to walk / drive to the computer stores as it works out either quicker, cheaper or both and of course much easier to return. By random chance, after looking at Dell Refurb – I spotted that they featured a ATI Radeon 4670 Graphics card and this set me off to look at what this offered.

Once I had chosen the device and spotted you could buy this card with a Passive heat sink for total silence – I searched around various online and offline stores. Amazon not only sell stuff from them but also many various stores you never heard of. Now I promised myself that I would not pay top banana for postage just so I can have the thing a day earlier. Had I went for the model with 1GIG DDR2 Ram plus a Heatsink / Fan, not only would I pay less but either get Free postage (3-5 days deilvery) or next day for a small sum.

The one I wanted though was out of Stock everywhere and only one store had it – so I paid the extra money (£10 or $15), I did not now want to pay another £10 postage, so settled for the 3-5 Working days. I ordered it Wednesday, it got despatched on Friday 9am and I honestly thought it would arrive by Monday even though they have Window all the way up to Wednesday night.

Not a single package arrived today, this means I now have to stay in tomorrow and the next day, I did email the company which was either media.tv or u-SM.com (1st is company listed on Amazon & 2nd is the company listed as despatched from) but I heard nothing back. In the future I will not go this route, while I am not in a Hurry for this item, I do not want to waste my time waiting around, a tracking number would have been great.      

My current desktop computer is a Acer which has been upgraded by way of the CPU and harddrives and seen as it#s an off the shelf thing, it has a standard 350 Watt power Supply and a rather limited case I would say. I pondered on upgrading what I have (cheaper) or buying a new one outright for the new technology. The current spec of the machine is Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4Ghz), 4 GIG DDR-2 Ram, 1TB + 250Gig HD, Geforce 7600GS.

Let us first take a look at brand new – I spotted for example a Dell Studio XPS, this has Core i7 2.6Ghz, 6 GIG DDR3 Ram, 640GIG HD, ATI 4670 Graphics Card. I did a quick bit of rfesearch on this and find that in fact it inly has a rather weak PSU, its hard to say if the one I was looking at would have the same weak PSU or not but the end price for his Box only is about £600 let us say.

Now if we look at upgrading, I can buy a ATI 4670 for about £60 including postage, I can buy a Q6700 (2.6Ghz) for £132 and this fits into my existing boar – this been a quad core. The question I ask myself, aside from the graphics card, would I see any difference at all jumping to Quad core? Was not one of the reasons for Quad core been Wirecast which does not work on ATI and am I just upgrading for the sake of it?

The real goal I felt was having a ultra quiet machine, the Acer is very quiet UNTIL it get’s hot here and then the noise picks up big style and I am also having some issue with this machine in the way of streaming via FME and such – to the point that I do not stream any more via this machine. The Machine for everythign else is fine.