Until recently, I had not really looked into buying any sort of apple computer mainly because my current system does everything I want and I do have the ability to run OSX on either a hackintosh if needed or a Virtual machine. I had passed a 21.5″ iMac in the local ‘Comet’ Store and it looked very clear and glossy and it got me thinking. I looked on Apple refurbished site and saw various models of the 27″ with £200 to £400 off. At this point we start to drop into the world of which version is worth the money, if any.

The various years and models.

While they all feature the amazing 27″ Screen, it seems that there is a few different configurations to choose from depending on what year it was made. We start with the CPU, we have the Core 2 Duo and we can agree I want to write these off as no use to me, this is old technology. We have the Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 and apple mix it up somewhat with Dual Core Core i5 and Quad Core i5.

Graphics cards seems to be ATI 4670 (which I currently use in my Dell machine), ATI 4850, the ATI 5670 and 5770 I think. Of course the latest and greatest is always better of which your not going to get with the iMac but the 5770 I am sure beats my 4670 for example and even the 4850 is a good card.

Why the iMac?

Looking at the Mac Range, I have no interest in spending £600+ on a very underpowered mac mini (in my own view anyhow) and I have no need for a Laptop, this leave either the iMac or the Mac pro. While the Mac Pro is very powerful, it would be a waste of power with the 8 core model and I know that the 12 Core is just too much for me to spend on a computer. The iMac by chance though comes with a very nice 27″ Screen, I love real estate and this can deliver. My thought was simple enough, the Core i7 can provide enough power – if I can find a cheap one of them, that would be the model of choice.

What about the i3 or the i5 ?

The Core i3 is a dual core CPU (direct replacement for the Core 2 Duo) that has hyper threading to simulate 4 cores. The Core i5 is a Quad core unit, no hyper threading to my knowledge (I could be wrong) and finally the Core i7 has 4 real and 4 virtual core plus can over clock on the fly.  

The Future of the iMac

I read that the iMac is due a refresh, I do not want to buy a 2009 model only to find a month later they bring out the Sandy Bridge version for the same price with thunderbolt and a better graphics card. For now, I shall leave well alone, I have no great need for a mac as of now, it would just be nice to get rid of all my surplus computer and monitors and be left with the Dell XPS 435, Work Laptop and a 27″ iMac.

VMWare produce various pieces of software that allows you to run a virtual machine and in the case of VMWare Workstation for example, this allows you to run Windows inside a Linux Box or the other way around. IN effect then it allows many different operating systems to run without you have to reformat your machine every time. At the other end of the scale is VMWare vSphere Hypervisor ESXi – this is a bare metal (i.e. wipes your hard drive) installation and allows many virtual machines to run at the same time on a headerless (no monitor) box – often servers.  I thought I would take an existing desktop machine and see how this ran – let is begin my journey into ESXi.

The Hardware

The first piece of the puzzle is the hardware to run it on, in this instance I choose a ACER Aspire E700 Desktop machine, this has 5 GIG Ram, Core 2 Duo 1.86Ghz CPU and a 250GIG HD. Now this machine had a broken Network port on the motherboard and I had bought a TP-Link Gigabit PCI Card, which worked 100% fine in Windows. I had removed the GeForce 7600GT and used the on-board graphics card instead which meant the system was now whisper quiet.

Getting the Image

The first thing you need to do is grab the ISO, I headed to the main page and finally managed to download one of the many ISO’s on offer which I burnt onto CD. I tried the VMWare Go from a different machine, this involves booting the donor machine into Windows 7 and following the guide from another machine. This failed at the end, it complained about Firewalls and such but gave me a different link to download the client install.

Booting the CD

After writing the CD Image, I booted the machine and followed the guide, I was impressed that it knew what my Machine was (Acer Aspire E700) and once I accepted the Licence, it failed with an error and dropped to the command line – vmkctl.HostCtlException Unable to load module /usr/lib/vmware/vkmod/vmfs3: Failure

At this stage I was lost, maybe if I left it alone it might continue? Of course it never did and I went about searching on google. After some false information about setting option in the BIOS for the CPU and it was an issue with PATA or SATA, I finally got the answer I was looking for – the NETWORK CARD was at fault, seems ESXi Does not like the chipset that the TP-Link uses (RTL8169SC). I also heard that Broadcom are a problem and this is worrying.

Fixing the Issue

I still had the Intel Server Gigabit Network card which only works if you recall on a Server OS or Linux but not a desktop OS such as Windows XP or 7. I swapped them around and soon I had passed the Licence Screen and was on my way to installing the server onto the 250GIG HD. After a Reboot, I was presented with a simple screen showing me the IP Address to download the client and such.

Grabbing the client

On another machine, I pulled up a web browser and placed the IP address of the server and got the following screen:

From here I could download the vSphere Client and do other tasks as shown. Once the Client is installed, you get to manage the server from whatever machine you need to.

Converting existing Virtual Machines

As I already have VMWare Workstation with a handful of virtual machines, I wanted to convert these across to save remaking them. I Grabbed vmware vCenter Convertor and followed the process of picking the files and letting it go through the process. At the end I had the same virtual machines running on the standalone box as I did on my client machine.

Server Farms

At work we use the commercial version of this and instead of having one server per task, we have instead bought a high end server which comes with 4 x 6 Core Intel Xeon cpu’s silly amounts of Ram and harddrive space and run as many virtual machines as required. This not only stops us having to run rack after rack of servers but makes it easy to deploy another server without having to look at actual hardware.

It is quite hard to turn your average PC into something that runs Mac OS X and normally requires you have the right motherboard and other parts to make it even get to the install stage. What if you could make a USB stick that boots a safe version of OS X (no graphic or sound drivers) and generally works without wiping your present drives – great right? I shall document what I have done so far and what the outcome was in regards this amazing program – iPortable.

What is it?

The first thing you need to do is get your hands on it – if you search for iPortable, you should find a torrent – now you need a few things to get this to even work. The first thing you need is at least an 8 GIG memory stick, I have also used in the past a USB External Hard drive but that will be slower (and its not that quick as it is). The other requirement is some sort of working Mac, be it a real one, a Hackintosh or a Virtual machine. As it happens I had my Athlon machine running 10.5.8 with the slight annoyance that you must have the USB already plugged in for the machine to even see it.

Making the Bootable Stick

The guide (included) explains how you mount the file on the mac, format the memory stick and then use included CloneTools to write the image onto the memory stick. I had to use the boot fixer before my computer would allow this device to boot. Once this process is over, you now have a memory stick that as long as your computer can handle booting from USB sticks (Mine showed up as blank in the list which fooled me for a while) – you can boot into Mac OS X 10.6.2.

A Working Mac – just slowly

It takes a LONG time for the USB to boot and eventually get into OS X, just be patient at this part. Of course you do not want to be booking and running from USB for a main OS, this is now the process to get a harddrive ready for the same image. I used the same process as making the USB but instead picked the 250GIG harddrive I had as slave, this meant that when I started the computer I either had Windows 7 or if I pressed F8 and choose the secondary drive – OS X 10.6

Getting the parts working

As with any Hackintosh, getting the right files to make the things work is a fine art, I had a Creative Labs sound card fitted and a ATI 3650 Graphics card. The sound worked fine, I searched the forums and found the correct driver, ran it and rebooted and we had sound. Graphics was a different story though, I picked I think the wrong one and while the machine was working, I was stuck with a blue screen (the mouse moved though).

Worse then any of the above though, evn though the Hard drive was 250GIG, as far as the OS was concerned, it only had 64meg free. It was at this stage I had to so some googling to get the answer I needed. When I was booting from the memory stick, it picked the first Mac OS it had found and in this case was on the HD. I had to tell it at the boot prompt rd=disk2s1 and now we were from the memory stick. The reason for this – to run the hard drive repair tools on a drive that is not in use.

In Diskwarrior (Supplied) so far it has found 1929 Overlapping files and is still going. I am hoping by the end of this process I have the full free disk space otherwise its pointless.

Is it worth the effort?

I do this as something to do, If I wanted a mac that badly I would just go and buy one. It is good to see people faces when I boot a work computer with Mac OS X even if it is slow from USB. It is safe as you can try it out and it gives you a bootable OS for another Hackintosh should you need to sort it out.

We know that the next big thing to come from Intel is Sandy Bridge, which will be the biggest CPU overhaul since Nehalem.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini made mention of the upcoming processor generation, saying that it’ll be the biggest leap the company’s made yet in terms of processing power.

While Intel would never encourage prospective customers to hold off on a new PC – especially leading up to the hot holiday buying season – the CEO’s enthusiasm for Sandy Bridge could give reason to wait until 2011.

In closing, I want to mention our next processor family codenamed Sandy Bridge. This quarter, we began volume production of Sandy Bridge and expect to ship revenue units in Q4 as we prepare for systems launch in the first quarter of 2011. Sandy Bridge represents the largest increase in computing performance in our history. This is a truly stunning product that we can’t wait to bring to market. Early demand from customers is much greater than we originally expected and we anticipate a very fast ramp.

Interesting times ahead as the Current Core series was a very good CPU and I look forward to what Intel are brining out next.

If you recall, I bought myself the Icy Box External SATA holder and for most part I used this as a means to add extra drives as required (mostly 2.5″ models) for storing data. As this device operates with eSATA (as well as USB) – this means it can be as fast as a normal internal harddrive. I pondered on the thought of having various operating systems per drive and by selecting this on bootup – I can indeed boot into another OS without ditrubing my present system

Preparing the disk

On my internal Drive on my Dell I have Windows 7 64Bit, I did not want to upset this by adding Linux although it is not that bad an idea (same end result). The Laptop I have already has Ubuntu 10.04 64bit installed, so the task at hand was to make a exact image of this onto another 80GIG SATA 2.5″ Drive.

I used the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows to boot the Laptop which gives a Windows like OS and the ability to run Norton Ghost, I had attached a 60GIG USB Drive with the idea to make a image of the Linux box. Ghost kept telling me that Linux needed to run CHKDSK, I tried this and it made no difference. In the end I got a USB Lead and plugged the Caddy into the Laptop and use a direct Image copying program to amke a 100% exact duplicate of the drive. As this was USB, this took some time.

Will it work?

After re-attaching the eSATA to my Dell machine and the 80GIG Drive which now has a copy of Ubuntu Installed – I pressed F12 (to select the Boot device). There was a large list offered and finally I worked out that the one to pick was Toshiba which had 80 in the title somewhere. Soon I was booting up Ubuntu desktop and as the Laptop also had ATI – I was good to go for Compiz. Everything worked as expected, it was fast and easy to boot into Linux when needed although if I was going to work with Linux, I would probably be happy enough with VMWARE for example as Virtually it runs very fast (due to Core i7 and 9GIG RAM).

Other possibilites

What about Hackintosh? You can install or have an attempt at least and just pick this external drive and if it does work – you just press F12 and boot into the drive, instant OSX and should you instead want to use Windows 7, then simply reboot – no dead machine. I can imagine you can do the Same with USB2 Drive but it will be a lot slower – so be warned.

While Intel’s Atom has a near-monopoly on the netbook market, that’s not the only place the processor will be practicing its power-miserly ways. Intel launched at CeBit its first Atom processor-based platform optimized for networked home and small office/home office (SOHO) storage devices.

The energy-efficient platform consists of the Atom processor D410 single-core or D510 dual-core and the 82801IR I/O Controller to run network-attached storage (NAS) devices that organize, manage, protect and share documents, photos, videos and music.

The new platform features six PCI Express lanes, 12 USB 2.0 ports, a port multiplier function and eSATA ports that give OEMs the ability to add peripheral devices and expand storage capacity outside of the box. It also features hot plug capabilities for easy capacity upgrades and an integrated gigabit Ethernet MAC controller for improved data transfers to and from the home server or small office NAS device.

“NAS systems have traditionally been found in businesses to manage, store and access data,” said Seth Bobroff, general manager, Intel Data Center Group, Storage. “Today, households and small offices have an ever-increasing number of computers, laptops, netbooks and mobile phones that create and consume digital content. This advancement in mobility coupled with the explosive growth of data and media are creating the need for centralized, easy-to-use network storage solutions for the home and small office.”

LaCie, LG Electronics, QNAP, Synology and Thecus are signed on as product partners for Intel’s platform.

On the 4th Feb 2010 ALDI have a special deal on a desktop PC for the price of £399.99. This is a Core i3-530 CPU running at 2.93Ghz, 3 GIG ram, 1TB HD and so forth. As is always the case with anything at ALDI, once it has gone, you won’t see it again – so be quick to get this deal.

Specs

Powerful Intel^® Core^® i3-530 processor (2.93 GHz, 4 MB Intel^® Smart cache, Intel^® Hyper-Threading-Technology)

This is a New CPU by Intel which is a dual core CPU but has hyper-threading which in real terms means it acts like a quad core CPU.

Powerful NVIDIA^® GeForce^® G210 DirectX^® 10 graphics card with 512 MB graphic memory and D-Sub VGA, DVI-I and HDMI interface (HDCP support)

The G210 is a low end unit compared to today’s cards but it can still play games should you wish. The machine will feature a PCI_Express slot to allow for upgrading later.

Massive 3 GB DDR3 SDRAM

Although not amazing – at least it is DDR-3 and 3 should keep you going until memory prices drop again.

Large 1 TB (1000 GB) S-ATA hard disk for more than 200,000 music title or photos

1TB is nice to have, you should not run out of room too quickly with this.

Multiformat DVD/CD burner² supports all the usual DVD/CD standards, incl. dual layer DVD-R and DVD+R

No Blu-ray but not to be expected at this price point.

Wireless on a dekstop is not common and odd to include but if you are wanting to go wire free, this allows you to put the machine in any room without having to wire in cables but if you need the speed, the GIGABIT wired network is a nice addition.

No Monitor included.

Remember this is the computer only, no monitor is supplied, so you will need to buy your own or use the one you have if you are upgrading a machine.

Worth the price?

What they have done, as with any PC builder these days, is take a few components and plugging them to make the machine sound amazing for the price but remember a computer is the sum of all parts. The Core i3 Is new and have received some good reviews. Do not expect true Quad core performance and do not mistaken this for a Core i7 by any stretch.

The NVIDIA^® GeForce^® G210 DirectX^® 10 graphics card will play games but the numbers on the various benchmarks are low indeed, as is common with Nvidia, they just rename an old part. The good side is that the Graphics Card will be very quiet and if you do not play many games, this will suit to the ground.

1TB drives are very cheap indeed, you can get one for £57 for example online. Wireless is like £14 and so on – so you can see them big numbers don’t really mean much in the big picture.

For more technical Info – head off to HERE

One of the new and often unknown features of the Intel Core i7 along with Hyper threading (which gives 4 Virtual Cores extra to the 4 that are already there) is Turbo Boost. It is activated when the Operating System (OS) requests the highest CPU Performance state (P0).

Any of the following can set the upper limit of Turbo Boost:

• Number of Active Cores
• Estimated current consumption
• Estimated power consumption
• Processor temperature

When the CPU is below these limits and the program requires extra power, the CPU will increase by 133 Mhz on short and regular intervals.

To put this into layman terms, if you run a program that is not fully Multi-core aware, the CPU will automatically overclock some of the cores to give the program a boost in speed. On my 2.67GHz CPU, I have seen it rise as high as 2.92 for a short time.  

You can Download a Widget (Vista / Windows 7) to monitor what the CPU is doing at a given time and to see when Turbo Boost is been applied. Thanks to Ken for showing me this link.

In 2009 there was a big movement in providing a cut down laptop which featured a 8.9” Screen, Intel Atom Processor and even some running from Solid state drives. The goal of these were highly portable computers that you could just chuck in your bag with long battery life and of course cheaper then a full blown laptop. Many people looked at these and fancied buying one thinking they could use them while out and about seen as they were so light and small but do they suit every need? Let us break it down.

Physical size

I have seen screens ranging from 8.9”, 10” and even 11.1” – what does remain the same for most part is the resolution of 1024×600. This is the first issue that most people have but I remember running a desktop computer on 1024×768, not that much different from the above right. Another aspect that might effect the size would be the battery, a normal battery allows the bottom to be flush while a 6 Cell Battery will stick out.

Screen Size

Like I pointed out above, does working on a 1024×600 screen present a problem to you? Some NetBooks come with a Pre-set Linux interface which makes best use of that small space with icons as such:

I use windows 7 and for most part this is fine, there is the odd program that goes off the screen and I cannot get access to press next. Remember you can always plug in an external screen so this is not as major as you think.

Processor

The Intel Atom processor is about half the speed of the equivalent Celeron Processor of the same clock speed, this is by no way a replacement for even an AMD Laptop, it is not meant to be though. I find using it on a day to day basis is perfectly fine for the needs of the netbook but I will not be converting video’s on this machine or broadcasting via wirecast.

Keyboard

There is no way getting away from this, the machine is very small so the keyboard is also very small indeed. I find the keyboard to be the likes of pecking away to get the job done but as I am not writing my latest novel on this, the machine works just fine for my fingers (as in they are not fat). The machine features USB so yes you can plug in a Keyboard if at a desk.

Harddrive

You have a choice of Solid State drives (4GIG, 8GIG etc) or 1.7” drives which come sin normal capacity. I made sure I bought a netbook which had 120GIG Drives – more then enough for my needs. Solid State are faster and lighter but not sure I am happy with the limit of 8GIG.

Webcams

I have yet to see a decent webcam built into one of these things, yes they get the picture out and would be fine for chatting to someone on Skype but do not expect to be broadcasting in 2MP quality for streaming. I found for streaming in fact the webcam could not keep up for FPS, now maybe some of the other netbooks have better webcams but the CPU will give up long before the webcam anyhow.

Battery Life

The quoted battery life and reality is quite different, they quote something like 6 hours but I would say this is closer to 2-3 hours in real life use. You can get 3 Cell Batteries (2-3 Hours life) which are slim and flush to the laptop while the 6 Cell Beasts last 6 hours and stick out (some call this a stand) on the laptop.       

What is a Netbook for?

Quite a simple question, were would you need a netbook over a normal laptop for your day to day life? A Netbook weighs not much at all and takes up a very small space and this alone makes a difference to carrying around a full blow laptop. To give an example in a working environment:

The company I used to work for used Linux for Servers and quite often I would need to go out on site (Construction) armed not only with tool and networking gear but a bag containing a 15.4” Laptop, Power supply and various other software etc. All I need the laptop for in reality was to SSH into the server and configure the various parts and quite often the laptop would be running out of power after 1.5 hours of heavy use thus I had to go and find a power point to carry on the work, so the normal laptop in this instance was too cumbersome by far. With a netbook, I could reduce what I was carrying and last longer and get the job done, the keyboard was find to be typing Linux commands into and the CPU Speed did not come into play whatever.

Should I go and buy one?

This depends on what you do with a computer – if you spend most of your time at your desk then personally a netbook will not be for you, in fact it will just sit there was take up space, I guarantee you will not use it at all. If you have Fat Fingers (sorry) then you are going to struggle to type on this thing and if your eyesight is starting to go – this also will present a problem seeing what is on the screen.

A Strange thing happened with Netbooks though – the started to increase the screen size, add bigger drives and also started to increase the price. No Longer were they very cheap but instead people started to say “Why don’t I just buy a normal laptop?” and this is why the sales started to fall along with people getting confused as to why they had no DVD roms fitted – they were never meant to have otherwise it might as well be a Laptop.

Some Netbooks make excellent Hackintosh computers for example such as the Acer Aspire One, I had this running 10.5.8 no problems at all with everything working as it should (I replaced the Wireless card).

Conclusion

While a Netbook might seem the thing to have, go to the store, try one and see if you can use it like a normal computers. Try the keyboard, see how small the screen is, compare thin, small laptops and see if this is a better idea. Netbooks are not for everyone, I think they are great which is why I own one.     

As Windows 7 Looms Closer to been released – 22nd October 2009 to be exact, is it a big jump from Vista before it or is it just more of the same? Read on for my very own view on a brand new machine.

New Machine – Pre Installed OS

Having just took receipt of a brand new Dell XPS 435MT which features a Core i7 2.66Ghz CPU, 3 GIG DDR3 Ram (I’m getting more later) and a X58 Motherboard – we power it up and then set about updating it from hence it came to make sure it was right up to date.

The first thing that I noticed was the LONG Boot time, it sat there as if waiting for something and around this we had a Laptop of much less power going from power off to desktop and ready to rock and STILL the desktop was loading. Was I missing something here? was the new Quad Core 2.66 Core i7 not fast enough, was the DDR3 Ram holding out on me or had Dell stuffed so much crap on there it was a 486 in disguise?

Installed Sofware

Dell has included Vista Premium 64Bit along with Norton Security, Microsoft Works 9 and Roxio DVD writing software. I first removed all signs of Norton (horrible thing) and then got rid of half the Dell crap and finally – set about updating it.

Around and Around

I was rebuilding my other machine with Windows 7, this been a Core 2 Duo and I had finished not only putting on the OS but a good handful of applications by the time the Vista machine had grabbed the first round of updates and rebooted – which took forever I may add. I finally got Service Pack 2 and all the Applications I think I might need on there and did a very quick compare – which was basically switch both machines on at the same time, this been the Core 2 Duo with Win 7 64bit and the new Dell with a Core i7 and Vita 64Bit. The C2D Machine was not only on and loaded but I was working on it and STILL the Vista machine was loading the desktop – how crazy is that?

Time to rebuild.

I had enough of this Vista thing and wiped the machine this morning – I installed Windows 7 64Bit RTM version, installed all the Application I need and what a difference. From switch off to fully working desktop, very fast indeed – now it started to feel like I had actually upgraded the processor. My advice is that if you are indeed still running Vista on your machine and you have the ability to get hold of Windows 7 – I suggest backing up your data and formatting that machine + Install Windows 7, you will not regret it.