torkell | Entries tagged with aether

Having finally resurrected Nyx (which seems mostly stable - the graphics driver has only imploded once so far), it's time to turn my attentions to Aether. As tempting as it is to just simultaneously upgrade all the things, it's useful to have at least one (mostly) working computer.

And today's upgrade is... *rolls dice*... Windows 7! Because there's a massive question mark over hardware compatibility, I wanted to take a backup of the SSD first so I can roll back if it all goes pear shaped. And because there's a similarly massive question mark over the reliability of the USB-to-everything adapter I've got, I picked up a couple more tools for the bits box:

Yes, it's another mSATA adapter, and yes, the first thing I did when I got it was take the mounting bracket off so I could see what was underneath. This time it's mSATA-to-SATA and so there's merely some power circuitry... which is a bit curious, because the SATA power connector in theory does have a 3.3V rail. Except there's a lot of Molex-to-SATA adapters that only provide 5V and 12V, so I suppose one can't actually rely on it being present. Especially here where I'm using a SATA-to-eSATA/USB cable that only provides 5V.

That forms the other part of the puzzle - see, my desktop has an eSATA port, and so it made sense to go with that rather than plain USB as in theory it should be a lot faster (in practice it was merely somewhat faster). Since eSATA doesn't provide power I found a combined eSATA/USB cable that pulled 5V from the USB port, and so had the whole mess dangling off the back of Nyx. To actually image the drive I ended up using... *rolls more dice*... Paragon Backup and Recovery Free - using DriveImage is considered unwise in this day and age, and Acronis doesn't entirely get on with Nyx.

Even more curiously there's an unpopulated USB socket on the adapter. I wonder what that's for?

Anyway, once imaged I stuck the SSD back in Aether and fed a 32-bit Windows 7 DVD to it. I did contemplate doing a dual boot or side-by-side install, but realistically if this worked I'd stay put in Windows 7 land and not boot the old XP install. So I just told the installer to use the existing partition without reformatting (the installer did save a copy of the old Windows folder, which is a nice touch). The actual install was surprisingly easy, and even more amazingly Windows Update had drivers for everything short of the sound hardware. Including the ATi FireGL T2 graphics (which AMD have disavowed all responsibility for) and the Intel 2915ABG wifi (which Intel claims won't work on Windows 7).

As with all major computer changes a new name is in order, and so the frankenlaptop is now known as Hemera, the personification of the day (to match Nyx, the personification of the night).

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Tyler Heath (Unknown) - Zelda 64 - Artifact of Power 2

Well, I've just done the CPU transplant on the frankenlaptop and the results are in!

First off, overall system performance. For this I used PassMark PerformanceTest 8 as it's the benchmark behind the numbers site that

pleaseremove keeps on referring to. With the original Pentium M Banias 1.6GHz processor, Aether scored a PassMark of 245.5. After switching to the Pentium M Dothan 1.5GHz - remember, although this has a slower clock speed it's a more recent model - the new PassMark was 248.5.

Which means more-or-less that the two processors are equal in performance. Taking clock speed into account the Dothan core is about 8% faster, which fits with what the Internets suggest. Interestingly digging into the numbers by far the biggest impact was with memory performance where the Dothan is on average 15% faster, and in some cases twice as fast - memory latency has halved.

I don't know what the impact on battery life will be, but hopefully it'll improve. The replacement processor both runs at a slightly lower clock speed, and is made on a smaller process (usually shrinking the process size reduces power consumption). Anyway, a replacement battery is the next item on the to-do list...

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: London Symphony Orchestra - Fantasia on Greensleeves [The Lark Ascending]

Writing about bonkers desktop upgrades the other day got me thinking about possible bonkers laptop upgrades. I did some digging and managed to confirm that Aether v2 has a Pentium M 1.6GHz Banias processor. Unusually for a laptop it's the socketed variant and so upgrading the processor is possible. The question then becomes, what with?

Option 1 is to fit the processor from the now-deceased Aether v1. That's I believe a Pentium M 715 1.5GHz Dothan processor, which is the successor to the Banias core. It's clocked slightly slower than the Banias, but Dothan-based processors are supposed to give a 5-10% performance increase which works out about equal for those clock speeds. The net effect of that upgrade will probably be no change in performance and a slight improvement in battery life.

Option 2 is to go all-out and buy the fastest processor that'll fit (or rather, the fastest processor that can be got for a reasonable price). That would probably be the Pentium M 755 2.0GHz - I could go for the 765 2.1GHz, but that costs twice as much on eBay. Upgrading this far means I have to start thinking about power and cooling as it's not like a desktop where I can just stick a bigger heatsink/fan on the processor, but rather I'm stuck with the cooling system of the laptop which will be designed around a specific thermal output. I think I can get away with this, as by moving from the Banias to the Dothan core the rated TDP of the processor actually decreases by a few watts. Not sure it'd help the battery life though.

Verdict: option 1 for now.

Another bonkers upgrade is adding more memory. It always used to be the case that the most cost-effective computer upgrade was to double the amount of RAM - these days, I think replacing the boot disk with a SSD is possibly more effective, but I've already done that. As it stands Aether already has had one memory upgrade (The Gnu ordered it with the laptop) and contains 1.5GB of RAM. I think DDR SO-DIMMs top out at 1GB so the best I could manage is a total of 2GB. That's probably not worth doing unless I happen to have a spare one somewhere - and I don't think I've got any spares large enough to be useful.

Verdict: nope!

Finally, a replacement battery wouldn't go amiss. New batteries for a ThinkPad R50p are unobtainium these days but there's a handful of outfits that do refurbished batteries and various eBay sellers hawking second-hand ones of varying capacity. There's also the option of replacing the CD/DVD drive with a second battery, assuming such can be found - even when the R50 series was new those were rather rare.

Verdict: get a replacement main battery, assuming I can find an official one with a decent remaining capacity or a non-shady refurbished battery outfit.

Time to break out the screwdrivers again...

Current Music: Bellowhead - Gosport Nancy [Revival]

In the meantime, I should report on the other upgrade that I've done to Aether: replacing the WiFi daughterboard, which I did after finally getting the new SSD to boot.

About the only thing I got wrong with the spec of the R50e that I had at university was not including onboard WiFi. Instead I thought that I'd be smart and, since I already had a 802.11b PCMCIA card, I'd just reuse that and so save a bit on the cost of the laptop.

Three WiFi cards and many years later... no, that wasn't that smart a decision. Having to stick a card in the side of the laptop just to use WiFi is awkward, and it leaves a lump sticking out which will eventually get broken off at which point you now have no Internet.

The Gnu, on the other hand, was smarter when he spec'd out his R50p and included onboard WiFi in the form of an Intel 2100B. It's one of the reasons why I happily switched over to it when he passed it on to me, as it's just so much more convenient. There was a slight downside though in that it's only 802.11b (top speed 5Mb/s on a good day), but that's generally fast enough for web browsing.

I'd previously tried upgrading to a spare Netgear WAG311 (officially a PCI card, but in reality a mini-PCI card in a mini-PCI-to-PCI adapter - that was quite common in the early WiFi days). This is slightly tricky as the ThinkPad BIOS has a whitelist of authorised mini-PCI and refuses to boot if it detects a different card... but there's a fix in the form of patching out the check in the BIOS. While the card worked it didn't support WPA2 and so was unusable in my network.

This time I did some more research and managed to find an Intel 2915ABG, which not only is capable of a/b/g connections but also supports WPA2 and is on the official support list. I even managed to find one with a correct FRU part number, for all of £13 (including postage!) from eBay:

Physically swapping the card is straightforward - just remove the keyboard and bezel, unplug the antennas, unclip and remove the old card, clip the new one in, reconnect the antennas, and put the laptop back together. And this being a ThinkPad there's no need to play "guess which screws to undo" - the Hardware Maintenance Manual lists all the steps.

Anyway, upgrade done, and now for the NUMBERS!

Before pulling the old card out, I did a very rough-and-ready speed test by pointing Firefox at speedtest.net and letting it rip. Running a speed test across the Internet is normally entirely the wrong way to test local network performance, but I knew for this test at least, my Internet connection would not be the weakest link:

Yep, that about the best one can expect for 802.11b WiFi. Theoretically that could do 11Mb/s, but generally you need to de-rate WiFi connections by 50% for a real-world max speed. Anyway, enough of that. Time for the new card, running in 802.11a mode:

FTP file transfer from the NAS: 27.77Mb/s

That's more like it. My Internet connection can and does run faster than that, but probably not in the evening when the universe is watching Netflix. The file transfer from the NAS is a better indication of true speed.

This has nothing on what Nyx can achieve, though it's hardly a fair comparison as Nyx has a 802.11n card with about 5 years of signal processing improvements. Still, it's a significant improvement over what Aether had before, and interestingly it also came with a decrease in power consumption - about 0.7W when idle, and a whole watt when running the actual speed test. Result!

Of course, there are some slight issues... most noticeably, the WiFi LED no longer lights. The consensus online is that this is due to a slight pinout change. The original Mini PCI spec had both sides of the LED connected to the card connector. However laptop manufacturers wanted to add a physical radio kill switch, and the way they chose to implement this was to change one pin from being the negative LED output to being the RF kill input. They then only connected one side of the LED to the Mini PCI connector and grounded the other side, so the card drove the positive output only. The upshot is if you fit a new card to a laptop that predates this change, nothing drives the negative LED output. The fix is to ground pin 13 on the Mini PCI connector, but without grounding pin 13 on the card that's plugged in (otherwise it thinks the radio kill switch is on). Simples (not)!

This will all be for naught though unless I can repair that screen...

Current Mood: accomplished

I should have known that anything involving the LCD panel would still be hard. True, there were only three screws... but there were still eleventy billion plastic clips to unhook, and the HMM didn't mention that the bezel was glued to the actual LCD panel. WTF IBM? Anyway having got that off (and discovered that the Bluetooth antenna cable had at some point broken off and needs resoldering - I'll just add it to the todo list, shall I?), I could get at the inverter.

According to the Internets the best way to tell if it's the inverter board or the CCFL that's failed is to swap one out for a known good replacement - usually the inverter board as that's easy to get at. This does assume you have a spare inverter of the right sort to hand... which as it happens, I do have as I've got the previous hardware for Aether, a ThinkPad R50e I had at university. The R50e and R50p are essentially the same hardware, just with different options fitted. The inverter boards aren't the same FRU number but both have the same connectors, and the board for the R50e even has the WiFi and Bluetooth LEDs. So, wrestle with the R50e to get the bezel off that (quite a bit easier, now that I know where the clips and glue are), swap the inverters, and power Aether back up.

And of course it didn't work.

Because being able to fix a dead LCD by transplanting an easy-to-access inverter board would be far too easy a fix. This means the CCFL tube is on its way out, and getting at that requires dismantling the LCD panel itself.

I think at this point I've got very few options for mending Aether. I could swap the hard disk back into the R50e chassis as that's still functioning, but I'd lose the onboard WiFi (which I only upgraded last week!) and would have to go back down to a 1024x768 screen. Additionally the screen in the R50e, while having a working backlight, has a column of blue pixels on the right-hand side stuck half-on. That's likely a failed connection to the panel itself and so falls squarely into the "not fixable" category.

Alternatively, since the panels are physically compatible I could swap the two LCD panels over. This would demote the R50e down to being purely a parts donor, but would get the R50p fully functional. However that still has the same screen-related downsides of the lower resolution and stuck pixels.

Or there's a third option, which is to replace the CCFL tube. It's both rather risky - you have to extract a long, thin, and above all fragile glass tube from the bowels of the LCD display without breaking it or getting dust inside the screen - and also requires a replacement tube of the right sort. The tubes themselves appear to be unobtainium these days as everyone's moved on to widescreen panels and the only eBay sellers with correct tubes are based in the US. However as it happens I do have a potential donor laptop in the form of the R50e. The LCD panels in both laptops are physically the same size and have the same wiring at least for the backlight - whether or not the tubes themselves are the same or close enough is unknown, but I reckon there's a good chance. This is easily the highest-risk option though as there's the very real possibility of breaking both LCD panels.

There's also the fourth option of a replacement LCD panel but that's more money than what I should spend on a 10-year-old laptop...

Hmm... well, the panel in the R50p is definitely unusable as is, so I don't really have anything to lose by opening up that one and seeing how practical the tube replacement is. The panel in the R50e, on the other hand, still works aside from the stuck pixel column, so I would be risking that... but to be honest, one of my primary reasons for keeping Aether going this long is the 1600x1200 screen in it. You just can't get laptop screens that large anymore - they top out at 1920x1080 and at that point you don't have a laptop, you've got a desktop with a built-in UPS. You can, on the other hand, easily get laptops with better displays than 1024x768.

I think it's worth a try...

Current Mood: contemplative

So at the moment, Nyx is currently of limited usability as the graphics card has failed and is awaiting repair or replacement. That pushed me to using Aether (a 10-year-old ThinkPad R50p I got from The Gnu a while ago) as a primary computer, and given that I needed to order some PC parts anyway I decided to spend a little more and get a couple of upgrades for Aether.

Which meant that it was now the turn of Aether to have a display failure, leaving me... well, far from computer-less but definitely irked. I'm typing this post on Aether, using one of the monitors that's normally hooked up to Nyx - and the hardware for Aether v1 still works so I could switch back to that (that's the R50e I had back at university) though that'd be a bit of a downgrade. Hmm, I might even be able to transplant the LCD panel as the chassis is the same, though I'd have to do something about the wifi antennas - but I digress. Anyway in this case it's either the inverter board or the CCFL tubes that have died - I suspect the inverter board, as the buzz at low backlight levels has been getting noticeably louder over the past week.

Aether being a ThinkPad, replacing the inverter tubes is actually a practical option as it's designed to be field-replaceable and Lenovo still have the complete hardware maintenance manual on their website (the tubes, less so, as they're integrated into the panel - but the Internets think the inverter is more likely). It's just tedious as strictly speaking to get at the inverter you have to remove the screen, and to do that requires dismantling most of the rest of the laptop. Plus to actually get at the thing you have to take the LCD bezel off which is held on by... apparently nothing more than three easy-to-find screws. Huh. I was expecting eleventy billion small screws and self-destructing plastic clips as being par for the course. This may be less tedious than I thought.

That said with this latest issue it's now fast approaching the point where I should just give in and either replace or retire Aether. The irony is that only the other day I'd commented on a post of

talismancer's how I thought that with care I could get another year or two of use out of Aether. Sigh.

Current Mood: irked

I've been umming and ahhing over upgrading Aether (a ThinkPad R50p laptop) probably since this time last year. On the one hand, it's over 10 years old and struggles with the JavaScript monstrosities that form the modern Internet. On the other hand, I can't quite justify the cost of a replacement given that I don't use it much these days. And on the third hand... it's actually a very nice machine to use and would be quite hard to find a decent replacement for.

So at the weekend I finally decided that if I wasn't going to buy a replacement, I'd at least buy a couple of useful upgrades. Upgrade the first was replacing the slow hard disk with a SSD, since SSDs make everything go faster (it always used to be that the most cost-effective upgrade on any computer was doubling the RAM - these days, I think the most cost-effective upgrade is adding a SSD). My choice of SSD is a 256GB Plextor PX-M5M SSD (basically, the mSATA version of what I fitted to Khaos/Nyx back in March). There's something just wrong about being able to fit 256GB of solid storage on something this small (let alone the 512GB that's now available!):

Now Aether doesn't support mSATA, let alone SATA, so I needed an adapter. Or a 2.5" IDE SSD (which do exist), but I didn't want to spend a lot of money on upgrades that'd only be useful in Aether. So I also picked up a Lycom ST-173-7 for a tenner:

And yes, I did take the mounting bracket off to see what was inside. The answer is not much, though it looks like there may be an actual DC-DC converter in there - that's good for power draw, as the alternative of a linear regulator wastes power. The result is complete overkill for Aether, but being mSATA I can trivially fit it to whatever the eventual replacement will be.

Easy part done, now to actually clone the disk!

( Of course, cloning the disk was full of fail )

( Of course, having cloned the disk there was more fail )

This only took me what, three evenings to get working? Anyway, now for the important part: NUMBERS!

Before starting all this I ran HD Tune against the old drive (a 5400rpm 160GB Hitachi HTS541616J9A - so basically your typical laptop HDD) to get a baseline figure:

I ran this a couple of times to try and get a clean graph, and both times had the sharp drop at the start. Probably there's a few reallocated sectors there. For reference, here's what the desktop drives looked like.

I did the test while on battery to get some idea of power consumption. Turns out there's no significant difference in total system power draw, which is mildly disappointing as I was hoping to get improved battery life out off the SSD (that said, the increased speed should help with this - the more time spent in an idle state the lower the average power draw). There was, however, a bit of an improvement in performance:

This merely qualifies as "fast" - as I said, the drive is epic overkill for an old laptop and is pretty much saturating the 100MB/s PATA connection. The adapter could theoretically do 133MB/s if the laptop's controller supported it, but the drive itself is rated for a crazy fast 540MB/s read and 430MB/s write.

That said, the near-zero seek time will give by far the most impact on performance. Certainly the laptop now feels a lot more responsive - where before it seemed to spend ages doing hefty random access, now there's just the odd flicker of the disk light.

The weirdest part of all this is how quiet the laptop is. It's genuinely eerie working away on a truly silent computer. The loudest part now (aside from the fan, but that only runs when needed) is a faint buzz from the backlight inverter, with an even fainter hum from the power circuitry. You can almost tell how hard it's working by the change in pitch of the hum.

Current Mood: accomplished

Err... oops?

My excuse is I got distracted by planning computer upgrades for Nyx and Aether, and trying to work out which bits to order from which supplier to minimise costs (no one supplier stocks all the parts). And then getting further distracted by working out if a certain upgrade is even possible.

Mainly as a reference for myself, for Nyx (the desktop) the planned upgrade is:

3.5" front panel I/O module (4xUSB 2.0, audio, Firewire) to replace the existing top-mounted I/O module which I've always found to be in a somewhat awkward position (it's in the middle at the top, so I can't really put anything on top of the case). Removing the I/O module will let me put a fan there to hopefully increase the air pressure inside the case and stop the CD drives becoming dust-eating air intakes.
3.5" front panel memory card reader, as it'd be more useful than the existing external USB reader. Slightly complicated as I'd like one that can handle SmartMedia, and massively complicated by the fact that there are no internal USB ports for it (the new front panel I/O module uses all of them). Or rather, no officially-available ports - the onboard wireless in Nyx occupies a dual USB header, but only uses one USB port and appears to have an unpopulated header to pass through the other one. It should be possible to solder a pin header onto that wireless card and use the other USB port for the card reader...
Pin header for the aforementioned onboard wireless card. Need to check the spacing carefully - not everything uses a 2.54mm pin spacing. And check which way round to fit it (top or bottom of the card?).
A couple of 3.5" to 5.25" front panel adapters.
A pair of 3TB hard disks to replace the existing ones which are a bit too old for my liking. Especially given that one of 'em sometimes struggles to spinup. Hard disks all seem to be much of a muchness these days, so I'm planning on getting whatever the current Seagate Barracuda is as previous incarnations have generally served me well.
A tube of Artic Silver 5 thermal compound for the graphics card repair.
And I've just thought that sticking an air filter in the front of the case would help against the dust bunny invasion. Need to check what size I need and work out just how I'll fit the thing. That's one of the few flaws with the Coolermaster Wavemaster case - no air filter on the intake fans. Not sure why they omitted it as the Praetorian had one.

While the processor is woefully outclassed by any half-decent one these days, the Core 2 Quad Q6600 is still fast enough that it's not worth me upgrading it. Especially as to do so would require a new motherboard, in turn requiring new memory and quite probably needing PCI-E versions of the TV and SCSI cards.

I might need a new graphics card though if the repair fails. That'd be only the second significant hardware upgrade since building Khaos 7 years ago (the first being the SSD earlier this year)

For Aether (the laptop):

Intel PRO/2915ABG Mini-PCI wireless card. Yes, I know, the laptop's ancient and this is certainly a non-reusable upgrade (unlike the other one I mentioned yesterday), but for £13 including postage I'm happy to take a punt on it.

Aether could really do with a new battery and an upgrade to Windows 7 but that's a significant cost and at that point I'm probably better off outright replacing it (not to mention that I'm not sure if I can even find the drivers for Windows 7). The current hardware is over 10 years old, and while the Pentium M was incredibly fast for its time (outperforming desktop Pentium 4 processors running at a much faster clock speed), it's just not fast enough for the Javascript monstrosities that are modern websites.

That said it'll be a shame to replace it, as you just can't get laptops with 1600x1200 screens anymore.

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Entries tagged with aether

Hemera

CPU transplant time!

Bonkers laptop upgrades

Laptop WiFi upgrade: success!

The laptop saga continues

Now it's Aether's turn to fail

Laptop upgrade: success!

NaBloPoMo fail, and computer upgrades