DarylDawkins.net

HP 1245DX Review

The good: Attractive design skips the usual gray and black; good battery life for a desktop replacement; touch-sensitive multimedia controls; Linux Friendly(relatively)

The bad: Slower performance than core 2 duo; low-res screen not ideal for HD content.

The bottom line: HP’s attractive, multimedia-friendly Pavilion dv7-1245dx is an inexpensive choice for a desktop replacement, as long as you don’t need too much horsepower under the hood.

Here is my review of the HP Pavillion DV7 1245 dx. I purchased in Feb 2009 and now just getting around to this review after some months with it.

My requirements for a laptop were simple. I didnt need the most powerful machine because my QuadCore Desktop will get utilized for any truly CPU intensive task. I needed somthing that had a large screen, full sized keyboard, good battery life and 64bit CPU. I needed something that would compliment my desktop system when I was away. Pretty simple. In that regards I did not need to spend alot of money so my goal was to find these qualities in a machine under $800.

The 1245DX seemed at the time the best choice for what I needed. It had all the requirements, including $700 price tag at the time. While the Turion X2 processor may not have been as fast as a similar spec core 2 duo, it is no slouch. Seeing how I was moving from a 32 bit single core CPU to this, I noticed a huge gain in performance in task such as Video encoding and ISO file creation.

The design of the dv7-1245dx is very similar to the smaller 15-inch dv5-1235dx. HP wisely makes the current dv line of laptops stand out from the crowd, skipping the typical glossy gray-and-black designs for a subtle cross-hatch pattern with a bronze tint, which is more likely to fit into your post-dorm-room decor. I also like the laptop’s single, long hinge, which keeps the display from wobbling.

The touch pad (which has wide-screen-like dimensions) and mouse buttons have a highly reflective mirrored finish. It shows fingerprints and smudges easily, but also offsets the bronze chassis color nicely. One other complaint: the mirrored finish on the touch pad glides less easily against the finger than a traditional touch-pad finish, causing a little bit of finger drag.

For a budget system, the series of lighted, touch-sensitive media controls above the keyboard look especially nice, glowing either white or orange depending on status (Wi-Fi on vs. off, for example which only works on windows.). There’s also a volume slider, but for sensitive volume tweaks I still prefer a physical wheel; touch-controlled volume sliders are finicky and lack the ability to do very fine adjustments. When the system is off or asleep, the button labels literally vanish into the mirrored strip above the keyboard.

The 17-inch wide-screen LCD display offers a 1,440×900 native resolution, which is typical in less expensive desktop replacements, but the more common 1,600×1,200 screens are better for watching HD video content. The glossy screen makes video content pop, but can cause distracting glare while trying to read or type, depending on the lighting in the room.

First Off there are some quick tips that you can do to make this faster right out of the box(for a little more cash however). The stock 5400 RPM drive provided the greatest opportunity for improvement so I decided to go with a Western Digital Scorpio 320GB 7200 RPM drive

This added an additional $89(newegg.com) to the price but was well worth it, especially since this laptop has 2 drive bays! The downside to running two drives however is decreased battery life. Right now my Scorpio has plenty of space still so I am only running 1 drive in it for now.

The other good part of adding a new drive to this is that you can keep the preinstalled copy of windows vista on the stock drive in case you need to sell the machine later on.

As the title implies, my plan was to install linux on this bad boy and see what I could squeeze out of it as far as performance goes and how that would compare to my previous 32bit P4.

So first thing was to crack open the machine and replace the hard drive, pretty simple task.

The two drive bays are visible in the picture above. I simply unscrewed the two black mounting screws from the mount tray and pulled the tab to remove the drive.

I then removed the original drive from the drive tray and replaced it with my new Scorpio (note that to use both drives at the same time, an additional drive tray is needed and not included, I found one using google)

After getting the drive back in, I was ready to install my OS. I first tried Fedora but due to some issues with the version of the kernel in Fedora 11 and unavailable ATI drives for it, I went with a more stable distro in Debian Lenny.

In both distros the install went very well, all hardware included wireless card, camera and mic were all detected.

One thing to note is that the included remote will not work unless you are running windoze.

As well, the touch controls may or may not need to be configured per app. Surprisingly in both KDE and GNOME my touch volume slider worked to control the volume. The media control buttons also work but need to be mapped per application first.

The wireless touch button also works in linux, however it does not change colors to indicate on or off. Mine stays an Amber color whether on or off. After a long bout of trying to figure out why my laptop could not see my SSID on my router which was 3 feet away, I used ‘iwlist’ tool to determine that the wireless card was not even on.

The 1245dx also has an ESATA port which is convenient for connecting external storage devices. I have found that linux kernel support for this does not seem to work until at least kernel version 2.6.30 which is in Fedora 11, but unfortunately not Debian lenny.

I ultimately choose Debian Lenny over Fedora because stability is more important than bleeding edge on my laptop. I dont want to be out on the road trying to fix drivers or something else crazy like that. Fedora is an excellent distro but better suited for my desktop right now.

Debian is stable, fast, small footprint, and has an excellent package management system. It also does not hold your hands like an Ubuntu distro. Very flexible and similar in alot of ways to my favoured OS, Slackware, Debian is the perfect compliment to this machine.

I use this machine mainly for development work, writing and compiling c/c++ code, as well as some multi media work such as encoding videos, creating and burning ISO files, and watching the occasional movie.

The 1440×900 resolution is certainly lower than the res on most 17″ monitors but certainly still HD quality(higher than 720p) and very much enjoyable to watch on. ATI drivers dont seem to be quite as up to par as nvidia drivers but they get the job needed for this non gaming system. Most of the issues I had revolve around getting the correct driver with support for the kernel you are running. Right now catalyst 9.9 has been released and this seems to work ok except for a few issues when running compiz.

All said, I am pretty happy with what I got for the price I paid. Under $800 including the Scorpio hard drive and I have a very capable system of being my desktop away from home

What is 1-Wire

1-Wire bus is a communication system developed by Dallas Semiconductor. It is quite similar to I2C, except for the data rate, which is lower, the costs, which are very low, and the range, which is higher. The 1-Wire protocol allows the communication among several devices produced by Dallas Semiconductors/Maxim, such as:

* temperature, humidity, and pressure sensors, thermocouples
* LCD, counters
* eeprom and rom memory, encryption (IP protection)
* identification devices (electronic keys)

The main applications of 1-Wire devices are as follows:

* Print Cartridge ID
* Medical Consumable ID
* Rack Card Calibration and Control
* Printed Circuit Board (PCB) identification and authentication
* Accessory/Peripheral Identification and Control
* IP Protection, Secure Feature Control, Clone Prevention
* Consumer electronics
* Access control
* Electronic cash
* Gaming devices

1-Wire is a half-duplex, bi-directional bus, and the communication is established among a device, the master, which controls through the bus one or more slave(s). The following figure shows the block diagram of the 1-Wire communication bus, with a detail of the master (HOST in the picture) and a generic slave.

 The master device is connected to the bus through an open-drain configuration and to the supply power (Vcc, which ranges from 2.8 to 5.25 V) through the pull-up resistor R (normally its value is 4.7 Kohm). On the other hand, the slave receives all the power it needs from the bus, which is the only wire present. As visible in the above figure, the capacitor inside each slave (usually it is a 800 pF capacitor) will be charged when the bus is in the idle state (corresponding to a high or positive level of the 1-Wire bus). When, instead, the bus is at a low level, that is when the communication between master and slave is taking place, the slave uses the energy stored in the capacitor to power itself. Differently from other bus protocols such I2C or SPI, the 1-Wire bus requires that each slave be physically connected to the bus: if a slave is disconnected, it cannot be operative any longer, thus entering a reset state; when it is connected again to the bus, it wakes up and, receiving the supply power directly from the bus, can declare its presence to the bus controller (the master device).

The principal advantages of the 1-Wire technology are:

• Inexpensive devices, simple wiring, parasitic power
• Unique addresses, individually addressable
• USB, serial and i2c adapters
• Mature technology, consulting and aftermarket support
• iButton steel sealed devices
• Single Contact Sufficient for Control and Operation
• Unique ID Factory-Lasered in Each Device
• Power Derived from Signal Bus (”Parasitically Powered”)
• Multidrop Capable: Supports Multiple Devices on Single Line
• Exceptional ESD Performance
• IP Protection, Secure Feature Control, Clone Prevention

Each slave connected to a 1-Wire bus has a unique and unalterable serial number: through this ID, it can be univocally selected and addressed by the master device. The 64-bit ROM number is written during the manufacturing process and it includes the following fields: an 8-bit Family Code which identifies the slave type and functionality (up to 256 slave types are supported), a 48-bit Serial Number, an 8-bit CRC. No clock is necessary in 1-Wire bus, since time synchronization is performed by the slaves on the falling edge of the bus wire controlled by the master. There are two kinds of data rate: standard, with a transmission speed up to about 16 Kbps, and overdrive, which increases the speed by a factor of 10.
The first operation to be executed by an application on the 1-Wire bus is the selection of the slave device. Once a slave has been selected, the master sends specific commands on the bus to write data to or read data from the slave. The reset command is accepted by all the slaves connected to the bus.

OWFS: a nice open-source project related to 1-Wire

Owfs (acronym of One Wire File System) is a project created by Paul H. Alfille and The Owfs Team (Owfs homepage: http://owfs.sourceforge.net/). It is an open-source project developed under Linux operating system with the following purpose: access any 1-Wire device as if it were a regular file belonging to the file system. So, to perform a read operation from all 1-Wire temperature sensors connected to the bus, a shell command like “cat */temperature” would be enough. For instance, the collection of temperature sensors above are all on one bus, individually addressable, and will reconfigure on the fly as items are added or removed. OWFS is an original and useful way to work and experiment the powerful 1-Wire devices of Dallas Semiconductor/Maxim. Moreover, shell commands are powerful and can be organized in script files to be executed (also automatically or on a batch basis) during the development, testing, and validation phases of a 1-wire application.
The main characteristics of Owfs are:

• Filesystem access
• Web access (through the application owhttpd)
• Remote network access (through the application owserver)
• Direct language support for perl, python, php, tcl, C (libow, ownet)
• Bootable CD
• Support for many processors and OS
• Free under GPL license

Universal 1-Wire COM Port Adapter

Dallas Semiconductor-Maxim offers an interesting tool (DS9097U) for 1-Wire testing and debugging. It connects to the RS232 serial port of a PC (both DB-9 and DB-25 connectors are supported) and, together with a TMEX software driver, allows reading and writing on 1-Wire devices which are connected through a RJ-11 port; both regular and overdrive data rates can be used. With the DB-9 connector it is possible to communicate only with non-eeprom 1-Wire devices, whereas the DB-25 connector allows also to write on 1-Wire eeprom even though an external power supply is requested in that case. The DS9097U adapter is based on the DS2480B Serial 1-Wire Line Driver chip.
Drivers can be freely downloaded from: http://www.ibutton.com/software/tmex/index.html.

Since there aren’t any native 64 bit packages of skype for linux, it has been somewhat of a challenge to get a workable solution. I’ve gone through the pain so you can enjoy.

My Specs:

HP DV7-1245DX laptop
AMD Turion X2 64 bit dual core 2.1 Ghz
Fedora 10 x86_64
KDE 3.5
Linux TeK360 2.6.27.19-170.2.35.fc10.x86_64 #1 SMP Mon Feb 23 13:00:23 EST 2009 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

You can install Skype with either static or dynamically linked libraries. I recommend the dynamic version, since it makes use of the existing system libraries that are managed by Fedora. This will minimize any potential library conflicts.
The only thing necessary for you to check is to make sure you have all the 32-bit versions of the libraries Skype requires.
you can use “ldd” to analyze the library requirements for skype. I have conveniently done this step for you and compiled the appropriate yum statement.

as root:

yum install alsa-lib.i386 dbus-libs.i386 e2fsprogs-libs.i386 expat.i386 fontconfig.i386 freetype.i386 glib2.i386 glibc.i686 keyutils-libs.i386 krb5-libs.i386 libcap.i386 libgcc.i386 libICE.i386 libpng.i386 libselinux.i386 libSM.i386 libstdc++.i386 libX11.i386 libXau.i386 libxcb.i386 libXcursor.i386 libXdmcp.i386 libXext.i386 libXfixes.i386 libXi.i386 libXinerama.i386 libXrandr.i386 libXrender.i386 libXScrnSaver.i386 libXv.i386 openssl.i386 qt.i386 qt-x11.i386 zlib.i386

Now, you can install the dynamic version of Skype from here

Choose “Dynamic”, near the lower left of the box in the middle of the page.
you should be downloading the file “skype-2.0.0.72.tar.bz2″

Now, open up a new terminal window, and “cd” into the directory that you downloaded Skype into, and extract and run Skype.

cd ~/skype
tar -jxvf skype-2.0.0.72.tar.bz2
cd skype-2.0.0.72
./skype

Skype should come right up, since you now have all the libraries.

Log in. Skype should now be up and running.

In the main Skype window, hit the “S” in the lower left corner to bring up the menu, then choose Options.

Skype sound device setting:

In Skype, go to Sound Devices. I recommend setting your sound devices to something that contains “hw:SB,0″ in its name. Do this for all 3 choices: sound in, sound out, and ringing. Choose the name of your device that best matches the hardware you want to use. Definitely avoid generic single-word names like “default”, “hdmi”, “pulse”, and so on.
mine looks like:
HDA ATI SB (hw:SB,0)

Skype video settings:

In Skype, go to Video Devices. Try selecting your webcam from the list, and hit Test. My integrated HP webcam was previously setup automatically when I installed Fedora. Fedora has really improved their webcam support in this latest release. Almost every known webcam should work by now.

Now, you’re ready to make a call. Call “echo123″ first, to make sure your sound works. Call your friends, to make sure your video works

And thats pretty much it. Enjoy Skype 2 on 64 bit linux!

Myths

• “You don’t need 64-bit software with less than 3 GB RAM”
• “There are less drivers for 64-bit OS”
• “You will need all new software, all 64-bit”
• “64-bit software is twice as fast”

read more…

Myths and facts about 64-bit Linux(®).

The kernel summit was two months ago, and at the end of that I got one of the new 80GB solid state disks sent to me from Intel. Since then, I’ve been wanting to talk to people about it because I’m so impressed with it, but at the same time I don’t have anyone locally who is interested enough to blabber to, so since I’m testing this whole blogging thing, I might as well vent about it here.

This drive is the absolute truth.

I’ve been impressed by Intel before (Core 2), but they’ve had their share of total mistakes and idiotic screw-ups too (Itanic), but the things Intel tends to have done well are the things where they do incremental improvements. So it’s a nice thing to be able to say that they can do new things very well too. And while I often tend to get early access to technology, seldom have I looked forward to it so much, and seldom have things lived up to my expectations so well.

In fact, I can’t recall the last time that a new tech toy I got made such a dramatic difference in performance and just plain usability of a machine of mine.

So what’s so special about that Intel SSD, you ask? Sure, it gets up to 250MB/s reads and 70MB/s writes, but fancy disk arrays can certainly do as well or better. Why am I not gushing about some nice NAS box? I didn’t even put the thing into a laptop, after all, it’s actually in a 1U Slackware server, so a RAID NAS box would certainly have been a lot bigger and probably have more features.

But no, forget about the throughput figures. Others can match - or at last come close - to the throughput, but what that Intel SSD does so well is random reads and writes. You can do small random accesses to it and still get great performance, and quite frankly, that’s the whole point of not having some stupid mechanical latencies as far as I’m concerned.

And the sad part is that other SSD’s generally absolutely suck when it comes to especially random write performance. And small random writes is what you get when you update various filesystem meta-data on any normal filesystem, so it really does matter. For example, a vendor who shall remain nameless has an SSD disk out there that they were also hawking at the Kernel Summit, and while they get fine throughput (something like 50+MB/s on big contiguous writes), they benchmark a pitiful 10 (yes, that’s ten, as in “how many fingers do you have) small random writes per second. That is slower than a rotational disk.

In contrast, the Intel SSD does about 8,500 4kB random writes per second. Yeah, that’s over eight thousand IOps on random write accesses with a relevant block size, rather than some silly and unrealistic contiguous write test. That’s what I call solid-state media.

The whole thing just rocks. Everything performs well. You can put that disk in a machine, and suddenly you almost don’t even need to care whether things were in your page cache or not. Firefox starts up pretty much as snappily in the cold-cache case as it does hot-cache. You can do package installation and big untars, and you don’t even notice it, because your desktop doesn’t get laggy or anything.

So here’s the deal: right now, don’t buy any other SSD than the Intel ones, because as far as I can tell, all the other ones are pretty much inferior to the much cheaper traditional disks, unless you never do any writes at all (and turn off ‘atime’, for that matter).

So people - ignore the manufacturer write throughput numbers. They don’t mean squat. The fact that you may be able to push 50MB/s to the SSD is meaningless if that can only happen when you do big, aligned, writes.

If anybody knows of any reasonable SSDs that work as well as Intel’s, let me know.