Computers

Since I’m making a post, might as well make some more…

I was browsing around on the XDA Developer’s forum to see if there were any new ROMs for my ATT Tilt (HTC Kaiser) and stumbled across an Android build. Interestingly, it actually shuts down WinMo6, boots up Linux, and then launches the Android platform. Of course, it doesn’t actually work very well (yet) but it’s a start! Supposedly they got calling and contacts to work, but it basically just freezes on me.

After some digging, I flashed my phone with the L26 Diamond ROM with WinMo6.1 and a few other goodies added. And, in the process, I lost all of my Outlook contacts - of course. (Stupid WinMo - why do you have to try to sync contacts with Outlook and then delete them if they aren’t in the local copy of Outlook!?). I may switch to Android (if I can get it working) just so I don’t lose my contacts randomly throughout the year. Until then, I’ll use NS Contacts Backup to backup everything.

I picked up an AT&T Tilt last week, though I was really hoping to get it before we left for Japan. The phone is capable of a couple of nifty features: GPS, connects to Wifi networks, 3G High Speed Cellular Data, and the 2100Mhz cell band (which is used in Japan for GSM phones). I had hoped to at least get to use the wifi capabilities so we could check email (and maybe even make a phone call or two using Skype), but that didn’t pan out as the phone was released the week before we left - not enough time for the stores to actually get any in stock.

Anyways, so I have this Tilt thingy. I did some serious reading over at XDA Developer’s forum and picked up the ROM used to flash your phone back to the original Windows Mobile setup HTC (the manufacturer) had rather than the messed up garbage AT&T gives you. The HTC ROM has a nice touch-screen graphical homepage that makes it easy to get to the basics that Windows Mobile has to offer.

Since HTC is one of the manufacturers who joined the Google Open Handset Alliance (a joke? We’ll see), I hope to eventually get a ROM that loads and runs Google’s Android phone OS. Windows Mobile works but, eh, it’s Windows and it already erased all of my contacts once.

All in all, a nice set of features in the hardware, but I think I like the Blackberry OS that my wife has on her Blackberry Pearl better. Windows Mobile is very serious/business-like - certainly not aimed at the same market as, say, the iPhone which is very much a “smart consumer” device. But I will say Opera Mobile seems to run pretty darn well on it (though I’m starting to think Opera Mini is going to by-pass Opera Mobile soon).

I don’t know how many folks out there are hackers/mashup folks, but I was at Defrag earlier this week and saw a talk about an ‘open’ hardware platform being developed.

The idea is that there’s a base unit running Linux+Java with built-in Wifi, etc with modules you can plug in. The modules can be a GPS unit, a camera, a touch LCD screen, pretty much anything. This thing is the ultimate Lego Mindstorm.

Check it out here, at Bug Labs.

The idea is that you can take the base unit and plug in whatever combination of modules you need to create your own special device. Using the Linux OS plus the built-in Wifi, you can then create applications and internet services based off of it. They even have an API Framework that already knows how to talk to all of the devices, so you aren’t doing any special programming for them. For example, you could plug in a motion detector and a camera, and set it up so that it’ll take a picture whenever there is motion and then ftp/post/whatever that picture somewhere.

Just thought it was a cool thing to point out.

(Another cool talk at Defrag was about visualizing data (particularly social networking type data) and how the speaker had worked with data from DARPA based on the America’s Army game; trying to find what a signature for a competent/well coordinated fire team looked like).

I know I haven’t posted about our Japan vacation (soon! .. I think) but wanted everyone (all 2 of you) that EVE Online now runs on Mac and Linux. No excuses now!

http://www.eve-online.com/download/

Dell was having a sale on some of their items, so I picked up this baby for $350:

[thumb:857:c]

It works awesome. 20.1 diagonal inches of widescreen bliss. It’s just a touch more pixelated than my ViewSonic 19″ CRT, but I don’t normally notice it. The extra screen area is awesome in EVE Online. Not sure I’d get it if it wasn’t for EVE, but it’d also be handy for those super wide spreadsheets in Excel.

Next toy on the list?

Probably a belt sander and a band saw. I hear those are handy when you start working on the fuselage.

Well, I was going to wait until I got more RAM before making this post (so I can do some more testing) but didn’t think waiting 3 months to make a Part 2 post would be a good idea.

I got my computer parts the following Tuesday, even though FedEx had the packages in Denver Sunday night.. I guess since I didn’t pay for 3-day-air they weren’t going to deliver it to me on Monday! Ah well, it was still pretty fast.

Anyhow, I installed all of my new stuff Tuesday night. I decided I would do some tests with my old RAM (DDR333) and see how much (if any) my new RAM (DDR400) made a difference. After a bit of tweaking and trying various video drivers I was finally able to get a score of 10086 with 3dMark 2003. This seems pretty comparable to other systems out there with my same setup, though I have seen some overclocked systems in the 12000’s. You can see my full system specs by clicking on the score above.

Unfortunately, I can only “publish” one test at a time since I’m using the freeware version; thus I can’t show you the difference between my old system and new. Suffice it to say, I gained about 2000 points (which is a good amount) and the CPU tests went a whole lot better.

After that test I put in my new Corsair XMS Memory, but got a slightly lower score of approximately 9900. Not much difference, but thats with only 512MB compared to my original 1Gig. I’m planning on buying another set of 256mb sticks, but I just haven’t done it yet. I’ll do more testing once I get those.

The best tests were done with the Omega 4.7 drivers. ATI just came out with 4.8 beta drivers that I was going to try as well, but I don’t think they will help that much. EVE Online does play a lot better with the new card, but not as well as I had hoped. Loading times are a lot faster (takes less time to load all those celestial objects), but framerates are still low. I think it’s just because they need to optimize their graphics engine more, which they are currently in the process of doing. Though I still hear of people getting 40fps, which I don’t get! Grr!

I guess my next step is to do a complete reinstall of Windows XP. This is something I do every couple of years, just because it seems to get bogged down the longer you have it running. Maybe I’ll get one of those cool 10,000 RPM drives while I’m at it..

Well, it’s an even year, so that means it’s time to dust off the ol’ hardware reviews and find all those cool websites I used last time I upgraded my computer. (One of the nice things about getting deployed is that you don’t have much to spend money on, so you tend to have a little saved up when you get back).

Being the weak-hearted soul that I am (at least, when it comes to new gadgets and toys!), I couldn’t wait to get a new video card. This prompted me to drive to Boulder and buy the first available X800 card:

  ATi Radeon X800 Pro [compusa.com]

But, after installing it and fiddling around a bit I wasn’t seeing much of an improvement in my frame rates while playing EVE Online. I read some forums and found this:

  Omega Video Drivers [omegadrivers.net]

After installing the ATi Omega Drivers, I was seeing an improvement on my frame rates, but still way lower than I expected. The Omega Drivers are cool because they are very much optimized for gaming, so I expect I’ll use them in the future as well.

I then found this very interesting thread:

  Another successful x800 pro to XT mod - here’s how [hardforum.com]

Very interesting indeed! For those of you who don’t want to read the forum thread, it’s basically a way to perform a software (bios/flash) upgrade on a X800 Pro card and have it perform the same as a X800 XT card. (XT’s are $100 more expensive and work a bit better). I wish I had known that before I bought this card: apparently it only works on cards that support VIVO.

Anyone want to buy a brand-new, used for 2 hours, ATi X800 Pro video card for $375? Comes with all original packaging! Pleeeeaasse?!

Well, after looking around for other ways to improve my video card’s performance (and stumbling across cool thing like this) I remembered that my motherboard only supports AGP 4x, which is half the speed of the video card! No wonder I wasn’t getting good results from it.

And so down came the hammer. Time to pony up for a new mobo and cpu. After some extensive reading of reviews and finding prices I ended up with this:

  ABIT “AV8″ K8T800 Pro [newegg.com]
  AMD Athlon 64 3500+ [newegg.com]
  Corsair XMS 512MB(256MBx2) DDR PC-3200 [newegg.com]

All-in-all, more than I wanted to spend, but it’ll last me a good while. One of the reasons I went with the new Av8 (Socket 939) motherboard is so that I could upgrade to the cool (but extremely expensive) FX chips in the future.

After ordering my new “dream” components, I decided that I should really run some benchmarks and see what kind of difference there is. This could be dangerous: maybe I won’t get much out of the $600 I just spent! But I plowed ahead, it’s kinda fun anyways.

I downloaded 3DMark03 from FutureMark, which allows you to compare scores with thousands of other users. After running 3DMark a couple of times and making some tweaks (changes to my video card settings) I was able to get a score of 8300. Blah. Not terrible, but it’s not very good when I see people with scores in the 11000 range with the same video card!

While I could find other programs to benchmark with as well, I’ll just stick with 3DMark for now.

I’ll let you know how it goes once I install my new mobo+cpu+memory.