Tag: Hardware

Hardware

Linksys Wireless N and AirPort don’t mix?

Just on a hunch I made a minor change to the WAP – I changed it from the default (B,G,N) to only do B & G – and surprise – I have full speed connection. So, trip to the Mac store – not needed. Big sigh of relief goes here

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ALCAN and hardware don’t mix

Well, it seems that I am doing what I said I never would – blogging from my iPhone. It seems that somewhere along the way the wireless card in the MacBook Pro got shaken too vigorously and now, while I can connect I am averaging a throughput of somewhat less than normal. It seems to connect at no more than 360 bytes (no, not kilobytes) and spends much of its time idling at 0. So it is off to the Mac store I go…

More as I have news.

Hardware

Sun opens UltraSPARC T2

Sun announced their entrance into the commodity silicon business with the UltraSPARC T2 (or Niagara 2), which is their fastest processor to date, delivering 89.6 Ghz of parallel computing on a single chip. They have signed their first OEM agreement with Marvell, and more are sure to follow.

In a surprising move, Sun will be releasing the blueprints and core design files and test suites for the T2 under the GPL.

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Hardware

I’m back

I am back and working on my new MacBook Pro. I think the best thing is that I am compiling KDE on Gentoo while installing MS Office on WinXP Pro (I already owned the copy of Office, why not?) and surfing on Firefox in Mac, typing a blog entry in ScribeFire (formerly known as Performancing.)

The biggest difference I can see between Windows or Linux running VMWare and Mac running Parallels is that Parallels is a whole lot faster. With the same kind of OS settings I used in VMWare I am getting performance that blows away anything I have experienced prior to now. So far I have had no issues with pausing the VMs and putting the machine in ‘Sleep’ mode – although I have seen a few complaints about hanging in that instance on the boards.

So the big thing over the next week or so will be data recovery from the old hard drives, installing all the tools I need, and getting my OSes set up the way I want to work.

As far as the old rig goes, I’m not sure whether it has anything to do with it, but the motherboard looks discolored around the on-board video card, and powering it up and leaving it for 10 minutes or so to see if it would actually ever try to boot resulted in a lot of heat from the video card.

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Hardware

Ouch!

Well, the Xubuntu experiment has been cut short. As have any other projects I was working on. My laptop finally decided to give up the ghost yesterday morning. While reading an article on Slashdot the screen went white for about 20 seconds, then random color pixels, then it shut down entirely and now “no post no beep.” (Not that it ever beeped to begin with.) I first thought it might be the LCD screen and tried booting with an external monitor, no luck. I tried all the classic “my laptop won’t boot tricks,” but nothing. My guess is that it is mo-bo related. I’m going to have it looked over to see if it is going to be worth the trouble to repair it, or whether it’s just time to bite the bullet and get a new rig.

Edit: Got the word back, and the word is ‘Toast.’