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I am setting up a (used) Dell D505 for a friend and found that the ethernet port allows the ethernet connector to slid in and out about 1/8 inch before it hits the stop. This causes the connection to become quite flaky, especialy if the laptop is nudged or bumped. Is this a common problem with Dell laptops?
I worked around it by disabling the built-in port in the BIOS and buying an ethernet PCMCIA card. I suspect Dell would be unable/unwilling to fix it without charging an arm and a leg (where's an 8-limbed baby when you need one)?
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001
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The socket in my D600 has been fine on the occasions I've used it outside of the docking station.
--
Help Stamp Out and Abolish Redundancy
The preceding is courtesy of the Department of Unnecessarily Redundant Repetition Department.
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If seen that happen to a few 520s. The people who this happens to usually tend to insert the cable with a lot of force, actually bending the contacts a bit.
This is the reason why many ports are only rated for this-many-cycles (I've seen figures as low as 10,000 cycles).
You can always try the following:
a) try bending the contacts back a little bit.
b) have your friend tape his cable's plug with clear tape a few times, tightening the fit.
c) use an extension (breakout RJ-45 jack with RJ-45 plug). Then hotglue the plug into your connector (don't get any glue on the contacts).
d) find an independant repair company which might have the tools to replace the port easily.
e) send it to Dell for repairs and cough up the money they want.
-- modified at 8:45 Wednesday 14th November, 2007
Cheers,
Sebastian
--
"If it was two men, the non-driver would have challenged the driver to simply crash through the gates. The macho image thing, you know." - Marc Clifton
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Nah, I just put in a PCMCIA ethernet card and called it a done deal.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
-----
"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001
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1. What is the fastest desktop processor available today?
2. Considering I can manage to pull down my funds a bit, can I afford a Xeon?
(USD 1000 max for the CPU, not a single buck more)
3. How much faster will a Xeon be when pitted against a C2Q Extreme?(Let's say a basic dual core Xeon running at 2.66 GHz vs a Core2Quad Extreme at 3.73 GHz)
4. I am looking for a fast setup for non-linear video editing. Is there anything important I'm missing if I'm considering the following?:
- Fastest Hard Drives
- Fastest Ram
- Fastest CPU
- Ati FireGL.
Thanks.
ASP - AJAX is SEXY. PERIOD.
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The fastest processor today will not be tomorrow.
US$1000, considering the state of the US Dollar, you are getting more bucks for your Rupee, so take advantage of the weak US Dollar while you can.
Bulky Fellow wrote: anything important I'm missing
A decent operating system that doesn't have you pulling your hair out every time you want to do something.
A decent sized monitor - but if you want to emulate Christian Graus, then get half a dozen. 
modified 1-Aug-19 21:02pm.
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Richard A. Abbott wrote: but if you want to emulate Christian Graus, then get half a dozen.
Oh.......If only I could. However, I will try (not now but) to get a second monitor and do a dual monitor setup. For now a single one will do.
As for OS, I don't know.......Windows XP 64? I hope that's not a stupid choice. Actually, I can't think of any other OS running Premiere and Vegas........also After Effects......
ASP - AJAX is SEXY. PERIOD.
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How about 64bit Ubuntu Linux
Adobe Premiere I understand is available under Linux, not sure about Sony Vegas.
modified 1-Aug-19 21:02pm.
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Sony will never make Linux software because it's harder to covertly install a rootkit under anything but Windows.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001
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Bulky Fellow wrote: I am looking for a fast setup for non-linear video editing
What software you want to use ? does it support/optimized for C2Q or Xeon (or whatever is in fashion today and tomorrow) ?
If you are doing professional work, I would suggest going the the vendor's site and look at the hardware they support.
For example, for Avid, they support and qualify a dual quad-core Apple Mac Pro system, and for on the PC side, they qualify for a pair or dual-core Xeon.
For the rest, raided drives, graphic card optimized for 2D graphics with support for 2 monitors; IMO ram is important, but not that much, except for the final rendering, what you want to look for is overall transfer speed between all the different parts.
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You are missing one of the important points: Get a decent SCSI or SATA Raid controller. You don't want your CPU to be involved in the copying as much as Onboard-RAID usually does.
Cheers,
Sebastian
--
"If it was two men, the non-driver would have challenged the driver to simply crash through the gates. The macho image thing, you know." - Marc Clifton
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Unless you're building a multiprocessor system there's little or no benefit from a Xeon chip. The C2quad would blow the xeon away by about 40% in a single threaded app, in an app that supported 4 worker threads efficiently it'd be 2.8 times faster.
--
Help Stamp Out and Abolish Redundancy
The preceding is courtesy of the Department of Unnecessarily Redundant Repetition Department.
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Intel just announced the Q9950 or something like that. It's a 3ghz quad core, and runs $1000.
The fastest RAM you can get depends on the motherboard you buy. If you want to use more than 3GB of RAM under Windows, you need to use a 64-bit OS. At that point, software and driver compatibility may become an issue.
The fastest hard drives are solid-state and run about $25,000 each (and if not that much, then some equally unreasonable amount despite being significantly cheaper). Barring your ability to afford such a drive, I would recommend a Raptor drive - supposedly the fastest available. I've never seem them larger than 75gb though (keep in mind I've been fairly out of touch hardware wise for the last 6-8 months)...
If you're doing video editing, you don't need a FireGL (that's for 3D stuff). You can probably find something infinitely cheaper, and then buy a decent video processing card to go along with it.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
-----
"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001
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There's a 150gig raptor. If the OP really wants the fastest hard drive possible he shouldn't be looking at raptors though, they're only 10k RPM. There're 15K SCSI drives that'll smoke them.
--
Help Stamp Out and Abolish Redundancy
The preceding is courtesy of the Department of Unnecessarily Redundant Repetition Department.
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If you want a machine for video editing you will need to do a lot of research. I myself have an AVID Express Pro box with the Mojo real-time renderer.
I heard Sony's Vegas and Adobe's Premiere Pro and After Effects names thrown around earlier in the thread. Do you know exactaly which software you will use? Once you find that out you need to do some research on the software, especially if you want real-time editing. If real-time is what you want, AVID is the way to go.
Should you decide to go with AVID; here are some of the things I found out about their software that my computer had to support (keep in mind that I built this machine for AVID Express Pro v5.2):
1.) To use the Mojo box, the firewire controller must be based on the Texas Insturments chip; AND, it must be the only device on that bus seqment to the chipset.
2.) The RAM must be DDR Dual-Channel 333Mhz ECC modules.
3.) If an IDE or EIDE HDD controller is used, the drives cannot be daisy chained. Each must have a seperate controller. (I went with 2 250GB Seagate Barracuda SATA drives @ 7200RPMs. 3Gbs is more than enough to do full HD 1080p real-time editing; just make sure that you are reading from a seperate drive than you are writing to).
4.) Windows XP Pro is the reccomended OS. AVID will not work with Windows XP Pro x64 Edition. I used XP Pro (32bit).
As far as video cards go, I have an Nvidia Quadro FX 1400 and it works great. You may want another one to output to a TV of some kind if your not going to go with AVID. If you do go with AVID and a Mojo, the Mojo will supply all the I/O you will need.
Is this for Professional use or home/pro-sumer use?
Now about the processor. I have 2 3.4Ghz 64bit Intel Xenon processors now. Let me tell you something, this system screams! I recently was the Animation Supervisor for Sisqo's music video "Who's Ur Daddy?", the video bombed (go figure) but that is beside the point. We filmed it on a Sony CineAlta and had the camera dump the footage live through a BlackMagic HD capture card and finally to an Apple G5 with a wicked sick SCSI RAID array (3TB, all drives functioning at 15kRPMs). The final capture was around 100GB. Most of the color correction (AVID), animation (Maya), and a few video effects (After Effects) were done on my system, and the machine never skipped a beat. Real-time, renderless editing.
In my opinion, I would rather have 2 single core processors than one dual core processor. Just look at the pin count, 2 seperate processors can physicaly handle more data, hands down. And a dual processor setup is cheaper. You can get the processors I have now for a ball park figure of $250/ea.
Now, 64bit or 32bit processors? 32bit processors are really cheap, I would not reccomend them. 64bit on the other hand can be cheap and can offer more than you think. a 64bit processor running on a 64bit OS is fast. But AVID does not support a 64bit OS. Now if you have 2 64bit processors (like my setup) and a 32bit OS, you can actually operate almost just as fast as if you were running a 64bit OS. The 64bit processor with HyperThreading turned on (assuming Intel) will split the single 64 bit pipeline into 2 32bit portions. Running 2 of these processors under a 32bit OS will yield the performance of 4 32bit processors.
Anyway, I hope this helps...
-David
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Hi! I need you help solving a strange problem.
On my cisnet AOL PC with XP SP2,
when I plug in my RiDATA 128MB usb 1.1 thumb drive
my pc restarts. This is a random occurence as far as the restart, but only happens to the RiDATA.
Why is this, and how do I fix it?
Note: I will not do firmware upgrades as i have a bad
past with them (Killed an awsome pentium II MX PC -
top of the line at the time and ran very fast even
with XP)
-- modified at 21:12 Saturday 17th November, 2007
"Shorter of breath,
and one day closer to death." ~Pink Floyd
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I am shopping for a notebook and came across a reasonably priced 64 bit Averatec with ATI Radeon™ Xpress 200M installed.
ATI Radeon™ Xpress 200M[^]
I don't know much about video in general (even less on a notebook) and would like to hear your opinions about ATI Radeon™ Xpress 200M.
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I have 2x512 MB of memory at a latency of 5-5-5-12. The question is can I add 2x1024 of the same latency and speed (800 MHZ) without damaging the system?
I am fighting against the Universe...
Reference-Rick Cook
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Assuming your board has 4 slots, Yes.
The only thing you want to make sure is that you put them in identically on both channels. Not installing them symetrically won't do any physical harm, but will force you out of dual channel mode and inflict a major performance hit.
--
If you view money as inherently evil, I view it as my duty to assist in making you more virtuous.
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I have 4 slots and the 4 sticks of memory are paired (TWIN...)Is this a correct placement: 1GB-512MB-1GB-512MB? I have read on another forum that I should make some changes in BIOS for the best performance. Is this true?
I am fighting against the Universe...
Reference-Rick Cook
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You need to read your mobos documentation. The various brands don't have a consistent layout or color coding scheme. You want a 1G and a 512MB on each channel, and both 1Gs in the same place in it eg both in the first or both in the second slot for the channel.
The BIOS probably be set to use official spec timings, which are potentially looser than your ram is rated at. YOu can change your board to match, but the gains from timing changes are very small and naming and layout are again cryptic and inconsistent between brands so you'll need to read your docs.
If you're messing with settings the one that you probably can't leave at dimm specs is that with 2 dimms per channel you almost always need to use 2T instead of 1T, the bios should've done this for you though.
--
If you view money as inherently evil, I view it as my duty to assist in making you more virtuous.
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The motherboards slots are colored in 2 colors (blue-blue-black-black), so probably the example that you suggested (1GB-1GB-512MB-512MB) is the correct one.
I am fighting against the Universe...
Reference-Rick Cook
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read your manual, it's the only way you can be sure. I've had boards where slot1 of channel A and slot1 of channel B had one color, and the slot2's had a second. I've had boards where both slots of channel A had one color, and both slots of channel 2 the second. I've had boards where the ordering was CA-S1 CB-S1 CA-S2 CB-S2, and boards that were CA-S1 CA-S2 CB-S1 CB-S2. The color coding is useless across brands.
That said, assuming your machine was originally put together correctly the 512's are in the first slot of each channel and you can just stick the 1G's into the two open slots.
--
If you view money as inherently evil, I view it as my duty to assist in making you more virtuous.
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I do the same thing in PPC .
but now I want to boot my pc into Linux because of interesting.
Is any one can interact with me.
lsmhg
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What is BSP ?
What is PPC ? ( is it a PowerPC processor ? or something else? )
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