COMPUTERS, THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY

[Pluggy]

Pluggy, I think I need a visit and a professional opinion..... Remember to pop in in the morning before 10AM..... Usual terms.... forcing the screen to refresh doesn't work with Solitaire and I am fed up with having to do it all the time while I am on the web.

Its not going to be today, Stanley. I've got a virus, afftecting my glands and making me ache all over. I feel rotten.

[PanBiker]

What you are describing smacks of a hardware problem on the graphics card. I believe from earlier posts that you are using a slot based card but the board has an onboard option. An easy test would be to remove the slot based card and enable the onboard graphics in the BIOS. Assuming of course that the mainboard drivers for the graphics chipset are Linux compatible. Costs nowt and will either fix the problem or rule out a main contender for the problem.

Sorry to hear you are a bit unwell Stephen, take care.

[Stanley]

Sorry to hear that Pluggy. No rush, get well before you come (and don't infect me!). I am not struggling. In fact there was a Linux update this morning specifically for 64bit systems and I have the feeling that response is quicker.
You could well be right Ian and that's why when he is better Pluggy will come round and breathe on the FM3 for me. As I said to Plugs, I am not struggling, I have found the work around for the problem by forcing a refresh with a click on the same bar that you use to move windows around on the screen. It's not a big problem, just an annoyance.....
Later. The latest update for 64bit has definitely made response quicker.

[Pluggy]

I'm feeling much better today, but Stanley has declined me coming in this morning. (I can't say I blame him.)

[Stanley]

True, I've told him I want him sterilising before he comes to see me! These viruses can be nasty little buggers! But in about a week I shall have Merlin in to work his magic.... I can survive until then.
FM3 is definitely more nimble after the specific 64bit update yesterday.

[Pluggy]

Do you reckon its safe for me to come Monday morning (5th October) ?.

You'll no doubt have an answer by the time I surface tomorrow.

[Stanley]

As long as you disinfect before you come.....! Any time but the earlier the better.... Look forward to seeing you.

Later... he's been and ripped out the graphics card. The FM3 is now running on its default graphics software and is fine, all my problems have gone away. In fact in some ways it's quicker. Apart from my refresh screen problem I have had a long term issue with Canfield solitaire running erratically, that's gone as well. Very pleased, back to normal and as I say, the on-board graphics is better than the Asus card has been for months.
Let's hear it for Pluggy!
While the cover was off I brushed out the fans and heat sinks with my old badger bristle shaving brush and vacuumed the case out. Amazing where all the pipe smoke ends up!

[Stanley]

Dead on Cue, massive update from Canonical for Linux, Firefox and Thunderbird.
I've spent half an hour looking for an image I have lost. In desperation I asked Gimp to put up every image with 77 in the filename as I thought that was the year. 5,760 thumbnails came up like lightning. (The pic wasn't there....) No doubt in my mind that the FM3 is running faster under the embedded Intel graphics than ever it was on the card on the motherboard. Thanks Pluggy, I have got my machine back running even faster!
One unexpected consequence is that when shutting down, instead of giving me a page full of text telling me what is happening, the screen goes straight to a Ubuntu logo with a line of dots underneath which it deletes and closes down much quicker.

[Pluggy]

Onboard Intel graphics 1, Geforce Graphics card 0.

I've repaired several machines using the same trick, and on Windows 7 machines with the built in 'Windows Experience Index' (who thinks up this garbage ?) has often improved the figure, I never put much faith in it, maybe the performance is better with onboard than lower end dedicated graphics cards......

The onboard graphics use system memory, which is a downer, but the FM3 has 16GB and the graphics only use 512MB of it, its hardly here or there.

[Stanley]

You got the spec right when you built it Pluggy. How many years has it been running? It's a joy to use......

[Pluggy]

I built the machine in March 2013 Stanley.

It will outrun anything but a recent top spec desktop, and there aren't many of those around. Most people buy laptops these days, and they are automatically half the speed of a 'similar' desktop and as most people buy on price there are a lot of slow crappy computers out there. You can cut it anyway you want, you get what you pay for is still largely true. From all accounts the tablet computer has had its day, Apple and the others don't sell anything like the number they once did, Large screen phones have taken over from the tablet. The content providers rather than the consumers still want a real keyboard.......

[Tizer]

In the light of that, this news is relevant:
`Microsoft launches Windows laptop' LINK
"Microsoft has launched a laptop dubbed the Surface Book, as part of a suite of new Windows 10 products. It also showed off two new smartphones, an updated Surface tablet and a new fitness band. Much is riding on the launches as chief executive Satya Nadella sets out to prove Microsoft can compete with its rivals. Analysts said the new laptop may help revive the ailing PC market."

[Stanley]

I went down the laptop route while I was doing a lot of travelling and they were handy but all limited in terms of speed and longevity. I have always favoured a big tower with plenty of space in it, biggest hard drives available, separate hard drives for programmes, OS etc and data. And as much memory as you can cram into them! I remember some people raising their eyebrows about the price of the FM3, the 16gb of Ram, the quad core chip and the 2 X 2tb HDDs. However, it was only the price of a top spec laptop and far more powerful. It's still a delight to use but as soon as Solid State HDDs get reasonable I'll take Pluggy's advice and go for an even more powerful machine. My ambition is to die owning the fastest 'proper' PC in Barlick.... My reason has always been the same, I applied it to cameras as well, I want the best machinery available, the limitation has to be me, not the machinery!
One further quirk introduced by the on-board graphics... I can't download pics from my Canon Powershot using the cable any more, I have to put the card in the front of the tower. No problem but a puzzle.... Otherwise all is fine.... wouldn't swap the FM3 for anything. Big Harry told me many years ago that chip speed and memory were the key. At that time he was working for Salomons the merchant bank where speed and power were essential and the spreadsheets they were using would have taken 30 minutes to get on the screen of my old IBM, never mind working on them!
By the way, the old IBM Activa still soldiers on upstairs running my old scanner and Nikon transparency scanner. It is almost 15 years old....

[Big Kev]

The old FM2 is still going strong, the only upgrae it's had is the additional 6TB of storage. It manages the manipulation of fairly large images (100MB +) in Photoshop CS6 which is all I need.

[Stanley]

Nice to hear that Kev. It is a good machine and the only reason I moved on was to massage my failing ego! I'll let you know first if and when the FM3 is up for grabs.....

[Pluggy]

Desktops almost always outlive laptops. Most desktops live until obsolescence, very few laptops see their 4th Birthday. They usually meet their demise on the floor, either hitting it after being dropped, getting stood on or having some beverage or other knocked over into them. Or in two cases I've met the dog has used it as a toilet. ( Unlike the advert, they were both on the floor at the time ). The demise of a laptop is usually used as an excuse to buy a new one, rather than getting it repaired. To be honest, often laptops aren't economically repaired anyhow.

I've a laptop sat on my bench at the moment where the trackpad buttons have ceased to function (very common). The repair cost I've quoted is about 30% the cost of buying a new one. ( Bad job to do and an expensive new 'palmrest' as they're called ). I'm awaiting an answer on which way to go on it. The cheap answer is you forget about it and plug a mouse into the laptop, but that doesn't sit well with many as it becomes less portable. Que sera sera, as the old song goes......

[Stanley]

When you look at the size of the FM3 box sat under the table you can understand the attraction of a slim laptop but as soon as you take the side off and realise you can get your hand in there you get the benefit.

[Big Kev]

Nice to hear that Kev. It is a good machine and the only reason I moved on was to massage my failing ego! I'll let you know first if and when the FM3 is up for grabs.....

Thank you

[Stanley]

I know who my friends are......

[Tizer]

One further quirk introduced by the on-board graphics... I can't download pics from my Canon Powershot using the cable any more, I have to put the card in the front of the tower.

That's odd. I wouldn't have thought it was anything to do with the type of graphics hardware, just a bit of the basic Ubuntu Linux. I've used about four of five different Canon cameras with my PC and all have worked first time simply by plugging the cameras USB cable into the PC's USB slot. No special software, a window pops up and I select where to store the files and press Save or whatever the command it offers.

[PanBiker]

As Tiz says, nothing to do with the graphics. I would be looking in whatever the equivalent of the control panel is on Ubuntu for functionality of the USB ports. Have you tried it in more than one port? I assume you will already have tried a reset? USB ports are part of the hardware layer and are usually supported automatically by the OS, any issues in your latest updates?

[Stanley]

No problems at all and the card is actually faster than the cable so I am not doing anything about it. Having written that I tried a memory stick in the USB ports on the front of the case and they don't report in. I haven't a clue what to do about it beyond take the side off the box and jiggle the connections!



This pic uploaded with the cable. USB connections are OK now. The big black double cable with the tiny connector block was hanging loose so I popped it back into the only socket it fitted and hit it with a 2lb hammer (I made that last bit up....). Sockets are fine now. I notice that the flash has shown up some muck in the heat sink on the Intel chip set I missed when I vacuumed the other day. Not fussed, there is far less than there was before! I probably knocked the cable when I was vacuuming....

[Stanley]

I remembered yesterday the frustration I had when I was using OCR to scan in the pages of transcripts for the LTP on the old Aptiva. The Intel chip ran at 16 to 150mhz. {I don't know how that compares with my present Quad Core, no doubt Pluggy can tell me.} All I know is that OCR took up all the resources and I used to have to sit watching the blue blocks processing across the screen as I played solitaire in the background. It took me just over three years averaging seven hours a day to scan in all 1,500,000 words.... I reckon that the FM3 could do it in a quarter of the time at least.... And people wonder why I am always chasing speed.... Life is too short to have to sit waiting for a slow chip working hard!
I don't know how many images I have in the database, upwards of 40,000 I think. You can do a search in Gimp using the file name .jpg and it will throw all the jpgs up, tens of thousands of them and all on the screen as thumbnails. I wonder if the old Aptiva could have done that? Modern machines are wonderful.....

[Pluggy]

Its difficult to get comparable benchmarks for such different processors. But from what I can determine I reckon the new processor is around 300 times faster than the 150 Mhz Pentium (Circa 1996). This is based on the modern Passmark CPU benchmark whose slowest CPU (Via Samual) is around 3 times faster than a 150 mHz Pentium based on the much older Dhrystone MIPS benchmrk. The i7 used in the FM3 is around 100 times faster than a Via Samual.

So in CPU time, what the old Computer took 5 minutes to do would be done in a single second. Its obviously much more involved than pure CPU power but you get the idea.

[Stanley]

That sounds about right Pluggy. Thanks.