Wavy Dr Hauser

And just what is Dr Hauser doing to prepare to ride the 6th wave?

Yet another symptom of HP Dysfunction - Pavilion v Presario

Hp bought Compaq way back in 2001, yet 12 years later it is still peddling Compaq-branded product. You mean that the Compaq brand still has that magic cachet?

This week I tore down two pairs of HP consumer laptops, a Presario V2000 and a Pavilion dv2000, followed by a Presario 6000 and a Pavilion dv6000. Guess what? They are almost identical, with differing cosmetic appearance. Oh, yeah. And some fools designed the Presario and Pavilion pairs with different hinges, hence a different plastic chassis. What does this mean? It jacks up the cost of producing the two models, because Foxconn has to retool the production line and molding machines between production runs of near-identical models.

You want to improve margins on the junky HP consumer laptops? Kill off one brand name or the other, either Presario or Pavilion. Same with the consumer desktops, although they use all the same plastic, metal and electronics, just a different BIOS showing HP or Compaq, and different markings on the plastic.

Ben Myers ben_myers@charter.net

Toshiba just does not get it. Arrogant!

Here is yet another reason not to ever use Toshiba kit ever again. I refurbish a lot of laptops, and the Toshiba brand has long been last on my list of recommendations to buyers. Even with the service manuals, Toshiba laptops have a downright kinky design and they are extremely difficult to service. It's almost as though they are designed that way so people will simply throw them away and buy another when they break.

I have long been critical of Toshiba as the only hard drive manufacturer that does not provide its own hard drive diagnostics to be used to test and field-recertify hard drives. Toshiba hard drives seem to have a worse than average failure rate. Coincidence? Maybe.

Toshiba continues to insult and disrespect customers and independent service providers. Seems like the company does not have any marketing or public relations people to temper its corporate arrogance... Ben Myers

Can we remove Microsoft Office and IE9 from these systems and install OpenOffice and Firefox?

If it's post-Windows, Microsoft has only itself to blame!

I have been a reseller of Micrsoft products for many years, of necessity, but not because I make any money selling their stuff. Microsoft has not exactly made friends its of distributors, smaller system builders, and resellers. My price from my distributor for any Microsoft product is a percent or two less than the retail selling price. In turn, my distributor pays Micrsoft a couple of percent less than he sells it for. Talk about a dis-incentive! Microsoft products are must-sells at near zero margins.

I can make very nice margins on the hardware, but when it comes to the software I have no room real to mark it up. Why should my customer pay me $400 for a copy of Office Professional, for example, when he can buy it for $350 in the big box store and install it in minutes? So I "sell" Open Office when I can and I can also sell refurbished computers with the official Windows stickers already on them. If I could convince people to run one of the ten thousand Linux distros, I would. But the Linux crowd shoots itself in the foot with too many distros that look way different than one another, several different UIs on top of naked command Linux, and childish names for programs like Konqueror, KAddressBook, and Kontact, which everyone thinks is oh, so cute!

Lenovo has damned good products, too.

Lenovo has damned good products, too. Maybe there's a relationship between good products and increased sales?

I continue to be impressed by Lenovo product quality, its easy to maintain products, AGGRESSIVE pricing, and a continually improving web site. I still like Dell products just as much, but consider this. My recently replaced 5- or 6-year old Thinkpad X60 has a 5+-hour life on battery. My newer, but not the newest X200, runs for 8 hours with its SSD.

HPaq and Acer-eGateMachines both have a long way to go to match Lenovo and Dell. Sony, Toshiba and Fujitsu also ran... Ben Myers

pan-HP or pan HP?

Dare we pan HP for its handling of the whole Palm mess? Makes me wonder what they are going palm off on some unsuspecting buyer. Any buyer of HP's PC parts better do its due diligence, or it may find itself owning a lot of doo-doo... Ben Myers

No incentives to resellers to reduce piracy

I'll focus on Micro$oft products here, because I have no choice except to sell them. The Micro$oft Office-and-Windows hegemony dominates the world of office software suites. No matter which version of Office or Windows we are talking about, the wholesale price I pay to a distributor is within pennies of the street price in the big box retailer stores. So where is my incentive to push Microsoft products, when my margin for the effort is maybe 5%, maybe a little more if my client is so inept that he needs to pay me to install the software.

Really now, if there is no incentive for me to sell the damned products to begin with, and I do so only to provide complete hardware-software systems to my clients, why should I even think about being a pawn in Microsoft's anti-piracy efforts? As Mike Myers or Austin Powers said, "Throw me a bone", Microsoft. Give me the possibility to make even 20% on a software sale, then offer a deep-discount anti-piracy incentive.

And the same goes for Adobe, Autodesk and all the rest. They bitch and complain about piracy, but make no attempt whatsoever to give incentives to those of us on the front lines... Ben Myers

"IE9 relies on Windows more than any other browser out there" Ouch!

Let's see now. Earlier versions of IE started this tight integration between browser and operating system and this led to more operating system and browser security holes than you or I could ever imagine. Given what's going on right now in the real world, is it apt to describe Internet Explorer 9 as a security Chernobyl waiting to happen? Or do we think that the Micro$ofties actually know what they are doing???

... Ben Myers

The chipset flaw is in which Cougar Point chips?

For crissake, if there is a flaw in MY Cougar Point chip, I would like to find out about it!!!!

Did Intel issue or will Intel issue a diagnostic that identifies the flawed chips? Given that Intel is so rigorous about steppings, sSpecs and other identifying information, the least they could do is enable us to check all our computers for the presence of defective chips, without doing a complete teardown of a system, of course!!!!!

... Ben

Why are we all going nuts about fast boot times?

Why are we all going nuts about fast boot times, and adding expensive hardware to make a fast boot happen? Has anyone, ANYONE, A-N-Y-O-N-E ever thought about the similarity between a laptop (or even a desktop) coming out of hibernation and the system boot process? What's the difference? Considerable. To load the OS, Windows (or Linux) has to mush though all manner of software modules, test for the presence of hardware, load drivers, and construct links from module to module. To bring an OS out of hibernation, a bootstrap routine needs to load the memory image from a contiguous (or nearly so) area of the hard disc. This is quick, usually just a few seconds. So why not write the same hibernation image to disk when the system is shut down, then load it into memory when the system starts up? An added bonus here is that whatever software was running when the system was shut down (hibernated) is the same software when the system boots up. Voila! Almost instant browser and word processor and spreadsheet. No need to wait for these to load, either.

The only possible fly in the ointment is that the hardware has changed since the last shutdown. If so, the OS needs to patch up the hardware drivers, not a major deal. Actually, with Windows it may be a major deal, because Windows is such a shabby house of cards. And memory fragmentation plus other instabilities may cause Windows problems. Well, duh! Once the system loads from the hibernation image, clean up the memory. All of this is practical and do-able by software engineers with a modicum of common sense. And it requires no added expensive SSDs to store the OS... Ben Myers

Really! What's in it for me, Microsoft?

As a reseller to small and medium business, I am already getting screwed by Microsoft on Office pricing, because my clients can buy at retail for pennies more than I pay at wholesale. This has given me motivation to push Open Office except when 1000% compatibility with Microsoft products is needed. So now Microsoft sticks all this on the cloud, meaning clients will need smaller hard drives and lower cost systems to use the cloud-based Office. Let's hope that the cloud has 99.999% availability and tight-as-can-be security, else people will become disenchanted. And, of course, the availability of the Microsoft cloud depends on local internet service providers and all those hidden providers of internet plumbing.

Microsoft has never offered any serious discounts and financial incentives to SMB resellers, instead charging for certifications. And they get beta testers to work on their products at below sweatshop wages, i.e. for free. So I guess this is no different.

Well, it will be interesting to watch... Ben

A steaming pile of horse manure dropped by Micro$oft

This is yet another steaming pile of horse manure dropped by Micro$oft in its long-standing anti-standards campaign. And it is yet another move to keep Open Office, Google Office and other Office products from gaining market share. They continue to try to kill interoperability between their products and others. This decision adds to the rationale as to why people need to simply leave Microsoft Office behind. ASAP... Ben Myers

Deja Vu All Over Again

For me, this is deja vu all over again. Back in the pre-historic times of mainframes, maybe around 13 BG (13 years Before Gates), I chaired a product design review for a new (new back then) removable hard drive product which increased hard drive capacity by 10% over its predecessor by increasing the hard sector size. Of course, the capacity increase was at the expense of a serious degradation in the performance of disk writes, because the operating system was built around the smaller sector size. Our design review flagged this as an unacceptable error, but the division general manager went ahead and released the product to marketing any way.

Try as they might, WD would have a helluva time selling me one of these drives for use on an XP system. The only possibility for these WD drives would perform adequately would be to modify the XP file system and/or its disk cache algorithms, something Micro$oft clearly will not do. Forcing the file system to allocate all files on LBAs modulo 8 helps a bit, but really not much... Ben Myers

Can't stand the heat!

HP has evidently not learned from its last fateful disaster with more-or-less standard and hot-running Pentium 4 CPUs inside their laptops. Of course, HP had plenty of company with Toshiba and Dell also doing "desktop replacements" in a 2003-2004 timeframe. Dell got hurt the worst, with a class action lawsuit, recalls and extensions to warranties on its Inspiron 51xx series. To meet these ill-perceived market needs, Intel provided HP, Dell and Toshiba with a standard 533Mhz FSB Pentium 4HT cobbled with SpeedStep to run at 1.6GHz on battery. Numerous desktop replacements failed or developed heat issues that could not be resolved. I have a Toshiba here with standard P4, taken in from a customer who suffered with overheating and shutdowns for years. I tore it down, cleaned out just a little bit of dust and dirt, applied thermal paste, and the damned thing now shuts itself down after a half hour instead of 2 minutes. Operate one of these laptops in a house with dogs and cats running around, and you end up with a clump of debris blocking the air vents and an even quicker failure. This whole desktop replacement phenomenon was exacerbated by people being somewhat ignorant in not keeping the air vents clear of dust, dirt, cat hair, and external blockages.

Dell follows the historical lead of Big Blue and all the rest who tried and failed

This nonsense about installing only vendor certified drives has been going on since the mid-'60s or '70s, when IBM tried to stop use of 3rd party disk drives with its gear. Dell, treat the buyer as though he has some intelligence. There are lots of us engineers out here onlce employed by now-defunct computer companies. We can read spec sheets. We can buy brand new drives from all manner of reputable sources.

What Dell is doing is taking commodity drives, but only certain models, mind you, running them through some tests and marking them "Dell-certified" at a premium price. Dell also runs the risk of lawsuits for this stupid ploy. Even with enterprise-class servers, hard drives, memory, and many other items are commodities, and need to be recognized as same... Ben Myers

Office 2007 migration and yet another migration to ???

Well, people who drank the Microsoft productivity kool-aid, having built all sorts of now-broken extensions to Office, apparently now have a massive hangover. Maybe it's time for some of them to consider another migration... away from Microsoft, to OpenOffice maybe?

What's wrong with this picture? Microsoft gives you a whole bunch of tools and capabilities to lock you into the Microsoft way of doing things. Your world gets more productive for a while and you and your cohorts take advantage of these tools to streamline work flow. Then, it's time to upgrade to a newer and more shiny Office, and you find that it is now necessary to rewrite AND RE-TEST every litle extension, macro, or script you ever did to make Office fit your way of doing business. And, oops! Anybody can write these little Office widgets, so you don't even know how many there are within the enterprise.http://www.channelregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/gates_horns_32.png

So much for putting your faith, trust and confidence in Microsoft products... Ben

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