My daughter left behind an Inspiron 1200 when she left for college. She said it was too slow for schoolwork. I argued that it should be fast enough, but, in the end, she got a new machine for school. I eventually pulled it out from the sticky mess under her bed and fired it up.
I didn't have her password, so I just decided to install Windows XP from the restore disk. The first thing I noticed was that the left touchpad button was broken. I grabbed and old USB mouse and completed the installation. The installation went fine and I logged into Windows. It seemed pretty snappy, but since the gazillion Windows updates were installing the machine got painfully slow.
I noticed the bottom of the machine was getting hot. I powered down to investigate and dismantled the machine a bit to pull out the cooling unit. It was packed full of lint and dog hair. I hit it with the ShopVac and put a little thermal compound on the heatsink and reinstalled. I fired up the machine and it ran nice and cool. The Windows updates continued to come in waves, but the machine didn't grind to a halt as it had before.
I noticed that Firefox start up was pretty slow. So I dug through my junkbox for a 1 GB PC2700 dimm that I pulled from upgrade last year. I plugged it in and went from 256 MB to 1.25 GB. This made a huge improvement in the startup and swapping time for applications. I needed to go into control panel and manually set the page file size to 1.2 GB to match the new memory size to optimize performance.
Once the Windows updates began to slow down, I visited the Dell support site and installed all the latest drivers and flashed the BIOS to the latest version. I hit a few blog posts and saw that the Celeron process running at 1.3 Ghz could be upgraded to a 1.8 Ghz 745 processor. I found one on ebay for $12 and also found a new palmrest to fix the broken touchpad button for the same price. When they arrived, I popped them in. The new process made a HUGE improvement in speed.
When I was on ebay looking for the processor, I notice some wireless antennas for sale. This got me thinking that although this model wasn't wire for an internal wireless card, I could string an antenna and plug it into a mini-PCI wireless card. I got both for about ten bucks on ebay. I pulled the LCD screen and two-sided taped the two antennas in, strung the wires to the PCI slot, snapped in the card, and enabled it in the BIOS. Windows XP didn't recognize it, but the driver was up on the Dell site. I installed it and connected with five bars at 54 Mbps to my network. It was a big difference from the 11 Mbs of my PCMCIA wireles adapter.
In digging through my junk, I found a 60 GB 2.5" hard drive. It was a bit bigger than my 30 GB drive that I had installed, but the real difference was that the 60 GB drive was a 7200 rpm unit, much faster that the 4200 rpm unit that was installed. I booted to my Acronis DVD, created a backup of the 30 GB drive, swapped drives, and restored from backup. When I booted the OS, it still saw only the 30 GB partition. Of course, Acronis wasn't smart enough to stretch-to-fit, so I booted to a GParted CD, and increased the partition size. I booted the machine and saw the whole 60 GB drive partition. This drive was fast, too. I put it through paces moving files around.
This machine is now a very zippy system. I've been using it regularly and its the fastest feeling Windows unit I have. Of course, there's nothing like a fresh install of Windows. I do realize that will degrade fast enough. Maybe I should just restore from my Acronis backup once a month.
After using the system for a few days, I discovered that the clock was losing hours of time. I figured it was the coin cell, a 2032 battery. The bummer was that I had six brand new 2025s, but no 2032s. I looked up the specs and learned they were pretty much the same battery, except the 2032 was slightly thicker and had more capacity so would last longer. I decided to go for the substitute. In taking out the coin cell, I broke the little plastic retainer tab for the battery. I decided my fix would be to put two dots of hot glue on the battery. It worked well and time loss problem was solved.
I also noticed that Window XP didn't have the codecs to play DVDs. I installed the free VLC Player found on the web and DVDs played just fine. I've always liked VLC Player. It can play anything.
The last thing I need to do is find a laptop battery. My battery holds a charge for a good hour, but the Inspiron 1200 wants to do a battery calibration every time I boot. The BIOS doesn't seem to have the ability to disable this test. It mostly just an annoyance, but I like this machine and I would like to not see the warning when I boot. I see batteries for $35 on Amazon and ebay, but I'm holding out for a $20 bargain. No pressure, the Frankenmachine is serving me well.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Monday, April 11, 2011
Installing Novell IDM Amazon EC2
I spent a fair amount of time installing the IDM 4.0.1 integrated installer on an EC2 64 bit SLES 11.1 image. The challenge, as always with small footprint images, is figuring out what packages are missing. The integrated installer is notoriously quiet about its failures and takes a fair amount of log file digging to isolate. Here's the packages I needed to add to get it to work.
- libgthread-2_0_0_0-32bit (This one will missing will cause the UA driver to not fully deploy. AppConfig will be missing.)
- libstdc++33-32bit
- libstdc++43-32bit
- compat-32bit
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