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My new Clevo W240EUQ Laptop from PC Specialists

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This is the Laptop I have moved to. No longer a Mac user, never more than a PC user and never a Windows fan. I’m now entirely into my custom built Clevo W244EUQ laptop, built to my configuration by PC Specialist in the UK. Having done a lot of research and agonizing over prices and parts, my system was constructed and sent to me in, call it 10 days including shipping and weekends. And yes I’m writing this post from it. and I’m doing it from Mint 13 with the Cinnamon interface. Everything works, with the single exception that the SD card reader is not picked up. It also has one ‘hot’ pixel which only shows up during boot time, and I can live with that. I was amused and gratified that the laptop was NOT an exact match to the photos on the PC Specialist site, but I don’t think it was their fault as the Clevo site have many different configurations of this model laptop. On the positive, the laptop is better looking, and has a better keyboard than shown in the Clevo or PC Specialist photos. Mine photos are included below, though the first one isn’t perfect, because the top cover is so black that the auto focus couldn’t lock in.

The Specs are not stunning, about the same as a MacBook Pro. A Intel i5-3210M processor, 8 GB of ram, a 500GB 7200rpm disk with 16MB cache, 14″ screen 1366/768 HDMI, 1000 base ethernet, A/G/N Wifi, 2 USB 3 and 1 USB 2 port and a (currently) non-working SD Cardreader.

UPDATE: 

      Benchmarks
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CPU Blowfish	    4.070
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CPU CryptoHash   343.235
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CPU Fibonacci	   1.819
------------------------------------
CPU N-Queens	   5.411
------------------------------------
FPU FFT		   0.972
------------------------------------
FPU Raytracing	  3.688
-----------------------------------

Maemo vs Meego

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This week Nokia announced that MeeGo would not officially be supported on the N900. On first appearance this would seem to be a bad thing. But I managed to down load the MeeGo v1.0 for Netbooks and burned it to a DVD. I attempted to run this with VirtualBox and then Parallels and neither would finish the load. But my old work Dell Pentium 4 worked just fine booting from the CD.

So I went exploring, and overall it was a bit of fun, and most 5 year olds will be comfortable in a few minutes with it. But use it on an adult machine, a netbook to get work done on? Not a chance, it’s like a world-of-wonder 5-10 year old grade toy.

And guess what, it’s a GREAT thing that this, this, what ever MeeGo is, is not going to be forced ‘officially’ on the N900 users of the world. Compared to Maemo 5…what am I saying, it’s not comparable, if you are listening…

Nokia!

Keep Maemo, and FUCK MeeGo!!!

UPDATE: Someone else doesn’t like Netbook MeeGo a NoGo

NOTE: and the BS continues, with Intel killing off MeeGo for Tizen to further delay or destroy Open Source for mobile devices.

Forgotten Rule of IT!

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If you happen to read my Blog, you will know that I’ve started a project to build a home server that more or less mimics the sort of server I use at the office. And while I’ve have had the parts for a few days, in fact, assembled on the first day, following some basic photos, I have not really begun to operate it.

During the weekend, a fellow blogger Connor announced, rather twittered that they had their home media server assembled and running. At first I thought he had beaten me to the Idea, but his is more for home Media, MythTV, rather than IT practice and development. And then he was hit with the first rule of IT regarding new equipment. “Don’t count your systems until they have burned in“.

Which is what happened, his system failed due to a common phenomena in IT. Either the equipment starts and runs for 100 years, or it dies in the first couple of days. Infant Mortality is one of the most common effects of new IT equipment and usually means you can never commit time to the new system for several days, up to a week until you feel safe with the system. During that time you can test it, stress it, but don’t count on it. Then when you are happy, erase your testing environment, and load the real installation.

So hence, I’ve been a bit patient and deliberate in my new system. So far the BOXD945GCLF2 (also known as the INTEL D945GCLF2, or Little Falls 2) motherboard has been performing quite well and the OpenSolaris OS has found and configured all the hardware I attempted to use. The board is currently mounted and operating in a Antec Minuet 350 Case.





And I’ll write and photograph this more later, needless to say that while this is a small case tailored for the microATX D945GCLF2, the board itself is nearly lost inside as I’ll show you later.