Free Canonical Ubuntu 8.10 CD And Stickers!

About a month ago when I was messing around with Linux, I took advantage of a free service from Canonical, the company somewhat behind Ubuntu, which has skyrocketed in the past five years to become pretty much the closest thing to a mainstream Linux distro. That free service is having free copies of Ubuntu shipped to you on CDs. It's really 100% free; you do not pay shipping or anything.

The last time I tried to order Ubuntu CDs was in 2004, when Ubuntu was just starting. I couldn't believe that a Linux 'company' could give away free CDs and still exist in the following months. I also thought at the same time that while I would apply for the CDs. months would pass and I would soon forget about them, and would never receive them.

I was astonished back in 2004 when I received a small package one day, and inside was around 20 of the Ubuntu CDs and a notice to pass them out to friends.

Fast forward to 2008; the service is still around, but this time they didn't send me 20 CDs. Instead, I received one Ubuntu 8.10 CD in a nice little folder, along with four Ubuntu stickers. The CD was shipped from the Netherlands.

Honestly I was once again surprised that I received the CD (and so quickly too). If you want to get your own Ubuntu CD and stickers mailed to you for free, you can sign up here.

I can't believe the people behind Ubuntu can do this. They even go as far as have a tracking page for you to check on the status of your requested free CDs. For example;

1 CDs requested on 2008-11-26. 1 CDs were approved and sent to the shipping company on 2008-12-01. Please note requests usually take from 4 to 6 weeks to deliver, depending on the country of shipping.

Pictures Of The eeePC 701 4g Motherboard

Here are some photos of the eeePC 701 4G Surf model motherboard. You can click on the images to enlarge them. If you have any questions, please feel free to email me.

Rosewill RCX-Z300.. Very Pleased

I suppose it was time for a new heatsink / fan for my socket 775 systems. I have a couple of old socket 775 heatsinks / fans, but after using them the past several years the cheap plastic pins broke.

This past Thanksgiving I managed to find that NewEgg was selling the Rosewill RCX-Z300 92mm Ball CPU Cooler for only $14.99 with free shipping. I'm glad I ordered it then because a day later, the price went to $19.99 + shipping. It was pretty much the cheapest 775 heatsink / fan I could find that had a 4 pin connector so that my BIOS could automatically adjust the fan speed, while at the same time actually looked like a quality product.

I'm always hesitant when purchasing heatsinks / fans for computers because frankly they seem to be so overpriced. Ten years ago, I could get a cooler from my local Radio Shack for $8. Even two years ago I could order a variety of heatsink / fans from Newegg for under $10 shipped. I really don't even know why I bothered paying $15 for a heatsink, when I could have purchased a 2.0 ghz AMD Sempron CPU in retail packaging (comes with cooler) for a mere $5 more ($20 total) [yes I am aware that Socket AM2 heatsinks are incompatible with Socket 775 for the most part.]. Now I understand the fact that the Rosewill heatsink is much better than any OEM heatsink, but its not like I am using any CPUs that require aftermarket heatsinks.

Anyhow, back to the Rosewill RCX-z300. The unit was shipped to me very quickly via UPS, and upon arrival I noticed that the heatsink had some weight to it. I put it on a postal scale and found that the unit weighed 15 ounces. The heatsink / fan it was replacing only weighed 10 ounces. The additional weight compared to the original heatsink is due to the copper core in the Rosewill fan (which is also probably the reason why coolers have gone up in price).

The RCX-z300 is just a simple traditional looking heatsink / fan. It doesn't use any weird block designs, or weird mounting brackets. It's simple, and I like that. The most sophisticated thing about this heatsink is the fact that the fan blades are red and there is a "Z" sticker on top of the fan. I don't need a four pound block of copper with several fans that look like helicopter blades to cool my processor.

The heatsink is already applied with thermal grease. Lots of people like to use their own thermal grease, but I just left the grease on. Installing the heatsink was a little tricky because Rosewill chose to use that annoying plastic screwdown method that Intel invented. I had some problems getting all four of the plastic screws to clamp down, but I always have trouble with any fan that uses the plastic screws. It would have been much easier if Rosewill would have included a back plate and used metal pins for installation. If they would have choose the metal plate / pin method, I know that I would have a great heatsink that I could use on different systems for many years.

The fan can spin upto 2200 RPM, and because of its four pin connector, can be controlled by the BIOS. With the speed control off, the fan was relatively quiet as it spun at 2150 RPMs. When I adjusted my system bios and turned the fan control on, SpeedFan reported that the fan was running at 70%, and 1250 RPM. The fan was much softer than the constant 3,000 RPM fan it replaced. I can hardly hear the Rosewill fan spinning with case open, and with the case close, I can not hear it at all (My system is not completely silent, the power supply's fan makes a slight hum).

As mentioned in the beginning, I used to have a generic heatsink that was not properly attached to the motherboard, had a fan running at 3,000+ RPMs constantly, and the case was open. The temperature in the case was 32 C and would steadily increase as I used the computer. (The room temperature is a constant 21 c) The Rosewill heatsink / fan allows my overclocked E2180 running at 2.6ghz to remain around 30 c all day, and the fan never runs above 1250 RPM.

Overall, the Rosewill RCX-Z300 92mm Ball CPU Cooler is an excellent budget heatsink / fan for anybody that needs a new Socket 775 fan. It's a simple design that works, and will fit on all 775 motherboards, and in most computer cases. The only complaint I have is the whole plastic screw ordeal, but with the price paid I really can't complain.

Rosewill has yet to let me down on any of their products. You can purchase the osewill RCX-Z300 92mm Ball CPU Cooler here.

Pentium Dual Core E2180 Benchmarks And Overclocking

This past May I was able to get a used Pentium Dual Core E2180 for pretty cheap off of eBay. It's a dual core Conroe (Although I think everyone refers to them as "Allentown") chip running at 2.0 ghz (10x multiplier) with 1mb of L2 cache, and a thermal design of 65 watts. While the chip doesn't run as cool as the 35 watt Conroe based single core Celerons, the Pentium Dual Core E2180 still runs very cool, and can easily be overclocked to 2.6ghz on pretty much any Socket 775 motherboard that a) supports the chip & b) allows you to set the bus speed from 200 to 260.

I've been using the chip on and off over the past several months and have decided to post some quick benchmarks for the chip in it's original 2.0 ghz glory, as well as in 2.6 ghz overclocked glory.

I've used the chip in two boards, both based off of Intel's 945 chipsets. Both boards are old (18+ months). If you are interested in buying a cheap setup, you will be happy to know that pretty much any Intel 945 board will allow you to get the E2180 upto 2.6 ghz without any problems. In fact for these tests I am using a Asrock Wolfdale1333 board that I purchased for $30 USD. Like the Core 2 based Celerons, these Pentium Dual Core ships easily allow you to get a 30% speed increase with a simple overclock.

Here is the CPUID screenshot of the E2180 at stock speed;



I used SuperPI to get a 1m time of 29 seconds at stock speed (2.0ghz);



I also used Geekbench 2 (my favorite benchmark tool), and the system scored 2199. The full results of the Geekbench test at stock speed can be seen here.



As you can see from the results, a year ago they may have looked fine, but now the numbers look a bit dated when compared to all the new chips that have come out. While the E2180 is a great chip at 2.0ghz, its a fantastic chip if you overclock it to 2.6ghz, which is easily done.

You don't have to worry about heat if you overclock the E2180 to 2.6ghz; the temperatures remain constant regardless if the chip is 2.0ghz or 2.6ghz. If you have SpeedStep activated, you even have less to worry about.

To instantly get a 30% speed increase of your Pentium Dual Core E2180, enter your BIOS, find your CPU settings, and change the bus from 200 to 260. Save and exit. Here are some pictures of my BIOS;






At 2.6ghz, you can see the difference. The score in Geekbench 2 goes from 2200 at 2.0ghz to 2870. You can see the full Geekbench results here.

SuperPi manages to calculate to 1m in 24 seconds.



Here's the CPUID screenshot of the chip at 2.6ghz;





Overall the E2180 is a fantastic chip. Intel has made new Wolfdale based Pentium Dual Core chips, which pose a problem to people who can't afford to spend a lot on computers. The problem is the new Wolfdale Dual Cores are $80+ USD and require a motherboard that supports the Wolfdale processors. Older Pentium Dual Cores such as this E2180 can be found pretty cheap, and Intel 945 based motherboards are also very cheap and allow you to easily achieve a 30% increase in speed.

And About The Whole Via Nano Thing...

Back in May of this year, I posted that I was excited about Via's new Isaiah processor. When I posted, I stated that I was mainly excited to see if the new processor would actually live up to the small hype that Via had presented, or if history would repeat itself and the new processor would be like its predecessors and fall into the shadows.

Well guess what. It seems as if history has repeated itself. Via officially announced the processor as the Via Nano in late May, stating that the processor would be ready for purchase within a couple of months.

It's now almost December, and I still can't find any netbooks powered by the new chip, or any small motherboards with the chip installed. What's even worse is that the few news articles I have read show the Nano displaying disappointing results. (Sure the Nano beats the Intel Atom in some benchmarks, but it was supposed to be so much better than that and didn't Via make a video of the Nano running that Crysis game?).

I thought that by now HP would be using the new chip in the HP 2133 successor, but it appears they switched to Intel's Atom chips. nVidia has also announced that they have stopped working with Via on a mobile chipset for the processor; really was this a big surprise?

Seriously, I find Via very entertaining. Every couple of years they promise a new CPU with 'surprising performance, only to have the chip delayed, and when it does get released it simply sucks. What's even more entertaining is the fact that Via actually gets other companies such as HP and nVidia to believe their hype and get the companies to give Via a chance.

I don't think its going to happen again. I would say that I wish AMD or Intel would just buy out Via and their Centaur CPU design team, but its really not worth it.

The eeePC 701 4g Revisited!

In a very weird twist of fate, I once again have in my possession a eeePC 4g 701, the original netbook. I purchased one originally almost a year ago for close to $400, and now there are a wide variety of netbooks out there that are not only cheaper, but vastly superior.

For a month or so I was a big fan of the eee PC. I thought to myself that I could get over the small seven inch display with the weird resolution, and could also get used to that evil keyboard. The fact that I spent $400 probably also had something to do with it.

Still within a few months, I found myself using the 7" laptop less and less, and within six months the little netbook was really of no use to me. But now, with a large armada of different netbooks available, the older 7" eeePCs can be found used for very cheap, and suddenly the thought of using one as a hobby toy has grown on me.

Now that I am looking at the 701 in a hobby way, (I have a couple desktops to play with, as well as a 17" inch laptop.. when I originally had an eeePC it was my only laptop, and for a time, it was my only computer) I am becoming a somewhat fan of it.

The resolution of the thing sucks. There really isn't anything else you can say about it. You can't view modern websites in it, and if you install Windows XP on it, you're going to have problems running software because of the low resolution.

The keyboard is awful. That's all you can say about it. While the keyboard is fine if you are just surfing the internet, it's truly awful in every other aspect. I have no idea why ASUS decided to put a Right Shift key right next to arrow keys, but the poor placement of this key leads me to screwing up during any typing. The fact that the keys on the keyboard are very small allow me to constantly make typing errors. I suppose I could one day grow accustomed to the smaller keys, but I really don't see myself putting forth the effort.

The 701 is a hobby machine for me now; I've spent the past couple of days trying various operating systems on the unit. A year ago, I had Windows XP on a 701, but after a month of usage, the boot time had increased to several minutes. Right now I am using something I found called eeebuntu (I found several Linux distributions based off of Ubuntu, so I am unaware if this is an 'official' fork of Ubuntu).

Because this new 701 (well new to me, anyways) is used, I'm not really worried about the warranty and am now deciding on what to do first, either installing a touch screen (DealExtreme has a complete 7" touchscreen kit that fits this unit for $40 shipped) or purchasing a 10400 mAh replacement battery so I can actually use the thing without the AC adapter (the original batteries on these things suck; I can not believe that for a device this small the battery lasts for less than two hours). I purchased a $5 4gb SDHC card to help deal with the small 4gb SSD, but because this is a Surf model, the SSD is soldered directly to the board and can not be replaced.

We'll see what else I can do with this thing.

Windows 7 Boot Time Compared To Windows Vista

I managed to get a pre-beta copy of Windows 7 installed on my Acer Extensa laptop this past weekend. I became interested in Windows 7 after hearing all the news of how it is supposed to pretty much be just like Windows Vista, only with the speed of XP (or something like that). While this is only a prebeta, I was able to install it on the laptop with little problems. For the record, the laptop has a 1.86ghz Pentium Dual Core CPU running on a 533 mhz bus, 3gb of 533mhz DDR2 RAM, a 250gb 5200rpm hard drive (with four partitions), and integrated Intel x3100 graphics.

I have to say, that even though its a beta version of Windows 7, the thing installed quickly. When Microsoft says that you can install Windows 7 within 10 minutes, believe them. On this laptop, the complete install took less than 20 minutes on battery power. Using the AC adapter, Windows Vista takes the better part of an hour to get itself running on the laptop.

The big thing I am concerned about is boot time. It takes Windows Vista 58 seconds to reach the login screen, and once I log in it takes at least thirty seconds to load the gadget bar (or whatever its called), as well as my virus scanner, chat clients, etc before I can actually start working.

After reading so many articles about Windows 7 boost in performance, I was excited to see how long the same scenario would take with Windows 7 (compared to Vista). The result? It takes Windows 7 53 seconds to reach the login screen. So only a five second difference, right? Wrong. Once I enter my password, Windows 7 presents me with my desktop, ready to work within 10 seconds. This includes loading the Windows gadgets, and my startup programs. In this aspect, I am very excited because hopefully by the time Windows 7 ships the difference will be even greater.

Performance wise, I really can't call Windows 7 any faster than Vista; my laptop handles Vista extremely well (besides the long boot time). Vista is indeed bloated, but the computers being sold today are a lot better than those available when Vista was introduced, and thus can easily handle the bloat. This Extensa came with three gigabytes of memory; less than a year ago when I purchased an Inspiron 1525 and I found Vista to be very sluggish, but that was mainly due to the fact that the laptop only had one gigabyte of memory. This laptop (the Acer Extensa 7620) is by no means a 'fancy machine'; it was purchased for less than $600 (less than what I had spent for the Inspiron).

Other than the boot time, I can't really judge Windows 7 at this point (because it is not even in beta form at this point). The new Superbar sounds very exciting on paper, but its current form is pretty disappointing. I am not a fan at all of the new "ribbon" thing they have going in Paint and WordPad, but am very excited that they added a lot of nice conversion tools in the Calculator application.