Monthly Archives: April 2012

rsts11: Laptop memory – above and beyond!

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Ever buy a spiffy new laptop, and then a few months later see that everyone else is buying laptops that take TWICE as much RAM as yours? Too late for buyer’s remorse or a return… but you can’t justify another thousand dollars for another new laptop?

I’ve been in that position twice… once with a laptop I’ve had for 4 years now, and one that’s coming up on 1 year.

UPDATE: I just remembered a third time when I managed a lucky super-upgrade to a laptop… that’s added now.

Inspiron 8200 with 2GB RAM. Pretty good for 2002 tech!

Back in 2001 or so I bought a Dell Inspiron 8200. This was a Pentium 4 Mobile based machine of the same design as the Latitude C840, about with a 1600×1200 15″ lcd, the C-series batteries (one dedicated battery bay, one battery/optical/zip/floppy/hard disk bay), one fixed (but upgradable) optical bay on the side, and a maximum of 1GB RAM. Or so I thought. Now to be honest, I sold the 8200 back in 2003, but later restocked with a short stack of Latitude C840s, which were the business spin of the same machine.

Recently when pulling one of my C840s out, I thought “I have some 1GB DDR SODIMMs. Why not try?” Turns out, while it takes longer to POST now, the C840 readily supports 2x1GB PC2700/PC3200 DIMMs for a total of 2GB RAM. You may find these sticks on close-out at consumer electronics stores… I bought out the closeout stock at 2-3 local Best Buy stores last fall.

The 8200 is still a very viable UNIX laptop, and runs XP or Windows 7 respectably if you keep it clean (I wouldn’t put Creative Suite or Mathematica on it). The docks, including one with a PCI slot, are easily available online, and while you might not want to carry it on trips with you, it’s very convenient for basic computing needs even 10 years later.

Latitude D830 with 8GB RAM? Yup.


I bought a Dell Latitude D830 with a corporate discount two jobs ago. It was as close to top-of-the-line as I could get with all the features I wanted. I’m a screen real estate addict… yes, I’m looking down my nose at your 1920×1080 display, over the top of my 1920×1200 display. Sure, it’s only 12% difference but it matters to me. I think this D830 had the second highest speed Core 2 Duo mobile chip available at the time, dedicated 256MB or 512MB video card, DVD burner, and 1920×1200 display. Three years of Complete Care and corporate-grade in-house service contract, which ended up helping at one point when the power subsystem started failing to charge, and one of my favorite features of some Dell and one Apple model–hot-pluggable modular bay batteries.

Power To The People!

My Powerbook “Pismo” had the option for two batteries, and if both batteries died and you had a third with a charge, you could close your lid, the computer would sleep, you could put another battery in and open it up and keep going. So of course I had three or four batteries. Dell has had a couple of models that supported modular bay batteries, from the Latitude C840/Inspiron 8200 (and I believe earlier C800/820 and I8000/8100) to the D800/830 line. Excellent feature, since I’m more likely to have use for an extra 2-2.5 hrs of battery life than a dvd burner on trips and in meetings/conferences. 

I bought the D830 with 2GB of RAM, knowing I could upgrade to 4GB more cheaply through Amazon or Fry’s or Crucial, than buying it pre-installed from Dell. So I did so, and bumped the hard drive up aftermarket as well.

Within less than a year came the Latitude E-series, very sleek, brushed metal case, and 8GB max RAM. I found threads like this one suggesting that BIOS rev A14 would support 4GB dimms.

The 5300, 6400, and 6500 as I recall all supported 8GB RAM on the same Core 2 Duo chips and chipsets, but when I asked my Dell rep about 8GB on my D830, he said “no dice.” So I quietly ordered the appropriate Dell part anyway, and when it arrived, I updated my BIOS and installed it. It worked, of course. I ordered another stick, and have been rocking 8GB in my D830 (with a variety of disk choices) for the last 3 1/2 years.

Sony VPCF22KFX/B with 16GB of RAM? Whoa!

Fast forward to last summer. I changed jobs, got a vacation payout, and found a Sony Vaio VPCF22KFX/B laptop on near-closeout sale at Fry’s. You can still find it at the preceding link for about $1k from Amazon (and if you buy it through my link I’ll be grateful of course), but I paid about $800 for it as memory serves. It came with a 500gb 5400rpm disk, 4GB of RAM, and the i7-2630QM processor — 4 cores, 8 threads, turbo, hyper threading, the typical power features. I bumped it up to 8GB of Patriot RAM, and a 500GB Momentus XT hard drive (500GB spinning disk with 4GB of SLC flash memory in front of it). It’s been working okay for me for the most part, but I started getting random BSODs, and in one night last week I found myself meeting over half a dozen STOP codes I’d never seen before, and a couple I had.

I did not want to believe that the laptop itself was dying, even though I have another 2 months of warranty left. So I pulled the memory and went back to the original Samsung 2GB sticks that came with it. Still got a crash every 3-5 minutes. Pulled the disk and put the original disk in, and other than having 100+ Windows Updates to execute, it worked fine. In fact, it survived three rounds of Windows Updates and three rounds of Vaio Updates. So I put the 8GB kit back in, and it was happy still.

But then I got to thinking… I’ve seen some Sandy Bridge laptops listed with 16GB, and Simon Gallagher (of vTARDIS fame) mentioned 16GB in his Macbook Pro last December. I’ve been waiting for the new Air-y Macbooks to come out hoping for 16GB capacity and a 1920px widescreen, but they’re not out yet and I was impatient. Saw a $110 16GB kit from Corsair, the CMSO16GX3M2A1333C9 to be precise, in the weekly Fry’s ad. It’s also $110 from Amazon but I hadn’t been in to Fry’s in almost 24 hours, so… I picked it up, brought it home, went to the little one’s Glee recital, and came home for a nap. After dinner, I started in on the upgrade project, slow and steady.

First step was a single 8GB dimm. I know the machine works with 8GB total, but will it handle a single 8GB dimm? Yup.

Next step, 8GB plus 4GB. Little bit risky, as the 4GB is slower than the 8GB and is the second stick. But it seemed okay with that. So, next step is obvious.

Yeah, I was thirsty. And Coca Cola has not paid me for their mention here, although if they wanted to send me a fully stocked vending machine for my store, I wouldn’t turn it down.

There we go. 16GB RAM, and it seems to be running pretty stably.

I still need to find the issue with the Momentus XT, and figure out a better disk option for this machine. I have some 60GB Pyro SSDs but I haven’t quite gotten the hang of a small internal disk on a laptop yet. So I may shell out for a 120GB SSD with rebate, or just bump up to a 500 or 640 GB 7200 spinning disk. The D830 is working well with a 640GB Caviar Blue drive, and I have a 48GB ExpressCard that I could use for high performance supplemental storage.

rsts11: Silicon Valley VMUG UC, and Storage Field Day

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Quick thoughts on the SVVMUG Conference

I survived the Silicon Valley VMUG (VMware User Group) conference event on Wednesday. It was an interesting mix of educational and informative presentations, and vendor exposure and conversations. I have some thoughts to write on later… including a grand unifying theory of tech conferences (that will require a bit of graphic work)… but I thought I should put a note out there to thank the organizers for making an excellent event for the 500+ of us who registered, most of whom seem to have shown up (as I did).

I also thought I’d mention the VMUG Advantage membership option, which I only learned about the day before. You can get a free VMUG membership, and associate with your local VMUG if one exists, at http://www.vmug.com. This will likely qualify you for any local events like this week’s Silicon Valley conference, and give you access to the local VMUG community.

If you’re looking at using classroom training or certification testing from VMware, going to VMworld, or purchasing a license for Workstation 8 or Fusion 4, look into VMUG Advantage. For $200 a year (or less with a discount code), you get access to a wide range of eLearning courses, 20% off on classroom instruction, 20% off one certification exam a year, $100 off VMworld registration, and a 30% discount on one of the desktop virtualization products per year.

(I believe you can choose Workstation or Fusion, and not both, for this discount… however, if you’re on VMware’s marketing mailing list, you will probably see a 15-30% discount on Workstation every few month, and I’ve seen 20-40% discounts on Fusion in the same mailings.)

By the way, I attended this event as a free member of the local VMUG, and while I received free lunch and coffee/soda, these considerations did not impact my opinions of the sponsors.

Oh look, Storage Field Day

I’m also pleased to report that I’ve been invited to be a delegate[1] to the first Storage Field Day later this month in Silicon Valley. Looking forward to seeing Robin Harris and The Other Scott Lowe again, and meeting more independent thinkers on storage for the first time. There will be a couple of familiar names on the other side of the blogger “dragon’s den” tables as well, including PureStorage and Coraid, and some folks I haven’t been all that formally introduced to, such as Nimbus Data and Tintri (the latter I actually met Wednesday at the VMUG).

Early in my career I did a fair bit of storage work, and much as going to work for Nortel pushed me into networking, going to work for 3PAR pushed me even further into storage technology. I’ve done a range of implementations since then, from what was more SPOD than JBOD (i.e. “steaming pile”, or at least overstacked pile), to conventional Engenio and EMC and 3PAR, so it will be particularly intriguing to come up to speed on what’s closer to the bleeding edge, or at least the warm and shiny edge… and have a feel for what’s coming in advance.

I expect that my “deep generalist” nature is a benefit that I bring to the Tech Field Day events. There are a lot of people there who are waders-deep in the specific topic, and I may learn as much from the other delegates as I do from the presenters and sponsors, but by being ankles deep in almost everything (except sales… whew…) I can offer a valuable perspective and maybe ask a question that wouldn’t be obvious to someone who lived the specific flavor of technology 24/7. Like why there’s a Rick Roll easter egg[2] in the new vSphere Client.

So I’m looking forward to the Storage Field Day experience on April 26-27, and the “bonus” Solid State Storage Symposium on April 25. You can probably still get a ticket to SSSS if you’re gong to be near San Jose, California on April 25, and you should be able to see most of the presentations all three days via online streaming at techfieldday.com. You can also keep an eye on realtime conversations on Twitter on the hashtags #SFD1 and #techfieldday.

[1] As with all Tech Field Day events, the sponsors and presenters will be providing for my lodging, meals, and entertainment during the event. They may also provide gifts or promotional items. We definitely appreciate their support for these events. However, as Tech Field Day delegates, we’re not beholden to the presenters as far as content and perspective (or even reporting/blogging at all) . You’ll hear what each of us thinks, from our own perspectives, if we think it’s worth writing or talking about.

[2] I hope you didn’t look too long for the easter egg… I’m just making that up.

rsts11: Fun with Verizon phones and vehicle navigation mounts

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I bought a DROID BIONIC phone about 6 months ago, and got the Verizon/Motorola cobranded vehicle mount. Turns out that the Verizon-branded mount includes a long 1/8″ to 1/8″ audio cable, as well as the original Motorola user guide that illustrates the cool 2x850mA car charger, and which talks about a custom USB cable that lets you run audio out of the dock to your car stereo aux input.

You see what they did there?

Yup, no car power adapter, and no USB cable at all.

Mind you, you can use any micro-USB charger with the dock, and it will help to charge your phone as long as you’re not really using it in the car. But if you want enough power to keep up with GPS or data or music, you’re out of luck.

I returned the Verizon-branded mount and found the Motorola original package at Fry’s (for about $10 more) and have been using it ever since.

I recently upgraded to the DROID RAZR MAXX, a brilliant phone with amazing battery life. I’m getting twice the battery life on RAZR MAXX with mostly stock settings and data/GPS always on, than I did on BIONIC with extended battery and Juice Defender running. Yep, *twice* the life, as in nearly two full days.

The store I ordered my phone from sold me a RAZR mount, and I didn’t look very closely since I figured they knew what they were doing, and going through a lot of effort to order my RAZR MAXX. It also made some sense to me that they might have a unified mount with variable inserts to fit the different phones. But when the MAXX showed up, it didn’t work with or without the insert. So I returned the RAZR mount, and ordered the RAZR MAXX mount.

Guess what didn’t come with the Verizon/Motorola co-branded version of the RAZR MAXX mount?

Yuuup. For those of you keeping score, it’s a Motorola P617 or SPN5581A dual-USB 12V cigar plug charger, and an SKN6394A USB and audio cable. You can find the P617 on Amazon for about $19, and it’s currently even eligible for Amazon Prime shipping.  It seems you can’t find the SKN6394A anywhere *except* in the Motorola original mount kits for the DROID BIONIC, DROID RAZR, DROID RAZR MAXX, and I think the DROID 3 and DROID 4 but I’m not sure about those.

As annoyed as I am, I’m going to keep the inferior mount kit after all. For one, I get a much better corporate discount from Verizon than from Amazon… and since I’ll be giving the BIONIC to my significant other, and she doesn’t believe in car mounts (and doesn’t have a 1/8″ aux input on her car stereo anyway)… if I keep the charger and audio/usb cable, we’ll all be happy.

But if you’re getting a cutting-edge DROID phone from Verizon, by all means get screen protectors, a home charger, HDMI dock, lapdock if you’re so inclined… but skip the vehicle mount and go to Motorola or Amazon and get the real deal.

As the links below will warn you, don’t lose that custom USB cable. Apparently you can’t buy it separately anymore (or at least Motorola doesn’t list it)… and I’m not seeing them on eBay yet either.

And as a side note, the spiffy skin for the phone was actually discovered through a Facebook ad for custom phone skins. They offer skins for many devices, including iDevices, Kindle Fire, and the DROIDs I have. Good prices, fairly quick shipping (for a custom product), and since my phone is Kevlar-enhanced I don’t feel the need for a ZAGG for this device. So it works pretty well. See the other patterns they have at this link, courtesy of site:customphoneskins.com in the Google search bar.

And as a disclaimer, I received no special consideration from any of the companies or brands mentioned above in relation to this rant.

 

 

Resources:

http://www.motoask.com/motorola-atrix-4g-general-discussion-f12/one-of-the-most-requests-part-number-for-atrix-vehicle-dock-t651.html

http://forums.androidcentral.com/razr-accessories/146016-audio-car-charging-cable-navigation-dock.html