Author: ArizonaBikeLaw

DUI Interlock

[update: the legislative session ended and the repeal was not enacted. In other words, the interlock will be required for all DUI offenders. Rep. John Kavanagh had a lengthy letter advocating repeal in the Tucson Citzen]

Earlier in this legislative season, AZ lawmakers passed and the governor signed a bill that requires a DUI ignition interlock device be installed for any DUI conviction. Previously interlocks were required only on repeat DUI offenders, or extreme-DUI convictions. A new bill/amendment has been introduced which would reverse the interlocks for first-time offenders. (it would be unusual to pass and rescind a law in the same legislative session)

There seems to be endless legislative fiddling with DUI penalties.

Continue reading “DUI Interlock”

Nettop Motherboard

(actual date Mar 14, 2009)

After my disappointment with the Amazon and the MSI Wind Nettop, I instead went with an Intel D945GCLF2 retail motherboard.

Newegg $86 w/shipping.

There are a bunch of reasons why this board works out to be cheaper than the MSI Wind: it uses standard i/o like ps2 keyboard connectors (i don’t have a spare usb keyboard), it has a parallel IDE connector (i have old, extra dvd burners and hard drives), it uses desktop ddr2 memory instead of so-dimm (i have extra of that, too). And it has a pci slot.

Power / Power Consumption

This mobo requires a standard ATX-style 24 pin (20 is ok too, just leaves the upper 4 pins open) plus a 4-pin 12V plug.

The neatest solution for power would be PicoPSU, a fan-less atx-style dc-dc converter. Mini-box.com sells them, e.g. a 60W bundle (includes the 12V dc “brick”) for $55. But I’m too cheap for that 🙂

In the meantime, I powered it with an extra, old atx power supply I have laying around. One that is already quiet, and relatively low-power.

ULtimately, at 36 Watts idling and 4W standby in windows is pretty good — though markedly higher than the MSI Wind Nettop which used only 24W/<1W.

BIOS

I couldn’t figure out what version I had, so I ran the latest from intel, version 0150 and I chose to do the windows version. I worked fine but was scarey, because the whole thing just goes dark for awhile. (though at some point when it rebooted it said checksum was invalid, and hit a key to continue).

Noise

The reviews were quite good, though a common complaint being the northbridge cooler fan (there is no cpu fan) is too noisy, a good replacement was suggested to be this $4 one: Scythe SY124010L which i probably would have ordered but was out of stock.

As promised, the northbridge cooler is pretty noisey. I tried it at 7 volts, and that was better.The color code for the cooler is white/red/black : tach/+12V/Gnd.

Speedfan sees two fans, the cooler fan jack (the 3 pin that is closer to the cpu; the motherboard says “MCH Fan”) is called Fan1 and the rear fan jack (motherboard says “sys fan”) is Fan0. The cooler fan runs at ~4400 rpm by default.

The bios has fan speed control — but here’s the catch; only “sys fan” is controlled. So I plugged the cooler into the sys fan jack, and set it to “not smart” and 50% PWM. Now it runs at 3500rpm and is pretty quiet (somewhat quieter than at 7 volts). I’ve seen some reports that say their fans won’t run at this speed, but mine seems fine.

There is much talk about the fan, see e.g. on silentpcreview. This guy is selling a Pabst 40mm fan on ebay. In any event it apparently is a standard 40mm x 10mm thick fan. And even 50%PWM or 7V is plenty to keep it cool. This guy did some heat sink mods.

Windows (XP, I imagine?)

Getting it booted up from usb flash drive, dvd, or hard drive was no trouble at all.

I loaded up XP Home, SP3 using an IDE DVD-ROM and a SATA notebook hard drive.That went uneventfully. At completion, many features were not working: graphics, audio, ethernet.

I ran the supplied on CD drivers install (which took a long time — 15 minutes?), and as far as i could tell everything worked great.

Windows 7 Beta

I had no luck loading the Windows 7 Beta (build 7000, 32-bit). The first phase; file copy and whatnot runs fine but once it reboots i just get the cool splash-screen and then a BSOD. I guess I could try the 64-bit, but i don’t have it downloaded. This guy says it runs fine.

The Final Chapter

In December 2019, I unearthed it from garage where it’s been resting comfortably since Aug 2012. I could not get it to power up. It appeared to be showing a blink code (but no beeps?) of 3 blinks. Removed DRAM stick and re-inserted. no good. So, dead I guess.

…

Historical note, Aug 2012 was when I replaced the ‘atom for Denise with a Lenovo i3 mini-tower purchased from Staples for ~ $300; I imagine that box came with Win7 (since free-upgraded to Win 10).

Also when hunting around gargage in Dec 2019, I found a forgetten mobo: ECS KBN-I/2100. A mini itx all in one w/some sort of amd core. Needs dram. Not sure what i ever did with it. It would go fine in the antec case used for the old and now dead atom. hmmm. maybe the dram from the atom ??

MSI Wind Nettop

I bought one of the newer MSI Wind Nettop from Amazon, their description at the time said:

MSI Wind Nettop 100 Desktop PC (1.6 GHz Intel Atom  Dual Core N330 Processor, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB Hard Drive, Barebone) Black. The price was $178 free ship which seemed pretty good.

It came in early March 2009 — despite it being on backorder, and despite amazon’s projected delivery of 3/31.

Anyway, it was a typo on Amazon’s part; it doesn’t really have Ram, or a hard drive — so I sent it back. Here is the same item at Newegg.

I can’t exactly find it on the MSI website, but this one is pretty close. The one i got definitely had the N330 Atom, though.

So while i had it, i put in a 512mb so-dimm (it only has one mem slot) and an extra 2.5″ sata hard drive. I tried out both Ubuntu live cd, and Windows XP sp3.

The only peculiarities were 1) the front sd slot isn’t available for booting (bios limitation? Which is weird, because i can boot from the sd slot in my msi wind netbook), and 2) Installstion of XP from cd booted fine from a usb dvd-rom drive, but then hung — I had to rustle up a sata drive to boot from. The sd slot wasn’t accessible to windows until i loaded the included cd of drivers.

The unit drew ~ 24 Watts running windows. Which is great.

Noisey

MSI claims that this pc is “Ultra Quiet” and “offers a true noise-free comfort even during heavy game playing or intensive computing applications“. This is not true.

The only source of noise is a 50mm(?) case fan which is controlled by the motherboard. The bios seems to have no settings for this. It only reports the fan speed. The CPU and chipset are covered by a machined aluminum heat sink.

It starts up with a brief roar, then settles down into what could be fairly described as nearly inaudible. Unfortunately the slightest activity (e.g. opening up a tab in firefox) causes the fan to speed up and become quite loud — for a minimum of a couple of minutes. then if it’s idling, the fan will revert back to nearly inaudible. It’s pretty annoying.

One ray of hope: the latest bios, 1.7 said “Fine Tune Smart Fan”. My hopes were quickly dashed when it turned out my machine already had the latest 🙁

MSI Wind: Ubuntu

(late 2008 timeframe?) I’m running ubuntu 8.10 booted off a live CD and then System/Administration/”Create a USB startup disk” on a usb flashdrive. I let it do it’s casper thing so that changes are sticky — using 256M for the casper file. I saved a copy of the casper file so that i don’t have to re-create the flash drive. From time to time (i guess) the filesystem runs out of space and bad things happen, in that case just restore the saved casper file. Continue reading “MSI Wind: Ubuntu”

MSI Wind OSX

(note the date is actually eight years hence. 2008)I located the file MSIWindowsox86.iso, and had trouble getting the installer to do much of anything. It just barely started and then it gets stuck saying “waiting for root device” or something. The problem was the usb to ide dongle I was using to connect an old DVD drive (actually, I’m not sure which one was the problem — but it was one or the other!). Anyway I got a cheapo usb to sata dongle off of ebay and connected that to my newer Liteon DVD SATA and the installer booted up and worked perfectly. But I couldn’t get it to boot off the hard drive.Apparently osx has to boot from a primary (not extended) partition. This is becoming problematic because I have 3 primaries already used up: one for recovery, one for Win XP and one for extra space (which I shrunk with ubuntu gparted to make room). So now i’m using my last primary partition for OSX (type 0xAF).Actually after the install it STILL wouldn’t boot — the installer sets the boot flag on the osx partion. the error is “HFS+ partition error”.What does work is copying the /usr/standalone/i386/chain0 file (this can be done in ubuntu, it can mount the HFS partition) to the root of the windows partition and adding a line in boot.ini, i.e. “c:\chain0=”whatever”.Once booted up, i was pleasantly suprised to see the webcam and audio just worked.What doesn’t work is wireless or even ethernet :-)Wireless can be enabled by getting the driver for 10.5 from ralink’s taiwanese site. It is a little ugly but it works. The only bug seems to be the radio defaults to off, so you must use the ralink applet to toggle the radio to get it on. this must be done each and every time the computer comes up either from fresh boot, or even from standby.Trouble with the ethernet can be fixed by messing around with the speed/auto sensing. Again, it is messed up either from fresh boot or standby.

Burn capacity

“Playo” DVD-R, when blank Nero disc info says 4,489MB available. Here is detailed info from imgburn:

Free Sectors: 2,298,496
Free Space: 4,707,319,808 bytes
Free Time: 510:48:46 (MM:SS:FF)
Supported Write Speeds: 2x, 4x, 6x, 8x, 12x, 16x, 18x
Pre-recorded Information:
Manufacturer ID: MCC 03RG20
Physical Format Information (Last Recorded):
Disc ID: 0@P-!-00
Book Type: DVD-R
Part Version: 5
Disc Size: 120mm
Maximum Read Rate: Not Specified
Number of Layers: 1
Track Path: Parallel Track Path (PTP)
Linear Density: 0.267 um/bit
Track Density: 0.74 um/track
First Physical Sector of Data Area: 196,608
Last Physical Sector of Data Area: 2,495,103
Last Physical Sector in Layer 0: 0

…

MSI Wind “Netbook”

— the actual date is Nov 16, 2008 —

— I subtracted 8 years for this category —

U100-279US MSI Part Number: 9S7-N01152-279. Another MSI site. The sticker on bottom says Model Number MS-N011

Serial Number (which is on the box, and strangely i can’t find on the unit?!): U100-279USK0809000480. (is that in nv memory maybe?)

I think most of the U100’s have a bunch of the same base features: webcam, some sort of wireless.

This unit is relatively fully loaded — 1GB DDR2 memory, 160GB hard drive. Wireless N (Ralink RT02700E). XP is preloaded.

The unit is named Y012 on my network.

My first official act was to open it up and install and extra 512MB of ram (ddr2 so-dimm) i had laying around. I can take up to 1G extra, but there is only one slot.

Since it has no optical drive, just 3 usb ports; i spent a fair amount of time messing around with being sure i could boot from, for example USB sticks, and running ghost. I made a bootable 2.88mbyte key and ghosted the recovery and xp partitions.

OSX should be do-able, but it didn’t work for me; looks like i need a more modern usb to ide dongle. MSIWindosx86.iso

There are hot keys (and hot keys only! also watch out: these devices default to OFF if you cut all power, e.g. battery and ac) for webcam (Fn, F6), wireless and bluetooth (Fn, F11. repeatedly).

Some details:

  • Wireless: Ralink RT-2700E, shows up in device manager as “1T2R Mini Card”. miniPci card sticker: MS-6890, RT-2700E, VQF-RT2700E. lspci: Device 0781, subsys device 6890.
  • Webcam: Bison
  • Bios version: 1.06, apparently. The website has a 1.09 as of the day i got it Nov 11, 2008. Now is says “1.0E“, dated Sept 2009. Here is a blog article about 1.0B (oh, i finally get it, that last digit is a hex nibble)
  • Hard drive:  160GB WD Scorpio, which is coincidentally the same drive that Dave bought to work in the xbox.

Inital Hard Drive configuration:

Ranish Partition Manager       Version 2.40.00
152,627M [ 19,457 cyls x 255 heads x 63 sects = 312,581,808 sects ]
                File                Starting         Ending      Partition

# Type Row   System Type         Cyl Head Sect    Cyl Head Sect  Size [KB]

0  MBR   Master Boot Record        0    0    1      0    0    1           0

1  Pri   Unused                    0    0    2      0    0   63          31

2  Pri 1 Compaq Diagnostics        0    1    1    509  254   63   4,096,543

3 >Pri 2 Windows NT NTFS         510    0    1  5,609  254   63  40,965,750

4  Pri 3 Windows NT NTFS       5,610    0    1 19,456  254   63 111,226,027

5  Pri   Unused               19,457    0    1 19,457   80   63       2,551

There is a bios function, if you hit F3 while posting you can run the recovery stuff on the hidden (hidden to windows, that is) partion 1. This will do a factory-restore of XP, I tried it and it worked fine and took like 15 minutes. Note that you have to then go through the initial Windows stuff (name, etc).

There is an application to create a recovery DVD (image, since the unit has no burner) — I did this and then chose to delete the recovery files since that makes the XP partion ~ 2G smaller. The unit also ships with a recovery DVD. Since I deleted the recovery files under XP with the tool, I can no longer create a recovery dvd (easily). Then I ghosted the recovery partion — this yielded about 2.5G worth of data and I burned that on yet another DVD that can be used to restore a recovery partition should the need arise.

The XP ghosts were 5 gigs including recovery files, and under 3G without.

Threads on the MSI Wind Forum on how to get the wireless working: here and here This actually worked; all i needed to do was install mkds(?) from the synaptic pkg mgr, then I double clicked on the .deb file mentioned in the posting. I rebooted (not necessary?) and ran the network configurator widget and connected to my web network. I don’t know how you “roam” (i.e. connect to an open network you don’t know what the ssid is?)?