Last year, I started WebKeyDesign as a way to learn more about web site design and hosting, and at the same time I purchased a Shuttle XPC to serve as a server for my home office. An XPC is a small cube shaped computer; it is Shuttle’s version of a small form factor PC. In reality it is a very nice PC for people who do not like full blown tower computers. The specific model that I got was the SN41G2, which features an NForce Socket A motherboard. Even last summer Socket A seemed to be on its last legs, and the price of the computer was very cheap. With the included Sempron 1800 processor, it was around $220. Compare that to a Mac Mini or even a used G4 Power Macintosh, and the XPC wins hands down. The XPC was really my third PC, I had an old Compaq P133 before, and a Socket 7 AMD machine I had built years ago. The AMD machine mostly sits in parts on my office floor as I use it mostly as a junk and spare parts machine. In all, I have to say that the XPC, (which I named Titan), is the first PC that I really fell in love with. It costs a fraction of my G3 B&W Power Mac and it matches my 15 inch Powerbook. The Powerbook is the best computer I’ve ever owned, but the XPC has allowed me to like PC computers.

Titan was upgraded with an Athlon 2600+ processor last winter, and while 1.9GHz was good, I still thought about one final upgrade. The Socket A processors were no longer being made by AMD and the motherboard did not have any overclocking options, so I either had to find the fastest Socket A processor AMD ever made or consider replacing Titan with a newer XPC model. This summer though, AMD is coming out with AM2, their new socket format and so 939 boards won’t are going to be obsolete pretty quickly. Most XPC models that feature 939 boards, have not really come down in price, so there really are no bargains in the XPC world right now. I decided on trying to find an affordable Athlon XP 3200+, and give Titan one last cpu upgrade.

The Athon XP 3200+ runs at about 2.2GHz and the Barton based models feature 400MHz front side buses. This would only be about 300MHz improvement over the XP 2600+ which had a 333MHz bus. The hard part is of course AMD no longer makes any Socket A processors so I had to find a used cpu. I tried eBay, but every time I tried to bid on something on eBay I would lose the auction, plus the 3200+ was going for around $175 in most final bids. That was pretty outrageous, so I kept looking at PriceWatch.com and seeing what the smaller online vendors had. Their price was about $150, but still kind of high. Ironically, some cpus actually become higher price once they are out of production. The 3200+ originally sold for $480 and was sold for as little as $125 at one time. It’s value was actually climbing now. Luckily I was able to find it on ComputerGeeks.com who got some in stock for a short time. They claimed the cpus were new too, not used. I was able to purchase one at $140.

Once I got the package from ComputerGeeks, I opened it up and found a white cardboard box inside a plastic one. Inside was a 3200+ cpu wrapped in foam, and with a crooked labelling sticker. After carefully removing the sticker and cleaning the surface with some rubbing alcohol, I had my new 3200+. There is something rewarding about knowing that you have the best and fastest processor AMD ever made, even if it is outdated by a few years.

While the XPC form factor is great, it does have some drawbacks and you are reminded of this every time you open one up. When I opened Titan up, the dust inside was incredible. It was everywhere and took a lot of compressed air to clean out everything. The other downside is trying to install anything in such cramped spaces. The processor upgrade especially requires removal of drives, the cooling heatsink, and some cables. Some patience is definitely required.

Eventually everything got put back together and after a few BIOS changes, Titan booted up with the 3200+ and ran fine at 2.2 GHz. The most evident change was in web browsing, as Titan is primarily a server, about the only real desktop use it gets is Remote Desktop. Firefox rendering feels immediate and less lagging. I don’t have any benchmarks but if you want to see that type of stuff, I suggest reading Sharkyextreme.com’s Athlon XP 3200+ review, which includes some nice benchmarks on how the 3200+ compares.

Probably the biggest detterent to getting a 939 motherboard and cpu, was that most AMD cpus are still around 2.2 GHz, and the entire computer industry is still stuck right under 3 GHz in general. The G4, the Pentium, the Athlon 64, and G5 are all still pretty much in the same range, so on sheer speed comparisons, an outdated Athlon XP 3200+ still compares pretty well to the current processors out there.

What I find really strange about younger people and computers is that they often have no idea how to use the DOS command line. When Windows95 was the new OS on the shelf, I remember vividly being able to pick out a person’s computer skills based on whether they knew what CD-backslash was. Eventually Windows95 took over and I had to teach people what Right-click Properties was. Now I hardly ever run into a Netware server or even an old Windows98 station, but computer users in general still do not know DOS commands and hardly even know anything about the computer’s boot process. I guess what I really found interesting about learning DOS was that it taught you something about how the computer worked. Today, all the complexity is abstracted to the point that power users have to spend hours changing WindowsXP back to a Windows2000 like appearance. In a way it had to happen. Plug and Play and other technologies were a good thing, but some other things I just have to wonder why they suck so bad.

My favorite rant about WindowsXP is Windows Update. Reinstalling Windows usually means about six to seven restarts! In between setup’s actual restarts, which I think are two or three, you have Windows Update which requires individual installation for some Optional Software listings. By the time you finished installing everything, you’ve restarted so many times you wonder what is so automated about Windows to begin with. It would not be so bad if it was just Windows, but it seems like every major application on Windows wants you reboot after installation. After a while you get a bit tired of watching the Windows Logo come up so many times.

For DOS all you really needed to know was how to edit config.sys and autoexec.bat, and where you copied your drivers to. Most of the time you either got things to work or you didn’t. In Windows, there are literally thousands of files and you never know what you have. The irony of it all is that EDIT is still faster than Windows WordPad; that DOS still boots faster on a 130MHz machine than WindowsXP does on a 2GHz machine!

As luck would have it I spent most of the weekend trying to fix my old B&W G3 Macintosh. She’s officially named Venus. In trying to install an update to an ATI video card, I somehow made things worse and ended up corrupting the main hard drive. At first I thought I had killed the video card, but as it turns out, the main hard drive was corrupted and would no longer boot into OS X. Since Venus has multiple hard drives, the other disk that has OS 9 began to boot up.

After trying to install OS X again onto the main drive, and not being able to have Venus boot up into OS X, I gave up and bought a new hard drive and set it up. It appears that even if I could select the old main hard drive as a start up disk, the fact that the directory was corrupt would not allow the Open Firmware system to load the bootloader file for OS X. It would have been easier if Mac OS 9 would have told me that the main drive was corrupt, because the OS 9 Finder saw the drive fine.

If you ever wanted to know more about OS X, read through KernelThread’s OS X Guide, which gives you a hacker’s point of view of OS X and how it works.

Most of all remember your startup keys:

• SHIFT: to disable all extensions.
• C: to boot from CD/DVD.
• X: to boot OS X.
• S: to boot OS 9.

The most surprising thing of having to use OS 9 again, was to realize there is no official 1.x version of Firefox that works for OS 9.

In the same week that Apple was spotlighted for one billion songs sold on iTunes, BusinessWeek publishes It’s Dell vs. the Dell Way, which spotlights Dell as out of touch and out of favor with the stock market. The big problem of course is that Dell really had one idea and that idea has run its course.

For the past 22 years, Dell has laid waste to mighty rivals with one of the most groundbreaking business innovations of the past half-century: selling technology products directly to customers via the telephone, and later the Internet, instead of going through retail stores or resellers. But now the remaining competitors, such as Hewlett-Packard, have narrowed the gap in productivity and price. That leaves Dell in a tight spot. Rollins and Michael S. Dell, founder and now chairman, must either come up with another breakthrough innovation or face a future of slugging it out on near-equal footing with rivals.

HP and to a lesser extent Gateway have caught up to Dell and consumers are changing their minds now about buying products sight unseen. Apple has been pushing the Apple Stores for years now and giving customers the chance to experience technology is all the fashion these days. Even Sony has their own stores now to sell everything from laptops to wide screen televisions. But I think more than any other technology, the cell phone and the iPod have given consumers this idea that all technology needs to be catered to their individual persona.

Consumers’ buying habits are a reflection of a broader shift in the technology world. People are mesmerized by new digital gear with unique features and style. Commodity technologies, such as plain-vanilla PCs, are passé. That’s a difficult development for Dell. It spends less on research and development ($463 million) than Apple Computer ($534 million), despite being four times Apple’s size.

Somehow Dell changing their biege PC desktops to grey and silver is not enough. If consumers wanted these colors I’m sure Apple would have sold an iMac in these colors already. Clearly that has not happened, and Dell really has no clue what makes for a cool home PC, because if they did their gamer machines would at least have an AMD cpu in them by now.

But the real danger for Dell isn’t Apple’s iMac, it is going to be Levono. I hate to root for a non-US company, but the simple truth is that Levono is going to take the US market by storm and seriously drive some needed competition. HP and Dell will find themselves competing against a new company with enough product lines to match them in multiple segments. The Thinkpad has been a high end laptop for years, but recent announcements show that Levono wants to corner the laptop market on the lower end as well. This will spell big trouble for Dell and HP.