欧州自転車レース追っかけ日記

and do did the CPU (Core 2 Quad Q9500)

Quickly and swiftly have they arrived! I was buffled when I recieved an email telling that the second package (containing the tiny CPU) was expected to arrive on Wednesday, February 26 a few days ago. That soon?

Normally a tracked parcel coming from the UK takes more than a week. Or it took before the Brexit. Does this quick arrival have anything to do with Brexit? I just had to wonder.

Anyway, they arrived on top of each other (just 40 minutes separate, maybe?).

I checked the contents and seemed to be OK. I had to check the PC, first.

As I had already written in the last (previous) entry, I was wondering if it would come with any wireless network device to fulfill the description of the seller. No sign of any network card in the PCI slot but I noticed that it came with a tiny USB dongle attached to the front panel (inserted in one of the USB slots there). So it did come with the proper device.

I attached a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse and a power cord and turned it on. It booted to a Windows 10 desktop after a long struggle (at least it seemed). The user that the seller created was "HP". Quite an unimaginative name or was the technician who worked on it just doing his/her job.

It had a Windows 7 Product Key sticker on the side of the case, so I can re-install Windows 7 (but which version? Family, Ultimate or such versions?).

I inspected the guts briefly before booting it up for the first time and saw not so much of dust accumulation. It did have thin layer of dust inside so it had not been cleaned by the seller but the machine could (might) have not been used so frequently or have been used in a neatly cleaned room. I have no way of knowing the forensic story of the machine.

It did have three memory modules in the slots and as I guessed it, they were two 2 GB modules and one 1 GB module. Other than that it had no surprises there.

After booting, I opened Control Panel (I had hard time finding it as it was first time I had ever used Windows 10) and had the graphics chip driver installed after connecting the machine to the Net by means of this tiny USB dongle adapter.

I installed a utility app called CPU-Z to know more about the CPU.

I am going to swap the CPUs. I am very sure that there won't be any noticeable performance difference between them (E5500 and Q9500).

In Japanese: 続きをどうぞ [HP Pro 3120 Small Form Factor PC (used) arrived]の続きを読む

テーマ:Linux - ジャンル:コンピュータ

1. 2020/02/26(水) 23:50:35|
2. Bike Races
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HP (Hewlett-Packard) Pro 3120 SFF

I bought one. It was a used unit and the price I paid was around € 54 and more than half of it was shipping charges from the UK. It was an ebay purchase.

The specification (as described by the seller) was something like:
SFF (Small Form Factor) format PC case
Intel Pentium Dual Core (E5500) clocked at 2.8 GHz
DDR3 SDRAM (10600) 5 GB
HDD 300 GB
Windows 10 Pro (upgraded from Windows 7 by the seller)
WIFI

I guess that most of the description must be correct except for the last WIFI part. I don't think it is equipped with PCI WIFI card, at least the pictures on the ebay page showed two PCI slots unused. Or the pictures used by the seller did not exactly represent the actual machine?

If the machine did not come with WIFI capability, I have to complain. I don't want to give this seller a bad rating. I don't want to be hated. I hope that it will come with an unseen (on the seller's photo) PCI WIFI card.

OK. Why did I buy a used PC like this? I just wanted to have a PC that runs Windows 7 (or equivalent) and Linux (or HAIKU OS etc.).

First of all, some of the gadgets that I own (like drive recorder) needs a Windows environment to update their firmware. This was the main reason.

Secondly, I miss Linux. I would like to play with it sometimes.

I currently run a version of Linux on Apple TV 1st generation. Please refer to OSMC.

I also installed LXDE desktop on it. I also installed Chromium and Synaptic on it. Chromium runs but not so smoothly as I had already anticipated.

Soon after the ebay purchase described above, I also bought a used CPU, also, from the UK. It was a CPU that HP offered on this machine. In other words, (I am guessing) a customer could order this machine with customer preferred configuration like how much RAM, which graphics card, which CPU and so on.

Intel Core 2 Quad (Q9500) was on the list so with a proper BIOS version installed, it (the machine) would boot without any issues. My only concern for the moment is that the increased power consumption (TDP 65W to 95W) the CPU cooling (its heatsink and fan) can handle the heat.

Q9500 was not expensive at all. Its rated clock is 2.83 GHz almost the same as E5500. I don't know if this upgrade would be worth the money I paid.

I thought of getting a graphics card for it but realized that I might be happy with the integrated video chip on the motherboard.

In Japanese: 日本語でどうぞ
[HP Pro 3120 Small Form Factor PC (used)]の続きを読む

テーマ:Linux - ジャンル:コンピュータ

1. 2020/02/26(水) 00:16:39|
2. Linux
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OMG! one of my babies (my cat and my MX-5) was harmed

One morning I went to my car and found the passenger's side window was smashed. Obviously someone tried to steal something from my car. Whatever he (or she) took from my car, it was not important.

I was heartbroken to see my car damaged. I had it repaired soon but I don't feel good about it. I am really annoyed and disgusted about it.

Luckily a car is repairable. I am happy it did not involve my other baby, my Hannah. She is irreplaceable but a car can be (unless you are talking about a real genuine Porsche Spyder 550 or something).

While the car was kept at the repair company (Carglass), I had an opportunity to drive a rental car paid by my insurance company.

It was a Nissan Micra 5-door (4 doors and a hatch). I did not care about the rental car and did not check the engine specs or anything (probably 1.2 litters?). It was roomy for a compact car. It was a shit in terms of driving feel. I felt like I was a captain of an old style big ship where a captain's command (full speed or something) is relayed to his assisting commander who toggles the levers and at the same time shouts into this pipe that leads to the engine room where a henchman deciphers the cracking voice and shouts the orders from above to his colleagues who jointly jiggles the engine control levers to complete the task.

In other words, anything I did on this Micra was felt like a remote echo of my control.

It was amazing to see how directly and promptly my MX-5 responded to my commands when I got it back after the repair. I unintentionally revved the engine because I was so used to violently press the accelerator pedal while driving the Micra for some days.

Mac mini G4 is kicking

I know it is slow but it can still play some movies (with the help of CorePlayer). It can still be a useful machine after 15 years since its production.

It can not handle the web surfing, though. The browser (TenFourFox) is an amazing piece of software but the machine's CPU (PowerPC G4 clocked at 1.42 GHz) is too old to handle the task of keeping up with the brutal world of the Internet. It is impossible to view almost any of YouTube videos.

I would like to use if as much as possible.

Apple TV Generation 1

I acquired these beasts (two of them!) about a year ago. I was just curious how OSMC would work on it and how a modified version of macOS Tiger 10.4.8 would work on it. Now I am working on my project.

Running OSMC on it is easy as the installing method has been well established and well documented.

Finding a meaningful use of the combination (the hardware and software) is more difficult than the installation.

Running Tiger on it would be much more complicated.

In Japanese: 続きをどうぞ [Nissan Micra (Japanese name March) and my Mac mini G4]の続きを読む

テーマ:車関係なんでも - ジャンル:車・バイク

1. 2020/02/09(日) 10:17:31|
2. Mazda MX-5
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