HP Color LaserJet CM2320fxi MFP

Delivery took forever on this printer. Overall it is working fine but the things not mentioned in the brochure are:

• The web management interface is extremely limited. You can not restrict printing based on a list of MAC or IPs. I assumed that all HP Business laser printers would have this functionality.
• If you want to use legal sized paper in the printer paper tray, the paper tray doesn't sit flush with the printer anymore.

Printing from Windows 7 (build 7100) works fine. No complaints from the Macintosh folks.

One problem I haven't tracked down was when I sent a job as simplex, it still printed duplex.

Dell Latitude E6500 virtualization BIOS option

With BIOS A11 on the Dell Latitude E6500 with the Intel T9600 CPU, if you want to enable the Intel VT extensions so VMware Workstation can run a 64bit VM, you need to have the 'Trusted Execution' Virtualization BIOS option set to OFF.

If you have it set to ON, the VMware CPU check says that the CPU supports 64bit but is turned off on the BIOS.

An Optiplex and a disk walk into a bar...

So let's say you have a Dell Optiplex 745 minitower that you'd like to expand by adding another disk. Other than getting another computer, what can you do or watch out for?

• The second drive bay is right under the first drive bay. The only fan in the system is the CPU fan above. This may cause some heat problems... See http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/op745/en/UG_en/mt_drive.htm#wp1136008
• No SATA cables (data or power) are provided for the second disk
• If you want to add additional cooling be aware that since the optical device is also SATA now, the only non-SATA power is to the floppy drive and the leads to the main fan.

On the bright side...

• The Zalman ZM-2HC2 disk cooler works in the bay under the optical bay
• The Highpoint RocketRaid 2200 PCI Express works in the PCIe x1 bay (and actually works under x64 Vista)
  

What's an extra 32 bits?

One may think that now that EMT64 extensions are common in laptop, desktop and server chips that it should be no problem running an 64bit operating system.

(It is somewhat amusing to consider what one is optimistic about and what one is pessimistic, or realistic, about.)


With this brand-new Dell Latitude D830 with 4GB of physical memory, one isn't forced to run a 64bit operating system, but, hey, why not? Got this Vista x64 ISO chewing up disk space on another machine so why not put it go good use?

Well, the answers as to why not vista x64 are currently:

• No Bluetooh driver (Dell D360)
• Video driver crashes daily; sometimes even more (luckily all this means is that the screen freezes for a second or two and then comes back).
  
• Palm Treo 700p drivers won't load (even though the Palm Desktop installs ok

On the bright side, the SATA AHCI drivers loaded and seem to be running fine

Why it all appears to be magic...

A while back I installed Windows Vista on a Dell Latitude D810 laptop. Given that Vista's Resource Monitor now provides more information, I noticed that my CPU wasn't running at full speed. What was unfortunate was that this machine was out of warranty and so I had low expectations (which were met...) for Dell Support. Their best suggestion was reinstall XP (which, I'm sure you are not surprised to hear didn't change a thing).

Jump to the present. My other Dell Latitude D810 started running slow after a system board swap. Speedstep tools, cpu-z, and other tools were all reporting that it was being clocked down to about 800mhz.

Jump to the answer. The problem was that the fan above the graphics card was unplugged when the tech replaced the motherboard. After plugging it in, everything worked fine. Running diagnostics on the other machine indicated a similar fan failure.

So given that the operating system was clocking the CPU down because of a fan failure, couldn't there have been a visible system alert that said something? I mean, I can have a tray icon tell me that someone logged in, why can't I have something that says "your fan is broken"? Instead, it all looks like magic stuff is happening in the background....

Shuttle SN25P and RAID5

It isn't that hard to convince yourself that the Shuttle SN25P supports RAID5. After all, it says it has the NVIDIA nForce4 ultra chipset and one of NVIDIA's pages indicate that RAID5 is now available. Not only that, you click on the NVIDIA RAID link on Shuttle's product page and the NVIDIA page prominently mentions RAID5..

Given the cookie cutter/cut 'n paste nature of some of the reviews, you just aren't sure whether or not someone actually looked at the RAID options or just took someone else's word for it.

After having purchased the unit, installed the latest BIOS (fn25s01o), what have I discovered? The answer is... Nope, no RAID5.

The SN25P has 4 SATA ports and it isn't hard to put a disk drive under the optical drive. It even has a SATA power plug for a disk in that location.

The current BIOS also doesn't have Intel's newish feature of allowing you to take two disks and have a RAID1 set on part of the disk and a RAID0 set on the rest of the disk.

So, to my former self, you would have been better off just planning to put a floppy in that bay and not thinking that you could optimize things by having 3 disks in a RAID5.

Them thar floppies...

You'd figure that the floppy disk on new computer systems would be as useful as a USB toothbrush or the human appendix: it doesn't really serve a purpose but doesn't really hurt to have around.

Well, I've been proven wrong. The problem comes in when you are installing Windows and the drivers for the disk subsystem are not on that CD. The workaround for this is that Windows will allow you to hit F6 during the initial load and before it actually tries to run, it'll give you the opportunity to insert a floppy disk with the drivers.

As a workaround, the BIOS on new systems will allow you to make a USB flash disk look like a floppy or perhaps you can use a USB floppy drive.

When you see the BIOS option, you figure there is some light at the end of the tunnel but the problem is that the install process needs to access the floppy twice. Once when the installer operating system is loading (so it can see the disks to allow you to partition and format them) and then one more time to copy them to the newly installed hard drive.

What seems to happen is that the BIOS can help you out for the first access. However, once the operating system loads, the BIOS hands control over and now suddenly you don't have a floppy disk in A:\ and so the install bombs.

Unless you were lucky enough to get one of those USB floppy drives that is recognized. (http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=0&uid=psg1MIGR-56064).


So, what would I tell my earlier self? Just get the damn floppy drive for now. Hopefully, Microsoft will fix this issue in Longhorn.