AMD A4-3400 Llano-Based HTPC Upgrade Rocks

Posted on July 29, 2012 by Dan

Several years ago I threw together a cheap HTPC based on an AMD Athlon 939-socket chip. It worked fine over the years playing back standard-definition movies and streaming Netflix without issues. Recently however I noticed lots of skipping and stuttering while my kids were watching an episode of The Avengers. The movie was attempting to play in HD, but the old HTPC just couldn’t cut it. I took a look at the CPU usage and it was pegged at 100%. I disabled HD and the movie proceeded to play without issues, but the CPU usage only dropped to about 80%. I decided it was time to upgrade this old machine, if for no other reason than to get HD playback on Netflix. After all, what good is an HTPC that can’t play back anything in HD?

My goal for this build was most bang-for-the-buck. I wanted to build the least expensive HTPC I could that would fit the bill of internet media streaming device without being required to do much else. The plan would be to keep all existing components such as the case, HDD, TV tuner, PSU, DVD drive, Windows 7 and only upgrade the CPU, motherboard, graphics and memory. This isn’t the first time I’ve done this kind of upgrade, and I find it works out well for anyone on a budget. And I’m usually on a budget.

So my HTPC upgrade starts off with one of AMDs brand new Llano-based APUs – the A4-3400. This little chip packs a 2.7 GHz dual core processor paired with a Radeon 6410 graphics processor. While this chip comes just at the heals of Ivy Bridge, it probably competes better with Intels’ lower end Pentium-based Sandy Bridge processors. I waffled back and forth between spending the same money on other either of these two chips and ultimately decided to go with the AMD A4 because of the lower bundled cost, better graphics core and ultimately better WEI scores (according to reviews on Newegg). At the time I made my purchase, Newegg was offering combo deals for APU/motherboards for as little as $99. So I jumped on that very deal and got $20 off an A4-3400 and and ASRock A55M-HVS motherboard. I threw in a 2×2 GB set of G.Skill ram for $25 and got free shipping on the whole deal. So for a mere $124 I upgraded my old machine to something the ultimately ended up being worlds faster than what I had before.

The build went without too many issues. The only thing I had failed to account for was the lack of a parallel IDE port on the ASRock motherboard – 6 SATA II ports and not a single parallel port. Whoops. I dug threw all the PCs I had in the house and only my Samsung Blu-ray drive had a SATA II port. I borrowed it temporarily and then later bought a new Lite-On DVD drive for 17.99 from Newegg with free shipping. I pulled out the old motherboard and dropped in the new shiny blue ASRock unit. I popped in the cool blue G.Skill memory sticks and the proceeded onto the A4 chip. I can’t believe how tiny the cooler is that comes with this thing. The heatsink must be no taller than 1″, including the fan. Fortunately this sweet ASRock mobo with its UEFI bios makes setting up the fan speed a breeze. I’ve got it set to spin as slow as it can safely go. I can’t hear it from beyond about 3 feet away.

Last thing to do is reinstall Windows 7 and I should be good to go – or at least that’s what I thought. I pulled out my Windows 7 install disc and turned on the PC. I was about to pop it into the DVD drive when suddenly the words “Starting Windows” appears on my monitor. I thought what the…? This thing is going to boot into Windows with a brand new CPU/motherboard/graphics and not crash? Sure enough Windows 7 loads up tells me it Found New Hardware (yeah, ya think?) and proceeds to install everything one by one. Well without the LAN driver, it wasn’t going to get far, so I dropped in the Driver disc provided by ASRock and installed the chipset, video, and LAN drivers. Once I got online, I downloaded the latest of the remaining drivers and the new HTPC was good to go. There were no other hangups. I couldn’t believe it. That just saved my like 2 days of updates and software re-installs. I did have to reactivate Windows though, but a quick call to the automated activation hotline and I was all set. Easy peasy. Never had an upgrade go so smoothly.

Now that its been a few weeks since the build I am happy to report that this new hardware is working flawlessly. My overall WEI went from 4.4 to 5.8. It plays Netflix HD movies without a fuss and CPU usage remains at only about 30-40%. It also plays back HD TV shows with no problems. Of course it plays back my DVD collection also without issues. Windows Media Center is much quicker, much more responsive. It also streams recorded HD TV shows to my other HTPC without stuttering, something my old machine couldn’t do. I don’t have a Blu-ray drive in this machine, but I have no doubt it would work just fine (or at least as good as any PC-based Blu-ray player works). I should also note that this computer stays on ALL the time. I haven’t turned it off in at least 3 weeks, yet every time I turn on the TV and receiver and select HTPC, it’s all ready to go. It’s quiet, efficient and makes for a perfect media experience without costing an arm and a leg. Hats off to AMD for making such a great product. Oh I should also mention that the UEFI interface on the ASRock motherboard is awesome. I don’t think I can go back to a simple text-based interface ever again. It makes the overall user experience just that much better. I haven’t actually tweaked anything, other than the fan settings and the default memory speed was wrong, but I didn’t intend on overclocking this little machine anyhow. Overall the ASRock motherboard compliments this build perfectly.

With that, here’s some pics of the hardware as well as my WEI scores for before and after the build. Next up will be a review of my new sweet new Nexus 7 Tablet. Spoiler alert…it’s awesome.

UPDATE: So the biggest issue I’ve encountered is the audio/sound over HDMI loses link to my Pioneer receiver every time the receiver is turned off/on and the input is selected to something else. Cycling the inputs doesn’t work, power cycling the receiver works half the time, power cycling the PC fixes it every time, both are not ideal solutions. Especially when my kids come in at 6 AM Saturday morning and say “Dad, there’s no sound on the computer” and then I have to get out of bed and fix it in a half-asleep daze. Curse you AMD! We’ll see if I can find a solution to the problem and I’ll post any updates. Apparently it’s a common issue with AMD drivers.

Posted in Computers | 2 Comments

Review of the Pioneer VSX-1021-K 7.1 A/V Receiver

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Dan

Last month my 13-year old Sony 5.1 receiver finally quit. The very same receiver that had been the hub of my home theater since the dawn of the DVD era. I was bummed to have it break since I wasn’t really in the market for a new receiver. The Sony DVD player that was just as old died a couple of years ago and the XBOX took over as my stand-alone DVD player. I hadn’t looked up receivers in years, so I had no idea what kind of new options I would be in store for. So I got online and started doing some A/V Receiver research to see what I could find. After several weeks of debating between a Sony, a Denon and a Pioneer unit, I finally decided on the Pioneer VSX-1021-K 7.1 A/V Receiver. Long story short, I give this unit 5 blazing stars. It is awesome and so far has performed flawlessly for the last several weeks with everything I throw at it. I couldn’t be happier with my purchase and highly recommend this unit for anyone looking for a fully-capable A/V receiver at a great price.

This is definitely one of those best bang-for-your-buck kind of items. I bought the VSX-1021 for $299 with free shipping from Newegg.com. They sell this thing for that price almost every weekend, while the usual price is $549. Amazon sells it for $399 any day of the week. They pack a load of features into that kind of price – 90W x 7, MCACC, AirPlay, 2 Zone, DTS-HD, DD TrueHD (plus all the usual decoding schemes), 5 HDMI inputs, 1.4a HDMI switching (3D), 2 coax and 2 optical inputs (all assignable), onscreen setup menus, DLNA, Ethernet port (upgradeable firmware, huge bonus), iControlAV2 (app for iPhone/iPod that is super cool), assignable input labels (including skipping inputs all done with your iPhone/iPod), downloadable calibration files, plus a whole lot more. Ultimately here’s some of the things I really like:

AirPlay – hands down best invention ever. As someone with several iPods and iPhones in the house, as well as multiple PCs and a huge mp3 collection maintained in iTunes, AirPlay is a dream. The simplicity is typical Apple, but a testament to the genious behind its invention, my 7-year old daughter can start a song on my iPod Touch and have it playing through the stereo seconds later without a hint of difficulty. Additionally, using the Remote app, I can play any song from my larger PC library that isn’t on the iPod straight from iTunes to the VSX-1021. The sound quality is as good as any of the mp3’s I own and AirPlay works effortlessly without missing a beat. While it does an optional Wi-Fi adapter you can purchase, I have the unit hardwired to my 100Mbs LAN which works great. The onscreen album art is a bit lack luster, but who needs the TV on anyway when you’re just listening to music?

HDMI Switching – OK so just about any bottom-end receiver has HDMI switching, but this is first time for me I’ve been able to hook up ALL of my devices to the receiver and literally run ONE cable to my TV. The DVR, the HTPC, the XBOX and the Blu-ray are all connected to the VSX-1021 via HDMI and the TV is permanently set to one input. For you married guys out there, this is a huge score on the WAF. I used to have all the audio running to the receiver on all the video to the TV and everything had to be set just right for sound and video to be all working. While being able to assign names to the inputs helped in the past, it didn’t simplify the process. Now it’s so easy I can’t believe I ever messed with it the other way. I’ve got specific names assigned to each input (which is a piece of cake to do with the iControlAV2 App) so ‘XBOX 360’ is exactly what it says it is and there you go, rocking out to Guitar Hero in seconds. Of course if you’re still old school and don’t like the idea of running video through the receiver, there are 2 coax and 2 optical inputs which are assignable.

I have had no issues with the video or audio over HDMI to the receiver. While the VSX-1021-K does have various video processing options, I’ve got them all turned off, so as to pass the direct video on to the TV without any additional processing. I did mess with them a little bit, but honestly don’t see a whole lot of value in using the receiver as a video decoder/enhancer/corrupter. Besides the manual suggests that if any of the video options make the picture look worse, to just turn the features off. So that’s what I’ve done. The only reason to use them would be if you’ve got a non-HDMI input (composite or component) that you want upscaled to 1080i/p. I haven’t tried out that option.

iControlAV2 App – While you can do a lot with the remote and the onscreen menus, this cool little app for iPad/iPhone/iPod is great. You can easily select inputs, change sound modes, turn the volume up/down mute, and pretty much anything else with a simple touch-based GUI. Kids got the movie too loud in the other room? Just open up iControlAV2 and dial it down a couple of notches. The mere fact that Pioneer has even created a useful app for their receivers just shows that they’re on the cutting edge of today’s technology. The fact that it works, shows they know what they’re doing.

MCACC – This is Pioneer’s auto speaker calibration routine. I haven’t had a chance to tweak my setup much other than to just run one sweep, but it worked great and definitely gave the sound the needed bump in the right places. You get 6 different memories and various different calibration modes – all of which can be manually tweaked afterwards. I love the fact that once the calibration is complete, you can “log into” the receiver from your PC and download the calibration files and view the response plots of your room. It’s pretty handy for letting you see what kind of changes are being made and why. You can actually set up the entire receiver from your PC through a series of menus, though it’s not very user friendly and seems to be written more for a total novice A/V person. I walked through the first portion of it and then quit. That part of Pioneer software engineers could do some work on. But it’s not a deal breaker, just don’t use it.

Those are just a few of the reasons why this receiver is so great. But I’ve written a lot and probably not said very much. All in all, this receiver is awesome. I can’t believe the technology in 13 years. I expected just something simply just to get my home theater back up and running, I didn’t even realize all the great conveniences I was missing out on. Now I don’t think I can live without them. Pioneer has been a brand that has been with me since I was a little kid, but with my recent experience with Sony products, I couldn’t go back to them. I’ve got quite the Sony Mortuary going on in my garage right now (DVD player, CD player, tape deck, VCR, discman, receiver, and TV) which have all since been used and consumed. I can only hope that this new Pioneer receiver lasts at least 13 years, though I wonder what kind of great features I’ll be missing out on then?

The Dreaded UE22 Error – 3/17/2017 Update

This receiver had been a workhorse in my home theater for over 5 years when just a couple months ago an error message popped up on the display which blinked “UE22”. This message was followed by a loss of audio/sound from the speakers. Leaving the receiver on for a few minutes would usually kick the sound back in but the error message remained. Eventually the sound petered out completely leaving the receiver completely useless. A quick Google search revealed that I was not alone. An incredibly lengthy thread over at AVS Forum details the vast number of folks who have run into this same problem. Fortunately Pioneer/Onxyo has stepped up and began offering free repairs of existing models or discounted pricing on newer refurbished models. I contacted Pioneer via email pioneeradmin@pioneerhomeusa.com and received an immediate response to send a picture of the error code, SN and proof of purchase and they would look into it right away. I was later contacted by Jhonatan.Romero@us.onkyo.com and was offered either free repair of my existing unit or an upgrade to a VSX-1130 $212.00. While the upgrade was tempting and the newer unit offering 4k support definitely would have future-proofed my ultimate plans to upgrade to 4k, I decided to hold off and just go for the repair for now. They shipped me a box with a pre-paid label and off the unit went for repair.

It was only about 2 weeks later that today the unit showed back up on my doorstep. I think it came back in the same box with the same newspaper packing I had thrown in with it when I shipped it. I did receive my exact same unit back as others had mentioned which I was glad. I haven’t had any other problems with the unit and I feel like I’ve taken really good care of it otherwise. I spent an hour or so tonight re-hooking back up all the speakers and cables and turned it on and it works great! No more UE22 error code and as far as I can tell it sounds perfect. I still need to go through and re-run the MCACC but otherwise it’s working fine. Time will tell I suppose how long it holds up. So hats off to Pioneer for standing by their products even when the warranty had long since been expired. Free shipping both ways on the return and they didn’t delay one bit. Everything went as smooth as it could have. So if you’ve got this receiver and you’ve been plagued with the UE22 error code, use either of the two emails I listed here and Pioneer should be able to get you up and running again. I don’t know for how long they intend on honoring this repair/exchange so don’t delay if you’re receiver is acting up.

Now after all that, the really interesting story behind this whole fiasco can be traced back to a faulty IC manufactured by Texas Instruments, a device that Pioneer was made aware of later in 2012 that this part was eventually going to fail. Shortly after the release of the VSX-1021 (and other similar models), TI issued PCN #20120919000 to Pioneer stating that they had discovered a problem with several family of ICs and while they had a fix coming there was definite catastrophic failure on the horizon. This actually isn’t that uncommon in industry believe it or not. The issue at hand they stated simply as “Premature Aging”. This notification was to let Pioneer know that they had purchased devices that were affected and would have a revision to the product available in the next 6-12 months. Obviously at this point the majority of their inventory was already out in the real world so there wasn’t a whole lot Pioneer could do about it other than “wait and see”. There’s a couple of links in the PCN that detail the issue so it appears as though it was a fairly well understood problem by TI. The more the part was used, the quicker it aged. The higher the voltage on Vdd, the quicker the part aged. The faster the device clock frequency, the quicker it aged. Pioneer may have considered that based on typical usage by the customer and the way the part was implemented into their design, that perhaps the effects of the aging either would never manifest or if they did it would be so far down the road that most people would be ready to upgrade anyway. Based on the number of posts over on AVS forum and the time of when they started popping up I’d venture to say that that timeframe ended up being around 4-5 years. For my unit it was at exactly 5 years. And I use this receiver non-stop. It gets turned on at 7 in the morning and stays on until 10 or 11 o’clock at night. I’d say that’s heavy usage and I probably waste a lot of electricity since we’re obviously not watching that much TV, the receiver just stays on all day anyway.

So the IC in the Pioneer unit is part of the DA8xx/DH8xx DSP family of devices and more specifically the D810K013BZKB4 part (reference designator IC9002). This is a DSP device that by the looks of the schematic is pretty much responsible for ALL of the sound processing in this unit. The IC is part of the D-Main Assy (Digital Main Assembly). It is believed (and confirmed by nulland from AVS) that Pioneer as part of the repair program is replacing the entire D-Main Assy with updated TI chips. This makes sense seeing as how 5 years later it would be unreasonable to expect TI to even have existing stock of any of the old devices, let alone be still selling them to its customers. For Pioneer its more cost effective to just replace the whole main board. While in fact I probably received a board that came out of someone else’s unit from a few weeks, or months prior, where they had already removed and replaced IC9002 in the D-Main assy and after some form of retest goes back on shelf ready to be installed into another failed receiver. My main board will go into the same repair cycle and someone else will probably get my old board with a new TI chip in a few weeks. This device is in a BGA (ball grid array) package which means it takes special soldering machines that provide controlled localized heating to properly remove and replace the device without damaging the entire board or the IC itself. It makes sense to do all that as a separate operation to the repair and return of just my unit.

Anyway, I’ll post a link to some of the information from TI of a similar premature aging issue they encountered on a different family of parts. The links in the original PCN appear to all be broken. I sent an email request to TI for the information but they never responded. Based on their analysis and subsequent solution to this issue however, I believe that the issue has been permanently fixed and we can expect at least another 5 years, hopefully more, of good use out of this receiver. So thanks again to the folks at Pioneer for making things right. I’m a fan once again.

http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/OMAPL137,_AM17x,_C6747/5/3,_DA83x/2x/1x/0x_IO_Buffer_Premature_Aging_Assessment

Posted in DIY Audio | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Blu-ray and Pentium Get Along at Last

Posted on June 25, 2011 by Dan

If you’ve ever wondered if that old Pentium IV computer you’ve got collecting dust in the closet might just make a great media hub capable of full 1080p, you may be surprised to find that it’s got just enough horsepower to actually work. That’s what I discovered last night after installing a Samsung Blu-ray drive into my 3.4 GHz Pentium HTPC and watched Back to the Future in full 1080p with perfectly fluid playback. Something I didn’t think would be possible with such an old CPU. But I’ve finally made the jump to Full HD and I’m totally blown away. The detail is amazing, the colors pop and the picture just looks outright gorgeous. And I managed to get it all for less than the cost of a decent stand-alone player. Here’s why I finally caved and how I got my system up and running.

In 1998 I paid $375 for my first DVD player. I jumped on that bandwagon before most video rental stores were even carrying DVDs. Even then I still waited about a year after their initial release because I wanted component video outputs and needed the price to come down just a bit. Today I paid a mere $65 for a Samsung Blu-ray drive for my computer nearly 5 years after their initial release. So why buy a Blu-ray drive instead of a standalone player? I debated the issue quite a bit, but ultimately for me it came down to convenience, price, and overall tweakability.

Here’s some quick specs on the machine I’ve got running Blu-ray right now. I bought it used for $50 several years ago and have been using it as an HTPC in the master bedroom for the last year. It’s an HP Pavilion dc7100 running an i915P chipset and a 3.4 GHz Pentium IV (Prescott 550) with 2 GB of PC3200 DDR400 memory. I’m running Windows 7 32-bit that gets a WEI of 4.4. A 320 GB Western Digital hard drive takes care of recording space for TV shows using Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1250. I have a super old school Sounblaster PCI 128 sound card that has a built-in amplifier, so it drives a pair of stereo speakers surprisingly loud without the need for an external amp (for now). An old Radeon X1600 took care of the video, despite that no supported drivers for Windows 7 were available. Though this setup played 720p HD TV shows just fine, it struggled with 720p Netflix content. I never thought it would have the power to play 1080p Blu-ray.

I decided to upgrade the graphics card to a Radeon HD 5450 (Cedar) in order to ensure compatibility with my HDTV (and Windows 7) offering a native HDMI port, full HDCP compliance, DirectX 11 support and plenty of options using the latest Catalyst Control Center from AMD to tweak for a perfect picture on my 40″ Toshiba LCD. Additionally, this card offers support for H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2 which should offload some of the HD rendering from the older CPU. There’s plenty of 5450-based cards out there but I ultimately settled on a GIGABYTE GV-R545OC-512I for $19.99 (after $20 MIR) with free shipping from Newegg.com. This is a PCIe 2.1 card and yes, it plays just fine in my old PCIe 1.0 graphics slot. This card runs a little faster than most of the other variants due to the DDR3 memory and even though I don’t plan on playing games on this rig, it was actually the cheapest of the 5450’s after the MIR. It’s not a fanless card, but the fan spins spins slowly and isn’t audible above the other fans cooling the PSU, CPU and case. This is a great card and offers plenty of resolution options to get what appears to be 1:1 pixel mapping at 1920×1080 on my LCD. At least text and graphics look perfect without being blurry. My TV has a 1080p PC mode which basically turns the TV into a perfect computer monitor. So I’m quite happy with the results. It’s a great card for HTPCs and I highly recommend this one if you’re in the market. Picture looks much better than that old X1600.

The Blu-ray drive I bought is the SAMSUNG Blu-ray SH-B123L/RSBP which is the latest drive from Samsung and features a 12x BD-ROM and has all the standard DVD and burning features found in most drives. While it claims 12x for Blu-ray, it only plays Blu-ray movies at 6X (even DL discs). Which is still faster than most players. I have no issues with the load times I’m seeing (about 8-10 seconds) and the drive is quick and responsive. The cool mirrored finish on the front panel is slick looking and dispite what most people in the reviews about the drive being loud, I find it no louder than any other CD/DVD drive I’ve heard and cannot be heard over playing a movie. It came with the latest firmware and Cyberlink’s Power DVD 9 for Blu-ray playback. Most people complain endlessly about the free version Cyberlink offers with most retail Blu-ray drives and how awful it is. I think considering the software is free, it’s actually not that bad. They make you install a whole suite of mostly useless applications, but Power DVD 9 works pretty good on this machine. I haven’t had time to tweak with it too much, but it works fine so far. I don’t suspect I’ll be purchasing the full version any time soon. There is one weird issue I need to work out, but I won’t dwell on it for now. I’ve been using Power DVD since version XP (which predated version 5) and have never had any (major) issues with them.

My first test Blu-ray was Toy Story 3 and it played perfectly. I seriously couldn’t believe how awesome the picture looked when it first started playing. This was the first 1080p content I’d watched on this TV (which itself I only bought 6 months ago) so I was really breaking in both the Blu-ray and the TV at the same time. Pixar movies in HD look absolutely incredible. I was impressed that not only is the detail better, but the colors are deeper, the blacks look better, there’s just more contrast and more color to the overall picture. I had to dial down some of the original picture settings I had on the TV with the old DVD player and old graphics card because they were all too high. So I was really happy about that. CPU usage was about 15% average throughout the movie, and the CPU frequency actually throttled down to 2.7 GHz throughout most of it. The next movie I watched was Back to the Future. This is a classic movie and one of my favorites. It played (almost) without incident. There were a few blips during the lightning/storm scene which shuddered and dropped frames. Turns out Windows was dowloading updates at that time. I went back later and re-watched that scene and it played through just fine. So I went into my Windows update settings and told it to not automatically download and install updates and to let me manage them. Should be okay for now. This is where a modern dual core CPU would be nice, but not absolutely necessary if you set Windows up right. CPU usage on Back to the Future was higher, up around 70%, but definitely still playable.

Now it’s time to start renting Blu-ray from Redbox and upgrade my Netflix account to Blu-ray and start enjoying all my favorite movies in HD. If you haven’t made the jump to Blu-ray and 1080p yet, what are you waiting for? Get off you’re duff and make it happen, you’ll be glad you did!

UPDATE – 9/5/2011 – While this setup worked well enough just playing Blu-ray movies, overall it was pretty slow running Windows 7 and flipping through Media Center as well as choppy playing HD Netflix (or any other) content. So this PC has been resigned to being my new Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) and I bought an older 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo with 4 GB of RAM to replace it. The new machine really plays Blu-rays without a hiccup, but also serves as a much better and faster media hub for all my HD viewing. I’ll be blogging about my cool new DAW shortly.

Posted in Computers, DIY Audio | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

My Tired Old PC Gets Some New Hardware

Posted on May 18, 2011 by Dan

I’ve been limping along with the same old Pentium 4 PC for longer than I care to admit. As long as everything was working fine, I told myself, I wouldn’t build a new PC until it finally pooped out. I needed a reason, something justifable to spend any kind of money on a new PC when the one I had essentially did what I needed (which turns out, isn’t all that much these days). Nevertheless, the day finally came about a month ago when ole’ trusty wouldn’t boot up. Now this happened once before, and swapping the power supply that time fixed it right up. This time that wasn’t the case. I tested out another power supply and the PC booted up but the video was a garbeled mess. The monitor showed nothing but a bunch of colored lines, though I could almost make out the Windows splash screen as the PC booted up. Then the video went dead completely. This was it, time to buy a new PC.

Well, not just yet. I got on Newegg and thought I’d go head and buy just a new graphics card, see if that would fix it back up and get me running again for a little while longer. AGP cards are pricey little suckers these days for what you get. I got the cheapest thing I could find that would at least run Areo in Windows 7. The card came a couple days later, I dropped it into my old machine and voila, it booted up with video, and seemed to play just fine. Even with the old power supply back in. I downloaded the latest drivers and thought everything was great. A half hour or so later the PC just shut off. No warning, no nothing. I thought, uh oh, my PC doesn’t like the new card. I turning everything back on and began running some tests. Come to find out any time the PC is excercised even the slightest, it would just shut down. I checked the Windows error logs upon booting back into Windows and found an error message something to effect of “Kernel power failure. Windows has recovered from an unkown or unxpected power failure.”

So the PSU is having issues? I thought the video card was bad. Ah, wait a minute. Now I started piecing the real scenario together. I once again tried out a new power supply with the new video card and this time everything worked great. No issues with unwanted powering down. I ran Prime95 for hours without a single shutdown. So this is what really happened, the power supply took a dive one night, and took my Radeon 9800 card with it. This was my 2nd PSU in this same PC in 5 years. And now it was running its 3rd just to stay alive.

Well, I limped along for about a month, with a PSU hanging out the side of my case, and just last week finally broke down and bough some new hardware. Here’s the play-by-play of what I picked out.

First off, I decided to just do an upgrade. Sot the plan was to keep my Antec case, HDDs, CD/DVD drives, monitor, etc. and only upgrade the PSU, motherboard, CPU and RAM. I wanted to just spend enough dough to get something a little newer and little faster without going overboard. Afterall, what do I use this PC for anyway? Blogging? Yeah right.

The first question any PC builder must ask himself – AMD or Intel? Sandy Bridge had just come out and Newegg was finally getting in stock some decent P67 boards again (after the whole SATA fiasco) but no matter how I configured it, Sandy was going to cost me $100-150 more than almost any AMB-based system. I just couldn’t justify the cost, considering what I’d be using this PC for anyway. Not really into gaming all that much, but I like the option to be available. I ended up picking a Phenom II X4 955 BE 3.2 GHz chip and paired it with an ASUS M4A88TD-V EVO 880G-based motherboard (Radeon 4250, USB 3.0, Sata 6.0, etc.). It was a combo deal for about $215, which at the time of this writing was about the best deal I could find on any quad-core setup with a modern chipset. The integrated graphics was a bonus too since I’d really like to save up and get a better card later on, as in, when it’s not getting purchased at the same time as hundreds of dollars worth of other computer gear. So in a month or so I’ll have the real graphics card I want when it’s the only thing I’m buying.

For memory I bought a 2×4 GB pack of G.Skill Ripjaws for the low-low price of just $69. It’s only rated at 1333MHz and not 1600MHz but again, for surfing the web and all this typing I’m doing on this blog, I thought it would be fast enough. Besides, I really wanted 8 GB of RAM for this new machine, but I didn’t want to spend $100 to get it, which is what all the 1600MHz stuff was going for. Lastly, the power supply I picked up a Corsair CX500. Obviously overkill for this system as it is (which consumes a whopping 164W with all 4 cores at 100%), but will be perfect for that AMD 6000-series card I’ll be picking up next month. =)

I had lots of fun dissasembling my old PC, gutting it from top to bottom, cleaning it out, and prepping the case for all the new goodies. I just love opening up the boxes of new computer parts. My son even got in on helping me out. He’s always a good helper, for about 10 minutes, then he usually loses interest. All the components installed without issues and when I buttoned back up the case, it looked just like my old PC. Under the hood however it was rocking some new goodies that I couldn’t wait to get Windows installed on to check out. But alas, that will have to be a post for another day! Until then, the new PC has been running great. For me this was a great compromise in hardware between value and performance and does just about everything I need from viewing/editing photos to videos, to running Office 2010, as well as the occasional game or two. Everything feels snappy and fresh. Hopefully I don’t have to keep it for another 7 years, even though I probably will.

1/23/2020 Update – Yup, I still have this same computer and it’s the year 2020. This PC is officially 8-1/2 years old. It has served me well over the years. The Corsair PSU kicked the bucket about 2 years ago. I picked up a cheap EVGA unit to replace it. I replaced the 1 TB HDD with a Samsung EVO 850 250 GB unit and installed Windows 8.1. Haven’t made the jump to Windows 10 but at least I’m off of Windows 7. I put that Blu-ray drive in it from my other computer and proceeded to watch zero Blu-rays with it or even use it at all for that matter. I added a 4TB WD Black drive to store my ever-increasing collection of pictures and videos of the kiddos and I bought some decent Presonus 3.5 speakers to beef up my sound. I also added another 4 GB of RAM that I stole from another PC that I no longer use so I’m running an unusual mix at 12 GB but at least they are matched pairs running dual channel and they are all PC3-10700 sticks from G.Skill. I’m thinking though it’s just about time to build something newer, better, faster and certainly with hardware from this decade. Even though this decade is only 3 weeks old.

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Windows 7 Family Pack Transforms 3 Old PCs

Posted on January 3, 2011 by Dan

For a brief period when Windows 7 was first released, Microsoft was offering a Family Pack of 3 licenses for the low price of $149 – that’s about $50 per license for an upgrade-only version of Windows 7. At that time I had intended on purchasing a Family Pack but before I could get around to doing so, the offer ended and I couldn’t find anyone selling it any more. Fortunately Microsoft decided to bring back the Family Pack around October of this year. I wasn’t going to let another opportunity to upgrade 3 of my home PCs to Windows 7 for such a great price. I added the item to my cart over on Newegg.com and was about to make the purchase when I noticed the price had dropped. For 2 days only, you could buy the Family Pack for only $135 with free shipping (Costco.com now carries it for only $125). I didn’t wait around this time, and I bought it that same night. It showed up 3 days later. The upgrade party was soon to begin.

Now two months later, I have successfully upgraded 3 of my existing, aging, yet still usable PCs to Windows 7 and I couldn’t be happier. I posted a blog about upgrading my old Inspiron laptop to Windows 7 and it soon became the only computer I enjoyed using. Going back to the XP machines, I felt like I was missing something, some of the ease, some of the refinement, some of the options I was getting used to in Windows 7. So I was happy to get them all upgraded. (Well, all but one. But its day will come soon enough). As much as I’d love to build a couple of new computers to load a clean version of Windows, the best I could do for now was just the upgrade, but even on these old machines, Windows 7 works amazingly well. What’s great about the upgrades also is that they give you both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows, so you can decide which version meets your needs. For all 3 of these old PCs, I went with the 32-bit version just to ensure hardware compatibility and since I have no more than 2 GB of memory in each one.

The first machine to get the upgrade was my main home PC. This PC is the one I’ve had for about 5 years now. It’s got a Pentium 4 Prescott 640 CPU with an Asus P5P800 motherboard. It’s running 2 GB of DDR400 ram with a Radeon 9800 Series graphics card. It’s got a 1TB WD Black HDD for storage and Windows XP was installed on an 80 GB WD drive that was actually a couple years older than the PC (the PC died and got rebuilt once upon a time). Here was my first dilemma – there was no way I was going to install Windows 7 on that tired, old 80 GB IDE HDD whose read/write speeds were abysmal (not to mention that drive ran loud and hot). I wondered, since the Family Pack is technically only an “Upgrade” version of Windows 7, would there be a way to do a clean install on on new HDD in an old PC? With the help of a couple of Google searches I found the answer – of course there is!

The first question people may ask is, is it legal to do a clean install on new HDD in an old computer which has XP with an Upgrade only version of Windows? In my opinion I say yes, and here’s why; my qualification for being able to do an upgrade is that my computer must already have a legal, existing version of Windows on it. That’s it. Since I have had XP on this machine for over 7 years now, this computer qualifies for the upgrade. The problem with the upgrade is that since old HDD which contained the previous version of Windows was removed and a new HDD was installed, Windows 7 cannot verify that the upgrade installation meets the requirements. That’s the theory anyway. I had an unusual case I suppose because I was able to install Windows 7 and activate it with the new HDD without any license errors or any Regedit workarounds. (This worked for one PC but not for another). I should point out that the old HDD with Windows XP has been shelved, to be used as a back-up drive or a spare drive, and will not be installed into another working machine ever again. That license of Windows has been consumed in the upgrade. That’s the caveat that makes my upgrade legal, discontinuing the use of that license of XP completely.

My second computer is the HTPC connected to our Sony LCD in the family room. It’s running an AMD 3800+ Athlon CPU ($22 Newegg blowout) in a Biostar motherboard ($34 Newegg open-box special) with 1 GB of DDR400 RAM. In this case I did a 100% by-the-book upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7. I have a WD 640 GB HDD in this computer with 40 GB partitioned off for the OS and the remaining 600 GB for data, movies, music and TV shows. Installing the upgrade over Windows XP went without any issues on the partitioned portion of the drive and all the data remained untouched. The activation was able to detect that a previous version of windows existed and was successful without any workarounds. By far the easiest of my 3 upgrades. I bought a Hauppauge WinTV HVR-2250 which plays happily with Windows 7 Media Center and records and plays HD shows without issues. Also with integration to Netflix, Windows 7 Media Center and the HTPC have definitely brought the PC out of the den and into the family room.

The last PC to get the upgrade was an old HP computer I bought from work. It’s got a Pentium IV 3.4 GHz CPU, 2 GB of DDR400 RAM, and a dying Seagate 80 GB HDD. This was another case where I was going to have to install the upgrade onto a new HDD in the old computer and shelve the old HDD. It squeaked, and clicked, and popped, and made some of the most horrifying noises I’ve heard come out of HDD. I couldn’t believe Windows would still boot every time I turned it on. So once again, I took an older (yet perfectly fine) WD 320 GB HDD and installed that into this old computer. I popped in the Windows 7 Upgrade disc and began the installation. This time Windows wouldn’t accept the activation key – said it was invalid – first time this had happened of all three installs. So I proceeded with the install by leaving the product key blank (thank you for at least allowing that Microsoft) and was able to do the registry edit trick to get it activated. Here’s the link for how to do that. Super easy, and it worked like a charm. I also bought another TV tuner card, the Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1250, for this PC, which is in our master bedroom and connects to our Toshiba LCD HDTV. We’ve watched several HD movies from Netflix and they all have played perfectly.

And that’s about it, 3 older PCs with Windows 7 and all running awesome. I’m not sure when I’ll get around to actually building a new PC with some modern hardware in it, but until then, I am getting by on the two HTPCs for entertainment, my main PC for doing whatever else it is I do on it (mainly my daughter uses it) and my Dell Core 2 Duo laptop for everything else (like blogging, yeah). I definitely recommend the Windows 7 Family Pack for anyone with at least 3 computers that are even several years old. It will bring new life to them for at least another couple years and make your computing experience just a little bit better.

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Upgrading an Old Dell Inspiron to Windows 7

Posted on March 29, 2010 by Dan

Dell-E1505With the release of Windows 7 and laptop prices dropping into the sub $400 range, one might take a look at their old, dated, nearly antiquated laptop and wonder whether it’s better to upgrade the old or buy brand new. After a few weeks of weighing the options, I chose to upgrade my 3-year old Dell Inspiron E1505, and here’s a few reasons why I did it. Additionally, I’ll go over a few simple steps I took to get the whole machine up and going.

Here’s the quick rundown of my current laptop configuration:

    Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 2.0GHz 667MHz CPU
    Windows XP Home 32-bit
    15.4″ UltraSharp Wide Screen WGXA+ with TrueLife (1440×900)
    2GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM
    8x DVD-R/CD-R Drive
    80GB 7200rpm HDD
    256 MB ATI Mobility X1400 Graphics
    9-cell 85watt/hour Battery
    Intel PRO/Wireless 3945a/g

So why upgrade instead of buying new? Well, I still like my old Dell, it hasn’t given be any major problems in 3 years and overall has been a great laptop. It’s not as fancy as some of the newer laptops available but it was an extremely popular laptop back in its day. Mainly I just wanted to upgrade from XP to Windows 7 and I needed bigger hard drive. Though you can get new laptops for pretty cheap these days, they don’t come with near the features that my 3-year old Dell came with. For example, the standard screen resolution of even some 15″ displays is a measly 1366 x 768. That’s just too small for my tastes. They usually come with small 4- or 6-cell batteries, so runtime will suffer and though they come with decent sized hard drives, most of them spin at 5400 RPM so overall performance will suffer as well. Additionally, the processor will be on the low end as well to keep that cost down. So once you upgrade the battery, hard drive, screen and processor, the cost of this so-called inexpensive laptop has doubled or tripled. This is where the upgrade idea starts to make more sense. A C2D processor is somewhat dated, but it’s still pretty quick at doing most tasks. That old Dell Inspiron I bought cost over $900 new (with $500 off of $1400) and I upgraded just about everything I could at the time – HDD, screen, memory, wireless card and the processor. It’s a great laptop, is plenty fast and does what I need. Sure it’s not as pretty as some of the newer laptops, but it’s not as ugly as some of the newer laptops either.

I ended up setting a budget of about $300 to do the upgrade which would include only the necessary components to get that Dell running Windows 7 as good as it possible could. In terms of buying new, the only thing in this price range would be a netbook. And though I tossed around the idea of a sweet little 10.1″ internet device, I just decided I didn’t really want or need one that badly. So off to Newegg to pick out some sweet new laptop parts. And here’s what I bought:

WD320GB25inchdriveFirst upgrade: a new 320 GB Wester Digital Caviar Black 7200 rpm hard drive. Though I have a 7200 rpm 80 GB drive in there now, the latest HD tune numbers I got were abysmal. Maximum transfer rate was around 40 MB/sec. This results in slow boot up times, slow application load times and overall sluggish performance. Obviously for the ultimate in performance, I could have gone SSD, but the cost of drives right now it just too high to justify for this old rig. Besides, I really wanted the extra space that 320 GB would offer. I picked up the Caviar for $79 from Newegg with free shipping. Users report over 80 MB/sec data transfer, which is double what I’m getting now. That should be noticeable in terms of boot/shutdown and app load times.

crucia4gbramSecond Upgrade: 4 GB DDR2 PC5300 667 MHz Crucial RAM. Thought Windows 7 can work fine with 2 GB of memory, most new laptops are running 4 GB, so I wanted to make sure my upgrade was on par with even the cheapest options available today. Especially since support for 64-bit Windows finally in full force, it just makes sense to run as much RAM as I can. I’ve got the old 2 GB modules on eBay right now, hoping to recoup some of the cost of the upgrade.

ramusageThere’s been a lot of discussions I’ve read online in terms of whether or not the i945PM chipset in a Dell E1505 Inspiron can really support 4 GB of RAM. Dell’s website claims 2 GB is the max. Intel claims the chipset supports 4 GB. So the belief is that the limitation is most likely in the memory controller on the motherboard, or in the BIOS. So the final word from my setup is that Windows reports 4 GB of RAM installed, but only 3.25 GB is available. The BIOS reports the same thing. Windows Resource Monitor reports that 770 MB is reserved for system use. As far as I can tell, some of that is reserved for the graphics card. CPU-Z reports a full 4096 Mbytes of memory installed. So I’m still not entirely convinced whether or not the system truly supports 4 GB. But even with only 3.25 GB of available memory, with just a few windows open, task manager reports 1.61 GB of RAM usage. That would tax a 2GB system very quickly, but everything is running quick and speedy and there’s still room to open several more apps. So I’m happy with it.

dell-inspiron-batteryThird Upgrade: a new 9-cell battery. Okay, so this isn’t so much an upgrade as it was just a necessity. The 9-cell KD476 85 Whr battery that came with my latop 3 years ago died just over 1 year ago. I’ve been using it “plugged in” ever since. Mainly because every search I did for a new KD476 battery resulted in thousands upon thousands of results from just about every etailer on the planet wanting to sell me a “genuine” “OEM” “Dell” knock-off. While dell wanted nearly $180 for a true Dell battery, I couldn’t make up my mind on whether I valued that Dell-branded battery or some equivalent battery for 1/5th the cost. I did nothing for a year because of it. The other night I decided I was done being plugged in and dropped by eBay and did a search: 1,193 results. Great, I’ll be here all night I thought. I ended up buying a replacement 9-cell 7800 mAh battery (the stock was only 7200 mAh) for $39 with free shipping from a guy who had over 42,000 reviews and 99.6% positive feedback. He had sold over 156 of these same batteries in the last 6 months. Every review I read gave the seller and the battery a great review. So I bought it. No more being plugged in for me!

windows7Fourth Upgrade: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. The more I use Windows 7 the more I like. Since the laptop gets used so much in this house (vs. the desktop), I wanted it to be the first to be running Windows 7. I downloaded and installed the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor and checked both the 32-bit and 64-bit options. Basically either setup was going to run without any issues (well there were a few issues with some software, but nothing a couple of new downloads wouldn’t fix). Hardware wise, the laptop got the green light for a 64-bit upgrade. I picked up a copy from Newegg for $99 with free shipping.

rosewillcaseOne last thing I bought was a Rosewill 2.5″ external enclosure. This way I was able to take out the old drive without backing anything up (even though I did back everything up), drop it into the enclosure, and once I got Windows 7 installed on the new drive, all I had to do was plug in the external enclosure with the old drive and copy all my data over. Easy peasy. And it was just that simple and it only cost an extra $10. Plus now I’ve got a cool external 80 GB drive that I can use for whatever.

So that’s about it in terms of hardware upgrades. This is probably the bare essentials in terms up upgrading to Windows 7 on an old laptop. The only other thing I could still upgrade would be going to a Wireless N card. Within the next year I’ll probably upgrade my home wireless from basic G to N, so when that time comes, I’ll just get a new card then. But overall this is really all one needs in my opinion to take an old laptop and get it running really well in Windows 7. I’ve got another blog post started going into some of the detail of how the upgrade went and my overall experience running Windows 7 on a Dell Inspiron E1505.

windows7experienceshotSo far everything is working great. I love the Aeroglass look, the taskbar, the way windows open and close, widgets, Media Center, Libraries (it’s about time!) and not to mention just how fast everything is. I can be out of standby and on the Internet is less time than it takes to read this sentence. Much faster than XP ever was. That right there was worth upgrade. And for those wondering, here’s a quick snapshot of my Windows Experience Index. Not bad for being as old as it is. The graphics card ultimately pulls the score way down to 3.6, but other that, 5.0 for the CPU and memory and 5.8 for that brand new WD hard drive looks pretty good. Not too shabby for an old-school Inspiron.

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