Technology for Mortals

A while back (summer of 2003), I spent my days off working at a small computer shop in the middle of nowhere. We were deep in rural South Carolina. As in, “can’t get cell phone reception” and “literally a one stop light town.” The shop itself was so small that it occupied a spare bedroom and the living room of the owner’s house, and I was the only employee. Before I started working there, I had always assumed that the “big companies” like Dell, Compaq, and so on were rip-offs. I had always assumed (and I may note, it had always been true until sometime early this decade) that building your own PC was cheaper than buying a true OEM machine. Well, by the end of that summer (believe me, our customers were not “high end” or even “mid-range”), I realized that the white box market was dead for the most part on the low end. The OEMs were selling a full machine (including a copy of Windows and shipping/handling) for less money than the parts would cost us. Ever since then, when someone has asked me if they should custom build a PC or buy an OEM PC, I tell them to go with the OEM model unless they have very specific needs that can’t be met.

Well, I have always considered my own needs very specific, so I never looked at OEM stuff before. For example, when I built my current PC almost three years ago, very few people ran dual monitors and that was a “must have” for me. In addition, I knew I wanted two RAID 1’s, and most OEMs were using motherboards without built-in RAID support. So I did it myself. Now, I am getting ready to replace this machine (technically, I will be turning the current machine into a server, and building a new desktop PC). After all was said and done, my parts list came in at just under $1,500. I could trim the price a bit, by dropping the thumb drive for ReadyBoost (I personally like ReadyBoost, I think it is an excellent idea), getting rid of the extra drive for backup purposes (not a good idea to drop it), halfing the RAM to 6 GB (do I really need 12?), reusing an existing case/PSU (instead of getting the Lian-Li/Seasonic combo I wanted), and so on. But I really don’t want to do that. I spec’ed it a certain way for a reason.

Remembering my PC shop experiences, I decided to see if the “big boys” could spank white box on the high end and well as the low end. I was stunned with what I saw. I looked at the “workstation” class PCs, since that is what I am building. First of all, what the OEMs had to offer was a lot of last year’s tech. On top of that, things that I thought would be common, were either not possible or extremely expensive (like RAIDs). And upgrades were unbelievably pricey. Basically, there is no way that the OEMs can beat a self-built system on this score.

Now, I do understand part of it. IT departments value consistency in the supply chain more than the best value; being able to swap a user’s drive into a replacement box and troubleshoot the hardware later will get a high-salaried engineer back to work a lot quicker than trying to solve the problem on their live box. Ditto for being able to just blast an image onto a machine. At the same time, I am baffled as to how the OEMs can think that they can charge what they charge for, say, a RAM increase, when every customer has a CDW or Newegg account. And of course, they may be willing to concede a lot of the market with the belief that most people looking on the high end are enthusiasts who always want a cutting edge, custom system that no OEM could profitably make. All the same, I was quite shocked to see just how bad the prices were on their high end kit.

J.Ja

I started off as the proud new owner of a brand new Sony VGN-FW140E notebook with the latest processor and chipset, but happiness turned to severe disappointment as the flaws rolled in one after another.  The notebook looks deceptively sleek and cool when it’s actually quite bulky with a 16.4″ LCD display, but that’s not one of the many reasons it failed.

The first problem with this laptop is that the display is so glossy that I could literally shave myself it in.  Take it in to any semi bright room with a window or bright lights and it’s basically worthless because you can barely see a thing.  I have no idea why laptop manufacturers keep putting out glossy displays but this particular laptop was particularly horrendous.

The second problem with this laptop is the buggy drivers.  The HDMI audio drivers for example simply refused to install on a fresh install of Windows Vista Ultimate Edition 32-bit claiming that it only installs on Windows Vista (don’t know how much more Vista I can get).  Clearly Sony has not tested this driver.  The other problem was the panel button drivers which disabled Vista UAC and rebooted and then installed itself.  I re-enabled UAC after Vista warned me and then all hell seemed to break loose with these drivers.  Vista now complained about a missing battery (strange considering the fact that it has power to warn me) and dropped me in to hibernate mode.  You boot up again and same thing happens again and I had to do a system restore to put the computer back to the ways things were before I installed those drivers.

The third problem is this laptop’s hardware.  The battery simply stops charging after a few minutes whether it’s in suspend mode or whether it’s powered on.  When you first plug the power cord in, the battery indicator in the task tray charges but it stops in a few minutes.  Even after leaving the laptop plugged in all night long, it refused to charge the battery.  I think the only way to charge the thing is to completely shut down and I’m still not sure if that will work.

The verdict on this laptop is that it’s a miserable failure because it belongs in a lab somewhere as a beta product and not as a production product.  It’s going back to Fry’s where I bought the machine at a discounted $899.  It’s not that the laptop is a complete design failure, it simply needs a lot of work to hammer out the flaws.  The camera and microphone worked fairly well, the inclusion of an HDMI port was a welcome entry, and the discounted price was reasonable for a high-end laptop.  But until these issues are worked out and the LCD replaced with something that works in a bright room, it’s a nonstarter for me.

Moving forward, I just bit the bullet and ordered a real road warrior’s laptop the Lenovo X200 12″ ultra-mobile laptop for around $1120 (need to order 9-cell battery extra) which got a fairly impressive review (especially the 6+ hour DVD playback drain test and CPU performance).  I was very tempted to go with an Asus 1000H NetBook at only $450 but I really wanted a high performance ultramobile with the Intel 45nm P8600 2.4 GHz CPU.