Mal and Weasel’s Tech Crap

My poor old HP Pavilion has sure been through a lot lately, having had its OS replaced approximately 8 times, the hard drive formatted for 5 of those. It originally shipped with Windows Millenium Edition (puke), its previous owner mercifully replacing it with Windows XP Home with Service Pack 2. I, however, found performance under Windows XP to be less than optimal, and many of the programs (i.e. games) that I wished to run on it simply wouldn’t agree with XP, or would otherwise choke at the system’s lack of video acceleration and/or DirectX 9.0 support. (Game Maker, I’m looking at you.)

So the first thing I did was stick Windows 2000 Professional on it. Performance was actually somewhat better than before, all my drivers still worked, and, most importantly, Slam Tilt Pinball worked (finally). Though as time went on, I found that Windows 2000 still didn’t suit my needs, and wondered if there was a flavor of Linux that would agree with it. So I ran down the list. Condensed version of my various attempts and findings below.

Xubuntu 8.10
I found that Xubuntu didn’t have enough memory to even install, and upon using the Alternative installer, had several read errors and eventually screwed up my boot sector (see Boot Loaders Suck).

Puppy Linux 4.2.1
Puppy actually ran from its LiveCD surprisingly well. I was highly pleased with it – until I learned that it was next to impossible to install to hard drive. (I realize that Puppy isn’t supposed to be installed to a hard drive, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.)

Damn Small Linux
DSL installed quite comfortably and even ran pretty well, but this was when I first became acquainted with the ridiculous things one needs to do to get a wireless card working in Linux. I hate you, ndiswrapper. Also, the package manager didn’t work for some reason, so I couldn’t get apps that I needed.

Debris 1.0.4
This one looked promising, until I learned that APT was connected to a very old Ubuntu database that no longer existed, and I unfortunately was unable to figure out how to set it to multiverse. Then, well, more ndiswrapper nonsense.

Fluxbuntu 7.10
Not only did APT actually work on this one, the installer acknowledged the existence of, but still didn’t know how to use, my Linksys WPC54G wireless card. More ndiswrapper nonsense later (and with heavy assistance from Malachai), I realized that ndiswrapper wasn’t even treating my wireless card as wlan0 like it was supposed to, but rather eth1, rendering it essentially useless. Default desktop settings were very pretty, though.

Tiring of all this open source stuff, I opted to just nuke the hard drive again and load up Windows 98 SE. This is an OS that I am extremely, intimately familiar with, having learned just about all of its quirks and tricks. Plus, Linksys’ driver CD supports 98, I can get mass storage drivers working very nicely, and basically I wonder why I didn’t just load Win98 on it in the first place. Since, well, that’s essentially what the darned thing came with to start with!

By “popular” request, we’ve opted to run some benchmarks on this paper-thin pugilist. DoomRater posted in the comments that he was interested in three specific benchmarks (thankfully none of which included running Crysis): ZSNES running Contra 3, Project64 running Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and Soldat running a botmatch.

The first test, naturally, went off with no hitches: ZSNES, being written for x86 assembly and optimized for Pentium 2, proved no difficulty whatsoever for the Mini 12. Contra 3: The Alien Wars ran at a perfect 60/60, showing no faltering and almost no tearing (and no tearing whatsoever once I remembered to turn VSync on). Default settings were proving to be no issue at all. So I stepped it up, beefing the screen resolution up to 1280×800 fullscreen and turning on the HQ3x filter. Still no performance loss whatsoever. I even threw the more complicated games at it – Super Pinball: Behind The Mask, a game making heavy use of the SA-1 coprocessor, also displayed no issues.

Project64 was where the first hiccups began. As the Mini 12 does not have proper video hardware acceleration, the Intel Graphics chip was all we could make do with. Set to the default settings, the introduction of Ocarina of Time ran at roughly half the intended speed, with the sound making horrible stutters all the way. I didn’t check to see if there was a software-only renderer included; I doubt this computer could handle that sort of thing, if it can’t handle it even with an onboard graphics accelerator.

Soldat sounded significantly easier, yet still presented a headache. Upon setting the game up, the program displayed an error that it could not initialize DirectX video and promptly peed itself over the available memory. By the time I could get to its process in Task Manager, it had racked up about 64 MB and was still increasing. Conclusion: Soldat doesn’t work.

So, the Dell Mini 12: too much gaming muscle? Well, it really depends on what kind of game you want to run. If it needs video hardware…you’re basically screwed.

(All tests were performed at default settings unless otherwise noted; testing OS was Windows 7 Ultimate Release Candidate, with a system rated at performance index of 1.9.)

Mal already got down to the nitty gritty of the Dell Mini 12, something of an in-between as far as laptops go: it’s not quite large or powerful enough to be a full-on desktop replacement, but it’s not exactly small enough to be considered a netbook or ultra-mobile PC. The thing is less than half an inch thick, weighs less than a paperback novel, and actually performs better than my current laptop, an HP Pavilion N5170.

The Mini 12 isn’t really considered a gaming machine, yet it holds its own on more than a few applications. This particular Mini came loaded with Ubuntu Linux, evidently quickly replaced with the Windows 7 RC, which as predicted, runs significantly better than my ill-fated and ill-advised attempt at emulating it via Virtual PC (which, admittedly, would probably have gone better if I’d used VirtualBox or VMWare). Malachai mentions to me that the OS will probably also get replaced with Win XP or such. The Mini 12, jack of all OS’es, master of…some? Wonder if you could put Windows 2000, BeOS 5, OS/2 Warp 4, or most of all, Hackintosh the thing and make it run OS X Leopard?

I’m pretty satisfied with this thing and kind of want one of my own. (psst, give me some money, Adecco, so I might buy something!)

On a slightly more tech-ish note than my previous post:

I’ve just purchased a Netbook. I’d sworn to myself a long time ago that I would never purchase an underpowered, tiny-keyboarded little laptop. God was I wrong. The minute I picked this little thing up I was sold. It’s a Dell Mini 12. This thing is so light that I could carry it in a backpack and never even notice it. It weighs less than most of the books on my shelf. (Truthfully, I just weighed it by hand along with my desktop’s keyboard. The keyboard was heavier.) Currently, it’s running an RC version of Windows 7, but I’m not sure how long that will last. Probably only until the person I bought it off of gets me the Windows XP CD that it came with. Win7 is pretty and all, but it just ain’t great enough for me to keep on this underpowered little system. (Also quite truthfully, even with a 1.33GHz processor, and only 1Gb of RAM, this thing seems to scream. It starts in about 30 seconds, and most programs start up in only 3 or 4 seconds.) It has a great little wireless card that gets a better signal than just about anything else in the house, and a little webcam at the top of the screen.

Performance Overall: 8/10
Processor: 5/10
RAM: 6/10
Graphics: 5/10
HDD: 8/10 (For a netbook.)
Screen Size and Realestate: 8/10
Webcam: 8/10
Wireless: 10/10 (Amazing reception.)

Form Overall: 9/10
Size: 8/10
Ease of use/typing: 7/10
Weight: 10/10 (Light as a feather @ roughly 2 pounds.)
Stylings: 8/10 (A nice looking black-silver-white combination.)

Overall Thoughts: 8/10 (Definitely worth a look.)