racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

I’m a known HP fan. I’ve actually owned four HP laptops and netbooks so far. I like HP for its design and for the relatively affordable prices of its consumer-oriented models.

With regard to warranty, HP hasn’t failed me. Its distributor MSI-ECS has serviced my computers twice. First, when my Compaq V2617TS had a defective fan, HP replaced the fan, as well as the entire lid and front bezel. I got a new LCD, plus a previously non-existent WiFi antenna. Second was when I had my B1256TU battery replaced. Both were done at the 11th hour, right before warranty expired.

However, HP’s service seems to be on the decline. Popular laptop club and retailer Cooltoyz wrote about how they have lost confidence in HP because of issues with the Compaq CQ-40 line. This was allegedly due to the “Line of Fate” issue with the LCD, in which the screen will eventually–and inevitably–flicker and just die out.

I made a few calls to HP Support, and I was able to solve the heating and battery life issue on my new Presario B1256TU. It turns out that a resetting of the BIOS to defaults would solve things. Now SpeedStep works even at first power-up (without needing to wake up from sleep first).

Next up: making some modifications to the BIOS, to see if things work well even with BIOS changes. I also need to see if disabling the onboard LAN from the BIOS would help extend battery life.

The new school year is just around the corner and I can see kids asking their parents to buy them laptops (among other gadgets, like cars, perhaps?). Here’s one practical choice: the Compaq Presario B1256TU. It’s not your top-of-the-line gizmo, but it sure packs a wallop for a compact 12-incher. I’ve been reading rave reviews about it, not mostly because of its performance, but because of its value-for-money.

For PhP 35,990 you get a dual-core machine with 1 Gig of RAM and 80GB of SATA hard drive space. It comes with a dual-layer DVD burner, a webcam, built-in mic, and most standard laptop peripherals these days.

This can practically be the next hit laptop after the Asus Eee–at least, in the Philippines! The B1256TU was, after all, designed to be targeted at the Asian Market. It is (relatively) affordable. The specs are reasonable. And Compaq is a trusted brand. And did I mention it looks sexy, too! It’s no MacBook Pro, but it looks sleek and slick, from what I see at stores and pics online.

Sure, my Asus Eee sells for half that price, but in terms of being a portable workhorse, the B1200 series can compete. And you can’t really compare them. It’s like comparing a main arm to a side arm. Like comparing the range, efficacy and accuracy of an M-16A rifle with a 9mm pistol. Both of them excel at what they’re made for, but they can’t necessarily be compared head-on because they were designed for different (though related) purposes.

One of the reasons it’s cheap is because there’s no OS pre-installed. Well, there is, if you consider DOS still useful these days! But that’s not a problem. If copyright is a concern, and you’re a penny-pincher, you can try Ubuntu. I suppose it should work like a charm, with this baby’s specs. As I’ve written before, Ubuntu can even give a better out-of-the-box experience than Windows. If you want Windows, the cheapest editions, I think are about PhP 4,000 for either Windows XP Home or Vista Home Basic.

Worried about RAM? You can upgrade down the road. 1GB sticks are cheap these days. Ubuntu will be fine on 1GB. XP, too. Vista would need more, but you can always just spend the extra PhP 1k each for 1GB sticks. That’s still a practical choice, compared to buying PhP 100,000+ machines with all the bells and whistles.

Now, considering I’ve been on the lookout for a laptop, do you think this cuts it? I’ve been a Compaq user for almost two years now, ever since I acquired my V2000 in July of ’06.

My V2617TS was my cheap laptop find back then, at only PhP 31,000 (less if paid in cash, which I did). But that didn’t have built-in WiFi. The B1256TU has all the works!

So parents, do consider the Presario B1200 series for your kids this June. Hey, my 5- and 3-year old kids are already asking for my Mac Mini and widescreen LCD!

If you want to skip the long story and go straight to the fix, click here.

I’ve been a Windows guy for most of my computing life (I have used DOS, of course, then desQview on top of that, and then Windows 3.1 onwards). Then I got hooked on the Mac. Since then, my computing was split between Windows and OS X, with the Mac dominating sometimes, and PC the rest of the time. When I got my PC laptop back from the service center (with a lot of parts being replaced at the tail-end of warranty period) I shifted my preference toward PC. But I wanted something more, and Windows XP just didn’t cut it.

Sure, it was stable (as how I usually build up my machines), but after a year of every day wear and tear, XP was starting to slow down.

So I took the plunge and installed Linux on My Presario V2000.

It’s not actually my first time to explore Linux, as I may have mentioned before. I used to use Linux on my work machine back in the corporate world (cost saving measures, and because some tech companies tend to have this preference for open source). I tried running Ubuntu on all my laptops so far using the Live distribution CD (from 5.10, to 6.06 LTS, and now 7.04, a.k.a. “Feisty Fawn”). I even ran 6.06 on my PowerBook the first time I got it, since the pre-installed OS X release was 10.1, and it didn’t support some of my devices, such as the Cardbus wireless adapter. But that’s not the same as actually installing it and using it as your main OS.It’s only now that I’ve committed Linux to my laptop.

So here are some thoughts about blogging on Linux, and Linux in general.

A quick comparison

First off, a comparison among Windows, Linux and the Mac, from my perspective. That means someone who’s not really a hardcore hacker, and someone who’s not exactly an idiot, either. I’m an enthusiast who loves to explore, but I don’t have the time to do uber-serious tweaking. I just want something that works.

Windows XP – Seems to be a reliable and stable OS–that is, if you know how to secure yourself from malware. XP is solid as a rock as long as you prioritize security, meaning you’ve installed a good Antivirus (AVG recommended), anti-spyware (such as Spybot S & D), and you let auto-update do its thing. Of course, there’s the human aspect, so security doesn’t preclude your being victim to social engineering attacks.

Don’t even ask me about Vista (I’ve used it, but I’m not about to install Vista on any of my computers anytime soon).

OS X – It just effin’ works. I hope that’s enough said, but then again to the uninitiated, OS X was supposed to be designed from ground up by Apple to work 100% well with Apple hardware. So there should be no glitches, hardware incompatibilities, and other such difficulties you might expect with an OS of wide distribution like Windows.

The Mac is supposed to be simple and straightforward enough for a dummy user to use. But it also accommodates the more advanced users–it’s a UNIX-like operating system, after all. I’ve had my share of command-line hacking and tweaking via Terminal, myself. So basically, it’s a solid, secure UNIX-based operating system with great eye candy for a user interface. Actually, the GUI is not all eye-candy. There are usability and efficiency concerns, too. Like Expose is not only supposed to be a beautiful way of switching across windows. You can make your workflow more productive and efficient with it.

Linux – It’s the OS for enthusiasts. Frankly, I’ve tried a handful of distributions in my life (including Red Hat, Mandrake / Mandriva, Slackware, and even locally-developed Bayanihan Linux, and as well as several live CD distros like Damn Small Linux and Knoppix), but none have been desktop- and laptop-ready as Ubuntu.

By this, I mean Ubuntu is the only distro I’ve encountered so far that a user can just pop into his computer, install, and run without much trouble.

Of course, this is relative. Sure, you will still encounter some incompatibilities, and you still have to tweak configurations and install patches. But compared to other distros, this one is less of a hassle. Great thing with most distros is that as long as you’re online you could download or install updates straight off the web (like with apt-get). You’ll have to spend some time searching for fixes to problems or issues, though.

I could go on and on, but that would be too much rambling on my part (and something that I would rather not do, as you would read further on).

Blogging about Linux

Now the thing with using Linux is that you would inevitably have to get online to read up on blogs, forums, bug reports, and other such online resources. That’s because you will encounter some glitches one time or another. And these are usually fixed either by updating your OS, or applying fixes/patches, or fixing something that doesn’t work natively–meaning a hardware incompatibility or unsupported hardware/devices.

For instance, I was really amazed by how Ubuntu Feisty got to detect all my hardware, including the built-in Intel Pro 2200BG wireless card. On Windows, I had to download and install drivers from Intel before this worked (silly, eh?). Same with audio and video drivers. Ubuntu worked like a charm when I first ran it. Windows XP needed specific drivers for the Intel 915GM chipset for video and the sound, and these I had to download from HP and Intel.

So here’s an observation I have with bloggers who blog about Linux (I’m generalizing here). Most of the time, the posts are about:

* Comparison between their experiences with Linux and other OSes, like Windows.
* How-tos, hacks, and fixes, like how to make incompatible or unsupported devices work.
* Bashing other OSes, or telling the world how better off they are with Linux than other OSes.

Okay, I guess I’ve adequately met most of these criteria. Now on to the fix.

ACPI and Network Manager Fix

While Ubuntu was generally able to detect my hardware and use the appropriate drivers (where Windows failed to do automatically), I still faced several issues. One, whenever I woke up the laptop from sleep, my wireless networking will not always turn on. In fact, sometimes, Network Manager would just stop working, and I would have to restart the computer just to get WiFi and wired networking back on.

I added a few scripts that forced Network Manager off before sleeping and forced it on again during resume. Here are the files I added (based on this fix on the Ubuntu forums):

/etc/acpi/suspend.d/05-network-manager.sh

#!/bin/sh

dbus-send --system \
--dest=org.freedesktop.NetworkManager \
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManager \
org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.sleep


And,

/etc/acpi/resume.d/91-network-manager.sh


#!/bin/sh
dbus-send --system \
--dest=org.freedesktop.NetworkManager \
/org/freedesktop/NetworkManager \
org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.wake

I made sure to make the files executable by running:

sudo chmod +x /etc/acpi/resume.d/91-network-manager.sh

and

sudo chmod +x /etc/acpi/suspend.d/05-network-manager.sh

I also had to edit /etc/default/acpi-support to include the following line, so the Intel Pro 2200BG driver would be enabled upon resume after standby:

MODULES="ipw2200"

Then another problem I noticed was that while my laptop LCD blanked when idle, the backlight would turn on after a couple of minutes, and stay this way until the computer was put to sleep or when the screen was awaken . This was so, even when the LCD had actually blanked out. I try manually turning off the LCD backlight using the command

xset dpms force off

but I still experience the problem–backlight turns on after a few seconds. Same if I substitute “off” with “suspend” or “standby.”

I scoured the web for a week until I found a fix that worked. Apparently, battery events (such as charging, full charge, switching to and from AC adaptor power) reported by the system caused the backlight to turn on. Using the NoPM option prevents these events from being misinterpreted (okay, not really a technical explanation, but it’s something like that).

The fix involves adding this line to /etc/X11/xorg.conf to add the following line under Section “ServerLayout”:

Option "NoPM" "yes"

I’m actually in doubt as to what this exactly does, since the X.org manual just says the following about “NoPM” “Yes”:

Disables something to do with power management events. Default: PM enabled on platforms that support it.

How descriptive, eh? At least it says the option has something to do with power management events, some of which–namely the battery events like charge update and power supply changes–were causing the backlight to turn on.

If you’ve been experiencing the same problems, I hope these fixes could help. For reference, my machine is a Compaq Presario V2617TS, with a Celeron-M 750 processor, Intel 915GM chipset, and an added Intel Pro 220BG mini PCI wireless card, DVD-RW drive (all of which work with Ubuntu 7.04).

I chanced upon this at a window display in SM Megamall Cyberzone last weekend. It’s the upgrade to my own low-end V2000 (which I bought for about PhP31,000 a year ago). the V3120TU runs on a Celeron-M 420 (1.6 GHz), 256MB DDR-2 533, 60GB hard drive and has a 14-inch brightview widescreen.

It’s not astoundingly fast, but what interests me is how a Compaq V3000 form factor can get this cheap. At PhP 29,900, that’s about US$ 660, which makes it priced on par with low-end branded units in the US.

I would recommend a RAM upgrade immediately, which would cost about PhP 1,500 (for a 512MB DDR2 stick). Reasonable enough. Oh, and models priced this low don’t have an OS pre-installed, so you would either have to: (a) shell out PhP 5,000 for an official copy of Windows XP or Vista Home edition; (b) install a flavor of Linux (I recommend Ubuntu); (c) go the Jack Sparrow way (meaning piracy–either bootlegged copies of XP, Vista or even OSX86!).

One big drawback though, as with the low-end V2000, this doesn’t have internal WiFi card. And don’t count on being able to install an internal mini PCI wireless card either! Compaq’s low-end Presarios don’t have internal WiFi antennae and it is most likely that the BIOS won’t accept the card by default (without hacks, that means).

This model doesn’t have Cardbus support, so your only option is to use a USB WiFi stick (or go wired!).

This could be great for offices/companies on the cheap that want to supply desktop replacements/substitutes for their staff.