RIP 8700M GT

Everything I buy, I buy on purpose and for a good reason. ... at least I try to.

I suppose I don't do nearly as much research for a toaster as I would for a laptop, but I digress.

The other day, my Alienware Area-51, m15x's graphics card melted. The corner of the board overheated and the board melted, nearly destroying the components on the surface. (in that corner, mainly resistors)

The tragic part is, if I had purchased the 8800M GTX which was available when I bought my system, I would've been stuck in the middle of a bad-batch of video cards... namely, the ones that nVidia recalled. So I'm thankful it lasted this long.

Tragically, this means the card is dead, and has since been removed from my system.

On a more positive note, for those who don't know, the Area-51 M15X was one of the first laptops to offer hybrid graphics. It was the first generation of hybrid graphics. It's a really interesting topic if you look it up on Wikipedia or something... Anyways, here's a run-down. The system had two graphics cards; the 'discreet' 8700M GT (in my case, there were others available), and an integrated x3100 from Intel (GMA945 Chipset). When gaming, crank it up to high with Stealth mode (down-clocking for power saving) off, and the nVidia card races along at full speed... For even better power-savings, switch to "binary GFX" (requires reboot), and enable stealth mode for optimum power savings.

The difference was astounding. Wifi + nVidia + no stealth on batteries was an hour or two, switch to the Intel card, and pop on stealth, even with wifi, it easily doubled play-time with the system. Add in the second battery, you'd be set for a full work-day of activity.

Anyways, I removed my nVidia card from the system (MXM-HE slot) and the system now powers on and runs without an issue. The most notable changes are A) decreased graphics performance (obviously) and B) no HDMI. That's right, the video-out on my system only works with discrete graphics.

Now I'm on a mission to get a price on a new (hopefully 9800M GT) graphics card for my system, that will work with the HDMI output... Last time I got a quote for it, it was a cool $650-ish (with cooler), but since Dell has now fully absorbed Alienware, I'm not certain I can even get a quote anymore. I'll try again on Monday.

I'm at a loss

It's not a frequent thing when I'm at a loss on how to fix something, especially with anything electrical.

It's usually a cold day when I give up on something, and I'm usually the last to give up, and I usually give up for good reason. I only had one false-positive, in relation to a bad device, ever. I rid myself of a Linksys LNE100TX, which is a very good NIC, for a D-Link DFE-430TX, also a good NIC, and when I returned back and installed the D-Link, I found the source of my problem, which persisted through NIC changes, however I had garbage-d the Linksys already and was unable to retrieve it.

I've done crazy things with computers, from building something from scratch, to fixing the otherwise unfix-able, that others have given up on as "too frustrating", all the way to re-soldering resistors onto the power-riser on a laptop that wouldn't power-up (it worked afterward by the way).

My point here is, I'm usually the last to give up, and if I give up, I have a good reason. My expertise with all these things is fairly expansive, and only hits a limit when dealing with determining problems on a circuit-by-circuit basis. I have a multimeter, but I'm not always sure what information it's giving me, or how relevant it is.

I recently have been working on a friends Dell XPS m1330, which has a bad video processor (on-board on motherboard), requiring a motherboard replacement. I ordered one, it happened to be from China. The shipping time and method was reasonable, when receiving it, the packing was adequate and the board looks to be in good condition. Upon installing the board, and applying all the screws, cases, cards, thermal paste and coolers (including modifications to the original design, ergo: "copper mod"), I attempted to connect power before I powered up the unit, to test for function, and the charging light didn't come on... that's odd.

I checked, and found the power-light on the PSU wasn't lit. okay? it's plugged in, what gives?

after extensive testing, the new motherboard seems to be causing the power supply to randomly turn off. Probably a fault safety or something. I connected the system to another PSU (variable Voltage, adjustable, universal laptop power supply), and all that accomplished was to reduce the (albeit small) display on the cord, which normally shows the voltage, to a very dim jumble of non-sense data. Removing from the system, the display reset to it's lowest value, 15V, attempting a 15V connection, resulting in the same problem.

Attach either of these power supplies to the original mainboard, that works apart from the graphics being completely unusable, and the result is the same: it works.

I emailed the supplier who claims "it was tested before being sent out"... if that's the case, then sometime between you testing it, and me testing it, it stopped working.

I've handled the motherboard actually BETTER than the original one that came with the system (which I accidentally dropped on the floor from about a foot up), and the original works, the "new" board doesn't. explain that.

The supplier is willing to do an exchange, so the board will be going out on Monday.

I can't help but be a tad bit insulted by the insinuation from the supplier that I'm wrong, and the mobo works. I tested the thing, I even checked the resistance of the original mainboard's pos and neg terminals (incoming to the system), and the resistance between them is very similar (there will be variance between the two due to a tolerance in the resistance of every resistor on the board, eg. 100ohm resistor with +/- 5% tolerance could be anywhere from 95 to 105 ohms in resistance). So, in theory, they should both be very similar. I even tested it with the elbow for the universal power adapter plugged in to check for faults in the power adapter, which I would've been willing to desolder and exchange with the power connector from the original mobo, if I thought it would fix the problem, however, the resistance doesn't change, indicating no short in the connector.

I'm baffled. Apart from a major fault of a circuit that handles the current on the mainboard, that isn't obvious, I don't see why this would be happening.

Oh well, another 2-3 weeks before I can reassemble this with yet another motherboard.

What I use.

A lot of people regard me as an authority on IT, Computers and Electronics as a whole. While I'm far from being perfect, I will say that I usually do my research before making a decision.

The most important thing for anyone to do while buying a new gadget, unless you're a first adopter, is to look it up. Look up features and specifications, and most importantly, look up BAD reviews. No matter what happens, the bad reviews will tell you about the parts of the device that may annoy you. Nearly EVERYTHING will have poor reviews somewhere, so look them up, they'll often tell you something that you will not see anywhere. Good reviews will usually just go over features you already know the device has, so skip those.

As an authority to many on all things digital, people are often curious about my gadgets and devices and what makes them so special. I'm usually pleased to tell them all about what I love and hate about the devices I use.

That's going to be the main focus of this posting. What do I use, and more importantly, why?

To preface, often I seek devices with similar traits, things like SD cards, and USB connectors are important to me. Having only one connector that connects to a specific device, in my opinion, is bad, since, if I lose that cable or stop using the device, I can no longer use that transfer method or cable (depending on which I stopped using), making both useless as soon as one becomes useless. So you'll notice that most, or all of my devices are exclusively SD, or include SD functionality; all of my devices include or are compatible with either mini or micro USB. While there are exceptions to this, often, I'll avoid a product BECAUSE it's lacking one or the other.

With that said, I begin. The core of my gear is, was, and probably always will be my cellphone. It is the single most important device day-to-day, and the one device that can do every task in a limited fashion. So I'll break this down into five parts: Video, Pictures, Music, Multimedia (video playback), and other.

My Cellphone: Motorola Milestone, AKA Droid.
(550Mhz, 256MB RAM, 512MB ROM, upto 32GB microSD, HSPA, Android 2.1)

Starting with Other, I'm mainly talking about web-browsing, games, etc. This is the ONLY area that my cellphone is not my best piece of equipment for the job. Instead, my computer works better. However, on the go, my cellphone is the best way to look up maps, browse the web for just about anything. For games, again, my Laptop will win hands-down, but the second best device for that is my cellphone. In this category my cell loses in almost every respect to my computer, as it does in certain other areas.

Laptop: Alienware Area-51 M15X
(2.5Ghz Core2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 320GB HDD, nVidia 8700M GT)

Moving on to Pictures, my cell does a 5MP shot with dual LED flash, which is fairly good. however, the picture quality is really lacking. As a photographer, I would never take pictures from my cellphone seriously. I also have a Canon Powershot A640, which is a 10MP Digital camera with 4x optical zoom. While I'm very disappointed with my Digital camera on the whole (being that I would prefer a DSLR), it produces VASTLY better pictures, and has a MUCH better flash. I've used quite a few shots taken from my Powershot for prints.

I got this camera about 2-3 years ago, refurbished, so I saved a lot of money on it. It's fantastic for the cost, great features, but not nearly enough to satisfy my picture-taking appetite. I tend to stick to Canon because I know the brand, I started with a Canon AE-1 45mm SLR, and I've consistently seen good results coming from Canon; that's something I'll pay for. I've heard and seen good things from Nikon and some other brands too. I will always stray away from Sony and Fujifilm, since each has their own, almost proprietary, memory standards (Memory stick for Sony, and xD for Fuji), which does not fit into my basic qualification of SD memory.

Next up: Video. My cellphone will take 720x480 video at ~30fps (I believe). My Canon Powershot will take video at 640x480 at ~30fps (which is the "square" version of my cellphone's res). I also have a Sanyo Xacti VPC-ZH1, which is a 720p (30fps) digital camcorder. It utilizes SDHC as it's primary storage. As a rule, currently, I avoid dealing with video that's larger than 720p wide screen, at 30fps. Not because I don't like it, or because it's too hard on my computer, but because I don't see a value in it.

To make good use of a video stream that is compressed, it needs to be valued based on image quality versus size, and you can get a much HIGHER QUALITY PICTURE from 720p, despite having a lower pixel count, than you can with 1080p video, even with a higher bit-rate. In my opinion, 1080p is never worth the extra space it's going to take up. unless pixels are the size of a fist, you're not going to see a significant difference between 720p and 1080p streams on similar sized screens (even larger home-theater screens). yes, if you're running an ACTUAL theater, you'll want to have 1080p as a minimum to project onto the several-hundred-inch screens, but for home-use, it is my personal belief that the difference between 720p and 1080p is lost.

With that said, I do believe 1080p has it's place, I just don't deal with video that would ever warrant dealing with a 1080p stream. Additionally, 720p is much easier to manage, has much smaller file size and can produce some stunning results.

For someone who intends to upload this on the internet, a lot of people will lose the detail of 720p in the translation to the compression algorithms used on you tube, never mind if it were 1080p.

So, for my purposes, this Sanyo Xacti camera does a Fantastic job, though I've only recently acquired it, and barely scratched the surface of it's use.

Music. While my Computer plays all kinds of streams from Grooveshark and similar services, my cellphone is great as a limited-use mp3 player. I say limited, because listening to music on my cell drains battery life more than I would like, additionally, because I don't want to have to maintain multiple playlists for multiple devices, I create one big playlist of random songs that I like listening to and dump them on every MP3 player I have, and go from there. So whether I'm listening to one media player or another, I basically get to listen to the same songs no matter what I'm listening to it on.

With that said, I'd rather save my cellphone's battery life for browsing the web, checking Facebook or Twitter, making calls, sending texts, etc. So I have a dedicated music player. The music player I use is the Sirius Satellite Stiletto 2 Unit. It has a microSD slot for expansion, and can record music live from the radio.

Of course, being a Sirius unit, it also has (both Satellite, and Internet Radio access to) many commercial-free music stations. I use this unit in my car, or while walking down the street. If I lose satellite coverage, I jump over to MP3 mode, and play all my recorded favorites (from the radio) randomly mixed with a random collection of favorites from my MP3 folder at home, stored on my SD card.

While the player has its problems, like adding static to an MP3 occasionally, it's fantastic for listening to live music, comedy, news, or whatever. It's capable and has very good battery life, in my opinion.

Next, is Multimedia. With this category, I'm primarily talking about playing multimedia (video) on the go. For this category, I have to reach back into the depths and reveal one of my oldest gadgets; but first, my cellphone can playback multimedia: as a current limitation of Android, the video files need to be in mp4 (AVC/AAC) format, in VGA or 480p res. Since most of my video collections, whether they're movies, TV or other, are AVI (DivX or XviD), this requires a transcoder to be able to play content on my cell, which requires time, etc.

My oldest, and one of my favourite gadgets, has been, and still is, my Dell Axim X51v. With a 624Mhz Intel Xscale CPU, 64MB RAM, 256MB ROM, Intel 2700G Video processor, SD card slot, Compact flash card slot, Wifi, and bluetooth, this 5-year-old Windows Mobile device has a lot to give.

Even now, at the time of this writing, there aren't many Winmo devices on the market that exceed the specifications of the Axim X51v; and running lenny's Winmo 6.1 or 6.5 with TCPMP (The Core Pocket Media Player) with full acceleration on the 2700G including DivX and XviD full-screen (640x480) jitter-free playback, the Axim is a device to trifle with.

Having both SD and Compact Flash is a bonus too. I have a 2GB Compact Flash that isn't compatible with many other devices that I use almost exclusively for multimedia files on this device... I can honestly say, that I am looking for, and have yet to find, a media player that has yet to parallel the capabilities of this device.

I used to use my Axim for my day planning before I bought a smartphone. It was excellent for keeping track of when I had to do what. Additionally, it had an excellent contact list, todo list, and other features that made it great. Now, though it may only be used as a media player, it's still top of it's game.

The only downside to the Axim is it's clearly dated screen. The 3.7" trans-reflective TFT display does not have very good viewing angles or very good contrast; beyond this small downside, the device performs better than most that I've encountered.

That's my basic kit. If I end up going out and need to do something specific, I can take the specific device out with me that I'll need (either the Canon Powershot, Sanyo Xacti, Sirius Stiletto 2, or Axim), otherwise the Motorola Milestone is a good catch-all for anything I need to do.

No matter what, always research anything you want to get. Bad reviews are good indicators of annoyances and downfalls of the product but like everything should be taken with a grain of salt. SD and mini/micro USB are good standards to live by too. Make your own decisions based on your own situation in life.