PCs and Laptops

Wan was in search of a netbook for use at home and work, so after a couple of days online and wandering around Zeer Rangsit IT Plaza, she finally settled on the Samsung NC 10. It looks good, has a nice sized keyboard, received good reviews online, and was priced well against other netbooks (Asus, Acer, Lenovo, Dell, etc.).

The specs are about the same as equivalent class netbooks from other companies:

• Atom N270 processor
• 1GB RAM, easily upgradeable to 2GB if needed
• 10.1inch screen
• 160GB hard drive
• IEEE 802.11b/g, Bluetooth, 100Mb/s Ethernet

The final price was 12400 Baht, which included an external DVDRW drive (which has yet to arrive).

As Wan has been using Ubuntu on my home PC for a while, the first thing I did with the netbook was install Ubuntu Desktop 9.04. I overwrote the existing Windows XP Home install, which I didn't think there would be any use for (However, I latter regretted this - I should've left it dual-boot. It turns out to update the laptop BIOS, Samsung software must run under Windows. Oh well, if an update is really needed it won't be too hard to backup Ubuntu and install Windows from the recovery CD).

I've had a few hours of setting it up and using it, and so far it seems like a good buy. The main thing I need to learn about is the Ubuntu power management features, where some fine-tuning is needed to conserve battery but also give reasonable (and constant) brightness settings.

Some sites with info on the Samsung NC10 and Ubuntu include:

• Samsung NC10 at Wikipedia
• SammyNetbook
• Ubuntu NC10 Community page
• Ubuntu on the Samsung NC10

After buying a new Video Card for my PC, I still had some serious problems. When starting my computer, fans, the CPU, hard drive and other devices seemed to start, but nothing was displayed on the monitor. This was similar to what triggered me to buy a new video card - maybe I wasted 3000 Baht!

Over the past couple of weeks I had a very crude fix to this problem: when booting, it seemed if I continually pressed Escape (maybe also other keys), the computer would start, that is POST would complete and the operating system start. However this didn't always work. It seemed every day I had to try 5 or 6 times to get the computer to boot. Not good!

Today I tried a bit harder to fix the problem. After checking all the cables and connections, and checking a bit on the web, I think I narrowed it down to two possible problems:

1. The internal battery and/or CMOS RAM were faulty (I had noticed about 1 week ago that the system time was incorrect one day). I followed the ASUS motherboard instructions of resetting the RAM. Unplug the power from the PC; remove the battery; change the jumper from default to RESET for 10 seconds; change back to default; put the battery back in; and start the computer.
2. One of the RAM DIMM slots was faulty. At the same time as doing the internal battery check, I also removed a new stick of 1GB RAM that I bought at the same time as the video card.

Restarted after these two changes and the computer booted immediately, without any input from the keyboard. This looked good. I put the second 1GB stick of RAM back in and the old problems occurred (this points to the RAM/DIMM being the problem, not the battery/CMOS - but my gut feeling says it was wise to reset the CMOS as well). So then after trying the second (new) 1GB of RAM by itself in the first slot (this worked), and concluded the second slot may be faulty. Now I have both 1GB sticks in the two second (black) DIMM slots, rather than the two first (yellow) DIMM slots. Everything seems to be working ok, but lets wait and see after a few days...

Lets hope this is the last of my computer problems for a few months.

Here are some notes from my installation and usage of Fedora Core 4 on a Dell Latitude D410 laptop.

Installation

My Dell Latitude D410 laptop already had Windows XP Professional installed on one partition, and a second partition was already created (when ordered through Dell).

Here you can find a brief description of my PC in Bangkok, my Web Server in Bangkok and the computer setup I used to have in Adelaide. You can also find some notes to some installation and configuration issues using Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora) and other software (e.g. NS2).

PC in Bangkok

A couple of days after I arrived in Bangkok and got my room I purchased the following PC which also acts as my TV and sound system. Total price: 38000 Baht (approx $AU1350).