Archive for the 'Hardware' Category

Nvidia 173.14 xrender benchmark

In a previous post, I looked closely the way nvidia binary driver works. In fact, like a lot of users I run into issues with firefox and other software which use Xrender extension to display stuff. A couple of day ago, Nvidia released a new version of its driver. They claim the future version fix [...]

admin August 2nd, 2008

2D benchmarks on Linux Nvidia, Intel, ATI: xrender

For my new computer I bought a ATI HD 2600 PRO with a bunch of memory. This card has some really good 3D results, and works well on Linux. But I run into some issues with de xv extension on this board. In fact the driver (the free or binary one) doesn’t seems to support [...]

admin May 17th, 2008

My new silent computer (Intel Quad Core Q6600)

Ok, I decided to change my computer a couple of months right now. But as Intel is doing some strange stuffs with the prices, this took a little longer than exepected. Some friends asked me what I bought, so I decided to write this post.
My new box description:

CPU: Intel Q6600 Quad Core at 2.4Ghz (G0 [...]

admin October 21st, 2007

My New Cheap GSM / Voip wifi Phone (Twin v2)

Everybody have a mobile phone right now, and me too :) I just bought a nice little phone from my DSL provider. They offer a good deal for new users like me: Free phone when you call wired phone (or SIP) thought a Wifi connection, and pay at normal rate when you use the GSM [...]

admin June 2nd, 2007

Media Player (Dvico 3100) + Netgear WGT634U = Cheap Wifi Media Player

This year, for my birthday I have a very nice Media Player M3100. This stuff is really usefull, no need to use a noisy computer to watch recorded Divx. It’s pretty kool to watch films from beds you know..
The only issue: I need to take it back to my computer when I want to upload [...]

admin April 5th, 2007

2*PIII 600 on a dual Asus P2BD

I have for a long time now, a Asus P2BD motherboard with 2 PII 350 on it. After googling a bit, I discover that I can put 2 Katmai PIII at 600Mhz on this board.
I have been looking at eBay for a while, I bought a pair of matched CPUs. Today, I received them. After [...]

admin December 9th, 2005

Shuttle ST62K (aka Zen) Fan issue

Like a lot of users, i get an issue with my fan on the Shuttle Xpc. In fact, i found a lot of comments over the net, that Shuttle used some bad fan in this boxes. Some users decide to use the waranty, but i don’t want to send this back to Paris, just to [...]

admin April 17th, 2005

Playing music on soundcard without locking

Why this soundcard allow me to play 2 mp3 at the same time while this doesn’t.. Hum good question. In fact to support this kind of stuff the sound card should support have some sub-device, to be sure .. simply aplay -l
Here on my shuttle .. not working
aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card [...]

admin February 9th, 2005

Suspend to disc with Dell Latitude D400 on Linux

I now have a Dell Latitude D400 for 1 month. This little (really small) computer is pretty nice to use, but it right now, it’s really hard to have suspend working on this kind of stuff. The main reason: it only support ACPI (no APM), and ACPI isn’t well supported by the Linux kernel.
I have [...]

admin October 24th, 2004

Maxtor Diamond Star Boot Error on ST62K

I just received my new hard-drive, a Maxtor Diamonstar 90 - 8M (read 80Go and 8M of cache). So I decided to fdisk + cp -a my old distros to the new drive. Everything is ok .. I have something like this:
/dev/hda1 Win (I don’t install this but leave a blank fat32 .. if)
/dev/hda2 [...]

admin October 11th, 2004