• Dell OptiPlex GX755 (mini tower); Windows XP Pro(32 Bits)
• Intel Duo Core 2.4 GHz
• 2.0GB memory, 250GB hard drive, floppy drive, 16X DVD+/-RW
• Keyboard and mouse, firewire port, USB port

HP Printer - for department high volume use

• HP LaserJet 4250DTN Printer
• 10/100Bt, parallel, USB, both PC/Mac
• MSU computer store List Price: $1,514

nice a day

奥行きの浅い棚に無理なく、こうやって（↓）置きたかった。

「見てくれ」はどうでもよく横向き。これなら配線変更も容易。

ドライブは、OS起動用ドライブは本体内蔵のSATA-HDDだが、他のドライブは全てUSB2.0ｍｐ外付けにしている。
光学ドライブは初めから純正のDVD+/-RWドライブを内蔵しているけれど、普段は外付けでロジテックLDR-PMD8U2を使っている。バスパワー駆動なので電源コンセントが節約できるし、簡単に外してEeePCの起動にも使える。
光学ドライブはピックアップやスピンドルの劣化が意外と大きいものなので、外付けにしておけば後々の交換も楽チンだ。

メモリーカードリーダーについては、私はデジカメのSDと携帯のmicroSDだけでいい。しかしこのメモリーカードリーダーこそが「実は最も頻繁に使うドライブ」と言えるかもしれない。
抜き差し回数が多くなれば当然、端子類のダメージも大きいので、これも外付けがいい。リーダーには（何となく）信頼の置けるPanasonic BN-SDCKP3を使っている。

-------------------------------------

余談だが、今、外付けのメモリーカードリーダーを探すと「33メディア対応」とか「47メディア対応」など、マルチタイプの、それも極端に多種メモリーカード対応のリーダーばかり見つかる。これ、おかしくない？
リーダーを作っているメーカーは本当にそんな多くの種類を必要とする奴が居ると思っているのだろうか？（それとも遊んでいるのだろうか？／笑）

「対応カードが多い分にはいいじゃないか」という意見もあるかもしれないが、そんなことはない。貴重なUSBポートを一つ消費し、それなりに場所と電力とCPUリソースを食らうにも拘わらず、使えるポートが1つか２つ（自分が使う分）というのはもったいなさ過ぎる。微妙に似たサイズのスロットに誤って挿してしまって、カードを傷めるようなこともあるかもしれない。

例えば「SDカードスロットx2」とか、「USBハブ付き」などの仕様のモノがあればどんなにか便利だろう・・・と思うのだが、いくら探しても見つからない。
こういう要求って「変」なのかなぁ・・・？

Dell, HP y Lenovo (antes IBM) se estan aprovechando de las lagunas de Microsoft en terminos de licencia para ampliar el sistema operativo mas alla de la fecha final de windows XP.

Incluso el director de Microsoft, Steve Ballmer (que si sigue hablando asi estara buscando chamba), comento que si XP es muy solicitado se consideraria el manterlo con vida

Dell por su parte esta utilizando una clausula en las condiciones de Windows Vista que le permite proporcionar XP bajo los terminos de una "descalificacion licencia" en caso de que sus clientes lo vean asi conveniente. Esto significa que Dell puede instalar Windows XP Profesional de forma gratuita en algunas de sus maquinas como las Latitude y OptiPlex para sus clientes corporativos.

Para los consumidores caseros y las pequeñas empresas Dell, por un pequeño pago, puede instalar XP Pro en  maquinas Vostro y XPS.

HP también está utilizando la "descalificación" para mantener a la venta de XP con algunos modelos hasta el 30 de julio de 2009.

Con algunas máquinas Lenovo maneja la instalación de Vista pero que incluye un disco de recuperación de XP para que los propietarios puedan instalar este software.

La noticia llega sólo días despues de que Microsoft informo de sus resultados de tercer trimestre y debido en gran parte a una disminución de las ventas en su división de software de Windows.

A pesar de ello Microsoft dijo que sus ventas de licencias de Vista ascendía a 140 millones de copias (que yo personalmente no creo).

Fuente CNN

Temas relacionados

Microsoft no da una

Microsoft SQL vs MySQL

・本体：DELL Optiplex755SFF」のクーリングオフ品＋OEM（DSP）版Windows XP pro SP2
・EIZO S2001W+Neo-Flex改(VESA規格のアーム）
・Happy Hacking Keybord Lite2（英語）・・・以前から持っていたもの

CPUはE6550、MEM-1GB、HDD-SATA80GBと、スペック的には特に見るものは無いが、それまでがThinkPad X31だっただけに、体感上はもうメチャ速。（笑）

版画制作のこともあるので少し大型のモニターを奢ってみたものの、この辺りで予算は枯渇。
メモリー増設やグラフィックボードはそのうちやろう。（やらないかも）

でもトータルでPC環境はかなり快適になった。

The company's triple-core Phenom X3 8000 series processors provide an option to mainstream PC buyers who don't want to spend on a quad-core processor but are looking for more performance than a dual-core processor, said Pat Moorhead, vice president of advanced marketing at AMD.

The chips could be used for high-definition video playback, casual mainstream gaming and productivity applications, Moorhead said.

The company's first triple-core processors include the Phenom X3 8400, which runs at 2.1GHz, and the Phenom X3 8600, which runs at 2.3GHz. Both will come with 1.5MB of L2 cache and 2MB of L3 cache.

AMD also launched three Phenom quad-core processors on Thursday — the Phenom X4 9750, which runs at 2.4Ghz; the Phenom X4 9850, which runs at 2.5GHz; and the Phenom 9100e, a low-voltage quad-core processor that runs at 1.8GHz and has a 65-watt power envelope during maximum usage. All the processors contain 2MB of L2 cache and 2MB of L3 cache.

PC makers will ship products with the quad-core processors in the second quarter, AMD said.

The triple-core processors are already shipping in volume to PC makers, AMD said. U.S. vendor ZT Systems will list PCs with the new triple-core Phenoms on Monday, with other "major OEMs" and system vendors shipping products next quarter, AMD said. Many major vendors, including Dell and Hewlett-Packard, have already hinted at including the processors in desktops.

Dell has listed plans to use the chip in its OptiPlex 740 business desktop systems. It will ship the triple-core OptiPlex in the second quarter, a company spokeswoman recently said, but she declined to specify which processor will run the desktop. Hewlett-Packard has also listed a desktop on its Bulgarian-language Web site with AMD's Phenom Triple-Core 8600B processor.

Mesh Computer, a PC vendor in the U.K., is offering the Matrix XXX Plus desktop with the Phenom X3 8400 processor and the Matrix XXX Pro desktop with the Phenom 8600 processor.

Because the triple-core chip is a new concept--set between the widely accepted dual- and quad-cores--it's unclear how it will fit in the market, said Dean McCarron, founder and principal at Mercury Research.

"You're going to get a performance enhancement with the extra core above and beyond a dual-core," McCarron said. But it also falls shy of a quad-core.

AMD designed the triple-core as a way to produce a cheaper chip. The triple-core processor is built on a quad-core CPU, with one core nonfunctional, McCarron said.

The triple-core chip gives AMD a tactical advantage over Intel, McCarron said. Intel will need to answer the triple-core chip with a product priced in the same range while delivering similar performance. Intel can take a dual-core or quad-core processor, adjust features like cache, and price it similar to AMD's triple-core processor, McCarron said.

Go to the manufacturer's site and obtain the latest network device driver for the model you are working with. Unwind the installation directory, but do not attempt to actually install the device driver yet. In our case, the device driver files were installed on

C:\dell\drivers\R161008\Win2K_XP

You should be able to spot the driver installation's configuration file with its *.inf extension. In our case the file was

C:\dell\drivers\R161008\Win2K_XP\b57win32.inf

Open the file and start looking for a section that talks about the network speed settings. In our case it is simple, here's the original section:

[ParamsC]
HKR, Ndi\Params\RequestedMediaType,      ParamDesc, , %Speed_Duplex%
HKR, Ndi\Params\RequestedMediaType,      default,   , "0"
HKR, Ndi\Params\RequestedMediaType,      type,      , "enum"
HKR, Ndi\Params\RequestedMediaType\enum, 0,         , %Speed_Duplex_Auto%
HKR, Ndi\Params\RequestedMediaType\enum, 3,         , %Speed_Duplex_10Mb_Hd%
HKR, Ndi\Params\RequestedMediaType\enum, 4,         , %Speed_Duplex_10Mb_Fd%
HKR, Ndi\Params\RequestedMediaType\enum, 5,         , %Speed_Duplex_100Mb_Hd%
HKR, Ndi\Params\RequestedMediaType\enum, 6,         , %Speed_Duplex_100Mb_Fd%

It is obviously enough to change the default Speed_Duplex_Auto (0) setting to Speed_Duplex_100Mb_Fd (6). I spotted an other identical section in the configuration file so I changed that as well, to be on the safe side. If you now try to install the device driver, your modification will not be taken into account, of course. You have to completely (and that is completely) remove the original device driver before you can replace the it with your own device driver which has the same version number.

Right click on My computer icon, select Manage, on the window that opens, click on Device Manager.

Click on the plus sign next to the Network Adapters, (in our case) we see Broadcom NetXtreme 57xx Gigabit Controller.

Right click on the network adapter, select Properties. Cllick on Driver Details. You will see at least one file that we need to kill, the actual device driver (but that is not enough, you have been warned). In our case, the list of Driver files contains but a single file:

C:\WINDOWS\System32\DRIVERS\b57xp32.sys

Back to Driver Properties dialog, click on Uninstall. Yes, you are sure that you want to remove it. But the driver is not gone completely. You can test this easily: back to the Computer Management window, on Device Manager, right click on the uppermost line of the device list (usually states the computer name) and select Scan for hardware changes. In a normal system, the missing PnP network device is not only detected but also its device driver gets reinstalled automagically. This is not what we want. We want to be asked questions.

Now, let's use Start -> Search -> For files and folders (with the stupid puppy, you remember?). Select "...search for?" All files and folders. Search for device driver *.sys file(s), in our example b57win32.sys. Look in: Local Hard Drives (C:). Click on More advanced options. Select Search system folders and Search hidden files and folders.

You will get a quite a few locations for device drivers, some of them in driver.cab files. Remember that our objective is to make Windows ask us questions where to find the device driver upon the re-installation, not to remove every single copy of the original device driver file. In fact, we just want to inject our own *.inf file into the installation process. This is how to reach that goal.

On the Search Result window, select the following files (in our example) and delete them.

C:\WINDOWS\System32\DRIVERS\b57xp32.sys

Hardly surprising, we saw that file already in the Device Manager, right? But that is not enough, we need to get our own *.inf file taken into account. Ask the puppy in the Search Results window to some more work for you. Select Start a new search. Part of the file name: *.inf, a word or phrase in the file: b57xp32. In our example, there are three obvious canditates for deletetion:

C:\WINDOWS\inf\oem1.inf
C:\WINDOWS\inf\oem11.inf
C:\WINDOWS\inf\b57win32.inf

Before deleteing the above files directly from the Search Results window you may want to double click on them to make sure that they are, in fact exactly the same files that we have edited above. Go ahead, kill'em!

You should remove also the following directory (see David Remy's blog post about this)

C:\WINDOWS\system32\ReinstallBackups

Back to Device Manager, right click on the uppermost line of the device list (usually states the computer name) and select Scan for hardware changes. The PnP network card is well detected and the installation of the device driver starts. But the automagical installation fails this time.

You would call this a problem but I would call it as success!

The main point is that you will be given an opportunity to give your own driver directory for the installation, with modified *.inf file. And this way we got that 100 Mbit/s Full-Duplex setting right from the beginning of the device driver installation.

Now when you have the network back up again, you can remake the device driver packaging for your OS deployment system. Read the corresponding documentation. In our case, http://www.ibm.com/redbooks Deployment Guide Series: Tivoli Provisioning Manager for OS Deployment V5.1, chapter 7 Common deployment features, section 7.4 Device driver injection.

Once you are done with the device driver packaging, remove the device driver again, following the entire procedure again, make sure that the device driver does not install automatically after a PnP scan. Remove the device.

Seal the system with command

sysprep -quiet -mini -forceshutdown -activated -reseal

In your OS deployment scheme, the packaged device driver will be deployed automatically while the OS is installed if you are using IBM TPMfOSd. The deployed host got the package automatically binded within the deployment scheme because of the PCI-bus hardware inventory indicating the compatible network card.

In your OS profile configuration settings you need to set up a customized sysprep.inf file that would force the rescan and installation of all PnP devices. The following example is for a Dell Optiplex 745. You will notice that we ask Sysprep to install device drivers even if they are not signed (no, Dell/Broadcom device driver is not digitally signed for Windows XP).

[Unattended]
OemPnPDriversPath="drivers\audio\r132379;drivers\network\R132254; ... "
UpdateInstalledDrivers=Yes
DriverSigningPolicy=Ignore
NonDriverSigningPolicy=Ignore

How to construct the OemPnPDriversPath ? It is best done with the UtilitySpotlight05.exe's PNPPath.vbs. It can be obtained through Michael Murgolo's article "Automated Device Driver Integration", Microsoft TechNet Magazine, May 2006. Although - after seeing the result - it is not too hard to guess what the path is, since it contains all the paths in \Drivers directory.

I just bought a couple Dell Optiplex 320 machines to use in my development Linux cluster. They are 64 bit Celeron D machines at a great price. Much to my dismay, I tried installing Fedora Core 5 onto them and was met with all sorts of problems. My first clue that there was a problem was a black screen during install. I did a little googling and decided to just try the install in text mode by running 'linux text' at the fedora install boot prompt. This got me a little farther (further?), but it crapped out again while trying to mount the hard drive.

At this point, I googled for "linux optiplex 320" and met with a sea of unhappy customers who have been fighting to get Linux installed on their Dell Optiplex 320 box.

Turns out there's a whole host of problems, but 18 excruciating hours later, I'm up and running! Huge! I'll share my notes with y'all and hopefully help someone in the process.

Editor's note: The instructions in this post are by no means all my own - I am indebted to the countless random tidbits of information posted across the blogs, forums, mailing lists, etc.

As far as I can tell, there are 4 major problems with the Optiplex and Fedora:
1. The SATA hard drive is not recognized
2. The video driver is not supported
3. The Grub bootloader does not work
4. The LVM (default) filesystem does not work with Lilo (which you use in place of Grub)

I could be wrong about 4, but I certainly couldn't get it working.

First off, it's important to note that this machine requires Fedora 6. It will not work with earlier versions.

Installing Fedora 6

In order to get the SATA drives to be recognized and mount, you have to pass the command line argument pci=nomsi whenever you start linux.

The first thing I did was boot off the CD drive - note that the default boot sequence is hard drive first, so you'll have to F12 or F2 to select the CD drive.

At the prompt, I typed `linux pci=nomsi` <enter>. This will start the installation process. For the most part, you can go through the install as normal.

I was unable to get the system to boot using LVM (the logical volume manager which is the default in Fedora). I chose to manually setup my partition and setup the following partitions: /boot 100MB, /swap 1024MB, / remaining. If you prefer to use separate partitions for /usr, /home, that's up to you.

I also told the installed to not install grub, the bootloader. You're going to overwrite it anyway, so you don't need it.

Once the install completes, you will be prompted to remove your media and reboot. Unfortunately, this won't really work :(

Installing LILO, the Boot Loader

If you reboot now, you'll hang immediately. Grub won't work, so we have to install Lilo. Lilo no longer ships with Fedora, so you'll have to boot to some sort of safe mode and download it separately. I removed the CD and replaced it with the Fedora Rescue CD, which comes with the installation set. Then I rebooted off of this CD. You may be able to do the same with Knoppix or Debian Etch, but the Fedora CD worked well for me. At the boot prompt, I typed `linux pci=nomsi rescue` and started rescue mode. After going through all the standard dialogues, you eventually get to a shell with your original filesystem mounted at /mnt/sysimage. You can make this your root by running `chroot /mnt/sysimage`.

Next up we download the Lilo binary. I got mine here:
http://lilo.go.dyndns.org/
and used the following specific file:
http://home.san.rr.com/johninsd/pub/linux/lilo/lilo-22.7.3.bin.static.tar.gz
I'll post a mirror if anyone needs.

It was easy enough to get from the command line (assuming you have network access - you should! ) using `wget`. To save yourself some typing you could always just download it onto another machine on your network and scp it over. That is especially useful for the next step ;)

Untar the lilo package and copy ./sbin/lilo to /sbin/lilo (assuming you want it installed for future use - you probably do). Next, create a file called /etc/lilo.conf and type/paste the following:

boot=/dev/sda
map=/boot/System.map-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6
prompt
timeout=50
lba32
default=linux

image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6
label=linux
append=" pci=nomsi root=LABEL=/"
initrd=/boot/initrd-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6.img
read-only

You can obviously change your label & default to anything you want (I like "fc6" personally). Double check your versions of the kernel with `ls /boot` and make sure the name matches what you have in the conf file.

Run `lilo -v` from the command line. This will read in your /etc/lilo.conf file and write the changes to the master boot record (the first 446 bytes) of /dev/sda. If you had grub installed previously, it will be overwritten with lilo. (NB there isn't much of a concept of "uninstalling" a bootloader - you generally just overwrite them. If you really want to uninstall it, you can just copy zeros bytes into the first 446 bytes like so: `dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=446 count=1`. Note that the partition table is stored between bytes 447 and 512, so you probably don't want to wipe any of those bytes out).

When I followed these steps using the default disk partition, I got a Lilo warning, and upon booting I got a kernel panic. That's why I recommend removing LVM and doing everything with straight up ext3.

Very tempting to reboot at this point, but I should mention that it _still_ won't work :(

Video Drivers

If you reboot now, you *should* get a lilo prompt with "linux" or "fc6" or whatever label you chose as one of your choices. If you had the "pci=nomsi" in your append statement in your lilo.conf, you won't have to type it anymore. You should be able to boot most of the way now, but you'll crap out with a black screen when loading KDE/Gnome/X.

If you have no interest in X (I don't), you can just edit your /etc/inittab and set the default run level to 3 and you'll be good to go. If you want to get X working, you'll have to install updated drivers for your ATI Radeon card.

You probably can't make the necessary changes before rebooting because you're in the chroot'ed rescue jail.  So either boot to run level 3 (if you changed the inittab), or run 'linux 3' at the lilo prompt to just boot to a shell (runlevel 3).

First you have to add a new yum repository:
rpm -Uhv http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-6.rpm

Then install the updated drivers:
yum install xorg-x11-drv-fglrx

Some people have noted that they had to edit their /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to set the driver to be "radeon" instead of "default" and others have mentioned changing "PCI:1:5:1" to "PCI:2:0:0", but mine already was correct and worked with no change.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, should be it!

In a word: trivial!