Intel Cougar Point Recall, Burns Early Adopters

Intel announced January 31 a design flaw in the P67 and H67 Cougar Point chipsets for its Sandy Bridge platform. In its press release Intel disclosed, "As part of ongoing quality assurance, Intel Corporation has discovered a design issue in a recently released support chip, the Intel 6 Series, code-named Cougar Point, and has implemented a silicon fix. In some cases, the Serial-ATA (SATA) ports within the chipsets may degrade over time, potentially impacting the performance or functionality of SATA-linked devices such as hard disk drives and DVD-drives... Intel has stopped shipment of the affected support chip from its factories. Intel has corrected the design issue, and has begun manufacturing a new version of the support chip which will resolve the issue."

In the wake of the announcement, several manufacturers have either announced recalls or promised fixes in the next few months. Dell was one of the first to post an update in it's blog Direct2Dell, "Customers experiencing issues will be supported under the warranty and service terms. Once we have new chipsets from Intel in early April, we will provide a motherboard replacement that corrects the design issue at no cost to our customers. Replacements will be provided at the customers’ location and convenience via authorized Dell service providers. Affected customers may also take advantage of the applicable return policy, which may vary by region."

Lenovo also took it's turn to assure it's customer that, "Following Intel's announcement confirming a design issue in their recently released support chip, the Intel 6 Series, Lenovo will be putting in place a special service program that will enable customers who purchased affected PCs to receive a system board replacement free-of-charge, as soon as those parts become available."

MSI made public a somewhat similar announcement for it's products, assuring it's customers that, "MSI takes the quality of our products very serious, so at this moment we are investigating product batches that may be affected and, meanwhile, have stopped all shipments to our distributors and resellers."

HP, Acer, Toshiba and Samsung have reportedly made announcements about recalls and release delays for their own products.  The recall is supposed to cost Intel $300 million in lost revenue and $700 million in repairs and replacements.

If there ever was a perfect time not to be an early adopter, this would be one of them. I count myself as one conservative upgrader. This time around, that actually worked to my advantage. And I'm thinking it's about time everyone give AMD a second and well-deserved look.

Dell's Upcoming Smartphones Leaked

After the purported 'lost' Apple iPhone4 development unit saw the light of Gizmodo, news of specifications and images of Dell's up an coming Smartphone line have been leaked. PCworld, FastCompany and Hothardware have all snapped up the news and come out with their own analysis of the Smartphone, pre release.Veritable Engadget has run a story on each of the new units starting with the Dell Lightning, then the Dell Thunder, the Dell Smoke and finally the Dell Flash.

According to the information had by Engadget the Dell Lightning is a Windows Phone 7 device. This will definitely occupy the high-end of the the line, as it has 3G, a 1GHz Snapdragon processor coupled with a 4.1-inch OLED touch screen. It also has a slide out QWERTY thumboard.

Next in the line-ups hierarchy is the Dell Thunder, an Android-based Smartphone with the same 3G capabilities, OLED screen and Snapdragon processor. It does away with the slide out keyboard though, but is as gorgeous (at least in the pics) as the Lightning. Aside from missing the keyboard, it also differentiates itself from the Lightning by bundling up apps for Facebook, Twitter, Hulu and Youtube in it's app arsenal.

The Dell Smoke is a bit of a departure, form-factor wise from the rest of the phones. It's candybar shape and QWERTY keypad reminds me of some earlier Sony-Ericsson Smartphone from years yonder. It has a 2.8 inch TFT screen, 3G and a 5MP camera. It also sets itself apart from the rest by having mutilple account support for Exchange and Active Sync, plus VPN support for secure connections. It has every indication, feature-wise, that is going to be positioned as a business phone.

The Dell Flash is supposed to be the  'mainstream' Smartphone of the line that will bring Smartphone goodness 'to the masses', meaning it will be cheaper than current Smartphones in the market offering the same function or feature set. Also Android-based, it will be powered by a 800MHz Qualcomm processor, come equipped with a 3.5-inch TFT screen, 3G connectivity, WiFi and a 5MP camera. The Flash is also being touted as having a better touchscreen keyboard better than what's currently available in Smartphones today.

With Smartphone news being leaked hear and there, the Smartphone manufacturers are obviously gearing up this year and getting as much press as they can to build excitement. As I have been holding out the last few months, wanting badly to replace my aging Treo 650, news like this makes me want to wait some more. I have been mulling over buying a Nokia E63 or an E72 (if my budget were a little more biggger). Now I realize waiting a few more months will give me more choices and the best bang-for-the-buck if all these exciting phones come to market soon.

Machine Revival - Part I

Yesterday, I went out with my wife and bought a computer table. I had been planning to revive an old Dell Dimension XPS T500 I had laying around and repurposing it to be an all-around computer for the kids. My son has simple needs. He has great fun playing the games included in Child's Play and Gcompris. Well the wife and I ended up buying a cheap computer table from Saver's Mall in Balibago.

After I got home, I immediately started working on the machine. I installed an 80GB Maxtor IDE drive I bought used a few months back. I also removed a non-working network card, and stuck a more recent PCI LAN Card i had lying around in one of my desk drawers. I also installed a PCI USB card.  The  Dimension XPS T500 had slow USB 1.1 and the card would at least bring it up to USB 2.0 speeds. I then closed up the side panel and expected the thing to boot. But it didn't! Beeps ensued and the Diagnostic LED's on the machine's back lit up with a pattern. So I went to find an online manual, praying one was still online at all. This machine has a date stamp of November 1999 after all. 

As luck would have it I found one (if your interested, it's here: http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dkub/) . Following the clues as to what was going wrong, I reseated the video card and tried booting it. It booted up but the color on the display was yellowish. I reseated it again and powered it up once more. It beeped with a memory error. I unplugged the DIMMs, moved 'em to other slots and gave it a try. It POSTed! But then it was showing a PCI error. I forgot I left a PCI dial-up modem installed and decided to chuck it. The thing booted fine afterwards.

After I got it working I tried Fedora 12 Games, but it was just too slow to be usable. I was just hoping, but I knew the machine was too slow to use Fedora 12 Games. Anyway, I went off and tried another live distro, Linux Mint 8. This time it booted a lot more faster than Fedora, but it was still quite a good 8-10 minutes before I saw the desktop. I could just imagine my son jumping in anticipation only to get tired before the machine had fully booted. He's a little hyper over waiting time and jumps excitedly at times. While that was happening, I was waiting for my DreamLinux 3.5 download to finish. I've used DreamLinux 3.1 before on this same machine and it worked okay. And so I went with the reliable option and went ahead and installed  DreamLinux 3.5. After rebooting though, the machine wouldn't boot into it. It looked like the drive was having problems. So I tried disconnecting it and checking if the cables and connectors were okay, then booted it up again to try and install DreamLinux 3.5 again. Then I noticed the drive size was only 74.++ GB when it should be a little over 76 GB. Something wasn't right about the capacity. While thinking about it I decided to think it over. 

So today, after I got home and after thinking about it the whole day while at work, I gave the drive a go with DBAN. It's still running, actually. I don't expect it to finish any time soon. Maybe tomorrow morning. So I'll post an update if i get this to work. It would be a waste if I didn't get to play Tux Racer on this old machine now, would it?

HowTo - Install Drivers From The Dell Resource CD

You may be wondering why I'm posting this. I was asked by a friend about installing stuff from discs that came with his system. I thought this kind of thing may be useful to some other people as well. I mean, not everyone is as savvy with this stuff. The following is not a comprehensive guide, just something to get you started and give you an idea of what to click and what for.

That said, time for a little rant. I hate what I call the 'yes-click' syndrome -- agreeing to everything the software says it will do by blindly clicking 'agree' and 'yes' without reading the fine print. That's plain asking for trouble, because that is exactly what a trojan, adware or malware will want you to do. Legit programs can also install 'extra' stuff that may slow your system down. Bottomline, read the fine print or any message before clicking 'agree' or 'yes'.

Now back to the guide.

The screenshots are from XP. I would have gotten them from Vista or Windows 7 had I had a system that came with it. Unfortunately, I only had an old Dell laptop to test this with. I used an equally old Dell Resource CD. The screens may look different in newer versions but the basics are the same. Here we go:

• Pop in the CD in the CD or DVD drive. If it doesn't start by itself, double-click on My Computer or use a nifty keyboard shortcut by pressing the Windows Key and the letter E at the same time. The Dell Resource CD would have a name like RESOURCE_CD. Double-click RESOURCE_CD :

• If Autorun is disabled (which I should add is the safest option), double-click on the file AUTORCD.exe or AUTORCD to launch the Dell Resource CD installer:

• That should start the installer right away. Read the message and click OK if you agree:

• The Dell Resource CD will then be 'installed'. In reality, I will be installing links to the actual files on the CD, and pleace those links in your Start Menu options. Here it is prepping the installer:

• Read the message and click Next if you want to continue:

• There's no stopping us now. Read the message and click Install if you want to continue:

• And off it goes:

• Click on Finish so you can start installing drivers:

• Once installed, you'll get the following dialog to help you get started:

• Click on Next in the dialog above will bring you to the main page of the Resource CD, where you'll find link to common tasks in the CD. If you check below you'll see links for Utilities, Drivers, Diagnostic Utility and Applications (click on the graphic for a larger pic):

• Choosing Drivers from the page above will bring you to the main drivers page shown below. You'll notice some drivers already have check marks beside them. That means they've already been installed:

• Clicking on any link in the above screen will direct you to another page where specifics of the driver are listed. Clicking in the Extract button will launch the driver installer for this driver (sample below is for the Audio Driver):

• The succeeding screens show the driver install process. In most cases, the default choices will do fine. The first will tell you what you're installing and what it is for:

• Next it will ask where to unpack the drivers. You can change the folder if you wish, but the default will do fine:

• Then it will ask if you want to allow a new folder to be created for the driver:

• Next is a confirmation that the files were unpacked into the chosen folder:

• As in the earlier part where the Dell Resource CD was installed, the InstallShield takes over and installs the necessary files, but not until you click Next:

• And off it goes to copy files and configure settings:

• Once finished, the next screen will ask what to do next. If your done installing drivers, choose Yes then click the Finish button to restart the computer and have the changes set. If you have any other drivers you wish to install, choose No then click the Finish button:

• You can continue installing other drivers by going back to the Driver page of the Resource CD:

Now, any time you wish to use the Resource CD, just pop it in the drive and let it run :-)