HP DM1 revitalized

A couple of years ago I picked up an HP DM1-3025DX as a fun little affordable Windows 7 portable computer. It came stock with an AMD E-350 dual core processor, an 11" 720P display, a speedy 7200rpm 250G HD, 3G of RAM, web cam, HDMI and VGA output. It also has 802.11n, gigabit ethernet and bluetooth.

Hardware upgrades

I upgraded the computer to 8G of RAM and a Seagate 1TB hybrid drive that I had left over from another project.

Windows 10

I recently upgraded the DM1 to Windows 10. All the devices worked as expected post upgrade. My only complaint was with the background updating. Whenever it was running the CPU and disk usage would spike. This was with the factory HD. I was surprised by how much disk activity there was. With the HD being a 7200rpm drive it should have been fast enough. So, other than being a bit slower than I care for it was an okay experience.

Linux Mint

There were a number of reasons I chose to try Linux Mint on this laptop

• The just okay performance of Windows 10
• I already have a powerful Windows 10 laptop
• I don't have a computer running Linux natively
• I don't care for the Ubuntu interface
• I do like the clean Linux Mint Cinnamon UI

The installation

I reset the Windows 10 installation to "new". I then removed that hard disk and replaced it with a Seagate 1TB hybrid drive.

Working on a Windows machine, I downloaded the ISO image from the Linux Mint website Then I picked up a copy of rufus for "burning" the ISO to a USB thumb drive. Next, I had to drop into the CMOS settings and reconfigure the boot order allowing for boot from USB.

Post installation, all of the laptop devices seemed to work properly except for Bluetooth. Research points to this potentially being a problem with this particular release of Mint.

I used a Logitech Anywhere MX mouse with this computer. I had previously paired the mouse and dongle under Windows. I did some research and found that there is software for working with the unifying dongles.

Software Installed on top of the base install

• Atom w/Markdown extension
• Google Hangout - has a bug that leaves the camera active post chat
• cheese - because I needed a way to turn off the camera
• Flash for Firefox
• slack
• mongodb w/developer settings
• git
• node.js

Observations

It did seem like the computer took a long time to boot with Mint. However, I've observed the same behavior on other more powerful computers running Linux.

PDF viewing was slow when I was viewing some rather large PDFs of graphic novels. Rendering and scrolling was painfully slow. However, when viewing more "normal" type PDFs like a one page hand out or a 100+ page text the performance was acceptable.

Web browsing and rendering of more complicated sites was slow.

Atom performed acceptably with Python as well as Markdown with preview.

Overall, I found the Linux experience enticing. I feel that I would rather use the laptop with Linux than Windows 10. This configuration is a pretty good balance of a don't worry about it on the go laptop. However, this form factor and sub-optimal performance does leave me longing for a laptop like what I envision the second generation retina MacBook will be like. Although, that will cost significantly more!

Update

Well, while Linux was enticing the overall experience/performance wasn't good enough to keep me hooked.  So, I thought I would continue the experiment and finish off with an apples to apples comparison with Windows.  I did a fresh load of Windows 10 on the Seagate hybrid drive.  This configuration performs much better than the earlier configuration.  I tested the Windows installation with Firefox, Atom.io, node.js, Python, git and mongoDB.  The machine is still not a power house.  However, it is acceptable performance.   Also, the boot time is much faster than it was for Linux.  At least for now, I will be keeping the machine configured with Windows 10.

Today’s digital notebook experience

Let me start at the beginning.  I usually like to start in the middle or at the end, much to the chagrin of friends and family.

We have tried to replicate the notebook digitally—mostly successfully.  Let’s consider a few aspects of the digital notebook experience:

• The physical manifestation of work.  The lack of the concrete.  The feeling of impermanence.  This can be overcome by making a hard copy.  But that just doesn’t make sense.
• Instant access.  Today’s technology with instant on tablets and software like OneNote are addressing this.  And now with the cloud we can often access the same notebook from multiple platforms.
• Search.  In a physical journal we can quickly and intuitively find content.  This seems to be a more difficult task with the digital notebook.  However, with a digital notebook you can use search against handwriting and simulate flipping through pages.
• Poor vendor marketing of the active stylus.  In my experience, you must have an active digitizer to do good note taking or drawing.  With the exception of Microsoft Surface Pro and Samsung, even when a device has the capability the vendors are failing to identify the feature.  For instance the Sony split and HP Split X2s offers an active stylus option but you don’t really see that marketed well.  On top of that, many people don’t understand the difference between a $40 active stylus and a $5 capacitive stylus from the check out line.
• Pressure sensitivity.  With the active stylus this has greatly improved.
• Palm rejection.  This used to be a horrible issue on the dual technology capacitive touch and active stylus systems.  However, this has been mostly resolved.  I’ve used tablets from HP and Sony that this isn’t an issue.
• The experience of the feeling of the pen or pencil moving across the paper is gone.  There is something magical about the feeling of a pen or pencil on paper.  Today’s active stylus typically has a very slick feel during use.  A long time ago, Cross made a stylus insert for their pens.  This was in the day of Palm Pilots.  It had a really nice feel to it.  It came very close to the feel of pen on paper.  I have seen no modern equivalent.

The digital notebook experience has come a long way.  With the wide spread adoption of tablet computing I really hope we continue to see advancement in the active digitizer field.  I would hate to see the technology lose to the far inferior capacitive touch only stylus.

Selecting a machine for OpenCL / GPGPU use

What is GPGPU computing?  GPGPU stands for General Purpose computing on Graphics Processor Units.  The basic idea is that we use the graphics card to do some computing.  Today most computers have 2 cores and some as many as 6.  With hyper-threading we may see what appears to be double that many processors.  However, a video card such as the NVidia 480 has “cores” or processors.

Portable or Desktop?

If you choose a portable machine you will be able to take the unit with you for presentations, research or on the go development.  However, you will typically sacrifice in the power or number of cores that the video card has available.  For instance a laptop with a GT330M has 48 cores.  A desktop with a GT330 has 96-112 cores.

You’ll also likely have a much harder time finding a suitable laptop.  When choosing a desktop, go for a mini-tower case or one that can be purchased with the appropriate video card.  Current video cards often take additional power from the power supply and require additional ventilation.  For instance, you could purchase an HP HPE-380T with an NVidia GTX260 with 1.8G of DDR3 RAM and 192 cores!

ATI or NVidia?

NVidia is known for its CUDA entry.  ATI has ATI Stream computing.  Both companies now have drivers for OpenCL.  I chose to go with NVidia because I was able to find my resources for their products.  ATI Stream is fairly new.

Whichever you choose, you will need to know what type of computing/gaming you plan to do and if there is existing support for that.  Also, you will need to make sure to check the manufacturers pages to see if the video card you have selected is supported for GPGPU use.

Cores, speed

In general, the more cores or shaders the better.  Also pay attention to how fast they are running.

Memory

What type of memory? In general you want to stay away from shared memory.  This makes use of the slower system memory and steals resources from the PC.  Look for DDR3 or DDR5 memory.  Sometimes they are prefixed with a G like GDDR3.  In general DDR5 is faster.

How much memory?  After consulting with a professor with experience in the field he suggested 512M minimum.  If you can get more that is preferred. 

Sony CW, F and Z series

Because I wanted to be portable and have the minimum 512M with an NVidia card, I considered the Sony CW, F and Z series computers.

However, these machines are new enough that the released video drivers do NOT support OpenCL.  I did find that there is a way to modify the released NVidia drivers to work on them.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sony/472664-vaio-f-nvidia-drivers-update-197-16-gt-330m-10de-0a29.html

After using the information above, I was able to run the Particles demo from here:

http://code.google.com/p/nativelibs4java/wiki/OpenCL

However, the hardware identification and mandelbrot set generator on that site don't work.

I also downloaded and tested a CUDA based mandelbrot application that was listed on the NVidia featured applications site.  It ran nicely.