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* intro
* my computer
* monitor
* headphones_microphone
* buy at low prices
* USB Flash drives and other gadgets
* buy coffee maker
* hard drives performance
* sound cards and speakers

 
Intro home - top of the page - email

I am not talking about million dollar enterprise servers.

I am talking about a computer for personal use.
It may be either a notebook or a desktop.

Notebook:
If you want a powerfull - yet reasonably priced computer - check http://www.discountlaptops.com/ . These people sell the same computers as the big names - but without the brand-name overpricing. You will see brands like Chem-USA, Sager, Twinhead, Panasonic. If you want a really small elegant computer - check out the big brands (Sony VAIO, Toshiba, HP, IBM ThinkPad T Series, Dell, etc.). If you brave enough to install Linux on some standard notebook - check available data first at  http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/ . Check major Linux publications for advice (Linux Editor Choice 2001).

Note: Always get an extended warranty for your notebook. Notebooks tend to break.

Other good option - Apple's notebooks with Mac OS X unix-like OS (www.apple.com).  It has the best of 2 worlds: unix core + smoothly working desktop/office environment (including Microsoft Internet Explorer and Office applications).

Desktop:
I used to buy from DELL, then from tigerdirect.com .  Now I prefer to get computers assembled per my specs. I use only the best brands for parts.  I avoid the latest CPUs as well as lastest video or sound cards, because they tend to cause problems and lack support for Linux (I have both MS Windows and SUSE Linux at home).

My current vendor - a very good chinese computer shop in NJ:

Micromax Computers

http://www.micromaxusa.com/

17 Leslie Court
Whippany, NJ 07981
Phone: (973)386-1538 /  386-1539 /  515-9089
Peter cell: (973) 479-7687

email: peter@micromaxusa.com

Note - Peter has lots of business clients working with video and other demanding applications. So he knows what currently is working for other people. Also, as he doesn't want things to break, he can advise you about the most reliable parts.

You can buy parts from Peter - and assemble yourself. I prefer Peter to assemble and test for me.

Note: before ordering I usually check what is available on the market using several web sites, for example:

Note: it's very important to have a good motherboad.  Stay away from onboard video/audio/fax-modem and Ethernet. Or, if you have them onboad - make sure that you can turn them off (using jumpers or setup settings). I prefer to buy all pieces separately. You get good brands, good quality, have no problems with upgrading or running Linux.

 
My computer home - top of the page - email

Starting Spring 2002 I switched to notebook. But then in 2004 I have switched back to desktop, because I have to do a lot of video processing.

Here is the configuration of my last desktop (May 2005):

 

  • Uneece Aluminum Case + 525W Power Supply
  • Motherboard - ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe  
  • CPU - P4-3.0GHz CPU
  • RAM - 4x 512MB Dual Channel Memory, Total 2GB
  • Nvidia FX5200 128MB AGP Video Card
  • DVD - Pioneer 109 16X DVDRW
  • Hard drives: ~ 1 TB:
      3x SATA Western Digital Raptor 74 GB (fast - for System and fast work)
      1x SATA 300 GB
      2x EIDE 250 GB each in removable racks (for video and backups)
          (Mobile Rack (1 fan, ~$14 each) - www.vipower.com.tw/MobileRack.htm )
  • Floppy Disk Drive, Network card, sound card,Keyboard, Mouse
  • Monitor - Samsung SyncMaster 213 T flatpanel (really big 1600x1200)

========================================

I had the computer assembled and shipped to me from here:

Micromax Computers
17 Leslie Court, Whippany, NJ 07981
Phone: (973)386-1538 /  386-1539 /  515-9089
email: peter@micromaxusa.com
========================================

I also use:

  • external USB hub from Belkin,
  • external flash memory drive from LEXAR (Jumpdrive),
  • Linksys router,
  • XEROX DocuMate 252 scanner,
  • Primera Brother II CD/DVD duplicator,
  • HP OfficeJet D-series (all-in-one printer/scanner/copier)


 
Monitors home - top of the page - email

I currently use Samsung SyncMaster 213 T flatpanel (really big 1600x1200) . Among old-fassionned CRT models I always liked Sony Trinitron monitors.


 
headphones & microphone home - top of the page - email

I listen to lots of education audio-s.

The equipment I use consists of:
  - a regular cassette player (Panasonic)
  - a set of good isolating headphones - Etymotic ER-4P (~$270 at www.headphone.com).You can probably live comfortably with a new low-cost version - Etymotic ER-6 ($130). Note that these headphones are expensive.  But they allow clean hearing in a noisy environment (on the street, in a subway, etc.). This gives you hundreds of hours of productive learning every year (which would be lost otherwise). So it is money well spent.
  - I went through many models of mp3 players. The best in my opinion are players from iriver.com. I use IFP-799 1 GB model.

- www.microphones.com - get a small microphone - Microphone Madness Lapel-2 ( www.microphones.com/miniature/lapel.cfm )
- www.speechtechnology.com - voice recording, digital processing, voice recognition

The analog input of the sound card in the computer is known to catch a lot of stray electrical noise from other computer components. To decrease the noise, I use external anolog-to-digital converter to input audio signal into the coomputer (Telex P-500 USB Digital Audio Converter - $22). My usual setup:
  a cassette player headphone jack <=> short male-male cable <=> P-500 DAC <=> USB.
I use Cool Edit 2000 software ( $69 from www.syntrillium.com ) to record the signal, process it - and save it into mp3 format.

Recording of phone conversations (interviews) - I haven't perfected this yet. Here are some advice from other people:
  - Radio Shack small adapters - basically a small microphone attached to a handset. Very sensitive to external sources of electrical interference (turn off all flourecent lights etc.). You need to try it with different phones. Some people like it.
  - Radio Shack small adapter inserted between handset and the phone base.
  - Marantz portable tape recorder - has direct telephone line jack to do the recording. But you have to flip the tape.
  - telephone adapter TRX-20 from from Ahern Communications (www.ahernstore.com/recordingjacks.html).
  - Sony DAT recorder ($400 off Ebay) - very good, up to 4 hours of recording.
  - Sony MZ-N707 portable minidisk player/recorder (~$180) - has analog audio input, records on a mini-disk up to 4 hours, good quality.
  - Konexx's "Phone 2 PC". The hardware/software combination. The splitter is inserted between the handset and the phone base. The signal then is fed into a small AC-powered box with AGC circuit (Auto Gain Control) which adjusts the volume automatically so that both parties voices have approx. the same volume. The output is fed into the audio input of your recording device or your computer. The software allows to monitor and adjust volume - and to record into WAV files or highly compressed GSM files (one hour -> 7 MB). The advanced version is different only is software (has more options for editing).
     at AHERN - $179  - (http://www.ahernstore.com/phone2pcbasic.html). 800-451-3280 - in MA.
     at KONEXX - $189 - (https://www.konexx.com/p2pcbas.htm). 800-275-6354 - in CA.
                        documentation -  http://www.konexx.com/PDF/Phone%202%20PC%20Interface%20-%20Setup%20Guide.pdf -
         KONEXX also sells "Model 100"
  - "How To Make Great Sounding Audio Clips For Your Web Site And Marketing Efforts"
      - http://www.hardtofindseminars.com/audioclipspage4.htm - report
      - http://www.modemspy.com/en/index.php - GoldWave software ($40) - sound editor, player, recorder, and converter.


 
Buy at low prices home - top of the page - email

 
Here is how to buy it at low price:
* www.computers.com - 
* www.pricescan.com -
* www.pricewatch.com -
* www.killerapp.com -
* www.bottomdollar.com -
* www.snap.com - 
* www.arstechnica.com - 
* www.techbargains.com - 		 * www.salescircular.com - 
* www.compusastores.com - 
* www.anandtech.com - 
* www.outpost.com - 
* memory.com - 
* upgradebase.com - 
* netgear.com - 
* buynetgear.com - 
* www.motherboards.org - 
* www.motherboards.com - 


 
USB Flash drives and other gadgets home - top of the page - email

search amazon for flash usb 256 (or flash usb 512)
- http://www.usbshop.com/usbflaspendr.html - good starting place
- http://hardware.articlecentral.com/ -
- http://www.everythingusb.com/ -

Some fast (or relatively fast) USB Flash Drives - November 20, 2007:
Flash Drive Name Price (November 2007) Description Write speed (my simple test of dropping a ~ 160MB file onto the drive

Corsair Flash Voyager GT 4GB
Corsair Flash Voyager GT 8GB

 $70
$149		 very fast (33MB/s read, 23MB/s write), 10y warranty, small, although the red rubber coating makes it a bit wider and prevents from inserting devices in the adjacent USB port. So the unit comes with a short USB cable to overcome this problem. Note: older blue models (without "GT") are slower ( 0.6 of the speed of GT, especially writing)

16 MByte/sec
17 MByte/sec

OCZ ATV Turbo 4GB $35 very fast (33MB/s read, 23MB/s write), a bit bulky due to protective coating  
Lexar JumpDrive Lightning 4GB $70 fast ( 30MB/s read, 21 MB/s write )  
Kingston DataTraveler 4GB $30 average speed (15 MB/s read, 4MB/s write) - very common and convenient 9.3 MByte/sec
SanDisk 4GB Cruzer Titanium $40 15MB/s read, 9MB/s write 8.4 MByte/sec
SanDisk 2GB Cruzer Titanium $26 15MB/s read, 9MB/s write 6.7 MByte/sec
Lexar JumpDrive Mercury 2GB $40 half te speed of "Lightning" - 15MB/s read, 10 MB/s write  
PQI Cool Drive 1GB (2005) $24 small 6.3 MByte/sec
OCZ Rally   small, slower than OCZ ATV Turbo (0.6 of its speed)  
Lexar Jumpdrive 1 GB old, not available any more Blue, medium size 5.6 MByte/sec

Note:

USB 2 interface can make 40 MByte/sec (raw throughput of the interface ~ 60 MBytes/sec)

USB 3.0 can make 400 MByte/sec, which us 10x more than USB 2.

Speed of flash memory by itself (without limitations of USB) is ~30 MBytes/sec which is slower than regular hard drives (~ 120 MBytes/sec).
Currently (March 2010) there are internal solid-state hard drives writing at up to 135..170 MBytes/sec, which is the same as regular hard drives,
and this is faster than USB 2. So with USB 3.0 we can expect to see USB flash drives with 100 BMytes/sec and more.

Although generally SSD hard drives are slower (or the same speed) as regular hard drives, there is one case when SSD drives are much faster ( ~ 25x), namely when it is necessary to access many small files. Reason - SSD can jump from file to file immediately, no mechanical movement is required, whereas regular hard drive has to mechanically move the head betwen tracks from one file to another which slows it down.


 
Buy a coffee maker home - top of the page - email

If you want to make yourself good coffe - you need right hardware. Personally I prefer to cook coffe on the stove, using either ibrik (also called briki or jesvah ), or Italian moka pot (stovetop espresso). Some people like traditional french press.

Look at pictures of different coffee brewers here:
- www.sweetmarias.com/prod.brewers.shtml - misc. stove-top brewers
- www.sweetmarias.com/prod.brewers.vacuum.shtml - vacuum coffee brewers
- www.sweetmarias.com/brewing.inst.chemex.html - Chemex Brewers

- www.gevalia.com/ - our favorite place to buy good coffee. They havve some good coffe-makers too.

 
Hard Drive Performance home - top of the page - email

I was thinking about upgrading hard drives to SCSI (for a computer having 1.2Ghz CPU and 0.5GB 266 MHz DDR RAM).
So I compared IBM SCSI hard drive at 10,000 RPM with a standard Western Digital IDE hard drive (ATA100 7,200 RPM).
I used special software like "WinBench 99" on Windows or hdparm (e.g. "hdparm -t /dev/hda7") on linux.
I also made my own simple script (see below). It gives a ball-park value. When using it just make sure to select the $count large enough so that time will be more than 10 sec (and small enough for file junk_mytest.txt to fit on the disk). Also note, that it may show different results fo Linux and Windows because of different ways they do cashing.

Here is the latest modified version:disk_pl.txt

Here is the original script:
 
#!/usr/local/bin/perl5

use strict;

my $unixflag = "";  #  set for unix, empty for dos
my @drives = ();
if ($unixflag) {
  @drives = qw(   /tmp   )
} else {
  @drives = qw(  D: G: H: I: )
  # @drives = ();
}

my $delete_flag = 0;
$delete_flag = 1 if @ARGV; # with arguments it just deletes the junk file

my $count = 10000;
my $count_cpu = 1000;
my $str = "0123456789ABCDEF" x 1024 . "\n";
my $bytes_in_mb = 1024*1024;

my $drive;
print "Start\n";

# ---------------------
# main work is done here
# ---------------------

test_cpu();
test_disks();

# ---------------------

print "Finished\n";
exit(0);
# ---------------------------------------------
# end of the main part
# ---------------------------------------------
 
 

# ---------------------------------------------
# mysync
# ---------------------------------------------
sub mysync { 
  system "sync" if $unixflag 
}

# ---------------------------------------------
# test_cpu()
# ---------------------------------------------
sub test_cpu {
  use Benchmark;
  print "  Testing CPU\n";

  Benchmark::timethis (
    $count_cpu,
    sub {
        my $ss = 1;
        for (1..10000) { $ss = ($ss + $_) % 10.0 }
        return $ss;
    }
  );

}
 

# ---------------------------------------------
# test_a_disk()
# ---------------------------------------------
sub test_a_disk {
  my $myfile = shift;
  my $action = shift;
  print "  $action - ";
  mysync();
  my $t0 = time();
  my $ii=0;
  if ($action eq 'write') {
    open (FF, ">$myfile") or die "can't open file $myfile for writing: $!";
    for $ii (1..$count) { print FF $str }
    close(FF);
  } else {
    open (FF, "<$myfile") or die "can't open file $myfile for writing: $!";
    my $yy=0;
    while ($ii = <FF>) { $yy += $ii }
    close(FF);
  }
  mysync();
  my $t1 = time();
  my $dt = $t1-$t0;
  my $filesize = sprintf "%.2f", ${[stat($myfile)]}[7]/$bytes_in_mb;
  my $speed = ( $t1-$t0 >=1 )? sprintf "%.2f", $filesize / $dt : "too fast";
  print "$dt sec, $filesize MB, $speed MB/sec\n";
  return $dt, $filesize;
}

# ---------------------------------------------
# test_disks()
# ---------------------------------------------
sub test_disks {
  my $myfile;
  for $drive (@drives) {
    $myfile = "$drive/junk_mytest.txt";
    print "$myfile:\n";
    my $dt;
    my $filesize;
    my $average=0;
    if (! $delete_flag) {
      my @actions = qw/ write read write read /;
      for (@actions) {
        ($dt, $filesize) = test_a_disk($myfile, $_ );
        $average +=$dt;
      }
      $average = $average / @actions;
      printf "  Average %.2f sec, %.2f MB/sec\n", $average, $filesize / $average;
    }
    print "  deleting $myfile\n";
    unlink $myfile if -e $myfile;
  }
}

Here are examples of results (speed in MB/sec, that is MegaBytes/sec):
 
=======================
Typical Windows PC (500MHz Pentium, 5,400 RPM hard drives, 300MB RAM)
Note: speed can go down to 1..3 MB/sec if the PC is a part of a corporate network
Note: speed can go up to ~30..40MB/sec on a new SCSI/RAID  NT server.
=======================
D:/junk_mytest.txt:
  write - 15 sec, 156.27 MB, 10.42 MB/sec
  read - 49 sec, 156.27 MB, 3.19 MB/sec
  write - 12 sec, 156.27 MB, 13.02 MB/sec
  read - 49 sec, 156.27 MB, 3.19 MB/sec
  Average 31.25 sec, 5.00 MB/sec
  deleting D:/junk_mytest.txt
Finished
=======================
Linux on a similar computer:
Note: sudo hdparm -t /dev/hdb5 - show close value of ~ 11 MB/sec.
=======================
Start
/tmp/junk_mytest.txt:
  write - 9 sec, 78.13 MB, 8.68 MB/sec
  read - 10 sec, 78.13 MB, 7.81 MB/sec
  write - 8 sec, 78.13 MB, 9.77 MB/sec
  read - 11 sec, 78.13 MB, 7.10 MB/sec
  Average 9.50 sec, 8.22 MB/sec
  deleting /tmp/junk_mytest.txt
Finished
=======================
Sun Solaris Ultra-5 with SCSI:
=======================
Start
/tmp/junk_mytest.txt:
  write - 3 sec, 156.26 MB, 52.09 MB/sec
  read - 3 sec, 156.26 MB, 52.09 MB/sec
  write - 3 sec, 156.26 MB, 52.09 MB/sec
  read - 4 sec, 156.26 MB, 39.06 MB/sec
  Average 3.25 sec, 48.08 MB/sec
  deleting /tmp/junk_mytest.txt
Finished


 

Sound Cards and Speakers home - top of the page - email

Portable - I use LG Portable Stereo Speaker - great small speakers. When folded looks like a small cell phone. Gets power via USB cable, and audio via 2.5mm or 3.5mm audio connector. Volume and sound are good enough.

Quality - search for "best sound cards". You will find "Asus Xonar DX", or "ASUS Xonar Essence STX", or Sound Blaster from Creative.
    http://compreviews.about.com/od/multimedia/tp/SoundCards.htm

Speakers - I really like Boston Acoustics Horizon MM220.