• Tag Archives computers

  • Upgrading Urutu – my home desktop

    Posted on by micha Comment

    After 8 years of service, Urutu got an upgrade of its core components. While the old hardware was still going strong, and capable of handling most tasks, a KDEnlive render task projected to take 23 hours finally convinced me that it was time to get some new parts.

    Urutu is on PCPartPicker:

    Main upgrades

    ItemOldNewPrice
    CPUi6700kRyzen 9900X¥69,980
    MotherboardAsus Hero Maximum VIIIASRock Phantom Gaming X870E Nova WiFi¥50,373
    RAMG.Skill Ripjaws 32 GB CL14G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo RGB 64 GB CL28¥48,566

    Even without converting to 2019-money, this upgrade was significantly cheaper than the last one, coming in at well under £1000 for near-top-of-the-range components.

    I am still waiting on a “new” GPU as well, a friend has an old GTX3090 which will be a nice upgrade from the 1080, although nowhere near as top-line as the rest of the components.

    What worked well

    Overall it took some time, mostly due to the custom water loop, but the upgrade went pretty smooth.

    • all the old components and the case still work perfectly, although I did get new 12cm case fans as well
    • making sure Windows was up-to-date and cloud-activated ensured it continued working after the upgrade
    • the new PC is blisteringly fast, near the top of most of the benchmarks in “HardwareInfo2” on Linux. My CPU benchmarks beat other Ryzen 9900X entries for some reason.

    Issues

    I encountered a couple of very minor issues during the build.

    Water loop

    Most of the work was taking apart the custom water loop and rebuilding it, but this was also a good opportunity to replace all of the tubing as it had yellowed quite badly in the meantime. I made a mistake and fitted the CPU waterblock the wrong way up due to cable routing. What I thought was just cosmetic turned out to be practical as an air bubble gathered at the top of the block.

    Cabling

    There’s some minor cabling issues due to the different board layout, mostly with fan cables not being long enough, so extension cables were needed. This time I also went for more (A)RGB components and these also required some extensions and splitters. In retrospect I made a mistake with the new case fans which should have been A-RGB instead of plain RGB.

    As a result, the rear of the machine is a lot messier than the previous build.

    OS Issues – Windows 10

    I should have removed all the Asus-specific software prior to changing the hardware as some of the (un)installers refuse to work now that they don’t detect the Asus motherboard anymore. It’s left a bit of a mess so short of reinstalling Windows (not really an option) I’ve been fighting to clean up the Asus software.

    OS Issues – Debian GNU/Linux 13

    For some reason when I upgraded to Debian 13 recently it left me on an older kernel, which did not have drivers for the new Realtek network card. After a bit of faffing about I managed to get a driver for it, got networking up and running, and then upgraded to a current kernel and no issues.

    Apart from that I had to remove a couple of modules which were specific to the old motherboard.

    Final Thoughts

    So far very happy with the upgrade, looking forward to fixing the CPU waterblock and getting new benchmarks once I get the “new” GPU.


    📂This entry was posted in Computers Hardware 📎and tagged

  • WordPress and Piwigo? Yes please!

    Posted on by micha Comment

    So I just discovered the PiwigoPress plugin for WordPress.
    While it’s obsolete and the widget no longer works, the “short code” feature still does. Unfortunately it’s not very well documented, but it is possible to add pictures to an article which link back to not only the picture, but also the album which that picture is part of.
    Yayy.

    Trawling through the source code, it seems the following is possible:

    [PiwigoPress id={<pic_id>,<pic_id>,...} lnktype=albumpicture url='http://gallery.lemmurg.com/']
    Expand Parameters Table
    idPiwigo picture id(s)eg.
    id=1 – picture id 1
    id=1-5 – all pictures with ids 1 through 5
    id=1,3,4 – pictures with ids 1, 3, and 4
    lnktypepicture (default, link to picture only)
    album (?)
    albumpicture (link to picture with album)    		eg lnktype=albumpicture
    urlURL of the Piwigo siteeg: url=http://gallery.lemmurg.com
    sizeSize of the picture. Possible values:
    sq – square
    th – thumbnail
    xs – extra small
    sm – small
    me – medium
    la – large (default)
    xl – extra large
    xx – extra-extra large

    		eg: size=sm
    nameAdds image name
    0 – no (default)
    1 – yes
    auto – ?    		eg: name=1
    descAdds image description.
    0 – no (default)
    1 – yes    		eg: desc=1
    class?
    style?
    lnktypepicture – link to picture only (default)
    albumpicture – link to picture with album
    album – ?    		example: lnktype=albumpicture
    opntypeWhether to open in the current tab or a new one.
    _blank – open in new tab (default)
    ordertype?
    random – random order (default)
    orderascWhether to sort pictures in ascending order.
    0 – no (default)
    1 – yes

    Additionally, it’s possible to control the layout of the embedded pictures by providing custom CSS for PiwigoPress tags as follows:

    .PiwigoPress_photoblog {
      display:inline-block;
      padding-right:10px;
 }
 .PWGP_shortcode {
      display:inline-block;
 }

    📂This entry was posted in Technology 📎and tagged

  • Installing Windows 10 on a Sony VAIO TZ

    Posted on by micha 8 Comments

    So I got bored and decided to see if I could get an old VAIO VGN-TZ27GN running Windows 10. The short answer is: Yes.

    UPDATE 2019-06 : Drivers download link.

    Summary

    After post-install fixes, these items are not yet working:

    • WebCam
    • Turning Bluetooth on/off via software

    And the following items have not been tested:

    • Modem

    Everything else seems to be working just fine. Not bad for a pretty old and underpowered laptop!

    Base Install

    The base install went quite easily, taking some time due to spinning disk, but nevertheless no worries. Ended up using just over 8GB of diskspace, around 9GB after a couple of updates and Skype was installed.

    Issues

    What worked?

    Almost everything. Not too shabby for an old bespoke piece of kit.

    The most surprising entry here was the fingerprint reader.

    What didn’t?

    • Three devices in the Device Manager: SD and MS card readers, and an unknown device.
    • The special hardware buttons on the front.
    • Some of the Fn keys.
    • The microphone and webcam. Nothing flagged up in Device Manager, but no go either.
    • Disabling bluetooth. Funnily enough disabling Wifi works.

    Post-install fixes

    All drivers were downloaded from the official Sony Support Site.

    Memory Stick and SD-Card reader

    Simple case of heading over to the Sony support site, downloading and installing the drivers. This sorted out the device errors in the Device Manager. A quick test showed them working now.

    Status: SUCCESS!

    Unkown Device

    The Unknown Device turned out to be the Sony Firmware Extension Parser (SFEP). A quick download from the Sony support site and it installed flawlessly.

    Status: SUCCESS!

    Microphone

    So the microphone did end up working just fine, it’s just that the TZ has both a built-in microphone as well as a microphone jack, and Windows 10 defaulted to the jack. Switching defaults in the properties and it’s all good.

    First Attempt

    • Downloaded Audio driver from Sony support site.
    • Created a restore point
    • Tried to install the driver.
    • The driver failed to install from the setup program, but installed fine when manually clicking on the various inf files in the driver package.
    • Microphone still not working, but found second device in Audio Settings now. Set other device as default, et voila, va haff a vorkink mikrofon! Now I wonder if it was always working… let’s try a System Restore!

    Status: SUCCESS!

    Camera

    As for all the other issues, Step 1 is to download the Camera driver from the Sony support site.

    Unfortunately the driver fails to install. Even forcing the install manually fails to get the camera working, as does running the installer in compatibility mode.

    For now, the webcam goes down as broken 🙁

    Status: FAIL!

     Keys

    To get the keys working, download and install the following drivers in this order, rebooting as necessary between each one:

    1. Install Sony Firmware Extension Parser (SFEP.exe)
    2. Install Sony Shared Library (Sony_Shared_Library.exe)
    3. Install Sony DLL Utils / Setting Utility Series (Setting_Utility_Series.exe)
    4. Install VAIO Event Service (VAIO _Event_Service.exe)

    And both hardware keys and Fn-keys are now armed and fully operational!

    Status: SUCCESS!

    Bluetooth

    While it works, it’s impossible to turn it off without using the hardware switch, which also turns off Wifi.

    Attempting to install the driver from the Sony support site failed with a message saying the software is incompatible with this version of windows.

    Status: FAIL!

     


    📂This entry was posted in Computers Technology Windows 📎and tagged