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The Windows XP defragger – is it good enough for the enterprise?. I’ve been running the XP defragmenter quite a bit on the video machine. Man, is it slow. Also doesn’t seem to speed things up much. So I’m off to try some commercial defragmenters. Here’s a quick review:

• O&O Software. This is another defragger. Got a good review from majorgeeks.com. I like the user interface quite a bit. Lots of control over how the disk gets laid out. Its interesting to see XP layout files. Particularly for big video ones, doesn’t make much sense to me. You can have 40% free drive (over 50GB), but in creating a 2GB AVI file, it creates something with over 100 fragments. So a defragger is almost mandatory. I’m going to try this on a dual partitioned disk, maybe it has to do with the fact that I have just one gigantic partition on my video edtiing machine.
• Diskeeper. This review says it is 30% faster than the builtin utility. This is the grownup version of the bundled version in XP itself. Now in Version 8. Have a 30 day trial too. Doesn’t have much configurability compared with O&O, but it does do a boot time defragging of the MFT (the file table) and other system files.
• VoptXP. This is the number one hit on google for defragmenters. Giving it a try now. This one is OK, but doesn’t give many diagnostics or configurability.
• Bootvis. A Microsoft tool that lets you see why it takes so long to boot. This thing actually did work for me. Complained about a file not being around.

Now to repartition an NTFS hard drive with real data in it. That is quite a trick. The default XP partitioner is destructive. You can buy Partition Magic (now owned by Symantec) to do a dynamic repartition, but it costs $60. One good suggestion is to use the NTFS repartitioner in Mandingo Linux. You can start the install, repartition then cancel before the install. Clever.

Tech Republic. Ther e is an old Netowrk Client Administrator utility on the old Windows NT Server 4.0 CD is you still have it that is the easiest way to create this.

With Pentiums, the only way to overclock is to increase the bus speed of everything. But, the Athlon, with the right hardware and know how, you can leave the buses at their normal speeds and just increase the clock on the processor. here’s how:

• XP-TMC Adaptor Socket. This is a piece of hardware that goes between the CPU and the motherboard socket and in effect decouples the processor clock from the bus clock. You can get this in bundles with motherboards for about $10-30 extra. A nice solution.
• Sharky Extreme. Or, you can go the manual route and connect together certain traces on the Athlon XP itself chip itself. HighSpeed PC makes a kit to do just that.
• Other folks have used a car rear-window defogging kit if you can believe that.
• You can also use Speed Strip which is another hack that does the connection.
• Viperlair explains that for Palomino, you have to connect five things, for Barton, its just one. Also if have an nVidia nForce 2 motherboard, you don’t have to do any of this which you’ll need since the latest Bartons have defeated all of this mumbo jumbo.

A couple of more sources for the latest on processors. I’m thinking about spending $1,000 to upgrade two machines I have that are currently Pentium III 450Mhz and 550MHz if you can believe that (state of the art four years ago with 256MB at 133MHz and 8GB hard disk on one and 500GB on the other). So that means upgrading to a midrange system. The choices are large thanks to Intel’s Pentium 4 and AMD Athlon XP and 64. Here’s an analysis, but the basic conclusion is that for budget systems, an Athlon 2500+ or 2800+ with 512MB of PC3200 memory has the best price performance. Then it is as far as egos and pocketbooks go.

CPU Scorecard – PC CPU Benchmarks, News, Prices and Reviews. A cool site that summarizes processor benchmarks across the Internet. HAs a scorecard that is interesting to look at as well. The site seems slightly out of date, but is super well organized in explaining the technical differences between the many processors.

Tom’s Hardware. Just did a year end CPU buying guide, so you can figure out the sweetspot pricepoints:

• CPUs at a glance. The largest table ever, but it has every fact (including the codenames) for every processor around pretty much.
• AMD Athlon XP is now at a deadend. but very inexpensive. Right now the pricing curves are $85 for 2500+, $136 for 2800+ and $205 for 3000+. Also motherboards are very inexpensive. Given its ability to overclock, its a good idea to buy a cheap processor splurge on memory. An Athlon 2600+ at $100 running at 2.3GHz instead of its normal 1.9GHz is about 20% faster and competes with the Pentium 4 2.8GHz costing $213.
• AMD Athlon 64. The budget model right now is the 3000+ at $220. Since I’m not buying a whole box, we’re just talking about motherboard replacement. Nice thing is that is has Quiet & Cool technology to make it run super quietly if you have the right motherboard (MSI K8T Neo or the ASUS K8V Deluxe)
• Overclocking. The Athlon XPs are good at it. The so called Barton cores can support up to 2.3GHz so an Athlon 2600+ at $100 is a good buy. You have to buy faster memory though to do this.
• Price/Performance. They do a nice analysis of price performance given the very unequal pricing for CPU, motherboard and memory. Not surprisingly the Athlon XP comes out very well particularly the XP 2800+ and below then the Pentium 2.6 and 2.8.
• Time Savings. They also asked how much time would you save on multimedia applications if you bought various systems. You could save up to 35% of your time with a Pentium 4 3.2GHz, 20% with an Athon XP 3200+ vs. the lowly Athlon XP 2600+

PureOC. Overclocking is a way to get price performance at the cost of stability. Interesting to see one man’s experiment. Take the cheapest Barton Athlon, the XP 2500+ which costs about $80 and see how fast it can go. The basic point is that as you overclock the FSB, you also have to increase the voltage on the processor. Most bios let you do that. Plus you need good cooling. Here’s what he found:

Tweaktown and Motherboards.org did a review of coolers and liked the ThermalTake SilentBoost. It’s very quiet which is nice as well and not expensive at $27 at Pricegrabber.com

OCFAQ has an incredible knowledge base for folks who want to know more about overclocking.

Motherboards Scorecard has a terrific scorecard summary. The ASUS A7N8X got a nice review in Motherboards and costs only $113 right now. The ASUS A7N8X-X is only $72. Other high scorers were the Abit AT7-Max2 and the Gigabyte GA-7VAXP.

OK, my third system this year based on the Shuttle. Bill wants to edit videos mainly and also use this machine to access the Internet. That sort of thing. He was looking at the Sony system which costs $1900. That machine has a Pentium 3.2GHz, 1GB memory and a 200GB hard disk plus a DVD and CD drive. Let’s see if we can do better. Here is the targeted buy. The main difference is that it uses the absolute best components, but doesn’t have a warranty or software on it nor an extra CD. It is much more compact though.\

The main changes even since the December recommendation are the new ultra-quiet Western Digital fluid bearing drive is just out. No reviews yet, but promises to be good and finding on pricewatch.com a bundle deal for the CPU and Shuttle system at $715.

Component	Price	Comment
Shuttle SN85G4	$340	$330 at zipzoomfly, but out of stock. Ewiz has CPU and Shuttle for $715
AMD Athlon 64 3200+	$300	3000+ is $215
Corsair TWINX2048-3200 2GB	$504	Or, Kingston 1GB PC3200 KHX3200AK21G for $198
Optorite DD0401	$136	8x DVD+/-RW and Optorites are good
Western Digital WD2500PB	$210	Hitachi Travelstar 7K250 is  $292 and 10% faster
ATI Radeon 9600 All in Wonder	$211	Has video capture too
Total	$1,661	Without monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers
Microsoft Multimedia Keyboard + Mouse	$28	OEM keyboard, in black as he likes
AOpen	$10	He’s not fussy about these
Total	$1699	Without monitor

BTW, the really great monitors right now are is the Samsung Syncmaster 191T at $641, it got a great Tom’s Hardware review.

ExcaliberPC is doing a promotion for a Shuttle XPC SN85G4 and the AMD Athlon 3200+ for $725, which is normally $740 from Zipzoomfly. There is also a $30 rebate on SN85G4 through January 5 as well. Only issue is I’ve never bought from Excaliber before.

Storage Review. The Western Digital product line is really confusing but the folks at Storage Review demystify. Basicaly, the is the basic BB line, the JB line has 8MB cache and is very fast, the PB has quieter fluid bearings and the JD are their serial ATA versions. The last should be faster but aren’t because they are really using bridging from EIDE ATA-100 to Serial-ATA-150. Best best right now is the WD2500PB which is quiet and fast.

“AnandTech’:http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1905&p=8 had a quick review of the ATI Radeon 9600 All-in-wonder. Said it had decent performance at a decent price which at $145 makes it a great price/performance buy if you need analog input or PVR functions.

X-bit labs – Hardware news – AMD Athlon 64 3400 to Come in December?. This chip didn’t quite make it in December, but it is the 2.2GHz version of the Athlon 64. So the line looks like:

Performance Rating Explained. x86-secret.com explains the strange conversion from performance rating and actual speed as 1.5 * CPU Frequency + 400. Strange way to reach this.

Athlon 64 Roadmap, here is the rough roadmap for Athlon 64s. The current models (codenamed Clawhammer) are in 130nm technology. What’s next?