Constant Random Change

Dealing with old computers after an upgrade is very a common problem. Sure, there are the obvious solutions like selling them or giving them away, but these approaches carry some problems (e.g. personal warranty, recipient not happy to receive a very outdated unit, red tape, etc.) that make them somewhat impractical.

There is another option: turn them into a firewall/router using pfsense.

Tech-savvy readers might ask what’s the difference between doing this instead of just upgrading your router’s firmware using DD-WRT or the like. Well, for starters, most of the routers sold in the Philippines are nerfed versions of those sold outside the country and don’t support custom firmwares. This simply means that it’s much easier to setup a pfsense server in this country than to setup DD-WRT.

In terms of features, pfsense and DD-WRT have features to distinguish themselves from the other. Obviously, you can’t control wireless signal strength in pfsense, and DD-WRT has some firewall features that are missing in the former. On the other hand, pfsense allows packages to be added to it like squid and nmap. It also has these funky RRD graphs:

The one feature that really caught my eye is support for load balancing. This allows you to consolidate two or more internet connections on your router, whether it’s for simple load balancing (bandwidth usage is spread between the ISPs) or for failover (when one ISP fails, the connections are routed to the other ISPs). With this, you could subscribe to two crappy DSL providers like, say, PLDT and Globe, and still have a relatively higher uptime than you would normally have.

You could buy a dedicated load balancing router, but the cost difference between that (PhP 4,000+) and an extra lan card (PhP 100-PhP 150 in surplus shops) and the thought that your old PC would probably be much more powerful than the puny chip inside that router make pfsense a more logical choice.

The biggest downside to using pfsense instead of dedicated router devices is the power usage, which can be anywhere from 5 to 20 times that of a typical router. Expect a slight increase in your power bill, especially if your “old” PC is one of those power guzzling Pentium 4s or Athlon XPs. You can try to underclock them, but I don’t expect to see much of a difference.

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With all that talk out of the way, let’s move on to the actual installation.

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For some odd reason, I missed this little gem in last year’s Notable CD-R King Items.

It’s a 64GB solid-state drive for only PhP 5,800.

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It’s a Sunday so we might as well do some cleaning.

Organize your hard drive with the help of a disk space analyzer.

Longtime Windows users should already be familiar with this app. WinDirStat (Windows Directory Statistics) provides a treemap view of your hard drives, making it easier to find out which files or folders are taking too much space.

This is a Windows-only utility, but alternatives are available for other OSs. JDiskReport runs on any computer that runs Java. Mac users can also use Disk Inventory X, while Unix/Linux users should be comfortable with just using du.

PhP 183K for a PC looks like is overkill.

For the curious, I’ve checked how much the whole thing would cost in real life.

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Just a follow up to last Friday’s note on pre-Windows 7 launch annoyances…

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New post over at Bugs Namin about Upgrading 32bit Vista to Windows 7 64bit.

I believe I haven’t eaten M&Ms for years now because one of the first things that went into my head while popping those colorful chocolate candies into my mouth was something geeky.

See if you can figure out what I was thinking then using the picture above. It’s not that hard, but if you need a hint, look at the category under which this post is filed.

Here are some of the follow-up questions my friend asked me after posting the previous two posts.

Why not go for SLI or Crossfire?

For those unfamiliar with the terms, Scalable Link Interface (SLI) and Crossfire are terms used by nVidia and ATI (now AMD), respectively, to call their method of allowing two or more video cards of the same to work on the same graphics rendering tasks at the same time. This should theoretically allow the computer to produce twice/thrice/etc the frames per second (fps) for games or other graphics-heavy programs.

In practice, however, the performance gains provided by both configurations are unpredictable. The performance might double in some applications, while the performance difference might be negligible on other applications.

Another downside to using SLI/Crossfire is that not all motherboards can support them. For example, none of the motherboards that I chose in the previous two posts support SLI, but all support Crossfire. If you’re planning to build an SLI-ready or a Crossfire-ready PC, you will have to make sure that the motherboard supports it.

The increase in the power requirement of your system from using multiple (energy guzzling) video cards might also require you to upgrade your PSU. You can go to this site to check if your (brand-name) PSU can provide enough power to your planned SLI/Crossfire system.

Speaking of PSUs, manuals usually ask the system builder to connect each video card to a dedicated line from the PSU to avoid overloading the line. You must make sure that the PSU has enough lines for your card as some PSUs only have one line for the 6-pin PCI-Express connectors.

There are cases where SLI and Crossfire make sense, though. One obvious scenario would be getting the absolute highest performance from the cards in the market. No single card would be a match to a system two or more of the most powerful video cards in the market working together in SLI/Crossfire.

Of course that scenario would only be applicable to the most hardcore of system builders. For the average enthusiast builder, SLI and Crossfire provides a way to beat the market sometimes. Recall what I said about the cards I chose being in a sweet spot:

…go any cheaper than the HD 4850 and you’ll get a large decrease in performance, but going for even a slightly more powerful card will give you a large increase in price.

Depending on the state of video card retail prices, there are times where SLI or Crossfire configurations would provide the same (or better) performance compared to their more expensive counterparts. This is currently the case for Radeon HD 4850 / 4870 and GeForce GTX 260 (that is, if you can find stores that sell those cards at those prices).

Another possible practical scenario takes advantage of the fact that prices always go down as new hardware gets introduced in the market. A system builder can therefore settle with just one video card first and just buy the second video card when the price goes down. This would allow him to “upgrade” his computer without having to buy a new (and more expensive) single video card.

Any incompatibilities should I watch out for when choosing parts?

First would probably be the motherboard. Some of the older motherboards do not support newer processors even though the processor sockets are compatible. There’s also the IDE ports: because of SATA, most of the newer motherboards do not carry more than one IDE socket so if you plan to carry over more than two IDE hard drives or IDE DVD-RW drives from your old PC, you’ll have to make sure that the motherboard you choose has two IDE sockets.

Another would be the PSU. As I mentioned above, you’ll have to make sure that the PSU has enough compatible connectors with your planned parts. It should also be able to provide enough power for your entire system.

Finally, there’s also the PC case. I’m sure you won’t make the mistake of buying a “micro-ATX” case when your motherboard is clearly labeled as “ATX“, but even the most well-informed computer user might not realize that some high-end video cards don’t fit in smaller cases.

I’m planning to buy this in December…

Don’t.

By December the lists I provided will already be obsolete. Who knows whether nVidia would release a new chipset that would quickly dominate the sweet-spot in the video card market? Who knows if AMD would release far better processors than Intel’s proposed i5 line? Would SSD (Solid State Drive) prices go down low enough to make the average consumer buy one instead of the traditional magnetic platter based hard disk drives?

Nobody knows the answers to these questions. Because of this, you will have to re-conduct research on parts on December.

Fortunately, most of the rules of thumb I mentioned will still work by then. For example, focusing on the video card will still be applicable by December given that the speed of improvements in graphics card chips is faster than in CPU chips.

For additional information, some sites like Tom’s Hardware provide system builder guides and buying guides giving readers details on how to choose parts based on the current state of the market. You can also go to vendor neutral sites like TipidPC where you can ask members for suggestions on parts.

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And that’s it for this post. I’ll post another one if my friend asks more questions.