Mr. Softwarepants

Being the non-soldering type, I finally got around to replacing sweetie's CPU fan.

Sweeite has a Dell Dimension 8100. The CPU fan in this model has a custom connection to the motherboard. It's a 3-pin connector, but it's not the usual 3-pin connector, and as such is a now "out of print" custom Dell part.

(Yeah, I don't know why they thought that was a good idea either.)

This fan has a problem where it begins to wear out and sound like a helicopter. Not good.

If you disconnect the fan, you get a beep+"Fan failure. Press F1 to continue." every time you boot, which sucks even if you replace the fan with a standard one.

The solution was to use an Antec TriCool 92mm fan. The Antec comes with a 3-pin connector (not Dell compatible) with a Y-cable that breaks it out into a "hard drive" style power plug and a 3-pin connector with only the sense pin connected.

Plug the large power plug in, then use pliers to remove the plastic sheath over the custom 3-pin motherboard connector. Plug only the sense fan pin to the exposed pins; it's the one the white wire was connected to.

The end result: A quieter fan that moves more air anyway.

Since none of you actually care, this is mostly for the benefit of Googlers. Don't spend $40+ (wtf?) on a NOS Dell fan, just get the $8 Antec.

Just for fun, let's price an Apple laptop comparable to my current work lappy.

MacBook Pro	vs. Latitude D610
2.0GHz Core Duo	2.13GHz Pentium M
Advantage: Core Duo. I run SQL Server, IIS, and Visual Studio, so that extra CPU has got to help somehow.
2GB RAM (667MHz)	2GB RAM (533MHz)
100 GB / 7200RPM	80 GB / 7200RPM
I'd cheap out and get a smaller 7200RPM drive, but Apple doesn't sell anything smaller at that speed.
15.4" screen, 1440x900	15.4" screen, 1400x1050
The Dell has more pixels, the Mac has widescreen. In an ideal world, either would usually be hooked to an external 1680x1050 monitor anyway. (Also: damn my aging eyes.)
ATI X1600 Mobility, 128MB VRAM	ATI X300 Mobility, 64MB VRAM
The Apple clearly "wins" here, but it doesn't matter.
$2,700	Don't know what they paid.

(Also, they ordered around 50 new laptops, 50 new monitors and some amount of new docking stations at the same time and got a nice discount on the package.)

Now let's buy off-brand RAM instead:
$2,200 for 512MB + $250 for 2x1GB ( minus selling off the 512MB stick): ≥$2,450.

(For the webdev stuff I do on my current Mac, 1GB is plenty. For Microsoft-shop style development, 2GB is definitely required.)

Plus a Windows XP Pro license at $150: ≥$2,600. A bit out of the impulse buy range, I'd say.

The current Dell model most like this one is a Lattitude D620, and comes in around $1,800 (after discount.) Note that I didn't try to match the battery options, since I don't really know what battery I have in here anyway.

The Dell is even cheaper if I don't add Bluetooth. I don't use Bluetooth, though my work lappy has it. Work lappy also supports 802.11a for reasons I don't want to know about.

Looks like Dell wins for "Windows development on the go." For the $800 difference you could buy some sort of Dell laptop and a low end MacBook or Mac Mini.

Do the Intel-based Macs compete with Dells on price?
A definite maybe!

I priced out a MacBook and a somewhat similar Dell. It's hard to do an exact comparison. The MacBook comes out about the same as the Dell, +/- $200, depending on how you count.

Big question: is OS X more like XP Home (or Media Center Edition) or XP Pro?

OS X comes with Apache. XP Home doesn't let you run IIS without terrible hacks and a copy of Windows 2000, though you can install... Apache. XP Home has some weird networking restrictions that don't come up in OS X.

But if you're going to take advantage of Boot Camp or Parallels or whatever on the Mac side, that Windows license is going to cost you on top of the price of the laptop.

The Dell's screen is 14" to the MacBook's 13". Dell doesn't have a 13", but it has a 12" XPS laptop (which seems to have a price premium for some reason.)

The MacBook has a FireWire port, which I suppose is really important if you have any FireWire devices (video cameras?), but if you're coming from Windows land anyway you probably don't. It's all USB2 in Windows land.

The MacBook comes with (essentially) no video-out by default. It's $20 a piece for VGA and DVI adapters, and then you need to keep track of a dongle if you need to present. You do get an Apple Remote, though. I don't know anything about the remote, or how programmable it is for, say, controlling a PowerPoint presentation (while running Windows.)

Both laptops use Intel 950 integrated graphics, which makes gaming a bit of a non-issue. (Parallels doesn't do video acceleration pass-through just yet.)

The Dell lets you choose a higher resolution screen, which I would probably do, but if I was strictly getting a Dell I probably wouldn't go for the most MacBook-like configuration.

I left the harddrive sizes at the default, 60GB (5400rpm) on the MacBook and 120GB (5400rpm) on the Dell. Dell clearly "wins" here. Since I don't keep all my CDs as MP3s on my laptop, I'd be more interested in comparing the noise levels than size, but hey, I'm weird.

The base price of the Dell was more than the MacBook (though about the same if you factor in buying a separate copy of XP), but the current deal knocked it down to about the same price for XP Pro or about $150 less for XP Home.

My Dad sent me a spare PC, as part of his stuff reduction system.

It turns out that Sweetie can use a better PC at home more than I can use another server box. Her home PC is a freebie the lab was giving away, and it's pretty much a clunker. This one I got is much better. (She has a nicer laptop that mostly stays at school.) Plus there's the fact that we're going to be living together soon enough, so I "get it back", so to speak, should I need to cram the 2nd drive up with WAVs and MP3s.

I did swap out the DVD burner, though, and add it to my main desktop as a 2nd drive. It's much quieter playing back CDs versus the stock DVD burners that Dell ships with.

The stock Dell drive reports as a "_NEC DVD+-RW ND-3530A". Why the heck why did the manufacturer feel the need to put an initial underscore in the hardware name? Gosh.

This other drive is a "SONY DVD RW DRU-720A".

They're both dual-layer burners.

I got the desktop with a dual-layer drive since that was on sale that week. I haven't burned a dual-layer disc yet, though, for two reasons. One, the dual-layer discs aren't rewritable, and I haven't had 9GB of stuff to write out at one go yet. Two, the blank discs are still $10 a piece, which is rather hefty since regular DVD -/+ RW discs are less than a buck a piece.

ATI Catalyst Tweak Guide

Has sections on disabling some ATI services and removing phantom devices that result from re-plugging devices in or reinstalling video drivers. (If you tend to replug USB devices, you'll have a lot of phantom hubs, mice, and keyboards too.)

It annoys me that ATI installs a "hot key" service, to listen for hot keys, even if you never ever want to use their hot key features.

Hell, it annoys me that any tweaking at all is neccesary, but here I am doing it anyway.

This sort of thing is why I'm going to play Pyschonauts on the PS2 instead of my new PC.

I have it in my head to upgrade from my ATI X300SE to a GeForce 6600GT, but that will have to wait until further employment.

And another thing! I like this Dell 1704FPT digital LCD. But I don't like how it stretches non-native resolutions. The native resolution is 1280x1024, which is a not a 4:3 ratio; it's 5:4. Most standard smaller resolutions are 4:3, which means they stretch just slightly more vertically. I'd really like for 1024x768 games to display centered in the screen with a black frame, but there seems to be no way to tell the monitor to do that.