Skip to main content

Don't buy a Portege R830

Okay, so this is something of a rant, but given my experiences with the laptop, how can I not?

Backstory:  Corporate IT maintains a list of acceptable portables, all of which are made by Toshiba.  After looking over the list, it looked like the best choice was the Portege R830.  It had the best possible CPU and it wasn't a giant clunker that looked my back-in-the-day 15 pound Inspiron 7000.  As a bonus, it was available with a reasonably priced docking station.

My first conception that something was wrong when, after first boot, I checked free memory.  Physically, 4GB is installed, but windows says that only 2.7GB is available.  The Intel HD3000 video setup is eating the rest (1.3GB!).  Okay, no big deal.  I can reboot and change that in the BIOS.  Oops.  No option.  Well, maybe it's just some old drivers.  Nope.  Drivers are latest from Toshiba.  They're not particularly new, so maybe the generic Intel ones will fix it.  Damn!  Toshiba has crippled the video so that it won't accept the Intel drivers.

Maybe if I install more physical memory.  As an aside, IT installed the 32-bit version of Win7.  I know, I know.  But I've got duty travel coming up, and getting the laptop within 3 months was a major achievement as it is.  Asking for a wipe on day two isn't going to win me any friends.

So, I dropped 8GB into the computer on the assumption that the BIOS would be smart enough to leave the 4GB that Win7 _can_ address to me, and take the rest for video, even if it is overkill.  No dice:  The BIOS reserves nearly 6GB of the 8GB memory for video.  Really?  Really?!

A tech support request to Toshiba hasn't been answered.  I got the obligatory "We'll get back to you within 24 hours" email, but no actual email.

I wouldn't think that being able to specify video memory would be all that big of a deal, but then again, this BIOS is pretty braindead.  I think I've seen more options on locked-down Pentium 1 era computers.  I'm not expecting overclocking options, but at least let me use the damn thing, especially if IT has already f**ked things up by only installing half the memory I asked for and then installing the 32-bit version of Windows.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Building Amazon Linux RPMs with Fedora Mock

Fedora's 'mock' tool provides a much more convenient way to build RPMs than using 'rpmbuild'.  It creates a chroot environment for your target OS and will install required dependencies. I've been running into limitations on the version of CollectD that ships with Amazon Linux, so I thought it wouldn't be that difficult to use mock to build an updated version complete with some missing plugins.  I knew that it generally worked, as I was able to use the specfile from the project to build for EPEL6 using Fedora 26.  Man, was I wrong about how easy it would be for Amazon Linux. I won't go into details here, but it's worth mentioning that the CollectD project documentation calls out that the specfile in their contrib directory is generally out of date.  That is 100% correct, so you'll need to budget some time for tweaking it. The first issue is that there are some packages in EPEL that can't be installed in Amazon Linux.  The most aggravatin
Post a Comment
Read more

Mass updating AWS Lambda Log Group retention

AWS Lambda and I have a love/hate relationship.  There is much about Lambda to like, but there are also some very sharp edges operationally. One of the cool things is that you get a new CloudWatch Log Group for every new Lambda function without any effort on your part.  Less cool is that it has unlimited retention.  If you haven't yet followed Yan Cui's advice , then you can use some Bash/CLI magic to fix retention on your existing Log Groups. First, get a list of all your default Lambda log groups:  aws logs describe-log-groups --log-group-name-prefix "/aws/lambda" | grep logGroupName | cut -d : -f 2 | cut -d \" -f 2 > /tmp/lambda_logs Read that into a Bash array:  readarray -t log_groups < /tmp/lambda_logs Then, add a 7 day retention policy to all those log groups:  for i in "${log_groups[@]}"; do aws logs put-retention-policy --log-group-name $i --retention-in-days 7; done It's a hack, but if you're going to put in th
Post a Comment
Read more

Python and libpuzzle

As much as I've dogged on Python in the past (significant whitespace, really?), I've got to admit that it's got some cool features too. For example, I'm playing with libpuzzle  (a library for visually comparing images).  It has a command line utility and a C and PHP API.  Unfortunately, the CLI utility doesn't allow one to dump the raw comparison vector, and it's a PITA to write C just to play with a library. Python's native "ctypes" to the rescue! from ctypes import * class PuzzleCvec(Structure): _fields_ = [("sizeof_vec", c_size_t), ("vec", c_char_p)] class PuzzleCompressedCvec(Structure): _fields_ = [("sizeof_compressed_vec", c_size_t), ("vec", c_char_p)] class PuzzleContext(Structure): _fields_ = [("puzzle_max_width", c_uint), ("puzzle_max_height", c_uint), ("puzzle_lambdas", c_uint),
1 comment
Read more