for keeping track of my digital experiments

It turns out that the only problem with my wiring was the heads. I couldn’t use my custom wiring schema for Gigabit Ethernet purposes. I changed the wiring for my Gigabit connections to the TIA/EIA 568B standard. Now the only limitation on my Gigabit speed is the processor and bus speed of my GX240 Optiplex. I’m pulling 170 – 200Mbps out of the thing to my Debian based file server. You might find the following wiring diagrams helpful:

So I finally picked up a gigabit switch off of ebay a week ago. I just installed it into my current setup yesterday. I had already purchased two gigabit network cards for about $20 (with shipping). Unfortunately the cables that the connections are running over, don’t support the Gigabit Ethernet spec at the current distance between network card and switch.

About two years ago, my dad picked up a thousand feet of Category 5 (Ethernet) cable from my uncle. The amazing part is that we got it for free, because my uncle had paid all of $5 for 3 spools of the stuff. The stuff is typically $100 for a thousand feet. So I wired up our unfinished basement with the stuff. I sent two lengths of the stuff to each outlet box, one of the lengths was a gigabit run, and the other was a split between telephone and 100Mbps. I used my own “in-house” spec for the cabling instead of the official 802.11 cat 5 spec. It made things much easier, because I didn’t have to deal with all of the crazy crossing over inside of each wire. I had read previous to starting this project, that for 100Mbps connections, wires 7 and 8 remained unused. Perfect for running the telephone connection! Your regular analog telephone connection only requires a pair of wires, compared to the 3 pairs needed for 100Mbps (fast) Ethernet, and the 4 pairs needed for Gigabit Ethernet.

Now the basement is much more complete with several wall now dry-walled and taped. Although the areas in between the top of the drywall and the overhead sub floor are still exposed.

Unfortunately, when I plugged in my computers with the gigabit cards, I recieved the dulcet amber lights, telling me that they were both still at 100Mbps. Gah! I did a little research a found out that you can only get Gigabit speeds out of Category 5 cable, if the run is less than 10 meters. I guess that’s pretty good considering that the maximum certified speed for Cat 5 is 155Mbps. Well, guess I’m going to see if I can trim down some lengths. And at least my current network switching center looks pretty fab.

It’s a great development and medium-level gaming system. Not that the specs are overtly mouthwatering: 120GB hard drive, dual-core AMD 64bit (each core about 1.8GHZ), 1GB of RAM, 128 ATI Xpress GPU. It can run MediaMonkey, Netbeans (for writing my Java), ActiveState Komodo (for PHP development) [info], Firefox, and FileZilla (FTP client) at the same time on dual-monitors. My 1501 can also put in it’s time running Halo.

Recently though, the battery has been acting up. The problem started out with the BIOS spurting out an error message at bootup, which I though was merely a glitch:

WARNING: The battery cannot be identified.
This system will be unable to charge this battery.
Press Any Key to Continue
Press 2 times to enter SETUP
Press and Any Key to enter Boot Menu

I figured I could fix this up with a quick update to the Phoenix BIOS (via a Windows utility) which my laptop was in need of. Remember kiddies, when flashing your BIOS, follow all the instructions or live in fear of creating a fancy paper-weight.

So I updated the BIOS to version 2.6.3. No more battery error messages, but my PC was still acting up. The battery wouldn’t hold charge and XP (32bit and 64bit) would be unresponsive to my keyboard and mouse clicks/movements while the battery was installed. I decided to pop out the battery and see if it would run faster, which it did.

All in all, the battery just was getting old and would no longer hold charge. I thought that my battery might last more than a year, since I had been keeping to plenty of battery best practices.

Last night, I ended up buying a new battery for my 1501, from this seller by the name of batteryfordell, who only sells Dell batteries. My question is, how and where does he get these brand new batteries for so little money? Regardless, I ended up paying $70 compared to the $300 that Dell wanted on their website. For pretty much the equivalant part.

Sweet deal :-)

Note: Although I got a great deal on the battery, the shipping and handling time was well over 2 weeks. The guy made excuses, like my address wasn’t correct and shit like that. I even called him a couple of times, but to no avail. He was just making excuses because he probably didn’t have the part in stock. I did end up getting my battery.