Category: Computer Hardware

Modem / Line speed tests

30 Mb and 5 Mb
TWC – 30 down and 5 up – plus a bit 🙂

Good morning Raleigh! Just had the friendly neighborhood Time Warner Cable guy here at my home office in Raleigh. He was a very friendly helpful guy named Reginald.  Silly modem/router has been bouncing for the last 3 weeks and sometimes knocking me offline for up to 30 minutes at a time. When you live or die on the web, that is an eternity.

All hooked up again with a brand new sexy router and it’s hitting the specs nicely.

Get a modem speed test from TWC at http://speedtest.twcnc.com/

Of course, I also use http://speakeasy.net/speedtest/

I always have the sense that if a TWC site detects a TWC IP, then it may provide a slightly different reading.  Seriously, I’m NOT jaded. Well, maybe a bit.  Well, okay, color me jaded…  BUT, they came out pretty similar.

Did hear that they are looking at topping out cable modems at a new high – 100 Mbit.  That’s as fast as our LANs were just a few years ago.  INCREDIBLE.  Though that is the download speed.  I think for home use, they have it as high as 10 Mbit right now, but the tech indicated he thought that would also be increasing.  Not that I actually think that I need that much more.  Going from 1 Mbit to 5 Mbit was an awesome thing – and is about all I need right now.

Spoke to a friend last night who was very strong on the AT&T Uverse stuff though.  Said it just blew TWC away on many fronts.   Very well may need to take a look at that.  I believe the girlfriend talked with TWC and got my bill down to about 200/month.  From what my friend indicated, he’s got considerably more service for about half that price.  Of course, that could also be an introductory offer.  Need to do a little digging on that.  I think a large chunk of my bill is the extended service adn all the digital boxes around the house. Don’t actually even HAVE any premium channels in that bill.  DO have phone, cable and the high speed internet.  You’d think for a couple hundred bucks, you might have more channels just out of the “Seriously, I pay you over $200 a month – do you think maybe I could get a premium channel thrown in there just as a thank you??”

 

speedtest-speakeasy

Dell XPS 8500 – 3 Monitor Setup

Okay, so the guide says that it is possible.  This particular model shipped with an nVidia GeForce GT 620.  It sounds good on the surface, but discovered that with an i7 processor and 8 (sort of) cores running in this screamer, that this video card is worth a whopping 40 bucks.  Really?  With an i7 processor and a 2 terabyte SATA 6.0Gb/s drive in here, a $40 graphic card?

MSI Eyefinity R6450
MSI Eyefinity R6450

Well, most of my work is in coding anyway, so it’s not a huge deal. Though, I do drive 3 monitors.  Gotta have serious copy paste room.  On the GT 620, there are 3 outputs – one each DVI, VGA and HDMI.  So I ran the DVI, VGA and then without an HDMI adapter, slapped up a USB2 (ugh) video convertor.  Actually runs pretty decent but it could run faster if I happened to have a USB 3.0 video adapter around.

Now, the manual says that the onboard VGA could be used and I HAVE done that very successfully on other machines before. But this one? Not so much.  Get a dire warning about the multi-monitor setting when trying to use it . There is a setting in the BIOS that supposedly enables the onboard and one would THINK that by enabling that, one could use the onboard in addition to the nVidia, but no. In that configuration, I only get the onboard and the 620 isn’t even recognized and does not show up in device manager (under Windows 7).

So now, I have two options – well maybe 3. 

  1. Figure out what the heck the deal is and why I can’t use the onboard, though I *was* pretty persistent the other day and tried everything I could think of.
  2. Order an HDMI to VGA convertor – which I did. That’s probably the easiest if it works properly.
  3. Best option – replace the $40 video card with a REAL video card – using the AMD EyeFinity DisplayPort technology.  That’s where I’ll likely end up going one day. Started doing some research on THAT technology, but it was going to require a BIG spoon to get through all the geek sauce around that particular project.

Definitely need to take some time to get my head around the DisplayPort stuff. That definitely sounds like the way to go.  Thinking this monitor stand, this 22″ monitor, this EyeFinity and I should be good to go… Thanks to the fine folks at AMD for helping me through figuring out what I need – and it isn’t even that expensive – well, the card at least.. Try out their Eyefinity Setup page.