smert.net

Yesterday I received my Everex TC2502 Green gPC. I paid a whopping $200 for the PC which included a mouse, keyboard and a small pair of speakers. Windows doesn’t come on this PC there is a fairly new Linux distribution called gOS that comes preinstalled. Sadly I missed the UPS man and I had to wait until he came back today. After it arrived I quickly opened it and started setting it up. The first thing I noticed was the fact that the PC is very light in comparison to my Sony Vaio. The next thing I noticed is that my mouse didn’t have a ball Further inspection reviled that the small plastic cover broke. Specifically the two tiny pieces that once twisted into place actually hold it together. I ended up using a few pieces of Scotch Tape to hold it together.

Next I started to boot the system. I didn’t get to see how long it took since I was using a KVM to share between my other computer. It did seem to be kinda slow. The next thing I was prompted with was several screens from the Ubuntu installation process. There were four total, one for the language, keyboard, timezone and user creation. Once that was complete it came into the login screen. After I logged in there was nearly an immediate prompt for my password again to run a program with elevated privileges. I’m not sure what it was doing since the next thing appeared was a license agreement for Google Toolbar.

Everything now was setup and ready for me to use. Since I forgot to plug in a mouse and Ethernet cable before I booted I stopped to do that. At this point I notice my screen resolution is messed up. There is a small black bar on the right side and the dock at the bottom goes below the actual screen. Next I tried and open a terminal to take a look at the xorg.conf file. The terminal (xterm) font size is so small it was actually very hard for me to read. Then I end up looking for some sort of screen configuration tool but I don’t find it. I end up using CTRL+ALT+minus key to lower the screen resolution. This ends up working but it isn’t properly fitting in the screen still. Now the problem seems worse since it looks like it has zoomed in and isn’t fitting all on the screen. I do end up finding the tool to change it (Screens and Graphics) but when I test it the result is huge FAIL. I ended up giving up since I plan to install Ubuntu. I’ve composed a list of annoyances so far.

• The dock on the bottom of the screen is very slow to scroll from left to right.
• The dock also flashes and blurs as an effect for hovering. It is very slow and looks like the PC can’t keep up.
• It seems to be pretty slow for a PC. I was expecting it to be but not this slow.
• There is an annoying high pitch squeal coming from the PC which is driving me insane. I want to become an hero.
• The tech support web site doesn’t create new entries in the history so you can’t press the back button to return to the previous page.
• There is no calculator application installed.
• The speakers have no headphone jack on them.

It seems that you can void your warranty by opening up the PC. There are two tamper stickers on the back that warn you to read the warranty first. The PC comes with a 1 year limited warranty and tech support. The technical support is limited to the reinstallation of the gOS operating system from the DVD. There is a FAQ which users can ask questions and hopefully get them answered by someone. Overall my first impressions are kinda disappointing so far.

So I decided to look for more things that weren’t working. I decided to play a DVD because there are good chances that it wouldn’t work. I know under Linux you need libdvdcss to play them and from my understanding it is illegal (DMCA). So to my surprise the DVD started playing right away! Yes libdvdcss is preinstalled. I don’t know legal ramifications might come because of this (if any). The sound quality from the speakers seems pretty good actually. You can’t really crank up the volume enough to see if they distort. I couldn’t find any place for a volume control besides those in Xine.

Since this 10 minute review has actually turned into much more time (almost 4 hours) than I originally expected I might as well point out that I did fix a lot of the problems I had in the beginning. The resolution can be set properly if I make the changes under Configuration –> My Settings –> Screen –> Screen Resolution. Once I did that the dock got messed up and I had to resize it and move it around to get it to display correctly again. I found that I could crank up the FPS for the dock so that it didn’t appear to running so slow. You can change that under Configuration –> My Settings –> Advanced –> Performance –> Framerate. I turned mine up to 200FPS. This made a huge difference. I changed the menu bar to make it smaller and stretch it so that it doesn’t scroll anymore I couldn’t figure out to make the menu go any faster unless it was displaying only a few icons. Still, when it got towards the ends it slowed down like it was before. It turns out the high pitch squeal wasn’t coming from the PC but from my dryer. It must be the position of the room because the sound doesn’t appear to get any louder going towards the dryer. The PC is EXTREMELY quiet. I don’t even hear the fans. The computer has been on for about 4 hours and I just felt the back. It is very cool and the power supply isn’t warm at all and I can’t notice any warmth on my hand. It really seems like I just turned it on for the first time since it is so cool. Somethings are still a little slow to open but it doesn’t seem as bad as it was in the beginning.

I do wonder how frustrated a regular user would be to deal with these issues after buying this PC. Anyone new to Linux might not have a good overall impression. I will end up putting Ubuntu on here since I don’t care for Enlightenment. Overall I am happy that I got a PC for $200. We will see how the installation of Ubuntu goes before I consider buying more of them.

Update (04DEC07)

It has now been a week since I got my new TC2502 and I’ve had it long enough to make comments about the performance. Since then I’ve reformatted and put the latest version of Ubuntu on it. During that time I played several flash videos and the PC was able to keep up. There were some hiccups during playback as I tried to do other things while it was playing. I also tried playing several videos from www.entensity.net (NSWF) with moderate success. The video will play but you can’t do anything while it is or it will become choppy which is quite frustrating. Later in the week I was playing with Slackware 12 on my laptop and it seemed to be a lot quicker than Ubuntu.

I decided to switch from Ubuntu to Slackware in hopes of getting a tiny performance boost. Now video on the TC2502 is unplayable but it isn’t completely the computers fault. There is something wrong with Xine because the same thing happens on my laptop. I really need to get videos working again to at least a playable state. When I use Google Reader the CPU comes very close to maxing out scrolling through my feeds. So far in Slackware I haven’t noticed the choppiness as much as I did while using it in Ubuntu. Overall the performance is just above bearable and at times it does become poor.

I’ve finally noticed that there is heat coming from the power supply. I probably didn’t notice last week when my heat was turned up. It still is very quiet but the computer is about 3.5-4FT away from me and it sounds silent because my Sony Vaio is that much louder. If I get closer (2FT) I can hear the fans over the Sony. I’ve also turned up the speakers loud enough to make them distort and they sound just as you would expect, like crap.

I decided to void the warranty today by opening up the case to see if I could upgrade the CPU which seems to be holding me back. The CPU appears to be integrated into the motherboard. Everything is PATA and I didn’t notice any SATA connectors. They mentioned SATA in the BIOS and I thought maybe they would have some inside. The motherboard is small and doesn’t appear to be a standard ATX. The only fan inside the case is the one from the power supply. The board only has 2 PCI slots and one is already taken up by the modem.

Right now I’m having difficulty recommending this PC for anything but moderate use, not something you would use every day. It would probably make a better low end file server or one hell of a router when combined with a switch. Also I’ve started to read up on Xine and Slackware 12. It seems that I’m using the Vesa driver and not the via driver. I’m going to try compiling a new one from source and see if my situation improves.

Update (04DEC07 @ 9:06pm)

Ok so I’ve followed the directions from here and compiled the driver from source. The directions are mostly correct except the diver isn’t called “via” anymore. When it asks for that part the driver is now called “openchrome”. It seems to have helped out A LOT. I hate to be such a flip flopper but I’m going to wait another week or so before I make my final comment on performance. I’ve played the same videos again from Entensity and they are at least doing what they did on the laptop. Before the colors were messed up and they wouldn’t play. Now they play but sometimes it crashes X and other times they freeze. I’ll be ditching Xine and going with Kaffeine probably. It seems to be running a lot smoother now and things are opening faster. Although Google Reader still eats up a ton of CPU this might be normal (and not a very good test). The flash videos still take up about the same amount of CPU usage as before and it seems now the they have the hardest time keeping up compared to Xine. Xine seems to be using about half as much CPU time as a flash video.

Update (07DEC07)

I finally got around to recompiling xorg-server from source today. I followed most of the directions from this post. Now Kaffeine doesn’t crash while viewing videos but as a side effect I can’t CTRL+ALT+F-KEY to another console. All of the movies have played flawless so far and it seems Flash has the hardest time keeping up. I still get hiccups with Flash at different intervals and they must be IO related since the CPU isn’t maxed out during the time. I’m going to see if this continues but so far I got the performance boost I needed to make this a working desktop.

Update (23MAY08)

A few months ago I ended up selling this PC. The main issue was how slow the CPU was and how frustrating it was to have to wait for certain applications to start. Choppy videos were no good either.