NEO laptop fail & some tips on what laptop brands to avoid

It finally happened. After almost a year of random shutdowns and a failing fan, my best friend’s NEO GL31 laptop made one epic fail, refusing to either powerup or even charge from the AC adapter. It’s been almost a month since installing Windows Vista SP1 on this machine when it made another shutdown last night. It seemed to do well running Vista, with the power settings set to “Low” to prevent the CPU from going full throttle and trip the faulty CPU fan, which leads to overheating and the shutdowns. The NEO GL31 is now sitting on the technicians table at a trusted repair center at the Porta Vaga.

This whole experience with NEO and their sub-quality laptops had me Googling last night, only to find one horror story after another. NEO Manufacturing and Services appears to have a huge product quality issue problem. NEO’s laptops have only been growing in popularity in the country due to their sometimes ridiculously under-priced items, often being 10,000 pesos cheaper (or more) for the same spec laptop from Asus, Acer, or Compaq. While it’s easy to blame NEO for such badly designed notebooks, the products they sell are only “re-branded” items from a company named COMPAL. A little Googling around will show that Compal has other local companies in Asia and Europe that re-brand their laptops as their own. If you’ve got a complaint with the build quality of your NEO laptop, blame Compal. I just hope this isn’t the normal Chinese “quality standards” that Chinese companies set upon themselves.

For those of you in the market for a cheap laptop, here are my personal pointers on what to avoid:

• The brand/company name is placed on a sticker - reputable computer companies have their logos and branding either embossed or recessed on the plastic or metal casing of the laptop. Also check if the branding is balanced out or aligned. The GL31 unit my friend got had the “NEO” logo skewed on the cover. You can tell a lot about a company based on how they handle things aesthetically with their products.
• Can you Google the exact model? - If you can’t get the specific laptop via a simple Google search, chances are you’ll have a hard time looking for other people to help you out if problems arise in the future.
• No Company support pages and legacy downloads - a reputable brand will always have a fully searchable support website where you can download drivers and updates, even for out-of-production models. A good company should always provide a way for people to download their drivers from their site, not relying on the OEM driver CDs the units came with. Case in point: try searching for GL31 on NEO’s website.
• Flimsy plastic - NO, it’s not supposed to buckle or easily be depressed by finger pressure.

It’s simple to say “you get what you pay for”, but that isn’t always necessarily the case. There are several great laptops out there that you can get for almost the same price, if not slightly more expensive than a NEO, with great specifications. Just last year, I guided my brother-in-law to an Asus X80 with a great classy finish and commendable specs for under Php 28,000.

As always, and especially when you are considering a purchase worth tens of thousands of pesos, a little research on what models to consider will go a long way to giving you “peace of mind” when it comes to owning a laptop computer. DON’T go to store and buy the first thing you see, DON’T trust the sales-speak of the store personnel who may be wanting to offload some old inventory, bring a piece of paper to write model numbers on, or take photos of the models you are interested in with your cellphone for further research and comparison. And, DON’T buy NEO!

Dual monitors with an NVidia 7200GS and Leopard

My friend decided to get some upgrades yesterday for his iDeneb Leopard rig - apart from a nice 600 watt power supply, we also got a Sparkle NVidia 7200GS PCI-Express video card with 256MB of video memory. Coming in at a measely Php 1,150.00 (or about US$23), the video card is superb deal for anyone looking to significantly boost graphics performance from the built-in Intel GMA950 graphics of the AsRock 945GCM-S.

I have prevously purchased and run this same video card for my old Tiger rig at the science laboratory without any problems, except for full dual-monitor support. My old rig was based on an AMD processor and some crappy motherboard provided by the school. I surmise limits back then to Tiger installations and driver issues were the root cause of my dual-monitor woes.

For this new purchase, installation was pretty painless on the iDeneb Leopard install. I just removed the old Natit.kext from the Extensions folder and reinstalled v0.2 of Natit Dual with kextHelper. A reboot into the BIOS to disable the onboard GMA950 video in favor of the new PCI-Ex card was needed to make it fully functional and immediately recognized by the motherboard as the primary graphics adaptor on the second reboot. No problems booting into Leopard - both VGA and DVI ports work, rotation is enabled from the Displays pref.pane, and Quartz Extreme / CoreImage was fully supported. No messy edits to the EFi strings were neccessary.

Although it may not be the best performing video card for games these days, the Sparkle NVidia 7200GS is a nice step up from the built-in Intel graphics and highly capable of handling general purpose work at high resolutions. Definitely recommended for those on a tight budget.

Running Leopard on an AsRock 945GCM-S Motherboard

If you’ve tried installing Leopard using an AsRock 945GCM-S Motherboard and get the dreaded reboot loop during startup or incessant halts on the “using 10485 buffer headers and 4096 cluster IO buffer headers” line, we’ve found a way to make your Leopard 10.5.6 installation work with this motherboard.

It appears the normal BIOS of the motherboard won’t allow you to boot the Kalyway unless you place the “cpus=1” flag into your startup. That flag signals the kernel to use only one core in your multi-core system, resulting in a slower than expected system. While you can boot into the Kalyway install disc with the cpus=1 flag, you’ll never get the system to work unless you choose the “SSE2″ option in the customize dialog of the installation. It will successfully install but you’ll either have to manually type in “cpus=1″ during startup or modify your com.apple.Boot.plist file. If you can live with a working a system with just one core working then I guess this method is good for you.

Using the iDeneb 1.4 distro will give you a successful boot into the install DVD and even completely install the system unto your hard disc, BUT you’ll be getting the common halt on the ”using 10485 buffer headers and 4096 cluster IO buffer headers” line (only viewable in verbose mode), and it appears there is no way to make the system work.

Incidentally, the OSX86 Project Wiki lists the AsRock 945GCM-S motherboard as “does not work any method”. Sad indeed especially when you consider that the 945GCM-S is a great board for overclocking. My best friend’s rig is currently running a 1.6GHz Celeron E1200 @ 2.6GHz and pretty much stable. I’ve seen reports of other users using this board to run the Celeron E1200 at over 3.0GHz successfully with a better fan than the stock one included by Intel.

However, it seems a simple BIOS mod will make this AsRock board workable for any install and multi-core enabled. OSXCores lists a modified BIOS version 1.10 for the AsRock 945GCM-S that will enable you to successfully install and run Leopard using either iDeneb or Kalyway (we successfully tried and is currently running off an iDeneb 1.4 10.5.6 install). You’ll just need to flash your stock BIOS with the modified one. Pretty painless for experienced users. Noobs should stay away and don’t complain to me if you brick your system!

UPDATE: It seems OSXCores is now charging for downloading and making BIOS mods. I’ll have a mirror of the modified BIOS once I find the original file we downloaded a few weeks ago. OSXCores website has been updated, you can now download the modified version 1.10 BIOS file from OSXCores Desktop page, just look for 945GCM-S. New BIOS mods will require a donation.

The Alexa Experiment (Part 1)

I loath Alexa. It has never been a favorite site of mine due to an incredible knack of getting statistics VERY inaccurately. For starters, it lists my main website, iBaguio.com - a Baguio City online city guide and travel portal, as having 65% of site visitors coming from the USA with only 15% from the Philippines. The real deal, based on my Google Analytics and OneStat reports, is 60% from the Philippines and 17% from the USA. Now how did Alexa get such a botched reading for my site visitors?

You see, as most smart webmasters have realized, Alexa is a joke.

To prove this point I have engaged in an experiment to see how easy it is to “game” Alexa’s system of ranking site importance and traffic. Alexa uses the Alexa Toolbar (for retarded Internet Explorer users) and Alexa Sparky (an add-on extension for Firefox) to guage how many times a user visits a specific site, logging pageviews and time-on-site to generate their trippy ranking. There are a number of blog posts elsewhere that claim substantial increases in a site’s Alexa ranking if the Alexa Widget is installed on the site’s pages. The premise is, the widget will report back to Alexa.com any pageviews by the site irregardless if the user is using the Alexa Toolbar or not. Sounds promising.

So now the experiment begins. I’ve just recently moved my Baguio City site from the ibaguio.net domain to ibaguio.com and decided to put the widget unto the site’s sidebar, which is present on all pages. As of 01 April 2009, iBaguio.com’s Alexa rank is in the mid-28th million. I’ll be tracking the ranking progress weekly to see if there is any effect to the ranking with the widget installed. As a counter-experiment, I’ll also be doing a usage expirement with AbandonedInsanity.com using Sparky on Firefox. AbandonedInsanity.com will not be using the Alexa Widget for comparison.

This experiment is un-scientific and should not be used as a basis for your faith (or lack thereof) in Alexa’s Ranking System. Let us begin!