JON HONEYBALL
Jon switches off Marillion to discover why his PC is running so dog slow, finally drops Dropbox and has a bit of fun with the Mac Pro configurator
Jon switches off Marillion to discover why his PC is running so dog slow, finally drops Dropbox and has a bit of fun with the Mac Pro configurator.
Ker-chunk. Ker-chunk. Ker-chunk. The sound of doom from a desktop computer. But before we dive into what happened, let’s consider the back story.
In the lab, there’s a work area for testing audio products. It houses some expensive and specialist equipment, including oscilloscopes, arbitrary function generators and two audio analysers: one from Audiomatica in Italy called Clio and a vastly more expensive item from Prism in Cambridge called dScope Series III.
Clio does a sterling job for day-today measurements (generator, FFT analysis, third octave and so on). The dScope does all of that and a lot more, including digital I/O on all the main formats (S/PDIF, AES/EBU). It can do everything in the analogue and digital domain, including rarefied tests such as eye-height patterns and the injection of dither noise onto a digital stream. In short, these are serious pieces of test equipment. Both need to be connected to a PC via USB, and both come with custom software to drive the instrument and interact with it.
Due to the nature of this, you don’t fiddle around with the host computer if you can avoid it. It’s a device that’s kept as clean as possible, doesn’t have extraneous crapware splattered upon it, and where you are cautious about the Windows upgrade cycle.
That’s why we don’t change the host computer very often. The PC has lurked in the lab for about seven years now, and was a top-of-the-line Dell XPS tower with a Core i7 processor and 32GB of RAM, along with a pair of 1TB Seagate Barracuda hard disks. Originally these were set up as a mirrored pair, but at some point they got split to a drive C and drive D.
Unfortunately, the machine had just got slower and slower over the past year. It wasn’t clear what was causing it, and when time is tight you tend to battle on with what you have, hoping to find a spare hour or two some other day. Yes, this is the reality of real work. It would be nice to have infinite time, but you’ll agree that this rarely happens.
Finally, the machine got so slow that I dived in. There was nothing to uninstall, everything seemed fine, Windows wasn’t throwing errors and there was nothing untoward in the system logs or management tools. At this point, I did the logical thing – uninstalled the relevant hardware control software, took it out of service and slotted in a year-old Dell XPS 27 all-in-one device that was being used for software testing. One big clean-up later, and the new touchscreen XPS 27 took over the role. The older XPS, with its still-gorgeous Eizo 30in calibrated monitor, was relegated to the side of my desk.
This morning, I decided it was time to sort it out once and for all. I spent the best part of an hour poring through the diagnostics tools and couldn’t find anything amiss. It wasn’t malware, it wasn’t some dodgy third-party driver, everything was clean. And then I heard it – kerchunk, ker-chunk, ker-chunk. Now I’ll admit that I probably missed it at first because I was playing Marillion at a robust concert level through one of the big hi-fi systems in the lab to help while away the hours, this being a Saturday and me being by myself, meaning no one could scream about my unhip choice of choons. But when I heard the noise, the diagnosis was instant and brutal: the hard disks were on their way out.
Nothing to be done with the current devices, so I pulled them out and pressed a spare IronWolf 3TB drive into action. This left one final problem: getting Windows 10 back onto the machine. I had an unopened, original Microsoft Windows 10 Pro installation box on the shelf, complete with badged USB stick for installing. I fired this up and started the install. It asked for a licence key so I took it from the Dell case. This didn’t work and my woes were now really starting. It turns out that the licence key on the XPS was for Windows 7 Pro, and the
Windows 10 installer wasn’t having any of that. No matter, I had the unused licence key for Windows 10 Pro in the box. I applied that and soon I had Windows 10 original build up and running.
Time for Windows Update. Ah, it decided that 1809 would be a good idea. I allowed that installer to run, but each time I tried, Windows decided that it wasn’t having any such shenanigans and rolled back to the original version. I downloaded the 1909 updater and ran its installer. That did the same. I won’t mention the various other things I tried, all of which failed. And, of course, when they failed, the error message was a crypto string of nonsense with no meaningful explanation.
I had no idea why original Windows 10 installed just fine when 1809 or 1909 failed so resolutely. I even tried the various “make my own media” options from the Windows 10 site, and they fell in a heap. At this point, I decided that Joe Public would have just given up. I’m not quite there: as I write, after another spin of the Windows updater tool, I’m being reassured that it is “Preparing to configure Windows. Don’t turn off your computer”. It’s been like that for an hour.
Maybe it’s time to put Linux Mint on the machine, and simply step away from this utter nonsense of broken Windows 10 updates. I have no issues with such updates in a corporate environment but, as I have said before, Windows 10 Update in the home/SME environment is utterly unfit for purpose.
Dell XPS 15
I had another Dell shopping accident this month. I like buying from Dell for many of the same reasons I like buying from Apple. I go to the website, tweak the configuration, place the order and have it delivered in a few days with minimal hassle. And if you’ve been following any of the recent podcasts I’ve been involved with for PC Pro, you’ll know that the dreaded Black Friday event came to pass.
I really shouldn’t have looked, but the temptation to check out the offers was just too strong. And there I saw it – a Dell XPS 15 7590 laptop. The spec was spot on: ninthgeneration Intel Core i9-9980HK with eight cores at up to 5GHz; 32GB of DDR4 RAM; a 1TB SSD; and a 15.6in Ultra HD (3,840 x 2,160) OLED DCI-P3 compliant 400-nit display. But the bit I really wanted was the 802.11ax Wi-Fi chipset.
Testing Wi-Fi things means you have to follow the standards, and 802.11ax has been out from a number of vendors for a few months. Unfortunately, no one has yet seen fit to make a USB 3 stick for 802.11ax, relying on the motherboard chipsets to deliver the capability. So buying this laptop would give me a client for 802.11ax testing. The cost of this shopping accident, including three years of next day on-site warranty? £1,940 plus VAT. I confess I also bought the external dock extension unit, which provides charging, gives an extra bunch of USB sockets, video and Ethernet, and means that this can be left in the lab and the main charger can be left at home.
The boxes arrived a few days later. All I can say about the XPS 15 is wow. The OLED display is absolutely stunning – more than bright enough, although not as eye-searing as my external toughened Dell laptop I described a few months ago. The blacks are blacker than a very black thing. The colour rendition is amazing, although I haven’t yet had time to hook it up to the Klein K-80 colorimeter and the industrystandard SpectraCal test software to measure it properly. The DCI-P3 claims are certainly not wide of the mark, though. Performance is scorching as you can imagine with an eight-core i9 processor and 32GB of memory. The price was somewhat of a bargain, being many hundreds of pounds cheaper than usual due to the Black Friday discount. And I hope to get at least five years of solid work out of it. This is, as they say in the popular vernacular, a result.
Dropping Dropbox
Some months ago, I expressed my ongoing frustrations with Dropbox, specifically Dropbox Business. A product that’s “business grade” only in its pricing. Almost everything else about the software is decidedly weak, verging on horrible. My renewal price for this year was going to be the thick end of $2,000, and so it was time to look elsewhere. As I have mentioned, we’ve moved wholly to Synology, and use VPNs as needed. I actually made a simplification to this last week by employing the automatic and seamless site-to-site VPN capabilities provided by our Cisco Meraki
“Windows 10 Update in the home/SME environment is utterly unfit for purpose”
infrastructure. Now I only need to use a VPN tunnel when away from home or the labs.
Shutting down my account with Dropbox, however, was an exercise in frustration. I guess I should have expected this, given the weakness of its Business offering. But there were some gotchas that made me curse. For example, it turns out that your account will auto-renew, even if you have shut it down. To kill this off, you have to talk to customer support via online chat and get them to do it. They couldn’t shut down the account a week early; I had to wait until the renewal date, at which point the account would collapse in a heap because it hadn’t been renewed.
On that date, I could then log in and tell it to delete my business team, and the accounts reverted to free Dropbox Basic accounts. Fortunately, the data held within hadn’t been deleted or lost. I then managed to upgrade the two remaining Dropbox accounts to Dropbox Plus versions, paying £10 a month for each while we decide whether to keep them on or not. It’s useful to be able to browse stuff from my iPhone using Dropbox, so some home items will remain in the account for the time being. Anything business related, however, is being removed.
I’m sad that Dropbox Business turned out to be a sour experience. However, it has some astonishingly bad design decisions, especially around sharing of items when you want to send something to a client. And the overall management process of the team wouldn’t be out of place in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Couple that to a truly eye-watering cost per seat per annum, and it was time to move on.
Apple Mac Pro pricing
There’s a game that a few of my friends play. It’s called “How high can you go on the Apple configurator?” Whenever Apple launches a “New Shiny” (as we call whatever it is that just hit the Apple store), there’s a rush to get the highest price possible.
Then there are the usual ribald comments of “so are you going to buy one, Jon?” This is because I have form for only buying the most maxed-out devices available at any one time.
However, I can show restraint. I am typing this into my aging iMac (Retina 5K, 27in, late 2014), which, with the original Core i7 processor, 32GB of RAM and a decent disk, is still doing service some six years later. I would move to an iMac Pro, but I fear that would top out at over 13 grand if I followed my usual form and ticked all of the boxes. While that’s quite a lot of money, it would sport an 18-core Xeon processor, 256GB of RAM and 4TB of SSD storage.
Things get much more exciting with the new Mac Pro, though. Some years back, I bought the then-new “waste basket” Mac Pro, with its eight-core Xeon E5 processor, 64GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. It still does sterling work today, hosting virtual machines running Windows 10 that are used for testing purposes. It may have cost thousands, but was a good buy at the time.
Enter the new Mac Pro configurator. The price starts at £5,400 for the poverty specification version, but you know you really don’t want that. A 28-core Xeon processor sounds much more fun for an additional £6,300. And it would be embarrassing to stick with the standard 32GB of RAM, so why not
choose 384GB for £5,400? Or 768GB for £9,000? Or really stretch for the Big Daddy version of 1.5TB of RAM for an additional £22,500.
By this point, there’s no need to be stingy. A couple of Radeon Pro Vega II Duo cards with 64GB of RAM each come in at a tidy £9,720. For storage, the standard 256GB is somewhat laughable unless you’re going to host everything on superfast Thunderbolt 3 arrays. So let’s go for the 4TB of internal storage for a meagre £1,260. An Apple Afterburner card is an additional £1,800, while a set of four wheels costs an enlightening £360. At this point we’ve reached the magic sum of £44,019.
But we’re not finished yet. This is without a display, and Apple’s nano-texture glass Pro Display XDR 6K screen is £5,499. Plus £949 for the stand (or £189 for a more likely VESA adaptor). Ignoring some extended AppleCare, and we’ve arrived at the heady price of £50,467. And no, I’m not buying one.
There’s the small matter of the 50 large involved, but this is truly a bargain if, and only if, you need this amount of sheer power. There are some use cases, and they don’t involve Word documents and PowerPoint presentations. This is the very highend audio and video production market. Or finite element analysis and computer modelling. 1.5TB of RAM allows you to run an awful lot directly from memory, and the 28 cores should be nailed at 100% utilisation every working minute of the week. The display is particularly good value because the nearest rival that I can think of, the astonishing 31in Flanders Scientific XM310K monitor, will set you back $45,000 ( pcpro.link/306flanders). Truly, if you need it, it’s worth the money.
I’m sure the new Mac Pro will be bought by two types of customer: those who actually need this extraordinary level of power and those who simply want a status symbol. Expect to see it on the desks of Hollywood producers and other captains of industry forthwith. And I’m certain it would look just faaaaaaaabulous on the desk in your Docklands pad. And another at your Cotswolds retreat for the weekend. Just in case.