Dell Inspiron 400HD Zino
Setup and Power

Setup Activities

Peripherals for Testing

• Dell 1902FP monitor (borrow from Jacinth)
• Using the keyboard and mouse that comes with it
• Speakers (borrow from Jacinth)
• Microphone and headphones from videoconference set

BIOS Setup

These are the BIOS points that are important for me; most were left at the default values.

• When in setup. the fan comes on semi-high, a little noticeable.
• You have to fill in the service tag (serial number) yourself; Dell doesn't do it.
• Clock was set to civil time -0700, appropriate for Dell's factory. Changed to UTC.
• It has Secure Virtual Machine (SVM) mode (enabled).
• AMD PowerNow! mode enabled (CPU speed/voltage modulation).
• UMA Frame Buffer Size: Auto (can set to 32Mb to 512Mb, actually used 256Mb).
• SATA: AHCI (could be ATA if the operating system can't do AHCI).
• Audio: enabled.
• LAN: enabled (boot ROM disabled).
• Power management:
  • Suspend to S3 (not S1).
  • AC recovery Off (what to do after power failure).
  • Low power mode changed to Disabled (was enabled, prevents WOL).
  • WOL enabled (Wake on LAN) (but it doesn't wake, see below).
  • Timed power on is available but not activated.
• Boot order: started as hard-disc, USB, optical; I reversed the order: optical, USB, HD. To configure, use up/down arrow to select a device, press enter, you get a menu of all the devices, up/down arrow to select one, press enter, the two devices are interchanged.

Run the Dell Diagnostics.

Hit F12 during POST to get the boot menu, and pick Diagnostics. While doing memory diagnostics, which probably maxes it out, the case is hardly warm to the touch, but the fan is in its "noticeable" mode and the machine (excluding monitor) is drawing 43W. The fan is putting out a respectable amount of warm air. The power brick is warm but far from hot, maybe 15C rise from ambient. When the diagnostic tests the "High" fan speed, it is really noisy. Random seeks: if you put your hand on it you can feel the disc motion, but it is not audible at all. While the long disc test is running, put media in the optical drive and the card slot, because these are tested next. All diagnostics passed. (It didn't include the graphics card.) To exit from diagnostics, use the mouse and click the X (close) button in the upper right corner of the window.

Memtest86+ Overnight.

It reports:

• Athlon-64 1600MHz,
• L1 cache 64K 12500 MB/s
• L2 cache 512K 2424 MB/s
• Main memory 1791M (minus 256Mb video RAM), 2171 MB/s
• Chipset AMD K8 IMC (no ECC).
• Settings: RAM 400MHz (DDR800), CAS 6-6-6-18, DDR2 (128bits). (have to find out what all these mean.)
• It ran 10.25 hours, 9 passes, no errors.

Local Administrative Setup

Before starting Windows or Linux, add the MAC, IPv4, IPv6 addresses and hostname to:

• /etc/hosts
• /etc/ethers
• DNS
• MAC filter on Jacinth
• DHCP fixed address on Jacinth
• hostgroup.db

Repartition the Disc

Before Windows starts, shrink its partition. As received (sizes in 10⁹ bytes):

• 1. Dell Diagnostics (0.041Gb)
• 2. Instant Media (NTFS, 15Gb)
• 3. Windows Vista (NTFS, 234Gb

Will the SuSE rescue system and installer boot? Yes, boots.

The size of the disc is nominally 250Gb (250 × 10⁹ bytes). The installer uses units of 2³⁰ bytes, commonly called GiB, and in that unit the total disc size is 233GiB. Mind the units when laying out the disc.

This partitioning was set up using the Linux installer's GUI:

• 1. Dell Diagnostics (0.041Gb)
• 2. Instant Media (NTFS, 15Gb)
• 3. Windows Vista (NTFS), shrink to 64Gb
• 4. Extended partition (remainder, 170Gb)
• 5. Linux swap (4Gb)
• 6. Linux home (remainder, ext4, 149Gb)
• 7. Linux root (ext4, 16Gb)

When I've done as much testing in Windows as I want, I'll move the Linux root into partition 2, home into partition 3, merge 6 and 7, and use them as a large media storage area.

Power Measurements

I measured the Zino's power consumption. These figures exclude power for the monitor: an old Dell 1902FP, which draws 33 watts when active and 6 watts in standby mode. In production for the audio client role the machine will not have a monitor. The numbers also exclude the powered speakers: 14 watts.

So the Zino is not as low power as a Koolu, and it requires a fan for proper cooling, but compared to a normal desktop machine it's quite low. I estimate that a second core would require zero power when idle and 12 to 15 watts when in use (not tested; this is a single core CPU).