Ranitomeya dorisswansonae, Amazon poison dart frog
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Dell Inspiron 400HD Zino
Setup and Power

Jim Carter, 2009-12-17

Setup Activities

Peripherals for Testing
BIOS Setup

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

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:

Local Administrative Setup

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

Repartition the Disc

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

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:

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.

Power off (S5) 0W
Suspend to Disc (Hibernate, S4) 0W
Suspend to RAM (S3) 3W
Doing nothing (graphics on) 29W
Playing audio 29W
Running integer benchmark 40W
Memory test (max CPU load) 43W

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).

Ranitomeya dorisswansonae, Amazon poison dart frog