Weather station Prologue IW006-DCF (Clas Ohlson 36-5364)

Well... on this one. Let's start with the good.

Advantages:

• Very nice weather station with color display that does not need Internet to show the weather! Everything else I found wanted to show me some nice pictures, temperature and forecast from some weather service. I can easily use my 3 years old tablet for this, if I wanted.
• Indoors and outdoors temperature and humidity readings. It has wireless remote sensor that pair with the station without any problems.
• Constantly lighted large screen where the time numbers are the largest - yes that is what I want!
• Radio time synchronization - it has the most stable synchronization from all of my clocks with such feature.
• Battery backup.
• Pressure sensor with some sort of forecast.

Disadvantages:

Universal thermostat CE UT-200

There is not much to write about it. It is an digital thermostat that one can easily use to maintain temperature below or above certain value. Conveniently enough, depending on the "on" and "off" setting you can set the thermostat in heating or cooling mode.

We have small room attached to the house that is not centrally heated and during the winter gets easily quite cold. We use it as gym, so maintaining a temperature around 5 degree seems reasonable enough (one can easily heat it better but of course it reflects on the electricity bill). I have hooked a regular 700W passive heating element that has its own digital thermostat, but that one is only regulating the temperature of the element.

I have Raspberry Pi that receives the temperature readings from outside and the room and in principle I can just use a regular remote switch that could be controlled by the computer. Except, that my philosophy is that I want to have a centralized system that controls the stuff around the house, but I want it to be also autonomous. I have the network version of the home automation module (Tellstick NET) and on couple of occasions when the internet connection was lost things could have got confused... Luckily, the local version (Tellstick Duo) is running independently. Unfortunately this one is also prone to failures, despite that it is running backed by UPS. So here is how I ended buying the thermostat.

Here are two graphs from the monitored temperature in the room (green line) and outdoors (red line), just to illustrate how well it works. The thermostat is set to switch on the heating below 4.5 and switch it off again above 5 degree Celsius.

Since it works as expected, I just need to mention the single disadvantage - it speaks German ;-)

How long does it take to warm an engine up?

From time to time in some car or other forums, pops up a question of this sort...

How long does it take to warm an engine up?

Most of the answers are reasonable but lack any concrete data. Here I provide, as reference, some data for Renault Clio III 1.2 TCe 100.

At the time of the experiment, the car was less than an year old, at about 10 000 km, with all original parts. The numbers were collected from the OBD-II port via ELM327 Bluetooth type adapter and Torque Pro (OBD 2 & Car) for Android.

• ambient temperature about 0 °C
• air humidity almost 100%
• city terrain (50 km/h speed limit) with no congestion, (just one slow guy in front of me for a while), 
• AC on. 

For better understanding, some relevant parameters were also monitored i.e. engine RPM, speed and turbo boost.

In summary:
It took about 13 minutes and 8 km to fully warm the engine coolant without rushing. The engine is small and probably one can see that the temperature increase is smaller while the engine is idling (on the graph - shortly after the 2 km mark). The thermostat opens at 89 °C first, then drops to 79 °C and converges with attenuating oscillations between 80 and 84 °C

Lenovo ThinkPad T61 (7664R6G) - just a few words

In general, perfect laptop for the work place and occasionally as a mobile computer. Quite good performance under WinXP SP3 and AVG Free 8.5. 2GB of RAM and 2 cores makes it easy to run Linux in a VirtualBox to avoid the dual-boot solution. Decent wide screen resolution and proper options to scale the external display (for presentations).

Windows XP from scratch:

I have used WinXp Pro SP2 slipstreamed installation following this guide: XP SP2 Clean Install - Less Trivial than expected.
The key points are:

1. change the SATA from AHCI to Compatible in the BIOS.
2. install the usual way.
3. install the Intel Chipset Support and Intel Matrix Storage Manager Driver for Windows XP from the support page.
4. reboot and change back to AHCI in the BIOS.
5. if everything is OK continue with the rest of the drivers and software.

Note: This will also destroy your recovery partition and the ThinVantage boot manager or whatever it is.

At the time when I did the installation, the wireless drivers were a bit buggy and ware not recognized by the ThinkVantage Wireless Assistant - so that one left aside and currently I use the build in Windows wireless assistant.

I have skipped many of the tools from the package including the Power Manager and Active Protection System - pretty much the minimum.

So far, the only problem I have encountered is: during charging process of the battery. The GPU temperature get too high and the BIOS speeds up the fan that runs constantly during the charging time (even after that), until I put the computer in sleep mode and awake it again or restart. It seems the the area and sensor in question does not get cooled by the fans at all, because the CPU and all the other areas get quite cool but this particular remains unaffected.

As temporary solution, when the noise bothers me, I run TPFanControl that works quite well on the particular issue.

Clean ThinkVantage System Update cache folder:

The System Update program stores the downloaded packages in C:\Program Files\Lenovo\System Update\session. You can delete all folders and files but keep ...\ststem\, ...\temp\ and these two files: QuestResponse.xml and updates.ser.

Pros:

• very good performance, 2GB RAM...
  
• USB ports on both sides, 1Gb wired network...
• convenient dimensions - close to A4 paper format - it fits easily in a bag with paper folders, articles, printouts etc.
• hot key to switch of the screen light - (well, I am quite sure when I will not need the computer for a while, so standby/hibernate settings are set to manual)
  

Cons:

• nothing that is worth mentioning.

Links:
Lenovo support forum: T61 and prior T series ThinkPads
Review IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad T61 Notebook
Essential Hotfixes and Tweaks

GRT-815M hard disk replacement

Well, finally I have replaced the original hard disk on my laptop with a larger, faster and quieter one - Samsung SpinPoint M5 160GB 5400RPM 8MB 2.5" (HM160HC). I will just add few pictures that illustrate the simple procedure.

There is only one screw (marked with a red circle on the first picture) that secures the hard disk bay. Unscrew it and carefully pull out the module from the computer. The rest is self-explanatory.









Of course, now the computer boots and runs faster, although, I haven't done any performance tests for comparison. The old disk was very quiet but one could still hear the heads positioning during I/O, despite the noisy fans, while the new one is completely silent in this respect.

Cloning the Windows XP OS to the new disk might be slightly out of the topic of this post but I will suggest anyway this article: Beginners Guides: Cloning WindowsXP. After the cloning (I have the original OEM Windows XP Home version that comes with the model) everything went smooth and I was not even asked to reactivate the Windows.

2008.02.14: Just to add some numbers for statistics purposes.
Although the clicking noise from the parking heads of the new hard drive is not noticeable at all, I have decided to turn off the HDD APM with hdparm -B 254 /dev/hda. As result the disk gets a little bit hotter in comparison to the case with the default APM settings:

• default settings: 35° - 38° C.
  
• APM turned off: 38° - 41° C.

Further reading:
clicking hard disk II
clicking hard disk

CPU throttling

Well, again it is not specific for the model but if you are looking for whatever reason to slowdown your computer - here is one option: winThrottle.

Personally, I was looking for alternative solution to reduce the noise from the fans on the laptop, in other words to make the CPU cooler. From my experience with version 005, the result was that throttling did not allow the computer to heat significantly. So, in long run terms (leaving the computer for long time on idle) with the tool or without the tool - it didn't matter. Similar were the results under Ubuntu Linux with the tools provided by the distribution.

Anyway, the tool is still useful if you want to slow down your PC to play some old or flash games.

GRT-815M - cleaning from dust II

This will be the second time writing about how to clean the computer from dust. Look first in the previous post for the details since this time i will only add some pictures on how to open the computer.

1. Loose the screw from the left-hand side of the computer.

2. Slide the plastic part left to release it from the body and then lift it up. On this stage one can clean pretty much most of the dust from the main fan that is easily accessible. To reach the second one, unscrew the screw marked on the figure and proceed to step 3 to lift the keyboard.

3. One more screw and you can release the keyboard (you don't need to disconnect it), lift it and you will have full access to the fans. .








Here I have found better guide for PCG-GRT100 that goes to extreme to remove the fans from the main board. It is a perfect illustration how to disassemble each part, step by step, so one can decide to what extreme to go.

P.S. On the pictures above the computer is really in working state. The purpose was to convince the readers that the whole procedure is not difficult at all as long as you have some basic technical skills and confidence. Don't try to experiment like this the first time you open your notebook. The proper (and safe) way is to remove the battery before you open the computer. I keep doing it my way, because I think it works better to clean the dust. Once the dust is blown by the spray it is sucked and blown away by the fans, so at that point I will just advice you to be careful!

GRT-815M - common temperature values

I have found on internet many people looking for referent data to check if they computers perform well. I have posted already couple of times the common values of the temperature sensors for the model in a previously mentioned user forum, but they are quite difficult to find. This is the main reason why I am writing this blog.

The values are for an idle computer running under Windows XP Home SP1 or SP2 (AC power): use Mobilemeter to get access to the readings of the sensor elements.

quote from my original post:

Recently (2006. Oct. 8) I have opened it and cleaned the dust that was accessible from what one can see under the keyboard and now when the computer is idle the CPU temperature is 45c (dropped from 47c before cleaning) - the temperature in the room is between 22 and 24 degree Celsius - about 40% humidity - (this is not a joke - it matters). Under heavy load the temperature goes up to 69c-70c and stays there. The HDD temp. is usually 35c and goes up to 39-40c under heavy I/O load. I get the same numbers under Windows XP and Linux.

P.S. Consider 45c as a record - I have never had this temp. since I bough it.