Dear friends,
Since you have been so helpful to me, I decided to mention another issue I would need help with. Computer hardware.
My mini desktop
For the past 4 years I have been using a small Linux box called a Penguin Wee 4th Gen GNU / Linux Desktop with some decent CPUs (4x 3-4130T CPU @ 2.90GHz) but a very weak integrated graphics controller and an equally bad sound card. I do have a very nice Dell UltraSharp U2412M 24-Inch Screen LED-Lit Monitor, but I think that my graphics card is to weak to cope with it as soon as video is involved.
This never bothered me until now because I am increasingly using videoconferencing, Jitsi, Skype, Whatsapp and other such applications for interviews, contacts within the community, etc. I also have an ancient Lenovo T60 laptop, also with Linux, and even that ancient piece of hardware runs Jisti and Skype better than my mini-desktop. Also, in October I am planning two videoconference with about 20 Patreon supporters each time for a Q&A with me.
I don’t do any gaming and I rarely have the time to watch movies, so I don’t need top of the line gear here. All I want is smooth videoconferencing. I already have a decent webcam (a Logitech C525) so I don’t even need a camera. And I have a great little microphone (a Zoom H1). I even have an excellent headset (a 7 year old Plantronics EncorePro HW301N from the time I was working as an over-the-phone consecutive interpreter). So I am all set except for the main device.
So, if anyone of you has some semi-decent hardware (especially with a decent graphics card!!) which you are not using or which you want to replace, I would be most grateful if you could send it to me. My dream? A laptop, of course, as my room and desk are already massively cluttered.
I you can send me such a computer, I would immediately install a lightweight version of GNU/Linux (either Debian or Linux Mint Xfce edition), connect my peripherals and only use it for communications.
If you can help with this, please email me at vineyardsaker@gmail.com and let me know.
Many thanks and kind regards,
The Saker
UPDATE: I have been contacted by somebody who will send me a laptop which will hopefully solve my problem. I think that this problem has been solved! Thanks so much!
The Saker,
Most of your kit is better than mine, except that I have a Zoom H2n, which I rarely use, but you never know, I might start doing video broadcasts too. I do have a couple of spare laptops, but none of them are new and you live in The USA. The postage costs, and the customs charges, and the delays, are such that the costs involved are greater than the value of the laptops. We live in The UK, and now the costs and the delays, are so great, that we hardly buy anything, or sell anything or give anything to the USA.
China, Japan and The rest of Europe are much easier, quicker, and cheaper to deal with, and The Chinese are just so polite, and their hardware Tech stuff is as good as anyone’s and a lot of us English have moved over there to do the translations and write the software.
We all think you Americans have gone a bit mad.
Do you have charity shops in the USA? in England, a lot of people drop off (give) their 5 year old laptops, which have stopped working due to Windoze 10 installing itself, and people buy them for £50 ($70) with the proceeds going to Charity. There is absolutely nothing wrong with them, that an install of Linux won’t cure (in theory)
I stil use Windows most of the time, as you (or your tech staff) probably know.
I also drive old British cars. For some strange reason, they keep on going.
Tony
The Saker, I may have metioned this before
My son has been running (his own company an ISP) since he started it with a mate from school when they were 13 years old, 16 years ago in 2001. It started off from computer games (and my son has made a lot of American friends – but also friends from all over the world where he has also travelled)
He met people from Ecuador (before he went to Ecuador), Argentina at a WOMAD festival in England…
They asked him, if he could run a South American TV show over the internet (now whilst admittedly the kids asking him to do this – they had most probably all played computer games with him when he was 13 years old (and most of them were war games – kids 13 years old – shooting each other on a computer many thousands of miles away)..and there was a lag – after fixing it (installed his own LINUX Server in The London Docklands) so there was no noticeable lag (the kids from all over the world sent a few dollars by Western Union – and some English kids stuck £70 through our front door and just walked off..and said Thanks..without even knocking
Some of them are still doing it…
He went commercial when he was about 19, and got his about 16 year old girlfriend (she looked a lot older – he turns up in his jeans and t-shirt looking all of 16 and not even wearing glasses) to meet his prospective New Customer flying in to London City Airport from Amsterdam. They skipped school – and they got the contract…..
Even I thought wtf?
He has lost his girlfiend and his school partner (well the first one) and got 1 and a half kids with the second one. …but still retained his business (and he still lives at home too). I’m going to be a Grandad again….another boy….
He no longer hosts in The USA. His Servers are just in England, Holland & Germany and he is almost certain to get a new contract, most of the costs paid up front (for the hardware, build,software and installation etc) These guys come from another part of the world (some Ex USA)
He could host your stuff, probably without anyone noticing (and probably a lot more cheaply and more reliably than Iceland)
But his business, is nothing to do with me, and I have no involvement with it…but you as an anonymous American – could simply ask for a quote – and he would almost certainly supply it and provide it. But I am not going to talk to him about this…, because I read and write on your website, and I don’t do nepotism. I believe in fair competition. I don’t care if you are an American or a Russian, and neither does my son.
He runs an enormous number of such sites all over the world, where the people write all the languages under the sun. There is absolutely no way he can moderate them. He is like a plumber maintaining extremely large pipes so they keep working. He has absolutely no idea of what the content is except over 99.9% is people talking to each other in all the languages under the sun. He can’t control it…and has no interest in it. A lot of the work he gets is from some other company half across the world just asking for price, specs and guaranteed bandwidth. He quotes them and supplies it. He has no idea what the content will be, and cannot possibly police it.
He just makes it work. Ask him for a quote. It’s nothing to do with me. Just pay your bills on time and you will get the 100% SLA (Service Level Agreement) as promised on his website and in the contract.
Tony
Tony_0pmoc:
My response is definitely OT, but I have to comment on the last sentence.
I also drive old British cars. For some strange reason, they keep on going.
Old British cars (old cars in general) don’t have that much electronics in them as new cars have. If you were going to refer to a new car as computer on wheels you would be correct. You can’t change a battery of many new cars without adjusting the battery and the on-board electronics. Forget about changing a light bulb of a head lamp. In many cases you need half a day – amateurs will need longer.
The integrated graphics card is mighty fine, as well as integrated audio.
In my opinion, the problem lies with a cluttered harddisk, and
I would recommend getting an SSD (SATA) drive and replace the old
mechanical harddisk. Then install linux.
Maybe RAM could be updated too (if you only have 2GB).
Hi Saker,
actually the mini PC you have is quite decent even by today’s standard. Intel Core i3-4130T is strong enough for “office” type of work and video conferencing. It has inbuilt Intel HD 4400 that is not particularly weak. Actually it is better than some low-end dedicated (discrete) graphic cards. I believe the source of your troubles must be somewhere else, not with the CPU or graphics.
As RATM has said, depending on present config, I would recommend upgrading RAM to 8GB and replacing HDD with SSD. That should bring whole new life into your PC.
Possible source of your issues might be: too low upload speed (must have “1 Mbps upload speed or higher”). C525 (webcam) – play with settings a bit – 720p might have too slow frame rate, try 480p, . You can also disable advanced features, such as RightLight and/or low-light compensation features. Try disabling auto-focus. You could also disable inbuilt mic in webcam. Poor lighting conditions can also considerably affect performance.
Regardnig laptop – T60 is very reliable but now really ancient. Actually it is possible to get refurbished Enterprise level laptop, such as Lenovo TP T430 or T440 with i5 CPU in very good condition (“A grade”) quite cheaply – for less than 200 U$. Some of those are even still under original warranty…
P.S. But of course – I hope you can get even better kit from kind donor …
Hey Saker,
I hope you get the hardware you need for the video conferencing. My 2 cents about videoconferencing is that most (pretty much all) of those applications run in linux as a web wrapper. Means the performance isn’t gonna be all that good thanks to the web overhead. As regarding distro, I think xubuntu might be better than mint-xfce since it’s more updated and supported. Also make sure you got the integrated graphics drivers are all set up, normally it’s done automatically, but I have no experience with mint. Your integrated graphics isn’t that bad by the way, but I personally don’t use conferencing applications, so I wouldn’t know how well they run on the intel HD 4400.
Some other tips:
– Avoid a graphical intensive desktop environment, aka one with glittery and fancy effects (cinnamon for example), I always run XFCE with compositor disabled and it’s great. (Xfce Options -> Window Manager Tweaks -> Compositor)
– As far as I know xubuntu is less bloated, more updated than xfcemint and has decent out-of-the-box support for many hardware configurations. You’re more likely to find an online solution if you encounter a problem. Debian is good btw, no bloat, another decent alternative is antergos (with xfce ofcourse).
– Optimal performance browser = Chrome/Chromium with HW acceleration (Go to chrome://flags, enable ‘Override software rendering list’ and GPU rasterization option). If you use web skype with this, it might become a bit faster. Firefox might only be a better option if you have few ram, (<3GB) it is however by definition slower than chrome/chromium. If you run those conference apps in browser definitely give this a try, it's real fast compared to firefox.
I wish you best of luck, if you could post your other specs maybe I could help with that aswell. (OS, ram, browser) You can check the quality of your HDD by doing a hdd scan. (gnome-disks works, select HDD click settings icon, benchmark) Don't underestimate the effect of a slow HDD on performance of an OS. If the sound card is intel hd audio then that's good too. (check with lspci)
@EVERYBODY:
Since several of you ask about my RAM, I have 16GB and most of that if free. So that is not the cause. In terms of disk, I run the Linux Mint OS and /home on a 128GB SSD hard drive formatted in Ext4. So that is plenty also. I also have a 16GB partition swap. I really don’t think that any of that is the cause.
But my graphics card has *always* lagged. I tried messing around with the config, but it just does not perform. As for the audio, I tested it today with my webmaster and while he hears me okay, I constantly hear like “crackling” on the line as if his audio was competing with his video for bandwidth. Speaking of bandwidth, I have got an excellent connection at about 100 Mbps up and 10 Mbps down.
So then we tried with my old T60 (second hand off ebay). All the sounds issues were better and my webmaster told me that he could see me fine. But I would see myself in the small control window with a huge lag.
What we plan on doing is a videoconference using Jitsi with about 20 folks connected each time. My concern is that my machine might just not be able to handle so many incoming audio and video connections (in Jitsi the actual connection is P2P).
Right now I get better results from my old T60 and from my Android phone than from my mini-desktop so this is why I figured by a process of elimination that my integrated audio and, especially, video must be the culprits.
Am I missing something?
@EVERYBODY: I have been contacted by somebody who will send me a laptop which will hopefully solve my problem. I think that this problem has been solved! Thanks so much!
The Saker
Three thoughts:
(1) Audio crackling could actually be a hardware problem (bad cable, headset, or faulty jack on the mobo), rather than a machine performance issue. Cables are cheap to replace, and you can test connectors by wiggling them with one hand while listening.
(2) If you suspect the integrated video is too weak, adding a decent video card could solve the issue. That would be a lot simpler than replacing the whole system. As you know, video cards also often have parameters and native drivers that you can fiddle with to maximize performance, so that’s another option.
(3) I would suggest using a performance monitoring tool like nmon to check your system during videoconferencing. It will report CPU, memory, network activity, resources, etc., and might be helpful for troubleshooting this.
Lastly, I’m guessing with 16GB ram your system isn’t swapping much, but if it is (nmon will tell you), that will slow things down. A swap partition on an SSD is fast, but will reduce its lifespan.
HTH
Dear Acacia
1) the crackling only happens when the other party talks. So it ain’t my hardware.
2) I don’t think I can add a card to my very small-sized system.
3) nmon is an excellent tool, I did not know about it. I will use it next time!
Thanks for everything,
The Saker
The Saker:
One aspect nobody wrote about is the driver of the graphics card or on-board graphic chip. Could this be the cause for the lagging? Maybe updating and/or replacing the driver may help.
With regard to a possible future notebook:
There are some companies that specialize in selling Linux Notebooks. If you want to stick to well known brands then I would recommend to get some Asus Notebook (most of Linux Notebooks of the following web site are Asus https://www.ixsoft.de/).
Whilst looking up the address of ixsoft I came across some Swiss company. Maybe someone can add some experience / opinion. Check their web site for further information: https://whyopencomputing.com/fr/5-portables-why.
Hello Saker,
Have you thought of the possibility your system is being deliberately throttled down by outside forces?
I read from a wide range of sources if the tools embedded in OSes and hardware permitting the three letter agencies a whole lot of mischief on computers.
I have stopped upgrading computers as out of the box, they work like butter until I visit some websites such as yourself and the PC just becomes a hog. Nothing due to your site, or the others but I have come to consider this the cost of acquiring knowledge.
God speed in getting a quick and lasting solution.
Tirius
@El
My thought precisely. I suspect Saker is using tor, which is in my opinion is heavily intercepted by the three letter “company”.
As a curiosity, I suggest constantly checking tor browser circuit used. you will notice it bouncing between mostly between five countries.
So, @Saker
Stay with pure Debian, older versions used to provide Vidalia. Vidalia was dropped in Jessie if I am not mistaken. I am guessing Tor people were forced to drop Vidalia because it gave the user to much control over the connection. I do not engage in any illegal activities, but I like to play with the stuff for the fun of it. If you have Vidalia please look at the graphic network jobbie and you will see the connection constantly being redirected through I am guessing Washington? or some place in central Canada.
This setup will requires that you have to have larger screen in order to monitor Vidalia and forcel vidalia to change the cricuit, reset the connection, and often Vidalia is forced to die.
So, the summary in my opinion is: no laptop will do. You need 27″or 30″ screen. Good video card like gaming nvidia supporting high resolution. This means you may need to look at 4k monitor with modern single hdmi or other (whatever is called) video connector which will drive the whole video shabang at much higher resolution than 1080P and high speeds. This is not cheap although it’s cheaper than it it used to be. I think LG has an excellent monitor for about $500. Nvidia to deal with that will cost you about $270 (3GB of RAM).
So going back to the rest of the system. What I suggest, you will have to do in steps. First install older Debian like wheezy, which I think still has the vidalia. Then upgrade debian to Jessie or stretch, but no matter what do, do not let the vidalia go away. If you like to use KDE and want to use 24hr clock etc, then stay with Jessie. KDE5, which is in stretch does not let you customize your Locale. You can use Firefox ESR or Mozilla, harden them by installing some addons like no script, etc… and you will be flying.
I noticed that using firefox esr is much faster than using Tor Browser, I am guessing there may be something funny going on in Tor Browser. You do not want to use Chromium/Chrome .
Have fun.
Regards,
I haven’t used Windows since 2007 when i moved to Linux. One of best decisions during my life. I recommend buying laptop without any OS and installing it with Mint or Ubuntu. There are lots of independent producers of laptops.
Here’s one…. (from Germany)
https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/index.php
This is not add in anyway. The point is i bought my latest from there and have had no graphics etc issues so far…
Anonymous:
As you’ve correctly stated Tuxedo is located in Germany. For two reasons I didn’t mention this company in my prior post (the Asus one).
1. Most Tuxedo Notebooks are more expensive than Asus Notebooks.
2. It’s not certain if Tuxedo operates outside Germany.
For the US check: https://system76.com/ (same type of notebooks, different name).
macbook pro, problem solved
With no offense intended, I until recently relied on a MacBook to run my highly resource intensive audio and video productions, and the machine melted down after about three years. The heat distribution on these things is appalling, they are not designed to do what they claim to do, and a lot of professional audio engineers are waking up to this big problem. I would advise anyone who wants to use their laptops for anything more than web-surfing to look at anything other than a MacBook. The products are intentionally designed to make you buy a new one after a few years, which can be a disaster if your work depends on the machine.
I know some cool guys in the USA who’ve made entire businesses repairing the logic boards of these things, and re-pasting the heat sinks, which requires removing the logic boards, which are not designed to be easily removed. They recently helped me out, and cheap, too! So there is hope for those of us suffering from the problem, however the design flaw remains. Google “MacBook Pro” overheating, or on YouTube. Double Click to Fix it are the guys I used and they were very helpful to me.
But I wouldn’t buy a MacBook Pro again.
eric:
Not that long ago I considered buying a Macbook Pro. Hardware and Software seem to be matched way better than Windows machines, especially with regard to photo editing and video editing Two aspects dissuaded me from buying such a computer:
1. The selected hardware would’ve been way beyond 2500$ and I wasn’t willing to spend such a ridiculous amount for a laptop.
2. Exchanging hardware is next to impossible. Last year I had read an article that said that the SSD is soldered into the device. So, you’re basically spending a huge chunk of money for a product and you aren’t able to upgrade it easily? (Environmentally friendly recycle-ability is not really given.)
As a result of my considerations I stuck with my Windows laptop.
after reading a couple of comments re. the mac, on my 2015 model macbook pro the SSD is not soldered on and you can find a refurbished one for a little over a grand. to every set up there are ups and downs but the macbook its just turn it on and go, works like a charm – cheers guys
https://www.apple.com/shop/browse/home/specialdeals/mac/macbook_pro/13
Cheers to you. You don’t appear to have read what I wrote. Which is par for the course, but please, don’t hawk Apple products here… A lot of us use Linux, just like the guys on the ISS…. How on earth you are unaware of the overheating issue is beyond me. Best regards, IEUSA.
Your system is fine for what you want to do. The sound problem is probably related to kernel module parameters (the equiv of a driver in a win machine). It is a known issue with intel hd audio which under the hood can be a few different audio chips. As for the graphics are you sure you are using the correct driver for x windows or the generic frame buffer one. I think you should visit linux mints related forums for proper configuration regarding your hardware. Which is definately strong enough for what you are doing. I think it is more software than hw related issue. T60 performs better probably because the hardware is old thus properly detected by linux mint hence the performance is optimal.
If you like a fast efficient linux version Antix is hard to beat and I find MX-16 (using xfce) is my personal desktop favourite. Also has the best forum.
I will send you a decent macbook pro laptop if you want it.
It’s 3 years old but works great… powerful graphics.
your friend in maryland