SmallBizVista
Congratulations!
To Chris Aarons, Geoff Nelson and , Nick White on winning this august award.
I have just heard that BuzzCorps, that innovative Social Media marketing firm, has won the 2008 Wommie Award from the Word of Mouth Marketing Association....(read more)
What a difference a year makes!
In January of this year – at the 2008 International CES in Las Vegas, I had the privilege of being a guest of BuzzCorps at a Social Media dinner co-sponsored by Symantec.
Dining with us that night was Rhonda Shantz, Senior...(read more)
For real!
My friend Stephanie has a Dell Inspiron 1520 laptop. (Purchased last year before I knew her, else, it would have been an HP – believe that!)
Anyhoo, unfortunately for Stephanie, she inadvertently clicked on a particularly nasty piece of malware...(read more)
The Hewlett-Packard xw8600 Personal Workstation is the first ever recipient of The SmallBizVista.com Absolute Best Award.
Why?
The HP xw8600 is the best workstation on the market today. Period.
This workstation embodies the very best of the massive amount of engineering IP and manufacturing prowess HP has amassed over the past nearly four decades.
I have been in possession of a copy of this fine system for the past couple of months.
The HP xw8600 Personal Workstation
The xw8600 sits at the top of HP’s line of personal workstations, and is powered by your customizable choice of several Intel Xeon processors. As the top system in the workstation line, the xw8600 is configurable in so many ways that even the most demanding of users/companies will be accommodated.
Immediately, you notice that this system is built for speed, reliability, expandability, and power.
Unboxing
I took no unboxing pictures, for I was too excited tearing the box and setting the system on its testing pedestal.
However, some pictures of the unboxed xw8600 are below.
Target
The xw8600 is targeted at the upper end of the personal workstation segment. Indeed, if you require more processing power, you would have to get a cluster of these workstations together, or obtain budget authorization for a supercomputer.
For upper-echelon digital content creation producers, architectural design, engineering, oilfield and geologic/geophysical telemetry and analysis, and Wall Street types, this system is perfect. And without peer.
It is that powerful!
However, that power left me in a conundrum: how do I test such a system correctly, sufficiently reaching its performance headroom, and tasking components and subsystems in real world scenarios?
Have no fear though; I was up to the task.
Review Scenarios
In order to adequately review the xw8600, I set up a test scenario using each of the professions listed above. I also configured the system to serve as my command center for my managed services operations.
Scenario 1: Digital Content Creation
For the digital content creation or DCC testing, I used two tools to create content: Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium and Microsoft Expression Studio 2.
The xw8600 seemingly made a mockery of the tasks I threw its way in this scenario, though a double-secret script I was given utilized all eight cores, and pushed the CPU’s VU meters to 100%. Even then, memory utilization was quite low.
Scenario 2: Architectural Design
Taking a different tack, I decided to be use Microsoft’s Caligari TrueSpace v7.6 to create a dream home.
While free, TrueSpace is not for the faint of heart. However, it allows even design neophytes such as yours truly, John Obeto, to be really creative.
I started with basic design, and then moved to using it to create a basic animation of the building.
The fluidity with which the twin NVIDIA FX5600 GPUs handled 3D modeling is just impressive. I was able to manipulate and modify my design very fluidly, without hiccups.
After getting somewhat depressed by the difference between what I wanted in the home as evidenced by my creation, and what I can afford, I pulled the plug.
However, I will gladly let HP provide me with the dream home I designed, so that I might re-test the xw8600.
Scenario 3: Structural Engineering
I drew on my earlier-in-life training to use AutoCAD and the xw8600 in an attempt to perform flow analysis of a part I designed.
Conclusion: design using the xw8600 = easy. Me, I need more classes, these past couple of decades away from the field having caused my design skills to atrophy.
Scenario 4: Oilfield Services and Geological Analysis
Geological analysis is one of the sectors that must be on the radar of the designers of this system.
As a result, I decided to use the xw8600 as the workstation for an oilfield services engineer.
In order to do this, I employed the resources of a client, a global oilfield services company, in the setting up of a client station with their software suite, allowing a selected user to use the xw8600 for the following:
It was cool seeing this guy warm up to the xw8600 as it performed his tasks easily, and I was most pleased when he looked totally dejected as I took his new ‘toy’ away from him.
I have informed his superiors at a certain French oilfield services company that we will be glad to furnish their entire African operation with HP xw8600 Personal Workstations. For a small fee, of course.
Scenario 5: Financial Services
Another target for this system has to be the financial analysis market.
For my review scenario here, I downloaded several client software packages from online brokerages and proceeded to install them on the xw8600.
Running all of them simultaneously, and reviewing the result of the four-monitor setup, my untrained eyes went straight into information overload.
Calming down, I tried to track trends, stocks, and futures like the pros, only using imaginary money. The week spent doing that was a revelation since it came during a time of great uncertainty in the (US) stock markets, and it provided me with results that were surprising.
Scenario 6: Remote Operations Center Console
One of the reasons I use a powerful desktop, or a converted server is that I want to have a system powerful enough to allow me to monitor and control our MSP operations from my remote locations, if required.
Enter the xw8600. This computer didn’t blink. With all the stuff I threw at it, it just kept on working. At all times, I kept a watchful eye of CPU utilization, which never seemed to want to get over 20%.
Scenario 7: Mega-tasking
The hardest task I took the xw8600 through was during my virtualization tests.
Since the system had passed each of the tests with excellence, I needed something so out there that it would bring the dual X5492s to a halt.
Mega-tasking
Mega-tasking
Mike Diehl taught me that word.When I was up at the HP Personal Workstation Business Unit in Fort Collins, Colorado, a while back, I had the privilege of being briefed by Mike, who is a Product Manager for the high-end workstations for HP.
Describing the roles and computing activities required by purchasers of such a system, and the many tasks I would perform as a power user, Mike let me know that I had gone past the power user level to a whole new realm – that of a mega-tasker. The sort of user for whom the xw8600 was conceived.
A true light-bulb moment.
What better way to task this machine to the fullest than by employing virtualization.
I cleaned out the xw8600, installed Windows Vista x64 Ultimate edition and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2* on it, and proceeded to create virtual machines, all Windows Vista Ultimate edition.
I then proceeded to replicate all of the test scenarios above, apart from the oilfield services scenario for which I did not possess the necessary software, and would not be making a return trip to their offices before I posted this review.
After setting up each scenario in a discrete VM, I brought each VM online until I had six VMs running concurrently. It was a remarkable sight!
It was at this time that the xw8600 started to show some signs of actually working, as opposed to the seemingly mocking 12% to 18% CPU utilization, I was seeing consistent readings above 50%.
Yet, my TrueSpace animation stayed fluid, indicating that even with such a heavy load, the graphics subsystem was not even doing anything more strenuous than reading the Sunday paper!
I was impressed!
*For this review, I have not used any unauthorized software. However, wink-wink, nod-nod, I know the xw8600 works well, and very well too, with both Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V, and Windows Hyper-V Server 2008.
*Furthermore, following PDC 2008, I hope to bring you a review of the xw8600 running those hypervisors, and….tada…Windows 7 alpha bits.
Conclusions
One of the things we tend to forget as a result of the Lego-like nature of the PC and workstation industry standard architecture, or ISA, is that simply plopping best-of-breed components into a fancy box does not a true workstation create.
A workstation, by its very nature, is like a tractor for the task it is designed for, unsexy, yet powerful and reliable.
HP’s Personal Workstation line embodies the very best of HP’s heralded engineering heritage, and it shows. From the entry-level xw4600, to the silent xw6600, and now the xw8600, I have reviewed a line of well-engineered and constructed workstations. (The nightmare of the beating these babies take at the physical testing and dropping facility at HP’s Workstation BU still scares me…)
The HP xw8600 is the best workstation on the market today. Period.
In every aspect, this workstation excels: engineering, build, configurability, reliability, future proofing, support, and power. The indomitable way it resolutely completes assigned tasks is just impressive
I tasked this unit to the max, each time trying to get it to sputter in protest; however, I could not achieve that. It just worked. Very well. Reliably, too. Moreover, with extreme dispatch.
There is no doubt that it will take and incredibly monstrous task to bring this system down, or at least slow it somewhat. It will do the work assigned to it in virtually all task scenarios.
The results of our review of this system placed us in a quandary: what honor do you award a product that has excelled in all facets? A product that went beyond excellence? Indeed, a product for which excellence could be described as ‘mere’, and just a starting point?
With that in mind, the editors at SmallBizVista.com decided to create an entire new class of award, one to be given only to those products we deem as going way beyond excellence.
Since the Hewlett Packard xw8600 Personal Workstation is simply the best deskside system in the world, we have honored it with the SmallBizVista.com Absolute Best Award.
Review configuration
In my review configuration, this xw8600 came with
While this system looks loaded for bear, and for most humanoid inhabitants of this planet, it might be overkill, please understand that this configuration is just about at the midlevel of what the HP xw8600 can actually do.
Apart from the wicked fast Intel X5492 Xeons (top-of-the-line) and the insanely powerful dual FX5600 graphics (top, too), everything else was pretty average.
Look at the maximum configurations you can achieve in the xw8600:
All these with configuration options allowing for 80 PLUS efficiency ratings.
For this test, I used four monitors, an HP w2207h 22” monitor (variable view, portrait or landscape), a Viewsonic vx2235 22” monitor, and dual HP w2007 20” monitors.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank everyone that made this happen, with my most gracious thanks going to Amy Reardon and HP. Jeff Wood, Will Wade, and the entire Personal Workstation team at HP, Mike Diehl for expanding my vocabulary, and finally Marco Pena and Edelman.
Where were the adults at #1, Infinite Loop when the incredibly boneheaded decision to brick unlocked iPhones were made?
Where were they?
In my post here , I laughed it off, calling it malware. In a subsequent post here , I warned IT managers not to take...(read more)
Kinda looks real good right now, eh?
When the cash portion was about 22 a share, or the blue sky scenario of $34 per in cash, you turned it down. ...(read more)
There is nothing more in telling about an arriviste company than when they suddenly try to bite off more than they can chew.
Case in point is Google.
If this report in ComputerWorld in correct, and I have no reason to doubt that magazine, then Google wants to take on Mega-Telco by, get this, coming up with a system allowing
mobile operators to compete in an auction for the chance to offer you service and then switching from one operator to the next multiple times a day to get the best rate or more bandwidth.
Stop it! I’m so not making it up!
Is this arrogance, hubris, confidence in your technology, assurance in the righteousness of your now-discredited mission statement*, faith in your barrister, a belief in your manifest destiny, or worse, a deadly combination of all of the above?
Like death and taxes, one of the certainties of life in these United States is the sacrosanct nature of the business practices of Mega-Corp, each in their own spaces: Mega-Telco, Mega-Oilco, Mega-Energyco.
In no jurisdiction of Terra have these companies ever being reigned in. Even the United States government couldn’t do jack: hasn’t AT&T reconstituted?
In plain English, you just don’t fuck with them.
Now come these clowns from the Googleplex in Mountain View trying to accomplish a Sisyphean task of taking down Mega-Telco!
If they think that Microsoft is a formidable opponent, then taking down Mega-Telco is tantamount to the difference between playing with a slingshot, and undertaking an interplanetary Earth-return mission to Jupiter.
FYI, Mega-Telco co-wrote the book on bribery lobbying!
They never play fair, and they are very proactive in squashing gnats.
I am gleefully looking forward to seeing how this unfolds.
*Mission Statement: Do no Evil. Do no evil my a$$!
Aka, go away.
On Thursday, September 25, 2008, a three judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C., confirmed what I called back in August of 2007, namely, there isn’t any $1.52 billion payday for Alcatel...(read more)
I have about had it with Firefox 3.
Yes, I do use it as browser #2.
For goodness sakes, the incessant shutdowns, the page errors, sheeez!
Light posting for the past several weeks due to being sick and completing a major migration at the day job.
I’ll be retro-posting on issues on my mind during that time.
Mauricio Freitas, Editor-in-Chief of Geekzone, New Zealand’s most trafficked tech (and, probably most trafficked overall) website, has been invited to Lost Wages for a Zero-G flight either this weekend or next week.
A Zero-G flight!
There is a lot of truth to the rumor that I am jealous.
For I have had those kinds of aspirations for nearly 3 decades!
Have fun in Las Vegas, M!
Nice. And fast too.
“The quad-core Intel Xeon Processor 5400 Series consists of the new X5492, X5470, and L5430 processors, the fastest of which claims a clock speed of 3.4 GHz”
Now look at the graphic below: I have been zooming along with a dual-socket...(read more)
adacosta (Andre da Costa) has been selected as the winner of the HP xw4600 Personal Workstation Giveaway by AbsoluteVista.com.
Congratulations, adacosta!
The Microsoft SharePoint Administrator’s Toolkit v2.0, the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, and the Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2 (eval) have been released into the wild by Microsoft.
At LogikLabs, we use the MDOP, and are...(read more)
According to a yum-yum on Cnet, it is a problem with people, not the code.
Say what now?
Describing Phalanx2 as "a self-injecting kernel rootkit designed for the Linux 2.6 branch that hides files, processes and sockets and includes tools for sniffing a tty program and connecting to it with a backdoor."
Okay…..
This drone then goes on to try to explain that while Linux may be ‘inherently more secure than Windows, as long as admins fail to secure it, it will be just as vulnerable.
That so, Sherlock?
Isn’t it amazing how the cattle try to moonwalk away from the truth every time?
Listen, dodo, that explanation holds true for every operating system.
However, since Microsoft has made ‘Secure by Design’ an architectural priority in Windows, the attack surface has decreased, and the number of vulns reported for Windows has been the best of any OS these past couple of years.
Contrast that to your stuff, yoyo!
You can now see why Linux, however much these clown bray about it, can never get traction with regular humans.
Can you imagine telling a business owner that the reason some criminal in some former Cold War country made off with their data is because it’s all about the people, not the code?
If you installed Linux as the operating system for your business, or your clients' business for that matter, he's right: it's your fault!
Linux, the favorite of the ‘live-under-the-stairs-in-my-grandma’s-basement’ crowd.
Not ready for business, Linux is!
O Oh!
I guess it isn’t a cakewalk to produce an OS, any OS, after all, is it?
When those arrivistes from 1600 Amphitheater Parkway in Mountain View announced their all-encompassing mobile phone OS sometime in the past year, the mainstream media harlots went agog...(read more)
I have just been informed by Xavier Lanier, the Supremo over at Notebooks.com that he is giving away four lappers.
Yes, that is not a typo! ….(read more)
In January of 2007, HP announced, and shipped the first generation of TouchSmart PCs. Positioned squarely at the entertainment and lifestyle spaces; it was far reaching in its potential, and probably just slightly ahead of its time.
The IQ506 represents the next generation of TouchSmart computers, and it shows in this stylish, yet functional system. The current TouchSmart software is more fluid in use, and provides seamless, yet dynamic tactile controls to the user.
Since August 5, 2008, I have been using the HP TouchSmart IQ506 personal computer.
This system is a single piece system with wireless mouse and keyboard combo. Touch functionality is enabled throughout.
Unboxing/OOBE
The TouchSmart IQ506 came in a very distinctive, and attractive yellow shipping box made of some plastic/composite material. This huge box, and with, a first for me on a system box, Velcro® bindings, contained the TouchSmart IQ506, the easily attached base, and an wireless keyboard and mouse combo in the well-padded case.
(NOTE: This yellow box is special packaging for the review units, as they have to withstand several packing and re-packing cycles during the course of the reviews.)
The OOBE setup manual, a TouchSmart user manual, and the usual support and licensing documentation were in the box as well. All required cables and cords were also in the box. A screen-wiping cloth completed the items therein.
I snapped the base onto the monitor/system unit, connected the power, and got the show started.
First impressions
I had shied away from all-in-one personal computers in the past since I assumed, correctly, that the tradeoffs were not worth the convenience of a multi-piece system.
No longer.
A look at the specs on this system reveals why:
All that in an all-in-one unit!
Testing Scenario: Entertainment
Since entertainment is one of the segments targeted by the TouchSmart, I decided to test it using lots of audio, video, and photographic content.
I went t the archives in The Floating O’odua, and transferred nearly 20,000 songs to a folder on the hard drive. I broke down my already sorted directory structure, and had WMP re-sort the files.
I copied movies to the hard drive, ripped some movies, and copied raw footage of movies, my animated movie I have been working on. I also copied several gigabytes of photographs to this system
Media Hub using HP TouchSmart Software
The HP TouchSmart system is a two-factor solution: apart from the touch functionality embedded in the TouchSmart PC hardware, HP TouchSmart software also drives this system.
The TouchSmart Software Suite is optimized for entertainment, and consists of the following components: music, video, pictures, RSS feeds, calendar, notes, and is controlled by the Touch Browser, an icon of which is embedded into the front of the system and a shortcut placed on the desktop.
Touch Browser. This allows two-finger scrolling, and single-finger selection of items. I was able to scroll easily through content listings, and select as easily.
TouchSmart Music. This is an easy-to-use music player. It presented my music in two album views that were customizable, and made the creation of playlists as simple as (finger) drag and drop. All music controls using the player were within a finger’s touch away.
TouchSmart Video. As simple to learn and use as the Music Player. It takes advantage of the embedded webcam and array microphones to enable the creation, which can be uploaded directly to YouTube.
TouchSmart Photo. TouchSmart Photo gives uses editing capabilities, with viewing, resizing, album creation, and slideshows at one’s fingertips. I found the use of touch to be much more intuitive in content creation than using the mouse.
Media hub, using Windows Media Center
After using the TouchSmart software, I connected the system to a cable feed and turned it into a media hub.
As a Windows Media Center device, the IQ506 performed as expected. DVR, HD content shone.
Media creation
In order to create content, I installed my consumer stalwarts on the system: Pinnacle Systems Studio 12, CyberLink DVDsuite, Reallusion iClone Studio 2.5 and CrazyTalk Pro 5.
Original video content was shot using a Canon HV20 HD digital camcorder, while a Canon Rebel XTi DSLR and a Nikon S52c point-and-click camera were used for still photography.
I created a movie containing animation from iClone Studio, HD content from the camcorder, and still pictures.
I then had Studio 12 transcode for Blu-Ray, regular DVD, and the Zune.
(Please look my forays into high-end content creation using the HP xw8600 and Adobe Premiere Pro shortly….)
In a word: sweet!
Unintended use: The Small Business Desktop
Why should consumers have all the fun?
One of the reasons I was intrigued by the TouchSmart series was touch functionality.
I have been a proponent of (Microsoft Windows-based) Tablet PCs since I realized the productivity gains afforded by the Tablet functionality while using them. As a result, I wanted to see if those sort of gains could be realized using the TouchSmart.
I am pleased to report that the TouchSmart does provide those productivity gains.
In my tests of the HP TouchSmart IQ506 in a small and medium business setting, from a business executive’s desktop, to an inside salesperson’s system, and culminating as a physician’s desktop adjunct to a laptop/mobile system, the IQ506 shone. Brightly, too!
It was fast, capable, ran Windows Vista™ smoothly, and didn’t create or run into incompatibility issues with software written for Windows XP.
For these business scenarios, the IQ506 met or exceeded expectations.
For the executive, being able t manipulate data and information directly using his/her own digits is without a doubt, a godsend. Perusing BI and CRM dashboards using Microsoft Office Excel and Microsoft CRM is a lot easier when you can point and select directly with your finger.
The salesperson is able to view several pieces of information, and move through several levels of that information effortlessly.
Finally, for an ongoing project, our test subjects the physicians actually preferred the TouchSmart to a standard PC since it presented the same interface as their Tablet PCs. In fact, I was informed that replacing all desktops used by the physicians and mid-level providers was under consideration, and might make it into their budget in 2008 EOY for fiscal 2009. Yeah, it was that good!
For this scenario, I installed Microsoft Research’s InkSeine.
Missing/wish list
Despite all this, the TouchSmart seemed to be missing the following:
I found myself wanting to augment the use of my fingers for close-in work, and using a stylus from one of my Tablet PCs for most of my business desktop trials.
Conclusion
The HP TouchSmart IQ500 series of systems should be your next media hub, and lifestyle system.
It is currently the best all-in-one system on the market, with the innovative TouchSmart technology serving to improve your entertainment experience.
It passes the OOBE test exceptionally, and then goes on to deliver more than expected based on that same combination of Windows Vista and HP TouchSmart functionality.
We award the HP TouchSmart IQ500-series the SmallBizVista.com Business Ready Award of Excellence.
I went into the test of this system looking to see if I could bring the benefits of TouchSmart technology to by core constituency, the small and medium business spaces.
I believe this system will deliver to the business desktop the same gains in productivity we now see in the use of Tablet PCs, of which my personal favorite is the HP tx2500 series.
I am looking forward to pitching the value represented in this device to my clients, also making them aware of the future proofing built into the IQ500 series: the Touch functionality that will be inherent in Windows 7.
System highlights
In addition to the system specs listed above,
Acknowledgements
My review of this system was speedy, and very much unexpected, for which I thank Marco Pena unconditionally. All it took for him to facilitate this review was a request.
Furthermore, he and Andy Lutzky were able to make Garrett Gargan, the Product Manager for the IQ500-series at HP, available to brief me personally on this worthy device.
