Juicing a Dell Inspiron 3593

“Ah my laptop is so slow! I’m going to throw this thing against the wall!!”

How often have you heard complaints like and similar to this and over the years? I’ve lost count by now. Which brings me to this post and how having a touch of knowledge can save money and make people a lot happier.

For most people, buying a laptop appears to be a major investment akin to buying a car. Not only that, most people decide that they need to penny pinch when buying the laptop, only to curse and scream when the thing is slow and doesn’t run like their friend’s MacBook does. Cue the “Apple make the best laptops” line or something similar.

The fact of the matter though is that for some reason I can’t understand, manufacturers still haven’t gotten the idea into their collective heads that no laptop should be shipped with its OS on a mechanical spinning hard drive. Having spinning rust is great for extra internal storage, but no OS should ever be forced to run off one of these anymore. The experience is downright terrible as Windows, Linux and macOS have all increased in size and complexity over the last years and spinning rust can no longer provide a sane usable work experience.

I do think that for most manufacturers, it is still unfortunately cheaper to include a spinning rust drive even if the rest of the laptop has really decent and usable specifications. That and/or the fact that bigger numbers tend to impress people more thanks to marketing. Two identical laptops, one has a 1TB mechanical drive and the other a 256GB SSD. Unless you know a bit about computers, most folk are going to go for the 1TB drive as it’s bigger and biggest must be better right?

The situation is improving though thankfully, but it’s still not the default yet to get a SSD in a entry level to low mid range laptop. Even though a cheap 240 or 250GB SATA SSD would literally double customer satisfaction ratings in this sensitive price bracket, the mechanical still stubbornly reigns as the default. I can only hope that with Windows 11 out soon, more manufacturers get the point and leave the mechanical in only the absolute lowest of the low devices. A small knock in profit margins would be more than offset by happier customers and less returns thanks to the speed of the SSD.

All this ranting finally brings me to my point. A colleague of mine owns a Dell Inspiron 3593 laptop with 10th Gen Core i7 with 8 cores, 8GB RAM, Full HD screen, DVD writer, LAN port, dedicated Geforce MX graphics and a 1TB mechanical drive, all wrapped in a nicely built and not too heavy chassis. Just one problem – the machine was running slower than a snail buried in concrete. Boot time to desktop, opening any application, you name it was an exercise in patience. Task Manager constantly showed 100% usage on the hard drive. I knew that this laptop could be capable of so much more. When the head of the maths department got me to look at new laptops, I told her that my colleague didn’t need a new one, just 2 parts to unleash the beast so to speak. One extra 8GB stick of RAM and one 500GB Samsung 980 NVME drive later and the laptop is keeping pace with the cheetahs now.

As a bonus, the mechanical drive stayed in and is now bulk storage for my colleague. Boot time went from almost 3 minutes and 25-30 spins of the Windows spinner down to under 20 seconds and 3 spins max. My colleague literally couldn’t believe her eyes when she saw that and felt the performance difference in the laptop. It literally was like a totally difference device was wearing the skin of the old laptop.

In closing, 2 simple upgrades that didn’t cost nearly as much as a new laptop not only saved us that cost, it prevented e-waste and made someone very happy. To paraphrase a tired old joke, the screw costs 10 cents but the knowledge of where to use the screw and how many turns to tighten the screw correctly costs $10000…

Thoughts on CCTV and Dahua

When I first arrived at my current job in February of 2009, I had a minor touch of CCTV knowledge from my previous job. The previous school I worked at had installed 4 or so analogue CCTV cameras that fed into a capture card in a PC that did recordings and playback etc. Resolution was low and quality was worse as due to the long runs of co-axial cable the cameras often dropped the colour picture down into black and white. It was not a pretty setup to say the least.

My new job seemed to have had some sort of CCTV at some point before I arrived, as there were a number of analogue cameras mounted on the front and side of our school, with a cabling nightmare that seemed to terminate in the security hut at the front gate. From the ramblings of our security guard, I believe there must have been one of those small industrial type monitors in the hut that they used to view the cameras. That being said, so far as I could tell, nothing was running anymore in 2009.

Sometime either in 2010 or early 2011, the business manager at our school got some people in to look at things, after which they suggested going the IP based route. Unfortunately a lot of cable had to be run by ourselves as that cost hadn’t been budgeted in for the install. That was a painful patch I hope to never repeat again in my life! We also took ownership of our 1st PoE switch to power a chunk of these cameras from the server room, whilst the rest would have to settle with PoE injectors in the various cabinets around the school. PoE switches were expensive and not something we could willy-nilly put into place, especially as we had just replaced many of the unmanaged D-Link switches with decent HP ProCurve 2610 units not too long before this CCTV project started.

Nonetheless, the Axis cameras went in, Camera Station was loaded onto a server and we started recording the school. As time went on, extra cameras were added internally and externally until we ended up with about 33 cameras. The cameras paid for themselves by providing evidence in disciplinary hearings and so on, but there was a growing number of problems with our setup:

1. Axis cameras were becoming more and more expensive to purchase or lease.
2. Camera Station licenses were becoming stupidly expensive and was capped at 50.
3. The resolution of most of our cameras was way too small to continue to be useful.

We were hobbling along until 2017 when our principal got schmoozed by a salesman at some conference. This office automation/copier company had expanded into CCTV and thanks to some persuasive talking by the salesman, our principal was determined to get them in to do an upgrade at our school. After getting mandatory additional quotes, the pushy company got their 5 year long contract. Such is how I was introduced to Dahua.

I had heard the name in passing before this when I read about how their equipment had been used in botnets to DDOS websites and services. I was apprehensive from the start about this system and it turns out I was mostly right to be concerned. Dahua has also found itself on blacklists thanks to Donald Trump, but that is another story.

The pushy company ripped and replaced our existing cameras which went quickly enough and then ran cable for all the extra cameras we had signed on for. I will say that the installing subcontractor did a very good job with the installs, they were neat and tidy and we had no issues with his workers interfering with our kids etc. I found the initial Dahua cameras to be a big upgrade resolution wise to the old Axis cameras and the build quality was also pretty decent. However, the management software side of things was and remains horrible.

Smart PSS is a horrible piece of software for managing your system, exporting recordings etc. It gets the job done but is buggy as hell and compared to Axis Camera Station, I found it severely lacking. Nonetheless, we got by. When our school built a new building wing the company was called in to expand the system and another 10 odd cameras were installed. We had now come to the point where we had filled the entire 64 channels on the NVR. With a remodelling of our sports pavilion and tuckshop in 2019, we had yet more cameras added to the system, necessitating an upgrade of the NVR to a 128 channel unit.

Since then the system continues to run, but we have had some minor issues. A couple of external cameras have had issues with weather sealing and subsequent faults, which have been replaced. A bigger issue that has cropped up however is the exact model of cameras we have.

When the original Dahua units went in, we were given units that had already been reached end of life status and were most definitely not current units in 2017. My guess is that the company had a lot of this stuff sitting in stock which they couldn’t move, so they made up specials to dump this stuff on unsuspecting schools. One model of camera hasn’t had a firmware update since November 2015, another since sometime in 2017. These 2 models comprise the bulk of our install, so we are left with cameras from a company with a known piss poor security track record that are not getting patched. Dahua’s answer to the problem mostly seemed to be buy a new model camera, although that seems to be slowly improving these days.

I am now looking at doing ad-hoc replacements of these older cameras from next year to at least try and maintain the security of my network. Thankfully since all the infrastructure is already in place, it is a straight swap and configure basically. I am also looking at implementing Dahua’s DSS Express software, which seems to be where they are focussing their attention on going forward compared to the horrid Smart PSS. In the next 2 weeks, I will be looking at doing a firmware upgrade on the NVR as well, as the current firmware is is close on 5 years old.

Without making this post longer, let me just say that I have learned some new things that I will talk about shortly in a follow up post.