Tag: Hardware

Dangnabbit, of all the companies to have released a relally nice gaming laptop it’s Dell. The XPS2 laptop is a really shit hot piece of kit. We’re talking big display, reasonable battery life (2.5 hours), groovalicious graphics card (6800 go Ultra – faster than anything I’ve got). It’s got insane blinky lights. It looks like Dell have finally gone out and done something really, really nice. I would have been following ths piece of hardware if it weren’t for the fact that I’ve been distracted these last few months. Maybe I should buy one! that would mean it becomes reasonably priced for everyone else. My current guide price is a hair under €4000, which is really, really expensive.

I’ve been pricing apple laptops and there’s no way – even at a stretch I can make the 4k mark! I mean really – apple; you’re not trying here!

I broke down and bought a big hard disk based mp3 player for myself. The only problem is deciding what from the collection should go onto it. It’s only got a 60gb capacity, which means that it can’t take my entire collection.
Oh! the decisions! They’d melt your face.

The cell looks really nifty.
Cell Architecture Explained: Introduction

It’s a sin, the Matshita DVD-RAM drive is not supported by DVD Idle Pronor do they ever plan to, according to their web site. This means that I can’t watch arbitrary DVD’s on the laptop – which relaly tees me off. Intervideo has already eaten 3 region changes, it changed to region 1 last night while I was watching the great irken invasion (all hail invader zim!). I need to find out more about this mysterious drive and why it’s not supported – DVD Idles ability is unaffected on my desktop – I can read DVD’s without any problem, it’s just the bloody laptop that’s an issue. Time to go crawling the web in a big way.
Well that’s a kick in the knuts, it looks like the dvd firmware is encrypted, based on the information from Cynikal’s superdrive page. With that piece of news I officially declare shenanigans on Matsushita/Panasonic shame on you for really driving me insane with this. Mind you, I think there is some form of history in the drive – I changed the region to region 4, and I was able to still read all my region 2 disks, however when I changed it to region 1, I lost the ability to read my region 2 disks, unfortunately I’ve not got access to my region 4 disks this weekend, so I can’t check them.
I’m just gong to have to stick to my dell laptop for reading DVD’s then, which sucks rocks, as it’s just not as nice.

Ode to joy, I got to attempt to install windows 98 onto a PC that my next door neighbor salvaged from a dump (he works in the waste management industry – no he is not a trash man). Having spent about 40 minutes copying the content of the windows 98 cd onto the hard drive and starting the installation process – we wnet for some food, then came back to the installation process to find that some of the hard disk was corrupt. Either the drive had been damaged in the discard process or it was damaged in the first place. It’s been left scandisking with the surface scan for the remainder of the night. Another installation attempt tomorrow, I have an old hard drive which can be used for the installation if needs be. I mean it’s an ATA33 machine!
Scary old hardware you are evil!

I got an emergency call from my housemate this afternoon – his computer had hanged and was not rebooting. it kept bluescreening. He is of course using windows.
The problem lies in his hard drive. He’s only had the pc for a few months but the hard disk has started failing. It took several hours of trying chkdsks and running the maxtor drive utility before it was accepted that the drive was on the way out.
The only problem is of course that he has all of his vital email on it. And he does not have a recent backup of any of it; it’s all on the one .pst file on the hard drive. Thank you lords of outlook.
I’m a bit paranoid about my data. I have about 3 copies of everything important, one on the laptop I wander around with, one on a remote server and another on the PC I have at home. Then I’ve an almost complete duplicate of everyting on an external USB hard drive. I think I’m about 80% insulated from failure. I know if I lose one of the devices I may lose a few days work, but at least I have a chance of recovering most of it.

The Review, with the best quote of the article being:

Ironic as it sounds, Sun is the inexpensive leader in Opteron workstation design.

The Little Engine that Could is an article about the Linksys WRT54G and what you can accomplish with such a small piece of kit. I’m surprised that it’s not happening around the globe.

Well a couple of comments about the tackiness and I had to post a shot of the cover. This time taken with my digital camera, which does a better job than the phone on showing the brighness of the red.

I have two of them at my desk at the moment. I feel all geeky.