Dell 640m
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal
Woohoo!! Got my Dell 640m on Tuesday, 26th. It was kinda quick too, considering I placed the order on 20th (last Wednesday) night. And as mentioned in my previous post, I upgraded the processor to the highest possible configuration: Core 2 Duo T7200. The great thing about Core 2 Duo (over Core Duo) is that it has SpeedStep. Shame on me: I discovered it after I got the laptop; I showed my friend my processor spec and found that it was at 998 MHz.
My 640m came with MediaDirect installed. That damned thing took up around 6GB of precious hard disk space (2GB + 4GB free partition that I’m guessing is for MediaDirect). Hey, I only have 80GB, and that’s not a lot today.. so what did I do with a brand new Dell? Format it.. yeah, mainly coz I needed to re-partition it to my liking :p Anyway, it was a friggin’ rush.. the driver installation was a pain in the ass too.. I had to click each of them one by one, extract them to disk, before installing.. argh! Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: life
Internet is Not Technically “Down” Lah..
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal
A lot of people misuse the term “down”. They always say things like “MSN is down”. On another hand, some people say “cannot login to MSN”, which is technically correct.
You see, it’s highly unlikely that the Internet goes “down”. The Internet is a complex link of computers with numerous routes to get from A to B. But of course, some of these routes are fast (eg: the Taiwan link affected: Asia Pacific Cable Network), some are slower. So when one of these routes go down, as in unusable, Internet traffic use other routes.
When you cant login to MSN, or any other websites, what’s actually happening is that so many users are trying to access it, a “traffic jam” occurs. Yeah, you could say that “traffic jams” happen, but you cant say that the “road is down”.
Opera, Still the Best Browser?
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Technical
I installed Internet Explorer 7 a week or two back, and primarily used to when browsing MSDN. It is a far cry from IE6 - tabbed browsing, better standards complaincy, built in feed reader and etc. One of the things that I liked is that the favourites/history/feeds pane floats by default, not disturbing the pages. Another advantage IE7 has over Firefox, is it can reopen closed tabs. When you close IE7, you’ll be prompted if you would like to reopen the tabs the next time you run IE7.
I also like IE7’s installation. When you first start, it’ll show you a list of search engines that you could add to it’s quick search box.
Nevertheless, like all other Microsoft’s newest products, it sucks up memory. To be precise, memory usage is OK, but, it pages a hell lot of stuff on disk: over 100MB! This wouldn’t come as a surprise to Firefox users, as it’s memory usage alone can easily go over 100MB. Here’s a screenshot of IE7’s memory usage, with just 5 tabs open (a few minutes of usage):
I’m not particularly woried about the high page file usage now. But when I migrate over to my laptop, excessive paging is slow! Why? Cause laptops only have 5400rpm hard drives..
All in all, I really have to say Opera 9 is the best “download-install-and-use” browser. Plenty of functionalities built in, simple user interface
Tags: software
New Dell Inspiron, on THE Way..
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal
Woohoo!! Just ordered my Dell Inspiron today:
- Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 (2GHz, 4MB cache)
- 512 MB DDR2 RAM
- 14.1″ Ultrasharp TFT with TrueLife, 1440×900 resolution
- 80GB SATA HDD
- Windows XP Media Center Edition (free upgrade to Vista Home Premium)
Price? RM 3838.. hehe.. I got that price coz I bought it together with a friend, entitling us to RM 100 off, each. Am gonna upgrade the RAM, probably by buying at Low Yat. Dell’s prices are killer.. Now I’ve gotta figure out which parts of my PC that I can sell off..
Tags: life
Reality: No Spoonfeeding in this World
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal
Yeah, that’s what I learned from the Microsoft Boot Camp. Nobody in the world will really get out their way to help you. It’s not their bad, it’s reality. Much like Stephen Tang said, everyone has their own set of problems to worry about. You probably think that what I’m saying here is that Microsoft Malaysia can’t be bothered about us Student Partners.. but NO, that’s not what I’m trying to say.
The Microsoft folks that presented during the boot camp, undoubtedly have a long list of things of their own to do.. would you possibly expect them to spend hours and hours to presenting and teaching us about Microsoft products/tools? They can only tell you, “hey! there’s this cool Micorosoft tool that can do this and this”. What I, as a Studnet Partner have to do, is to learn it up myself. There’s no spoonfeeding in this world. The people in charge of “educating” the public about Microsoft tools aren’t at Microsoft Malaysia, they’re under MSDN.
Nevertheless, LJ (Chiu L J or something, a lovely lady from Microsoft Taiwan) did brief us a little on “presentation tips”, which of course I find useful. Other than that, I already sorta know most of the other things that were presented: WPF, .NET 3.0 and Office 2007.
We were taken to lunch at a French-Vietnamese restaurant at KLCC. Damn.. I can never picture myself shelling out that kinda money for that kinda food. Though they wer eusing PDAs, their service is still like shit. Food was, nothing out of the ordinary… heck, I can find plenty of stalls with nicer “wantan mee”.. theirs just had an extra 4 beef balls (that was tasteless as well)..
ps: a small redesign is on the way!!
Tags: life
