Craig's Musings

Sunday after about 4pm is "Craig Time" - from 4pm until I fall asleep, I get to stop being a dad, a husband, a manager, an employee. I'm "just Craig", and "Craig Time" is a lot like "Hammer Time", only different. I usually fiddle with something - hardware, software, media stuff, it's hard to say - but the theme is always "fiddle".

Tonight's fiddle project was to see if I could bring my Power Mac G4 from the year 2000 back to life. Turns out all it needed was a little cable wiggling - it had been moved from Redmond to Bellevue to Great Falls, VA back to Redmond and I guess something came loose along the way.

I hadn't done an OS upgrade on my Power Mac since I upgraded OS 9 to OS X 10.1 WAAAAYYY back. It had a decent amount of hard disk space - the boot drive was 36GB, plus it had a 74GB second drive, both SCSI and 10,000 RPM - I spared no expense back in 2000 to make my dream video editing machine. But the drives were cluttered with a sea of crud, after futzing around forever trying to figure out what mattered and what didn't, I finally said "to heck with it" (in reality, I said something different, but this is a family friendly blog ), and decided to clean install Tiger.

I am amazed how well it is performing - dual 500MHz PowerPC G4's aren't exactly up to par with the dual core 2.33GHz Intel proc in my new iMac at work, but it's not bad. And amazingly, I plugged my Power Mac into a spot where I had a Windows machine - and the video card from 2000 supported my 24" Dell monitor at 1920x1200 (albeit through a HD15 (VGA) cable, not DVI) and input mostly worked with a Microsoft mouse and keyboard (the mouse freezes a little from time to time). And as if hooking my poor ancient Power Mac up to a Dell display and Microsoft input hardware wasn't enough indignity, I also pulled two 256MB 133MHz SDRAM DIMMs out of an old Pentium III machine, and put them side by side with the two 256MB 100MHz SDRAM DIMMs that were in my Power Mac already - and it didn't halt and catch fire. So now I have a gig of RAM instead of a mere 512MB - Tiger seems to like it better that way.

My Y2K Power Mac G4 is back from the grave and ready to party!

Posted by Craig at 7:25 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

Comments

Hmmm. It's different. Almost makes me rethink my sweet little black MacBook. Almost.

Posted by Craig at 4:06 PM | Permalink

Comments

I'm posting this from my hot new Black MacBook - I'm not only on a new laptop, I'm giving ecto for Mac a spin. I ordered my new laptop Monday night from MacMall - tricked out with a 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo Intel processor, 2 GB RAM, and 160GB of hard disk.

I've never had an Apple laptop before - just desktop machines. I started playing with it when I got home about 2 hours ago. Man this thing is sweet.

Posted by Craig at 11:06 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment

Comments

About a month ago, I was figuring out what desktop PC to get for work. I have a laptop that I'm not too happy with and I wanted a little more horsepower. And a bigger screen. And a bigger hard drive. And a real video card. Other than those things, I was perfectly happy with my laptop.

I'd also been looking for an excuse to buy a 24" iMac for about a year - the spot in our kitchen back in VA was about a half inch too short to accommodate it (doh!), so I was stuck getting a 20" one. I have a space now, but the 20" one survived the move and so I couldn't really justify buying another.

So I figured - make it my work machine! Why not find out if the corporate buying process at Microsoft can handle it? I figured it was possible since we have a Mac team. Sure enough, the corporate process handled it, and it just showed up late yesterday afternoon. Whaaa-freaking-hoooooooo! It's fully tricked out, too:

• 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 2GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM
• 750GB Serial ATA Drive
• NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT 256MB SDRAM

I have meetings, meetings and more meetings today, so I can't do any with it until tonight - bummer!

Posted by Craig at 12:25 PM | Permalink

Comments

Christmas has come and gone, and Santa was very good to me - he brought me a brand new Alienware 7500 series, fully loaded!

• Processor: Intel® Core™ 2 Extreme QX6700 2.66GHz 8MB Cache 1066MHz FSB
• Chassis Upgrades: Alienware® AlienIce™ 3.0 Video Cooling + High-Performance Liquid Cooling
• Memory: 4GB DDR2 Performance SDRAM at 800MHz - 4 x 1024MB
• System Drive: Extreme Performance (RAID 0) - 300GB (2 x 150GB) Serial ATA 1.5Gb/s 10,000 RPM w/ 2 x 16MB Cache
• Graphics Processor: Dual 768MB NVIDIA® GeForce™ 8800 GTX - SLI Enabled - Requires 1000W Power Supply!
• Power Supply: Alienware® 1000 Watt Multi-GPU Approved Power Supply
• Sound Card: Alienware® Edition Sound Blaster® X-Fi® Elite High Definition 7.1 Audio

Man this sucker is FAST!! I've been running it overclocked to 3.2ghz for a week with no problems - the liquid cooling is great for overclocking.

I bought a copy of 3DMark 2006 from FutureMark and ran it on my various and sundry machines using the default settings (1280x1024, no anti-aliasing), and got the following results.

The XPS Dell and ALX Alienware machines both are running Vista. It looks like the ATI drivers for Vista don't support crossfire - the control panel help says to go to the "Crossfire" advanced setting to enable Crossfire mode, but sadly, that option doesn't exist. It would seem that the Alienware ALX 3DMark score should be closer to 10,000.

In any event, the Intel Quad Core Extreme Edition plus the NVIDIA Quad SLI 8800 GTX kicks some serious 3D gaming ass. My system was compared to 674,434 system configurations and there were only 1,167 systems with a higher score.

It's a long, long way from a 386 and a Mach 64 card, baby! Whooooooooooooooooooooooosh!!!

Posted by Craig at 12:21 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment

Comments

It's only been a year since I got my Sony T370, but I decided to update for two reasons. One (more minor): I was tired of traveling with my giant Dell XPS laptop and my T370 every time I wanted to play Rise of Legends or Age of Empires III with one of my friends and secondly and more importantly, I figured after over two years of using my own laptop for business, I should have a laptop that was actually a company laptop, not my personal one (a giant ding in my T370 after a business trip is what pushed me over the edge).

Back in January at CES, Sony announced their VAIO SZ Premium. It was supposed to ship in March, but like all new cutting edge things, was a little late. I decided to go with the Sony VAIO SZ281P because it was still light (3.7 pounds with the standard battery), fast (2ghz Intel Core Duo), had lots of RAM (2gb), a huge hard drive (120gb), a bigger display for my aging eyes (13.3" @ 1280x800) and could play games pretty decently thanks to the NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400 chipset. I've had it for a month now, and I have to say I am delighted, although there were a couple of gotchas.

First gotcha (minor) - at the time, I couldn't order the 2.16ghz Intel Core Duo. Had to "settle" for 2.0 ghz. Like I said, a minor gotcha. Bigger gotcha - the alleged 7 hours of battery life on the standard battery was a drug-induced hallucination some marketing person had. Standard battery is 3 hours at best of real usage. The good news is that by switching to the extended battery and pushing the weight of the laptop up to 4.1 pounds (still acceptable, although a full pound heavier than my T370), I could get the same performance as my T370 - 5+ hours of DVD playback, 7+ hours of office work.

My favorite thing about the Sony SZ is the dual video chipset, which I didn't even notice when I first blogged about the SZ series. You can switch between a decently fast (and power hungry) NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400 with 128MB TurboCache and a putt-putt slow but power sipping Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 with 128MB of shared memory. I switch it to the power saving Intel chipset whenever I am on a plane, and it adds an hour or so to my usage (thus the 5ish hours of DVD playback instead of 4ish which having the NVIDIA chipset enabled gives). And the NVIDIA chipset and the 2ghz Core Duo combine to give awesome performance (at 1280x800, the native resolution of the laptop) for my two games of choice.

Finally, the docking station: I'm glad I have it, because now I don't have separate desktop and laptop, which was a huge pain in the rear. The docking station is pretty standard, with an upside of supporting DVI and 1920x1200 displays (although you have to turn on the NVIDIA card to use it). The only weird thing about the docking station is that you can't plug in any speakers. Weird, weird, weird. Luckily, I found some pretty decent USB speakers from Altec Lansing (XT1) - they are designed as portable, but they sound great and are plenty loud if you plug in the power supply (not required, but the volume is limited on USB only power).

Bottom line - this laptop makes a great business, gaming, and day to day use laptop. I love it!

Posted by Craig at 11:35 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

Comments

Okay, this is just darn funny: William Shatner pitching the Vic 20 - the wonder computer of the 1980s! I had Commondore 64 and a Commodore PET and I still own (sadly) a Commodore Super PET, but I never had the wonder computer of the 1980's. I feel cheated. Ebay to the rescue!

Posted by Craig at 9:53 AM | Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

Comments

Yesterday afternoon I had a throbbing broken tooth, so I needed both liquor and a distraction, and since it was afternoon, I only had one of the two. So I set about the task of reorganizing my rag-tag fugitive fleet of home brewed crap (Home Datacenter 1.0) to the new, streamlined, mostly-built-by-professionals Data Center 2.0.

After plugging everything in, I flashed back to the thing that I did to kill some harddisks last year - I accidentally turned off power instead of flipping the house to the backup system to exercise it. Ooops. And I looked at my cool Vtrak 15200 and my cool Dell 1850, both with cool redundant power supplies and I thought - perfect, both power supplies lose power simultaneously when something goes amuck. So when I took my boys out on "boys day out" today, we stopped by "Best Buy" (after all, Full Retail is the Best Buy! ) and picked up two APC Back-UPS XS 1500's, which can support up to 865 watts. I had one already, but it was old, and I figured I would use it in a less critical spot. Of course, one of the two I bought had a defective battery, so I am using the old one while I figure out when I am going to get time to go back to Best Buy.

I split the load - each UPS has one of the power supplies of the Vtrak and Dell, and then I divvied up the miscellaneous crud (two switches, 2 Buffalo TeraStations, and the monitor) evenly. Now I can get struck by lightning (which is my luck, by the way) and survive. Turn the house power off by accident? No problem. Trip the circuit (happened at least 4 or 5 times since we moved here, there is one outlet by the bathroom in the basement that is tied to the same circuit as my Home Datacenter)? No problem. Have a UPS fail (had that happen last year too)? Only a minor problem, as one of the switches will go offline.

Home Datacenter 2.0 is finally done being tinkered with (well, I still haven't found an automated replication/backup system I like, but that is it. Oh, and I should use a rack instead of a wicker basket and a Virginia ham box. But then really, that is it. Except for I am down to 1.3 terabytes out of 4.8, so I am likely to need more storage. Hopefully the 1.3 TB will hold out until tax refund time next year). I get to spend the next few hours doing other things for a change - like enjoying my broken tooth (but luckily it is after 5 so I can add liquor to the mix ). Now that my tax refund is spent, its back to being an I.T. lightweight - maybe I'll get to buy a new phone or something soon.

Posted by Craig at 3:21 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

Comments

Its been almost 2 weeks of screwing around in little bits and snippits of time, but I finally got everything working on my spiffy new server.

There was un-ending joy in trying to get it the final details to work. Microsoft's latest iSCSI initiator doesn't work with my Vtrak 15200, but their old version 1.06 did work. Oh, and of course it didn't occur to the folks that built the iSCSI initiator that you might want to share directories on an iSCSI disk, so every time you reboot your server, all the shares go away. I just cracked that problem after about 2 hours of googling over the past 2 weeks - turns out you just have to run the command sc config LanManServer depend= MSiSCSI from a cmd prompt on your server. Lord knows that was too complicated to just add to iSCSI setup.

Then there was Virtual Server 2005 - whenever a virtual PC was running, it would disconnect the network briefly a couple times a minute, thus ensuring that no files could ever be copied to or from the server. But Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise Edition (how is that for a mouthful!) seems to have fixed that problem. I'm running 3 virtual machines, each running Windows 2000 server and DVArchive, a way cool java app that emulates a ReplayTV. Now my ReplayTVs can see the 3 different show archives again, and all of the archives are consolidated on my Vtrack15200.

Final project is to move pull the old servers out of the server room, and either sell them for parts on ebay or find new homes for them. Wahoo!

Posted by Craig at 5:46 AM | Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

Comments

I've been running a home-brewed set of servers in my house ever since 1997, when working on the Chrome Project. Chrome ("fast and flashy") was Eric's and my big follow-on to DirectX, stuffing high performance multimedia into Internet Explorer 4.0. Sadly, it never really saw the light of day (although Eric slipped it out on MSN Access CDs when he took the MSN Access job). Anyway, back then the hot processor was the 300MHz Pentium II, and if you could buy one (which you couldn't as there was no supply), it cost $1,999.00. My Intel contact scored me FOUR, count 'em, FOUR of these bad boys, and being the generous soul I am, I kept three for myself and gave one to Eric. From those three, I built a desktop machine and a 2 processor server that I ran for years. I used it for managing internet access (128kbps ISDN until 2003, if you can believe it), file storage and printing (i.e., a server ). When my first born server finally started coughing and wheezing, I replaced it with another home-brewed contraption (which for the life of me I can't remember the specs of), and most recently (in July of 2002 - going on 4 years ago), I built a monster of a server - dual 2ghz Xeon with 2 GB of RAM and a 750GB Raid 5 (w/hot spare) array with 8 125 gb drives on a 3Ware Escalade IDE RAID controller. The damned thing has 15 drive bays and was the size of a small planet. I upgraded this server to1.5 terabytes (8 250gb drives) in December of 2003.

Over the past two years, I took a couple of desktop machines, added a 3 bay 4 drive hot swap array and a 4 drive 3Ware Escalade IDE RAID controller and declared them servers as well. One is running Exchange 2000, and the other does nothing other than run a java program that simulates a replay TV device and serves up recorded kids shows. Along with my Vtrak 15200 iSCSI appliance with 4.8 terabytes of storage, my furnace room (where this all lives) sounds something like the inside of a jet engine and is burning something like 1500 watts of power.

As our life became more and more digital (110gb of pictures and mpeg videos taken from my digital Elph, along with terabytes of shows, mp3s, etc) I realized that I was pushing my luck relying on these power hungry home built dinosaurs that could fall over on any given Sunday. So I dedicated the rest of my tax return (the first part went to my gaming PC and 30" monitor, of course ) to a new server, built by professionals and actually supported. I had been waffling about buying it since Christmas, and finally pulled the trigger in the United lounge while waiting for my flight to Toronto a couple weeks back (34% off was enough to get my butt in gear).

And boy oh boy, what a server. For not a lot more than the home brewed server I built 4 years ago, our fancy new Dell PowerEdge 1850 has the following (all in a sweet 1U package, which is only 1.75 inches tall and 19 inches wide):

• 2 Dual Core 2.8GHz Xeon processors (with 2 2MB caches each)
• 8GB of DDR2 400Mhz RAM (8 is so much better than 2!)
• a PCI Express Dual 1GB Intel network card (for 1 port for network, one to connect to my Vtrak 15200)
• DVD/CD-RW drive
• Dual 146GB U320 10k RPM SCSI drives, in a RAID 1 configuration (finally I don't have to worry about boot drive failure)
• Perc4-SC RAID controller, with 128MB cache and battery backup for said cache
• Dual redundant power supplies

Whaa-Hoo! Thanks to my handy MSDN Universal subscription, I could install Microsoft Windows 2003 Server Enterprise Edition (necessary to access the full 8GB of RAM) and Exchange 2003 Server without mortgaging my house. Pretty painless, all the drivers were supported, so no screwing around to get Windows booting. 8GB of RAM is pretty cool, and - get this - because there are dual Xeons each with dual cores and each core is hyperthreaded, Windows shows EIGHT processors. Truth be told, it will probably perform like around 3 or 3 1/2 processors, but it still 8 looks cool!

I had all kinds of trouble getting the Microsoft 2.01 iSCSI initiator to see my Vtrak 15200 (by all sorts, I mean it never did work). The older 1.06 version worked great, albeit on reboot, I lose all the directories I shared out - I think I can solve that problem by change some service start dependencies, I need to do some digging.

Exchange 2003 installed without a hiccup either, athough I got bitched at by both by the main install and the SP 1 upgrade that there were some "compatibility issues" with the version of Windows I was running - gotta love that, Exchange 2003 complaining about Windows Server 2003. But bitching aside (which in fairness, by SP2 MSFT managed to make Exchange 2003 not bitch about having compatibility issues with Windows 2003 Server), I could connect via Outlook just fine, so I am in the midst of backing up all my outlook data (8gb!!).

My next great adventure is to add Virtual Server 2005 so I can run Replay TV servers, get all the data transferred from my old server to the Vtrak array, and setup MirrorFolder to auto-backup my Vtrak to my new Buffalo TeraStations. Then I can take about 1000 watts of home-brewed servers offline at last - 9 years after my first home brewed server first saw the light of day.

Posted by Craig at 5:28 PM | Permalink

Comments

I meant to write this follow-on-on blog to DirectX Then and Now when I got my new PC, but then work and a giant abscess got the best of me, and so my new gaming PC (and Alienware ALX) has sat unused since it arrived on Monday. As luck would have it, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion came out this week too, and so with my abscess treated and work done, my cool new machine and my cool new game were ready for a workout last night.

It is amazing - I can turn the Oblivion settings for detail way up, and the game plays beautifully at 2560x1600. My new Alienware Aurora ALX PC kicks ass, and I love, love, LOVE my 30" Dell monitor. Once you have one, you can't go back. Ever since 1998, I would seek out the "high end" monitor, and it always cost about $2000. First it was a couple of iterations of the 21" tube-based dinosaurs, then I moved on to a 21" LCD, then the Samsung 24" widescreen LCD (twice!) , and now the Dell 30" widescreen LCD. In each case, about $2000 bought the state of the art (good god, I don't want to add up how much I've spent on monitors in the past 8 years). I can't wait to see what $2000 buys 8 years from now.

It is remarkable to me how rapidly technology has evolved since I last worked on DirectX. When DirectX 3 shipped in September of 1996 (I didn't finish DirectX 5, I moved on to work on Internet Explorer half way through), the minimum requirements were a 486 66MHz with 8MB RAM, with a recommended Pentium 60MHz with 16MB of RAM, and a 2D/3D card. State of the art when DirectX 3 shipped was the ATI 3D Rage II, that promised 3D acceleration up to resolutions of 1280x1024, and came in 2, 4, and 8MB configurations.

My new Alienware PC seems to stack up OK against the DirectX 3 recommendations. Dual, count'em dual, ATI Radeon X1900 XTX video cards. Each with 512 MB of RAM -a long way from an 8MB max configuration. So check that box, "OK on video". At the heart of my ALX is an AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 dual core processor that whups the ass of the Intel Pentium 4 EE 955 dual core processor. While GHz (forget the sad MHz of 1996) doesn't matter any more as it is all about what can you get done in one clock cycle, not how many clock cycles are available, never-the-less, let's note that the 2.6 GHz processor certainly meets the recommended Pentium 60MHz level for DirectX 3. And of course, dual core is pretty close to 2 processors in 1, so I'm thinking I'm well covered. And the 2GB of uber-fast RAM meets the 16MB minimum recommendation, as well. My Soundblaster X-Fi with 64MB RAM appears to meet the sound card requirement of "sound card from Creative Labs". And while storage is not a DirectX 3 requirement, my ALX has two Western Digital Raptor 74GB SATA 10K RPM drives in a RAID 0 configuration with a 500GB storage drive to boot, so I'm ahead of the game.

I boldly inserted my DirectX 3 CD and ran the samples. My personal favorite is FoxBear (I spent far too many hours working on FoxBear in the day), and amazing - code from 1996 targeted at Windows 95 runs on Windows XP SP2. And good ol' FoxBear runs great at 2560x1600, rate limited at 60 frames per second, the refresh rate of my monitor. Immortal Klowns (our tongue-in-cheek version of Mortal Kombat) worked great, as did RockEM3D, our rock-em, sock-em robots take off. Amazing.

Before these CDs suffered terrible bit-rot, I figured that since they were publicly available in their day, it should be OK for them to be publicly available today. So if you just can't help yourself, I present for your (perverse) enjoyment:

DirectX 1 CGDC 1995 SDK Beta (6.4 MB)
DirectX 2 SDK (32.5 MB)
DirectX 3 SDK (78.3 MB)

And for the truly bored, the full specs of my Aurora ALX are in the extended section below... things have come a long, long way in the past 10 years.

Continue reading "DirectX Then and Now (Part 2)" »

Posted by Craig at 5:47 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment

Comments

I lost my patience with waiting for a sale and bought a Dell 30" Widescreen Flat Panel Monitor last weekend. It showed up this past Tuesday, and it is stunning how large it is - the resolution is 2560x1600, or 4,096,000 pixels. What is amazing is that there was not a single dead pixel. I can't believe manufacturing has gotten that precise - I remember when a dead pixel or two on a 1024x768 display (786,432 pixels) was considered "acceptable" by the manufacturers.

I got my cool display in anticipation of my new gaming PC (more in a later blog), but then when I talked to the order verification people last week I found out my new PC was going to take 30 to 45 days. No big deal, I think to myself. But then I hooked my new display to my current PC. The "obsolete" card I have (an ATI Radeon X850, which was the state of the art a year ago when I got the machine and now might as well be an ATI Mach 64 from DirectX 1 in 1995) can only display 1920x1200. The display can't do 1920x1200, it can only do 2560x1600 or 1280x800 - so my display had to scale down to 1280x800 and was running at 1/4 the resolution it could. It was looking at my Sony Vaio T series through a giant magnifying glass - underwhelming to say the least.

Rationalization set in quickly. Well, I say - my gaming machine of today is about to become my guest gaming machine of tomorrow. Surely my guests deserve to have state of the art graphics. What kind of host would I be if I invited someone over and my new gaming machine SO overshadowed the guest machine? A crappy host! And being a good host, I ordered a new ATI Radeon X1900 XTX - the single card version of the dual cards I am having put in my new machine (only they call them "Crossfire" to make you feel extra special).

I was in Seattle for a few days, and the card arrived while I was gone. I got a chance to install it about 30 minutes ago (I LOVE Dell cases - they are so easy to work with), and I only have one thing to say.

HOLY FREAKING MOLEY.

I can't go back, I won't go back. 2560x1600 is not be believed. I have an unholy amount of screen real estate. I thought my productivity went up when I had got my 24" Samsung flat panel @ 1920x1200 and my visible information jumped through the roof - this is as state changing as that. 2,304,000 pixels jumps to 4,096,000 pixels - 78% more pixels. GACK!

I haven't even tried it for gaming. I had to reinstall Windows on this machine a few weeks back (love that it is 2006 and you still have to do that) and have yet to put any of my games on. Can't wait to see how the X1900 performs (it is working with a 3.73 ghz Pentium Extreme Edition with a 1066 mhz front side bus, so hopefully it will kick some serious butt). Gotta go find out!

Posted by Craig at 6:22 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

Comments

Okay, this is my next laptop. Sony announced these at CES a month ago, but I just discovered it today (I need a better loop as I am out of the one I am in now).

My current day to day laptop is my Sony VAIO T370, which weighs 3.1 pounds and claims 7.5 hours of batter life with a standard battery. My configuration is a 10.6" widescreen, 1GB of RAM, a 60 gig harddrive (4200 RPM, putt, putt, putt, freakin' PUTT!), and a 1.2 GHz Pentium M processor

The SZ Premium (which isn't out yet, supposedly available in March) will weigh 3.7 pounds and give 7 hours of battery life from a standard battery. And it is apocalyptically better for the extra 0.6 pounds of weight (here my configuration when I get to order it):

• 13.3" wide screen (my eyes are starting to have trouble with my 10.6" screen, sad but true)
• 2GB RAM (2x the RAM, and we all know more is better)
• 120 GB harddrive @ 5400 RPM (2x the harddrive space, and faster to boot. See "more is better" rule above)
• 2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo Processor (righto, not only an extra gigahertz, but TWO, count 'em, TWO cores)
• Integrated Biometric Fingerprint Sensor (damned cool!)

Plus all the same goo I have now - DVD burner, WiFi (only a/b/g, not just b/g), and Bluetooth. And of course a useless & annoying memory stick reader.

Can't wait!!

Posted by Craig at 6:38 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment

Comments

1. 60gb harddrive vs 40gb - I was out of disk space constantly on my TR as I like to keep a bunch of my boys' photos on it, plus I have a truckload of software
2. 1.2ghz processor vs 1.0ghz - hey, 20% faster is 20% faster. Centrino processors are too darned slow no matter how you slice it. What we really need is a low power, low cost, dual core 4.0ghz extreme edition P4. But since that doesn't appear on the Intel roadmap (dammit!), I'll live with my 20% improvement.
3. Built in bluetooth - don't have to carry the darned bluetooth USB dongle any more!
4. 802.11G vs 802.11b - 5 times faster access to the network. While 54mbps on wireless is nowhere near as fast as 54mbps on wireline, it is still 5 times faster than 11mbps on wireless - and so copying all those pictures is way faster.
>Built in GPRS+EDGE network for when no wifi is available - of course, you have to pay $50 a month to Cingular to get it, but that isn't a bad deal at all if you want to be always online.
5. DVD+R dual layer burner vs CD burner - well heck, might as well be able to burn 8.5gb DVDs if you are going to have a media drive.
6. 3.1 vs 3.5 pounds. That is 0.4 pounds lighter for the same battery life - why, that's over 10% lighter. Since my ideal travel scenario is teleporting with luggage floating in a zero gravity field, 10% lighter is at least a step in the right direction.
7. Usabilty improvements. both USB ports are on the same side now, and the DVD/CD drive is on the side instead of the front so you can't eject by accident nearly as easily

So in short, my T-370P from Sony kicks butt. If you travel a lot, need long battery life, decent performance, and light weight, you will be hard pressed to do a better.

Posted by Craig at 10:52 PM | Permalink

Comments

Posted by Craig at 2:27 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

Comments