Quaere Verum

Just a few days ago I bought a new notebook computer to replace my trusty yet aging Compaq Presario CQ40-107AU . That notebook served me well for three years, and it'll still continue to serve my purposes here at home, no longer as my main portable unit. So what did I replace it with? I replaced it, of all things, a Samsung . Yes, I admit, Samsung is not really a brand that comes to mind when talking about notebook computers. Until only a few years ago, they were all but unknown in the portable computing segment. Now, they seem set to be a force to be reckoned with in this product category, the same way they started out before virtually dominating sales of LCD TVs and mobile phones. And their tablets aren't that bad either, having owned a Galaxy Tab for several months now . It's not that I set out from the start to get a Samsung notebook computer. I do my notebook shopping the same way I've always done...with a budget and set of specs in mind. Then I set out to fi...

For some reason, a lot of my colleagues at work and even some of my friends in their homes prefer to position their PCs on the floor, leaving only their monitors, keyboards and mice on their tables. Frankly, I don't think this is such a good idea. True, the jumble of cables coming from the rear of a PC isn't exactly aesthetically pleasing, but if one values reliability, durability and ease of use above aesthetics, it is always preferable to position a PC in an elevated position such as on a table, and not to leave it on the floor. Reasons: Modern PCs have plenty of components which generate a lot of heat such as the CPU, the northbridge chip, power supply and video card among others. To keep these components cool, a PC typically has at least two fans, often more, and are configured to suck cool air from the front of the PC, through the chassis and out through the power supply and/or an exhaust fan at the rear. A PC on the floor tends to suck up the dirt, dust and grime on t...

Several weeks ago I bought a new notebook computer to replace my aging Asus A9Rp . The Asus , while tough as nails and as reliable as a Toyota, was starting to get a bit long in the tooth, and compared to its contemporaries, getting to be a bit of a dinosaur. While the Asus A9Rp is by no means a cutting edge notebook computer even when it was brand new, it was perfectly adequate for most computing purposes such as word processing, internet browsing, watching DVDs, and even gaming thanks to its built-in ATI Radeon™ Xpress 200M graphics. Where it does fall short, is in its size, and weight. It has a 15" screen with a 4:3 aspect ratio, so it's not widescreen. Not being widescreen, the notebook itself occupies a fairly big squarish footprint which inevitably makes it heavier than average at about 3.26 kilograms (7.17 lbs). With today's notebooks (and netbooks) sometimes weighing less than half that, I decided it was time for a change...and this time, other than price, weight ...

A couple of weeks ago I upgraded my entire PC...well, at least most of it, after my video card failed. To be honest, I was quite happy with the performance of my old Athlon 64 rig, but after being faced with the prospect of a defective video card, it didn't seem right to invest in a new mid-range AGP video card, considering that PCI-Express is now the de facto video card interface, and AGP is on its way to extinction. It started innocently enough. For no apparent reason my PC started crashing, and the startup screens started showing columns of weird checkerboard patterns. Strangely enough, I could run the PC perfectly fine when the video card was in VGA mode, but when I installed GeForce drivers and rebooted, nothing happened. Literally. The PC would just sit there, with the monitor blacked out. I could reboot into safe mode, but that was about all that I could do. The symptoms my two-and-a-half year old Inno3D GeForce 6800LE showed seemed strangely similar to the symptoms exhib...

Just recently upgraded my laptop 's memory to 2 GB. Somehow 1 GB doesn't seem to cut it anymore, and memory is cheaper than it ever was, so might as well. Hopefully, disk grinding should be significantly reduced. And if it still isn't fast enough? Maybe I should just spring for that new Intel Core 2 Duo laptop. :-)

If you're wondering why I haven't posted anything new lately, it's because my computers at home were all down until only a few days ago. Went through a couple of hardware upgrades which, unfortunately, didn't really go as smooth as I was expecting them to turn out. The first upgrade involved the video card of the PC my son uses to play games with ( Athlon XP 2400+, 1.5 GB RAM, 256 MB Radeon 9550 ). He started complaining over the slow frame rates he was getting with some newer games, particularly the resource-hungry RTS World in Conflict . The game is actually playable when using low graphics settings, but there's nothing quite as pathetic as playing a computer game with all the settings turned down to low. After some research, I figured the GPU with the best bang-for-the-buck was the NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS , with its 12 pixel pipelines, 5 vertex shaders, and a core running at 400 MHz. All I need now is to find one, particularly one which runs on an AGP bus. I soon...

I finally bought my first notebook computer. I've been meaning to get one for some time now, but I never really got around to actually buying one, since I really didn't think I needed one before. I was simply content to use either of the two desktops I have at home, or the rather antiquated one I have in the office. The fact that I didn't have the funds for it or that most new notebook computers then were really expensive didn't help much either. With a little spare cash and a plethora of inexpensive models now flooding the market, I decided it was high time I took the plunge. After conducting a thorough research of locally available makes and models, I ended up choosing an Asus A9Rp notebook computer. Considering the low price of admission (29,900.00 PHP, or about 650 USD) I was able to get a notebook with a 1.86 GHz Intel® Celeron® M processor processor, a 15" display with ATI Radeon™ Xpress 200M graphics, 512 MB of DDR2 SDRAM memory, an 80 GB hard drive, a ...

After I've upgraded my main PC several weeks ago (see previous post here ), I ended up with a surfeit of fully functional PC components just laying around the place. Rather than disposing of them, I thought it would be a good idea to build a backup system around these components. It helps to have a second PC in case you have problems with your other computer, that is, there would always be one available that you can use to download drivers, utilities, and look up knowledge bases with. A second PC would also maximize the use of my broadband connection, and it would give my son a computer he can use anytime without waiting for me to finish what I'm doing. Additionally, I thought it would be a good opportunity to build a system with a meager power draw that wouldn't suck up that much electricity when left on most of the time. My main rig is unsuited for this purpose since a lot of power hungry peripherals are installed in it. Here's the system I ended up with: Processor: ...

If there's a game which can surely bring all but the most powerful PCs down to their knees, it has to be F.E.A.R. (see my review of this game in this earlier post ). Like Doom 3 , F.E.A.R. also has a benchmarking function built inside the game itself. All you have to do is go to the options menu, then click on performance , then test settings . That's all there is to it. Here are the results I got on my PC: Using medium computer and graphics settings as automatically set by the game, as determined by my hardware setup (no tweaking whatsoever): 800x600: minimum 21, maximum 76, average 35 FPS 1,024x768: minimum 13, maximum 54, average 23 FPS 1,280X960: minimum 9, maximum 34, average 16 FPS Clearly, you have to have some serious muscle in your rig if you want to run this game at high quality and at high resolutions. Even with my current setup, I'm getting an average of only 23 FPS at 1,024x768. If your current PC's specifications are less than stellar, you may have to t...

In the process of burning in and testing my PC's new components (see earlier post here ), I ran a number of benchmarks to give me an idea of it's relative performance, particularly when running 3D games. Here are the results I got. If you're into this type of thing, perhaps you could run the benchmarks yourself and compare your results. :-) Futuremark benchmarks: 3DMark 2001 SE : 15,212 3DMarks 3DMark03 : 4,891 3DMarks 3DMark05 : 2,245 3DMarks 3DMark06 : 779 3DMarks Note: All 3DMark tests were run using default settings. Download free versions of the benchmarks above by clicking on their respective links. Doom 3 benchmarks: High Quality, 800x600: 72.9 FPS High Quality, 1,024x768: 72.9 FPS Hiqh Quality, 1,280x1,024: 60.6 FPS Note: Testing done using Doom 3's built-in "demo1". You can do this yourself by bringing down the console and entering the command: "timedemo demo1". If you don't know how to access the console read this guide . Read my revi...

Well, after several hours of shoehorning a new motherboard and CPU combo into my PC and reinstalling Windows XP and virtually all of my software, I can finally breathe a sigh of relief. The deed is done. I replaced the ECS K7VTA3 v3.1 motherboard and Athlon XP 2400+ processor with a MSI K8N Neo v2.0 and an Athlon 64 3000+. The K8N Neo v2.0 is a fully loaded Socket 754 motherboard with an NVIDIA nForce3 250 chipset. It features an 800 MHz HyperTransport interface, support for DDR 400, ATA 133 and SATA 150, ATA and SATA RAID, USB 2.0, built-in 5.1 sound and network capabilities, and expandability via one AGP 8x/4x and five PCI slots. It also features dynamic overclocking. The Athlon 64 3000+ is a 64-bit processor based on AMD's 0.09 micron Venice core. It has a transistor count of 76 million, or more than double the 37.6 million transistors of my old Thoroughbred-B Athlon XP . It runs at 2.0 GHz, and has 512 KB of L2 cache. Here are some before and after pictures: This was the...

After all that has happened in the local political scene in the last couple of days, I guess it would be a good change of pace to blog about something different in the meantime, to get my mind (and yours too) off the frustrating turn of events which have been plaguing this country. Let's talk tech. Oh, I can already hear the groans from here. Sorry people, I can't help it. I'm a techie, and there's probably nothing I can do to change that, so I might as well live it up, at least here in this blog. If you find this subject boring, stop right now! I'm sure there are other posts you may find interesting here. However, if you insist... I made the switch. After more than two years in ATI 's camp, I went back to NVIDIA . If you don't understand what I'm talking about, I'm referring to video cards , those sophisticated circuit boards you plug in your PC responsible for generating all the lovely 3D graphics of your favorite games. For more than two years, I ...

Obsoletus Instrumentum - The Iomega Zip Drive The year was 1996. That was the year my son was born. It was also during that year that I first logged on the internet (my ISP at the time was Sky Internet ) using a pathetically slow 14.4 kbps U.S. Robotics internal modem. At the time I was using a machine with a Pentium 100 processor, 32 MB of memory, a 1.08 GB hard disk, and a 4x CD-ROM drive, running Windows 95 . Yeah, it seems kinda quaint by today's standards, but it was a performer during those times, consistently outrunning a friend's Pentium 133 machine which only had 16 MB of memory. Those were the days. Going back, as an internet newbie, and despite having an excrutiatingly slow connection, I was extremely fascinated by the ability to download, well, basically anything from the internet that wasn't too large. I ended up downloading tons of small programs, utilities, add-ons, wallpapers, desktop themes, and all sorts of knick-knacks. I remember then that my download ...

The PC I'm using in my study is slightly more than two years old. Its not cutting edge by any means, nor has it been considered so even when it was brand new. I built it myself using parts I bought off the shelf in January of 2003. While there is indeed a market for branded or preassembled PCs, such PCs are not for me. I prefer using a PC that I built with my own hands, to my own specifications, using parts that I chose myself. The nice thing about home-built PCs is the fact that there are no limitations when it comes to customization and upgrading. Virtually any part that you can get from anywhere is bound to fit and work. In fact, as it currently stands, this PC can be considered a different machine altogether from the PC I assembled more than two years ago. Then, it had an AMD Athlon XP 2000+ processor, 256 MB of PC2700 DDR333 SDRAM, an NVIDIA GeForce 4 MX440 with 128 MB, 80 GB of hard disk storage, a DVD-ROM drive and a CD-writer. In the two years that followed, I upgraded th...