The second long-spike article that I’ve resurrected is regarding Intel’s decision to downgrade its Larrabee platform release into a Software Development Kit, written back in December.
Posts Tagged ‘hardware’
March 7th, 2010
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January 11th, 2009
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With the missus getting increasingly addicted to Guild Wars, it’s been getting harder and harder to get on my PC of an evening. Accordingly, I have treated myself to a new toy – an Acer laptop.
The specs are reasonable, although I could have lived without Vista. It’s taken me almost a full week to beat the thing into submission – it’s amazing how irritating Vista is when you’ve used a grown-up operating system like Ubuntu for a while. Actually, that’s the next step – dual-boot the thing, with Vista for games (and Blu-ray playback) and Ubuntu for actually getting things done.
One thing I’ve noticed about the specifications, actually: it’s fitted with an ATI Radeon Mobility 3470 chipset, but CPU/Z shows it as a 3450. I’m assuming this is an artifact related to the fact that I removed the crippled drivers provided by Acer and replaced them with hacked desktop drivers based around the latest Catalyst version. The new drivers work fine – and with the performance of a 3470 – but display as a 3450. Strange.
All complaints – and between Vista and some of the stupid things Acer has done, there’ve been a few – aside, it’s a reasonable new laptop, and it only set me back £470.
Oh, and in honour of its status in the house it’s been christened TOYBOX – after the debris recovery vessel from Planetes.
October 26th, 2008
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In a brave attempt to rid myself of some of the cruft I’ve gathered over the years, I’ve recently had a somewhat brutal clearout. As well as all the rubbish that I’ve collected, I’m planning to get rid of the vast majority of my old gaming equipment – including my beloved Commodore C64 collection.
Accordingly, I’ve put a page on this ‘ere site called – surprisingly – For Sale, which contains – again, surprisingly – a list of all the items I’ve catalogued. The page will be updated just as frequently as I can bring myself to, with the easier-to-catalogue stuff getting added first – which means that the C64 with its two large boxes filled with games will likely be last.
If you’re interested in any of the items you see, make me an offer either via e-mail or through the comment link on the page.
October 19th, 2008
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I’ve been on a massive clearout session of my old computing stuff with a view to finally decluttering my life after twenty-some years of being an unrepentant hoarder, and I spotted an old brochure lying in the bottom of a box.
Just think – for under £3,000 you can get an ‘ultimate games machine’ with a Pentium 200MHz CPU, 32MB of RAM, and a whole 3GB of hard-drive space!
Let’s compare to my mobile phone shall we? ARM 266MHz, 16GB of usable space, 64MB of RAM…
I wouldn’t mind, but this was only 1996…
July 12th, 2008
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I finally got around to recording just how long my Eee PC 701 lasts for under normal usage.
That’s with almost minimum brightness, playing music and browsing the ‘net. It’s not the greatest battery life ever, but pretty impressive for the size.
To be fair, I shut the system down when the battery light started to flash. The version of Unbuntu I have installed doesn’t read the battery life properly – despite reporting 28%, there was probably only about 10% left. I know that //last// time I left it running, expecting auto-shutdown, it ran out of juice and crashed hard.
