Posts by dan

Apple power brick sparks lawsuit

at last.....

i've had to buy 3 macbook power supplies over the last few years and 2 macbook pro ones which have failed for the same reason.. fraying of the cord. yes maybe i could have treated them a bit better but generally i am in a rush, throw the power supply in a bag and want to go. I don't want to stand there folding it into a neat bundle every time. the replacement cost for each out of warranty can vary from about 55-70UKP and although apple were replacing some power supplies about a year ago for free I was told by an apple reseller I would have to let them have the old one for up to a week whilst the photo of the fraying was sent to apple to verify an replacement could be given... net result i would not be able to charge my laptop for a week and therefore earn money so i had to put up with the minor small volt electrocutions from the cord every time my wrist touched it until i reluctantly paid for another new one. .. its very poorly designed and although i buy a lot of apple products it is an example of some of the style over substance design choices apple makes sometimes that makes it difficult to justify the premium pricing

2008's top three netbooks

reasons i went for the nc10

i looked at a lot of the different flavours of the netbooks out there before purchasing the samsung nc10 and as a lot of the basic components are very similar it generally came down to the following differences for me over the acer, asus, msi etc.

the combination of the following i found better on the nc10 than any of the others... although obviously some of the others have these features:

trackpad button layout - the samsung nc10 has a small trackpad but after about 30 minutes you get used to it and the right hand side allows page scrolling. clicking can be done with the trackpad meaning you only need to really click the button when right clicking. i found i just couldn't get used to the trackpad buttons being on the side with the aspire one.

screen size - i personally prefer the 10" screens like the nc10. I find with the 8" models that you don't always get that much size difference in device as there is a large border round the screen.

hardrive size - the nc10 came with 160gb and windows (although windows is not necessarily a plus, its handy to have a licence when it is comparatively similarly priced to those that don't include it)

cost - the nc10 was cheaper than msi wind varients of similar spec by about 40-50 when i got mine

bluetooth as standard

build quality - compared to the plasticy cheap nature of some of the netbooks i found the samsung, espec for the money, the best of the bunch.

samsung software - i didnt know much about this until after purchase and cannot vouch for what the other netbooks provide but i find the samsung system backup and restore software that starts on first load pretty handy. (it keeps a 6gb partition for storing the o/s which can be then used to restore without messing about with the supplied cds)

battery life - the 6 cells battery really does allow over 5 hours use which I find invaluable for using it as commuter machine

its all down to personal preference as to which bits are most important... if you have small hands and good eyes the 8" models are probably suitable... being a sausage fingered oaf i need something with as big a keyboard as possible.. espec when trying to do anything like use it for coding.

Another 60 days' free MobileMe service, madam?

@Isamu

i meant for email rather than web site hosting... afaik you cannot allow mobile me to act as your mail provider i.e changing your mx record to point at apple's server etc like google's free hosted domain service will do....

i know people have talked about auto forwarding and having a different reply to address or even leaving a pc on at home to sync etc etc... but it's all a bit nasty...

all i am saying is that google gives me that for free at the moment and no-one would know i would using gmail as the mail client to send and receive mail for that domain....

this service i would expect in a paid for solution like mobileme and one in which there must be thousands or small companies / designers / developers who are using apple products to run their businesses but want to use their own domain name in their email

180 days is inc. the original trial

60 days original + 30 for launch problems + 30 for cc error + 60 for latest issues...

even though i now have access until early next year... i am still finding it fairly unappealing, buggy and too ajax based and clunky in the web-apps.

also until they let me bring my own domain mail across like gmail then i will never actually pay for it....

unless i had registered f***@me.com or b*gg*[e-mail] i don't want to have a me.com email address.