Posts by Chris 235

Nokia Digital Radio Headset DAB

Train commute

@Andy 97 - probably depends on where you commute to & from.

I have a Pure PocketDAB which I use on my way to & from work (Ilkley to Bradford) and it's great!

Bold as brass metal thieves disrupt rail, comms, electric

Incredulous colleagues

When I have work-colleague visitors from India, they're stunned when I tell them about this.

They expect it back home, but had no idea this would happen over here!

Minister 'C*nt' promises £50m to get fabtastic fibre for all

I'm wondering...

...if there was a spike in traffic accidents at 8 o'clock this morning!

Apple kills 'Get a Mac' ad campaign

Sure...

Sure - understood and those factors did play a part in my choice.

...and it was a hard choice too!

I had a good look at a colleagues new 17 inch MB-Pro last week. Nicely put together piece of kit, but there were some odd design issues. For instance, the power connector is at right angles, which means it gets in the way of an adjacent port. The build of the case is rock-solid though, no complaints there. However, Apple are still using effectively previous generation Intel / Ati components and charging a premium.

When I priced up the same 17" model with the extras I'd need, it came out in the region of £2300-ish.

Since I configure/build my PC desktops and do most of my spade work on there, I don't really need something bomb-proof laptop-wise. Something functional with plenty of CPU grunt and discrete graphics. I won't be running it on battery power, so I'm not worried about that.

In fact, since I'm using it primarily for playing live gigs with Ableton Live (replacing my old Dell XPS Gen 2), I was more tempted to get something a little less expensive and (dare I say it) - almost disposable.

I think the real point is: we all have different requirements for the machines we use which means the factors we take into account aren't constant, or necessarily obvious.

:)

No probs

Well, I don't tend to take insults from strangers on the internet very seriously.

:)

As it happens, I'm pretty-much OS agnostic. Use Windows, Linux, OS-X and various embedded Oses others in the day-job.

Boils down to: I can run the same applications I want to run on my home laptop either under Windows or OS-X. I don't really mind which, so going the non-Apple route at home seems best for me at the minute. I'd have been quite happy going with a MacBook had the prices been more reasonable.

Only really piped up because I've just been in the position of potentially going for a MacBook...

I seriously considered a Macbook Pro recently

...but then realised that, for literally half the price, I could buy a considerably more powerful machine.

So - basically, I had to decide if OS-X was worth paying the extra for, along with taking something with significantly less grunt hardware-wise.

This seemed to be a no-brainer!

It feels almost like Apple are deliberately pricing their kit higher to discourage people buying desktops and laptops in favour of the iPad etc.

Microsoft counters Windows 7 upgrade hack advice

@Michael C

"Keep in mind, "moving" to a new PC involves anytime you have replaced 3 or more core serielaized components as part of an upgrade or major repair"

I think (please do correct me if I'm wrong someone) one of those "components" is the volume ID of your disk. That means: if you reformat your hard drive so that the volume ID is different, you lose one of your 3 lives. The ID of the disk itself is also a "component".

That seems unfair since the hardware doesn't change, but I guess MS are attempting to stop people from having lots of multi-boot partitions using the same license.

Here's where I got my idea of how this part of the system works:

http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/wpa.php

How many bits?

"If you have to upgrade the PC in order for the new OS to run at a decent speed, how many bits to you have to replace before it becomes a new PC?"

How about swapping out everything but keeping the case and possibly power-supply?

The off-the-shelf PC's I've seen seem to have the MS sticker on the case, not the motherboard or CPU.

;o)