Does defragmentation really help?
I was not defragmentation believer that much until using Outlook for a while and most of Outlook users would know how darned slow it is. I usually have to wait about >30s to be able to open the mail otherwise Outlook will freeze for 5 sec or so.
Now—since my machine has done disk defrag, now I could use Outlook as fast as Thunderbird [might not that fast, but waiting few sec comparing to a min is fantastic.] Ohh my god! it’s really helping. My outlook databases (3*IMAP) are about 800MB, 500MB and 200MB. FYI, whole defrag process is about 5 min or so for my 120GB with about 50% free of space.
I don’t know which one is the best, but I can say that Auslogics Disk Defrag is worth checking out. It’s free and fast, enough huh? If you have any advice, I would love to hear.
Popularity: 3% [?]
New HP Home server EX485 & 487 are up
It has been a rumor for a while; finally it’s up on HP website. Basically it’s just changing from AMD platform to Intel platform. Can it be more exciting? no!
Same old brand chassis with a little new change:-
These two new models have only one difference; size of the storage. It’s not even clear whether this Celeron will be dual-core or not since there are 2 possibilities suiting this ambiguous spec.
Hope that HP is not that cheap to put single core on this 2 servers since the price of E1400 is only $8 more, but thinking of 65W versus 35W, HP might come up with such a nicely green excuse. Celeron 440 does to job well! Overall, I’m happy to grab EX470 at $260 on black Friday. Only $30 more for new Athlon 64 might be able to gain performance to be on par with these new releases. That is easy. Stay tuned for full review at myCapsules.com.
read EX485 review @wegotserved.co.uk
Popularity: 3% [?]
TechCrunch reallys takes their tablet project seriously?
Whoa! that’s the first word seeing TechCrunch plain simple tablet named Crunchpad turn out to be real. The idea is quite simple—a device, tablet PC basically which has nothing but touch screen and web browser. If you missed that, check this out. That’s on July 21, 2008 around half a year ago!
And now they come out with their prototype B. It’s not a render photo anymore, it’s real.
Briefly it’s like Motion Computer device and runs Ubuntu. Check for more information at TechCrunch. There are youtube running this in person too, but as it is prototype, so don’t expected to have that deep info. They just told that it would be ended up around $299 or so.
What do you guys think of this? or grabbing used motion like LS800 is a better idea!? I just don’t think this Crunchpad has that bright future honestly until it will be like what they designed at first.
[via UMPCPortal]
Popularity: 3% [?]
Circuit City was gone; who’s next?
It’s just sad that another nationwide brick & mortar store is closed. Although anyone can see this coming, I don’t think they expected to be this fast. News was spreading this morning; they are going to close at the end of today. The rest, from now on, Circuit City will be controlled by the liquidation store—sale? good deal? probably. But the thing is their sale will be final, no warranty of any kind. I don’t know whether it still is a good deal this way. It’s worth to spend time seeing all those left over though. It’s only 10% of tag price; not even close to some Circuit City online deal.
Nonetheless, the more important things are how long Best Buy will be the only giant nationwide electronic store. New face coming up or all B&M stores fading away, who know? But now less competitor, less competition. That’s bad for us anyway.
Sooner or later, there surely will be another big store closing. But the question is who? -_- Now it’s time to move to *local* store, *smaller* business. Thus it will have more stability and reliability.
Yeah!, America. It probably is the right time to realize that you couldn’t control anything although you can print bills as many as you want. Is that relevant, huh?
Popularity: 3% [?]
Windows Live 2009 suite BETA is up for grab
Everything is new; from the installer which is much smarter to install what they are needed rather than giving us some unuseful info & help. Live Messenger, Live Writer, Live Photo Gallery, and Live Movie maker are completely redesign. Although I am yet to find any significant improvement for Live Writer besides Photo album, it is much easier to recognize non-blogging content manager like Drupal. I like that =) For messenger, it’s supported new animation display and is much cleaner UI.
They all are quite cool update; check them out here.
Added 1/16/2009: you can grab standalone installer here; about 134MB total.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Only tiny bit over a year since the first “netbook,” Asus Eee PC 701, was released to the market. I don’t think anyone expected netbook to be this large market, but it is growing constantly and rapidly. However, it’s probably coming real close to saturated point so far. It just could not be anything more than this since there is almost no possibly significant improvement available. Low price? yes eventually Eee 701 and 900A reach $199 in brick and mortar store. If it’s lower than this, I bet Asus would better bundle with their hi-end motherboards which almost twice as that. Performance? I think Atom can only take you this far since intel won’t take any risk to destroy Pentium D indeed. Cheap stuff gives less margin; no business wants to destroy its own profit indeed. Size? 7” 9” 10” 12” what else do you want? smaller than this will be MID or PDA or even phone, larger than this is Notebook. There is just no more room to fit in. CDROM? we still need that? once a year usage won’t justify extra price and weight for this market.
What we have so far should be about the same as we will have in next 6 months or a year I guess and I’m really happy seeing all netbooks available in B&M store. In my opinion, if I have planned to buy another netbook besides Eee 702 I’m using, I will buy …
- HP 2133 Mini-Note – It fades out of the market for a while; although keyboard is big, it looks so cheap anyway. Passed! We’ll see if HP Mini 2140 will be better or not.
- MSI Wind 10” – this could be named as king of netbook because it’s just about right in everything. Sadly it’s too big for my taste.
- Acer Aspire 1 – this is another good netbook with a nice keyboard. No weird right-shift anymore, but it failed me in term of appearance.
- Eee Eee Eee – I don’t know what model they have anymore 900 900A 900HA 901A 902Z 1000HA 1000A whatever I don’t care them anymore, just because too many models and I don’t believe in quality of SSD from Asus from my own experience. For $300+ I expected to know what I will get, not luck.
- Dell mini 9 – it might be a good one, but by the fact that it is the only one I have yet to see in person and there is no dedicated F1-F12 keys. I would not get it anyway. Such a shame that most B&M stores carry Dell laptop, but it’s hard to find Dell mini 9.
- Lenovo S10 – look good; quite good features; small keyboard for 10”; somehow I just don’t feel S10 better than anyone else on the market, how weird is that?
- Samsung NC10 – the first contender for Wind 10” throne. Fantastic >6-hr battery life on 6-cell; nice design; matte finish chassis. Ohh I like it very much. It seems to be real solid machine in my opinion.
- HP Mini 1000 – damn! I couldn’t believe that HP can improve 2133 this much. Same design but look much much more solid than the predecessor. Its lid looks like normal HP, but once open it. What a nice job from HP! Everything is about the same with others IMO but it looks much better with matte finish. Just about 3-hr battery life—no larger battery available due to design—not so bad, but it wins me completely.
Although I’m not a person who buy things by its look, when comparing HP Mini 1000 to the rest, it just shines. If you don’t see it in person yet and are looking for netbook, I highly recommend to see and play HP Mini 1000 by yourself. Alternatively, Samsung NC10 could be on the top of the chart in term of functionality. Again if I were you, I definitely pick HP Mini 1000. Hey! sometimes look can just win functionality without any logical reason.
** I can’t believe I like HP product this much since I hate glossy design so badly. HP Mini 1000 is just an exception.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Palm Pre: worth waiting this long?
Eventually Palm folks could be sort of exciting of what it will be releasing tomorrow like what we always had long long time ago. Palm PRE! newest release device from Palm, Inc.
It’s a PHONE. DAMN! I still want PDA-only device, but will watch this closely how they deal with Zen of Palm.
Only 2 things I am so anxious to try out are PIM–I still want easy and intuitive calendar like the old day–and e-mail–which is supposed to be as great as Chatteremail. Stay tuned!
Check the Pre out at Palm.com
No word on price, but as expected it should be up as high as Palm could do–$599 probably?? You know? Palm just needs money to run damn bad business.
Well there are tons of features which they claimed:
- GPS navigation software (made by Palm, really? I just don’t think it’s Garmin or Tomtom)
- Full Web experience (Well, no words on real engine yet–Webkit? Gecko? well hope it’s not what Palm cook themselves ) [it's Webkit with no flash support, according to pocketables.net]
- The rest is what you can expect from every phone these days.
- Oh I miss another one, fat design device. Palm just wants to differentiate itself from today’s trend I guess and be like what it was all the time.
Personally I don’t like glossy finish of this device that much, but would love to try if this WebOS (can they think of better name? Nova is much better, dude) is good as we are expecting. I’m just afraid that Palm couldn’t reach our old Palm OS folks’ expectation because its web, Palm Pre’s web, still is broken somehow–so unprofessional. Could you think of Apple’s site broken like this? Never..
All we have is “hope” to have more than 2 great mobile OS besides iPhone’s one and andriod.
Well head over jkOntheRun, for some info about WebOS. I found out that all apps are natively running on browser. In other words, they all are just HTML, CSS, and javascript. We’ll see if that’s the only thing they got.
Still no exact words on PDN about SDK. If it’s really only a “Web” OS, I’m not jumping on this board for sure!!!
Added[Jan 09, 2009]: Pocketables.net has such a nice detail in Palm Pre Lounge; Pre’s feature makes me think of G1 indeed–no on-screen keyboard, small battery capacity. Also no memory slot with that fat design??
Look like the world responds to Palm Pre pretty well–about 40% stock price up. Wait and see if it’s real or just a hype.
Popularity: 3% [?]
