Archive for the 'Computers' Category
Will Natal Change the Game? 23 Feb 2010
The ever-excitable Jason Bradbury has posted a written and video review of his experience playing with an early prototype of Microsoft’s much anticipated Project Natal gaming interface (check out the videos on the Natal YouTube channel here). I’m not much of a gamer, though Natal does hold some interest in the same way the Wii [...]
I’ve installed an SSD as my boot drive 6 Jul 2009
So I’ve had my Mac Pro for quite a while now and it more than meets my needs, but the one thing that bothered me was how long it took to get to a usable desktop, I timed it as:
Time to logon screen:
2:01
Time to usable desktop:
2:58
As you can see, nearly three minutes to get to [...]
Power Consumption 6 Jun 2009
I borrowed an energy monitor plug this week to check what my home entertainment devices were pulling down. Some surprising numbers:
Wii (Standby)
1w
Wii (On)
16w
Wii (Max)
18w
TV (Standby)
0w
TV (On)
118w
TV (Max)
119w
Laptop (Charging)
24w
Laptop (Boot)
58w
Laptop (Idle)
46w
Mac Pro (Standby)
5w
Mac Pro (Idle, disk usage)
180w
Mac Pro (Idle, no disk)
166w
Mac Pro (Boot)
210w
Mac Pro (Max)
218w
HTPC (Standby)
3w
HTPC (S3 sleep)
4w
HTPC (Idle)
80w
HTPC (Playing back recorded programme)
82w
HTPC (Watching live [...]
Taskbar Shuffling 5 Mar 2009
A while back I mentioned my love of Taskbar Shuffle. Unfortunately, while it has Vista support, it only supports 32-bit, and I run 64. So I hunted around and found an alternative which does work on 64-bit: Taskix.
It’s one of those programs that runs quietly in the background and you only realise how [...]
Easier Ways to Surf 12 Apr 2008
A friend of mine has an iPod Touch, not so much to listen to music, but so he can check his mail and surf the web quickly and easily sat on his sofa. He’s been finding it great for those times when you want to quickly look something up or check your email without [...]
The Move to Vista 12 Jan 2008
I meant to write this when Leopard was released, especially in light of the fact that Apple users were, for the first time it seems, experiencing beta software with the launch of Leopard. Welcome to Windows World. I whinged about how bad I found Tiger in a previous post so it’s probably not [...]
PC Noise Ratings 29 Sep 2007
PC manufacturers give a lot of info about their PCs; weight, height, how many frames the graphics cards can do, how many watts the PSU kicks out, how many fans there are, how big they are and how fast the turn. Do you know the one thing they all leave out is? The [...]
Rest Easy OCD 23 Sep 2007
I’ve mentioned before my slight OCD tendencies. Turns out a number of my workmates are likewise afflicted (a lot more people than you realise, it might be just because we’re getting older and like things a certain way, scarily I have noticed I’m getting set in my ways and I haven’t hit 30 yet!). [...]
Drowning in Email Addresses 17 Sep 2007
I have a lot of different email addresses. In Thunderbird I have 23 separate accounts listed. Most aren’t used, many now forward into other accounts and I’m slowly bringing them together, although I still have the issue of a work account too. This means people often get confused when mailing me.
Many of [...]
Back on Mac 11 Sep 2007
As I mentioned in my previous post, I’m back on a Mac. I’d been thinking about a new PC for a while, thinking I would get a cracking laptop, but as I prefer using my computer at my desk with a full-size keyboard and mouse, not to mention two monitors, and I was thinking [...]