Jason's Development Blog

I may be doing Computer Science, but the detailed Hardware stuff has always been my biggest weakness in that field. I know the basics, why one piece of spec is better than another, but I’ve never been that good at the whole picture, where good trade-offs can be made etc.

So my old laptop is going down the toilet, it’s actually physically falling apart 0_o Dell’s studio brand’s hinges were really badly designed as a result it’s not even acting as a laptop any more, and it still overheats at the drop of a hat…

Hopefully I’m looking for a laptop that’ll at least last until I’m out of university in three years time xD

At present I’m looking at the XPS 17 from Dell. I can get one with pretty good specs for a bit over £1000.

CPU: 2nd generation Intel® Core™ i7-2720QM processor 2.20 GHz with Turbo Boost 2.0 up to 3.30 GHz
The 2.3GHZ CPU is a lot more expensive and whilst the speed would be nice, since CPUs are very difficult to impossible to replace on a laptop…this is a fair trade-off I think.

Monitor: 17.3″(44 cm) HD+ WLED True-Life (1600×900) with 2.0 Mega Pixel Integrated Camera
The better monitor requires the 3D Graphics card and together that costs £300. I refuse to get the 3D card.

Graphics Card: 3GB NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 555M Graphics Card
Not. Getting. 3D. Card.

Memory: 6144MB (1x2GB, 1x4GB) 1333MHz DDR3 Dual Channel SDRAM
The 1333MHz is a bit slow, but there’s no other alternative for this one except an 8GB 1333MHz DDR3.

Optical Drive: DVD+/-RW (DVD, CD read and write)
I barely use one of these these days. Games come from Steam mostly, so I’d only use it for Movies and burning my coursework to CD.

Hard Drive: 1TB (7,200rpm) Serial ATA Dual HDD – (2x500GB)
Only one available, and two 7200rpm 500GB hard drives? That strikes me as not bad…

Battery: 9-cell 90Whr Lithium Ion battery
Only one available, and I like laptops because I can move around with them but I’m still willing to leave it plugged it.

Wireless: Intel® Centrino® Wireless-N 1000 (EUR)
Wireless speed doesn’t bug me, I live in England. Our internet is generally slow as hell anyway…

Cost: £1,039.00

I can go for a bit more than this price-wise but I wince for every pound over £1000 xD I’m considering getting a proper Desktop, but they tend to be less convenient especially for moving back and forth between two cities several times a year…

This one is on deal, if I can’t find a better one soon I’ll order it since by the 20th it’s out of deal and’ll cost £500 more

Quote of the Day
“Hardware works best when it matters the least.”
Norman Ralph Augustine

Well it seems to be that time again, there are too many icons, half-installed and unused programs, legacy copies, musics, torrents and gigabytes on my laptop, where no matter how much I think about it I don’t know how at least half of my 250GB hard-drive is actually being used.

Seriously, where does it go? Well, the solution is simple at least: Pull out the 1TB hard drive, copy the very useful things over and do a good format.

It’s interesting to think about why computers need regular formatting. The data just seems to creep onto them when you aren’t looking. Useless programs you never uninstall, random files you download…if you don’t format every year or two you wind up with an ugly looking file system, to say the least.

I wonder if this has a technical term…probably.

Quote of the Day
“Quantum mechanic Seth Lloyd says the universe is one giant, hackable computer. Let’s hope it’s not running Windows.”
Kevin Kelly

I’m sure the whole keyboard feature has been suggested before…many times in fact. Still, this is definitely a slick presentation of the concept, but I doubt it would have the revolutionary power it claims (it’s basically just the keyboard has key as a mini-screen).

Quote of the Day
“Cynicism isn’t smarter, it’s only safer. There’s nothing fluffy about optimism.”
Jewel Kitcher