Posts in category Technology

Motorola Xoom Review

Jan29
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Mauldor

The Motorola Xoom is a 10.1” Tablet that runs Android 3.2 (honeycomb) with Ice-cream Sandwich (4.0.3) coming to the UK Soon. This started life as a £399 device competing again the iPad 2 but came with a default of 32GIG storage instead of 16GIG. It first dropped to £329 (which it currently retails at) but for a short period of time, a couple of stores had it for £249, which made it somewhat of a bargain. I managed to get the last on in stock while passing Carphone Warehouse, would this have the same issues as the Blackberry Playbook or would I end off keeping this device?

Posted in Review - Tagged 3.2, android, carephone, honeycomb, ICS, motorola, tablet, warehouse, xoom

Motorola Xoom Drops to £249

Jan21
2012 Written by Mauldor

The Motorola Xoom started life as a £399 10 inch tablet, competing against the iPad 2, the theory was it had double the ram for the same price as the baseline iPad 2. Sales were bad and soon they dropped the price down to £329 and in November 2011 brought out the Xoom 2. Recently a few retailers have slashed the price down to £249, such as PCWorld & Carphone warehouse (the same people who also slashed the prices of Blackberry Playbook). I thought I would pop along to local PCWorld and see if they had any in, online stated they had none in stock.

Posted in Tech - Tagged 3.2, 32gig, android, Apple, honycomb, ICS, ipad, motorola, tablet, xoom

Blackberry Playbook Price Change

Jan14
2012 Written by Mauldor

The Playbook started life at full price, about the same price if I recall as the iPad and then we had the first drop which saw the device go for 16GIG – £249, 32GIG – £329 and 64GIG – £409. We next had another price drop just the other week and now it was 16GIG – £169, 32GIG – £200 & 64GIG – £329. They are having another go with the prices going up instead (and down on the bigger models). As you can see from the screenshot, 16 GIG – £249 (£80 Increase), 32GIG – £259 (£60 Increase) and 64GIG – £269 (£60 decrease). If the £169 did not seem worth it – cannot see why people would spend more now?

Posted in Tech - Tagged blackberry, drop, pcworld, playbook, price, riim

Spiceworks Network Monitoring

Jan10
2012 Written by Mauldor

Spiceworks is a free browser-based network management and administration program. It provides the user with a single dashboard from which he or she can inventory, monitor and troubleshoot the network.

When you first install it, Spiceworks scans your network. It checks Active Directory, does a NetBIOS scan and pings the addresses in your specified IP range. It took us a fair bit of fiddling with the firewall to get all the devices on our network inventoried, and even then our locally attached printer wasn’t found. This was a bit odd, given that it was attached to the PC Spiceworks was installed on.

Once it has its inventory, though, Spiceworks is refreshingly intelligent in the way it uses your information. For instance, wherever it can it will identify a client PC’s make and model. It will then automatically link that PC’s entry to the driver download page on its manufacturer’s website. It will also show you the machine’s spec, the programs that are installed on it, the amount of disk space free and so on.

Posted in Review - Tagged browse, browser, free, freeware, monitor, network, spiceworks

Blackberry Playbook 32GIG Review

Jan08
2012 Written by Mauldor

BlackBerry Playbook

I currently own an iPad 1, wife has an iPhone 4S and I have a Windows Mobile 7 Phone, so I have enough devices to do what I need on the go. I have been looking at tablets for a while now and a few caught my eye such as Sony Tablet S, Blackberry Playbook and the Motorola Xoom. The end choice is always about money, splashing out £400 for an iPad 2 was too much money in my books and even the £329 price points of Android Tablets seem a bit high. The two machines that are at the £200 price point are the Blackberry Playbook and Arnova 9 G2.

Posted in Review - Tagged android, Apple, archos, beta, blackberry, DDPBInstaller, ios, ipad, playbook, rim, sideload, twitter, xoom

HTC Trophy review

Jan01
2012 Written by Mauldor

Work supplied me with HTC Trophy which runs Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) as it’s core operating system. I have been using this phone for a few weeks now as my main mobile and I would like to go through my thoughts on how it pans out as an all-in-one smartphone. The phone has no form of memory card slot and comes supplied with 8GIG Storage, you cannot increase this in any form (rather like the iPhone) but it does come with Microsoft Skydrive which allows an extra 25GIG worth of stuff ‘in the cloud’.

Posted in Review - Tagged fast, htc, mango, mobile, phone, Review, snapdragon, tiles, Trophy, windows, work

Smartphone Smackdown

Dec27
2011 Written by Mauldor

The three main smartphone’s out there at the moment are Android, Apple and Windows Phone 7, of course there is a lot of makers of these phones (apart from the iPhone, only Apple make them). It just so happens that I have to hand three phones to compare, this been the HTC Hero (Running Android 2.1), a slow and small phone by today’s standards but it does give me a chance to compare. The wife has the iPhone 4S and I got a new work phone, the HTC Trophy, A Windows 7.5 phone. Is there a clear winner here? Will the iPhone wipe the floor with the rest? Onward to battle.

Posted in Review - Tagged android, Apple, iphone, mobile, phone, portable, smart, smartphone, windows, wp7

Secunia Personal Software Inspector

Dec10
2011 Written by Mauldor

While Windows update does a grand job or updating the core microsoft programs, unlike Linux, it does touch the other software. Enter Secunia Personal Software Inspector, this is a free program that not only scans your machine for updates, it fixes security issues as well. Head over to the website and give it a try, its free after all.

Posted in Tech - Tagged free, secunia, Security, update

Is SSD a must have product?

Dec02
2011 Written by Mauldor

I am sure that it may have crossed your mind to replace your main system drive from the old and slow mechanical SATA drive to a faster SSD. Looking at the prices of SSD will show that that it’s about £1 per GB (give or take) and to have full advantage of the speed on offer, you need to have a SATA III Connection (6GB/Sec). The main issue will be one of space; it is easier than you think to fill a 120GIG Drive. Recently I had a new works laptop (Dell Latitude E6420) and this came with a SSD Drive installed (Samsung SSD PM810) and the boot time of 30 seconds was impressive until you realise that this is a fresh build Windows 7 and not joined the domain.

Posted in Tech - Tagged boot, cost, fast, price, space, speed, ssd, time

Blackberry PlayBook drops in price

Nov13
2011 Written by Mauldor

Recently on my travels looking for a tablet computer, I noticed that they have dropped the price of the BlackBerry Playbook. It comes in 3 models 16GIG – £249, 32GIG – £329 and 64GIG – £409. If you were just to look at this from a normal ‘person on the ground’ view point, you could argue that at £249 it is £150 cheaper than the iPad, smaller which means easier to carry around and it all does the same thing right? While I have not bought one as of yet, this is what I found out so far about the device.

Posted in Review - Tagged blackberry, drop, fast, multitasking, playbook, portable, price, small, tablet

Posts in category Technology

Motorola Xoom Review

Motorola Xoom Drops to £249

Blackberry Playbook Price Change

Spiceworks Network Monitoring

Blackberry Playbook 32GIG Review

HTC Trophy review

Smartphone Smackdown

Secunia Personal Software Inspector

Is SSD a must have product?

Blackberry PlayBook drops in price

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