Posts in category Tech

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.

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?

Tagged blackberry, drop, pcworld, playbook, price, riim

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.

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.

Tagged boot, cost, fast, price, space, speed, ssd, time

DD-WRT Router Firmware replacement

Nov12
2011 Written by Mauldor

DD-WRT has been going for some time now and it is in effect a complete replacement firmware for your router. Virgin Media supplied the D-Link 615 Rev 4 and I found this to be very slow, very restrictive and missing some important features. Instead of buying a new router, I went with DD-WRT instead. You can head off to the Main site for DD_WRT and find the files for your own brand of router.

Tagged d-link, dd-wrt, firmware, flashing, router, wireless, wrt

Why not to fix Laptops at home

Oct05
2011 Written by Mauldor

I work in computers and quite often people come to me with computers to fix. You can understand why they do this due to the fact if they took it to a shop, they would be charged a good chunk of money. For some time now I have been told people “I do not fix computers” outside of work and for good reason, quite often people wanted to pay the lowest value for the most amount of work. Recently I took on a laptop to fix, a Compaq CQ61, maybe I felt sorry for the guy and maybe I thought it was an easy fix – how wrong I was.

Tagged backup, broken, data, ebay, effort, keyboard, laptop, spillage, time, water

Boxee Box vs Playstation 3

Sep11
2011 Written by Mauldor

Recently a good friend of mine went out and got himself a Boxee Box and the strange thing here is this box can be bought in the USA for about $179.99 whilst the UK pricing seems to be closer to £200. For those that are not in the know, the UK price should be closer to £114, so you can see why UK people will reject this box pretty much straight away. What got me thinking though was simple, will a Playstation 3 (which is now $250 or £190) do a better job then the boxee box as well as provide more content in the way of games and such?

Tagged box, boxee, media, Player, playstation, tv

UMPlayer Cross platform media player

Aug28
2011 Written by Mauldor

Came across this open source free-ware media player that is out there for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. It can be skinned, plays just about anything and its called UMPlayer.

UMPlayer comes packed with dozens of advanced features, such as skinnable interface, built-in subtitles search, audio / subtitles sync, enhanced filter rendering and YouTube™ player / recorder, yet has a simple and intuitive user interface that was designed for ease of use.

With over 270 built-in Audio and Video codecs UMPlayer can handle nearly all media formats, including AAC, AC3, ASF, AVI, DIVX, FLV, H.263, Matroska, MOV, MP3, MP4, MPEG, OGG, QT, RealMedia, VOB, Vorbis, WAV, WMA, WMV, XVID and many more.

Tagged linux, Mac, media, movie, mp3, osx, Player, radio, shoutcast, songs, tv, windows

Excel won’t open shortcuts problem

Aug20
2011 Written by Mauldor

I came across a strange problem at work, a person could not open any Excel documents from email, short-cuts on his desktop and so forth but he could open up Excel and open the file that way. My first course of action was to go into add/remove and repair the office install, this never fixed the problem. Going to the windows update, I made sure it had all the updates, still the problem was there. I did some searching around and found the answer, this I would like to share with you.

Tagged DDE, email, excel, microsoft, options, shortcut

HP 6715B Laptop Slow Boot

Aug20
2011 Written by Mauldor

I have an HP 6715B Laptop which is powered by the AMD Turion 64 X2, features the ATI’s Radeon Xpress X1250 and one of the great features of this 15.4 inch laptop is the fact the display runs at 1680 x 1050 which is equivalent to a 20″ display right. Now the Laptop is getting on a bit these days and HP laptops in my own experience tend to suffer badly with mainly the graphics failing. My Problem is that upon switching on the Laptop, the BIOS Screen with sit there for a good while, maybe 5 minutes or more? Once it got past that it booted and worked fine.

Tagged 6715B, ati, BIOS, fans, heat, HP, laptop, loud, noisy, Radeon, slow, Turion, Video, X1250, Xpress

Posts in category Tech

Motorola Xoom Drops to £249

Blackberry Playbook Price Change

Secunia Personal Software Inspector

Is SSD a must have product?

DD-WRT Router Firmware replacement

Why not to fix Laptops at home

Boxee Box vs Playstation 3

UMPlayer Cross platform media player

Excel won’t open shortcuts problem

HP 6715B Laptop Slow Boot

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