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.

Selling the lie

I asked a sales woman about the price – she stated that the price was only available on-line and I had to buy the product (and have it delivered) on-line also. I went on to explain that it gives you the option at the on-line price to pick up from a store, so the only Online bit was me actually choosing it online. She went on to say that she has no stock and this was without checking in any form, we can assume that she has already been asked about these today or is in fact guessing. She went on to tell me about the brand new Xoom that is coming soon and this is why they have reduced the price, when I asked about which model, she was unsure but as soon as I mentioned Xoom 2, she said that was the one.

I went on to inform her that the Xoom 2 came out in November 2011 and can be bought anywhere and is not ‘coming soon’. The last bit of info she shared was the fact that PCWorld was the only retailer that is selling the Xoom at £249, once I explained Carephone Warehouse have the same model and price – she walked away, almost annoyed I guess.

Tablets going down in price

It stands to reason that as CES 2012 has been and gone, there will be a whole bunch of new Tablets coming out, these are faster (Quad core), better GPU (Tegra 3) and features Ice Cream Sandwich (V4 of android OS). The tablets that are left in the stores have two options, reduce the price to attract the impulse buyer / looking for a cheap tablet or not sell any more of them.

Let us not also forget the Apple iPad 3 is due out soon and this may be a game changer on what to expect in tablets. I am no hurry to buy a tablet and it seems its hard to get them anyhow, maybe the staff bought them all as they did with the HP, at least I have saved myself £250 once again.

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?

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.

]]> http://www.liquidsilver.org/2011/12/secunia-personal-software-inspector/feed/ 0 http://www.liquidsilver.org/2011/12/is-ssd-a-must-have-product/ http://www.liquidsilver.org/2011/12/is-ssd-a-must-have-product/#comments Fri, 02 Dec 2011 11:09:35 +0000 Mauldor http://www.liquidsilver.org/?p=3786

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.

OS Speed (Apple)
With a normal 7200rpm Drive fitted to the apple, I can boot in 30 seconds or less, this is more than normal for OSX. One of the main good things about SSD then is it will bring windows loading times closer to that of apple. How many times do you power your computer from scratch during the course of one day? Maybe twice at most and waiting an extra one minute is not really that much of a pain.
General day to day use
I have not seen an amazing difference starting application on the laptop considering I went from an E6400 which featured Core 2 Duo and 7200rpm drive to E6420 with Latest Core i5 and SSD.  I am sure there is a speed difference of maybe a second or two but in day to day operations, most of the uplifting is been done by the increased processor speed rather than the fact it has an SSD in there.
Would I buy one of the desktop pc?
I can get my hands on a 120gig SSD for about £120 but as I only have SATA2, I will not get the full speed. I could add the price of a card to give me sata3 which is adding another £35 to the mix. My question of course is that would I see a major benefit to my system for the extra £150 or would the speed difference wear off after a week of using it, I think the latter.

Views
Have you gone to SSD and did you notice a major difference? Would you put your hands on your heart and say that it was money well spent or did you just think it was great as you spent so much money on the device? I would love your hear your thoughts on this.

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.

Flashing your Router

The first thing I did was grab the right files, when I went to the router database, I found the correct section for my router. There was two files, one is marked Factory while the other is not. You pull up your router IP address (in my case 192.168.0.1) and head off to administration then firmware upgrade. It flashed the router after selecting the  dlink-dir615d-factory-webflash.bin file. After the router reboots, it is now running of a different IP. You can either set your network card to the correct details (192.168.1.2 with a gateway of 192.168.1.1) or you can just refresh your IP settings to get a new address.

One you get to the router page, the first thing it asks you for is a user name and password, you can set this to what you want and thus nobody will know what name to even type in (more secure). You now need to go to the admin page again, flash the firmware with the second file (dir615d-ddwrt-webflash.bin) and wait until all is done.

Remember that as it is now a new firmware and such, you need to change a few settings, the first one will be the wireless security for a start. I changed the IP address of the router as well, I had everything set up for 192.168.0.xxx so I made sure the router was now 192.168.0.1.

What does this do?

It improves the current features and gives you a whole lot more. I mentioned at the start that my router was very slow when accessed and now it is very quick indeed. I can see what machine is using in terms of bandwidth, I can see who is connected and a whole lot more. The Wiki Page can tell you what it does better than I can – best have a look there.

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.

The original problem

The back story was he had spilled liquid over his keyboard and since then most of the keys never worked properly. He was worried about his data and if possible could he get this saved. The other issue was the laptop was very slow indeed and various other small issues.

It started with a backup

The first thing I did when I got this laptop was to back up all his data to an external drive, once I had this, I then started to rebuild the Laptop. I placed Windows 7 on there along with Office 2010, acrobat, flash, Java and so forth. Everything worked fine apart from the keyboard. I pointed him to a site to buy his own replacement keyboard, this was if it does not work – he looses out not me.

Faulty Keyboards

The first keyboard arrived and once fitted, I tested this out – only to find the space bar did not work. I was unsure if the keyboard was at fault or the controller. I advised the owner to send this back and get another. The seller advised him to send the keyboard plus £5 to cover postage and he would send another but this person instead just board another at £14. This took another two weeks to arrive, in all this time the laptop sat built ready just needing a keyboard. The keyboard did arrive, I did fit in and every single key worked as it should.

Putting it all back together

All I had to do was flip the computer over, screw in 6 screws and that was the job done, for some reason though now (as the battery had gone flat) it would not power on. The Power supply led come on the side of the laptop but no other LED came on. This baffled me – this thing had worked all the other times and I had done nothing different. I checked this thing out, had testers on it and still dead, I was baffled for sure.

Paying the piper

Before this thing had broken – we had discussed a price and he felt £40 was fair as he had already spent £28 on parts. To be perfectly honest, the amount of time I had spent on this, if charged by the hour would have been closer to £120. The bad thing now was he gave me the money before getting the laptop back. I had informed him since of the problem but he feels I can fix it.

Stopping the clock

I felt I had spent enough time trying to fix this issue, as I won’t be getting any more money – I put it all back together and bagged it up. I shall give him the laptop and the money back and inform him to take it to a shop.

Conclusion

While I do feel sorry for people paying through the nose, I have not got equipment to fully fix all laptops. If the fix is simple (Software related) then it could be a quick fix but more often than not people want a full-blown fix, often costing more than a new laptop but for the price of a crate of beer. I think I shall stop fixing any laptop, no matter how simple.

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?

A Quick review of the boxee software

You can download Boxee software to run on Windows, Linux and OS X for free, this is the same interface and functionality as the thing above but of course you provide the hardware. The interface is geared to be used by a remote but you can use the keyboard and mouse. What you will find is that it is very hard to navigate around using a mouse, especially when you are trying to go through the unidentified movie’s it has found.

What you need to do is go into the settings and add some media sources, tell it what it will find there and it will go off and try and index your files.

This is the main screen and from here you can jump to 6 sections as listed – this been Photo’s, Music, Movies, TV Shows, Apps and Files. Photos presents just a folder you can go into and do slideshows and such from there. Music gives you the option to look at artist or album.

When we jump into movies, boxee will go off to imdb and other services to get you cover art as well as a bio of the movie.

TV Shows is not quite what it seems, if you think you can now sit and watch Live TV, then you will be disappointed at this stage, this is what Boxee thinks is your TV show collection and a lot depends on the naming of files in your shared drive. If your running Windows, may I suggest theRenamer which will correct all your TV shows for you.

In my case, Boxee has not managed to get the complete list of my TV Shows, this will involve a lot of work in the backend of the boxee software to tell it what my files are and put them in the right group.

Last on the list then – Apps, these are effectively Web based pages and for example the Tech Buzz one opens up previous shows to watch or you can click watch live which will take you to his web site to watch the live video.

Unidentified Videos

After it had scanned my files, it had a long list of movies it had no idea what they were, this was odd as I made sure I named them the correct way. I had to go in and do a search on the name, find the right movie and then it would add it to the right list. This is my eyes was a lot of work and some movies for example had UK naming which it failed on as it only knew of the USA names for movies.

Boxee conclusion

I never really rated boxee that much, in the same light as Google TV and other such things, I do not see any difference to a standalone media player (such as the WDTV) given how much this box was or even building yourself a Linux Media device for example.

Playstation 3 as a media device

Most people including my good friend there would only see the PS3 as a mean to play games and would dismiss this idea without a second thought The PS3 can either come with a 160GIG HD or 320GIG and to make it even better – you can add your own such as 1TB 2.5″ Drive if you really wanted to store all the media on there. It has gigabit networking as well as wireless. Using the PS3MediaServer you can make the PS3 play any format out there, this is a program you run on a computer of your choice (Linux, Windows or OSX) and it streams to the PS3. If you have a NAS Drive (as I do) this can also act as a media server and as the PS3 can play Flash, you can watch Live TV (in the UK at least) using CatchUP TV or the in-built tuner on your TV of course.

The upshot also is it has a BluRay player and it can play some amazing game, has a keyboard add-on, remote control and Move..

In Conclusion

In my own view, the PS3 is a much better choice given you can play games, browse the web and play BluRays. I would suggest you the software from Boxee Software as well as XMBC before you start splashing money over the counter on things that may well not do what you wanted them to do.

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.

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.

What is the issue?

, go into This is the error you get upon trying to open a link on your desktop, no clue at all from Microsoft in why it has happened. What you need to do is click the Office Button Top left and choose Excel options. On the let had side Advanced and scroll down the list.

The option you are looking for is in the general section and is marked as Ignore other applications that use Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE). Make sure this is Not Ticked, if it is, this is the issue. Now you can open spreadsheets as normal.

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.

Dealing with the issue

The first thing I did was reset the internal battery and even went into the BIOS and did various checks, none of this sorted the problem. The other thing I noticed was how noisy the laptop was, seems the fan was running high all the time. It was a shame the laptop was doing this as I had planned to sell this on at work if possible but there was no way I could give them a laptop that took forever to get out of the BIOS screen.

Cleaning inside

I got some compressed air also called Air duster and got to work on the laptop. Unscrewing three screws on the bottom marked keyboard symbol, flipping it over and pressing the latches on top of the keyboard (4 of them) to allow the keyboard to be removed. I used the Air Duster to Blast out any crap and gave it general clean.

Will it now work?

The first boot was the same but later that same day and it went through the BIOS quick (as it should do) and the other bonus was now the laptop was very quiet indeed. When I was testing it for streaming and the CPU was like 95%, then I noticed it was loud again. I will carry on to make sure it is fixed before I dare sell it to someone.

Bonus Clean 

I used theAir Duster on my Dell XPS 435MT, I could here it pulsating as if the fan was struggling to keep a constant pace. Once I had blown out every scrap of dirt in there, the Dell was now silent, I recommend a can of this stuff even though it does not last that long, already half of the can is used up on just two cleans.