Archive for the ‘Hardware’ Category

Speed up Virtual PC

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

Here are some tips to speed up you Virtual PC from my experience:

  1. Run you VPC from an external hard drive or a drive other than your primary Windows drive (partitions on the same physical disk doesn’t count and won’t improve speed).
  2. If you’re using an external drive it should preferably be connected via eSATA (#1 choice) or FireWire (yes I know that USB 2 is in theory faster than FireWire, but FireWire has better continious data through-put).
  3. If you are using a differential disk I found that VPC runs faster with the differential disk on the your PC (Windows) drive and the parent drive on the external drive (and not the other way around which is considerably slower: even slower than having both virtual drives on the external drive).

On a side note I do not recommend running VPC on your main PC (Windows) drive for prolonged periods.  It puts a lot of stress on the drive trying to cope with bot Windows page file writes etc. and meeting the demands of the VPC, especially if you have a low RAM config (2Gb or less).  I have had at least 2 drives dying rather prematurely because of constant VPC usage.  Although there is no way to prove this, identical drives (same batch) lasted much longer (in fact still lasts) than the ones used for VPC.

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New generation big screen Windows Mobile phones

Saturday, September 19th, 2009

I’m in the market for a new Windows Mobile phone. For me the most important aspects are screen size, processor speed, memory and battery life.  These are the ones I’m considering at the moment (all information sources from GSM Arena):

  1. HTC Touch HD: One of the first big screen window mobile phones, but getting a bit on in age having been released more than a year ago.  It features a 65K color,
    480 x 800 WVGA, 3.8 inch display, Qualcomm 7201A 528 MHz processor, 288 MB RAM, 512 MB ROM and a 1350 mAh Li-Ion battery.
  2. Samsung Omnia II i8000 (also dubbed the Samsung Omnia Icon): This is a brand new release from Samsung following on its predesessor the Omnia i900 (which I seriously considered a while back).  It features a 65K color AMOLED 480 x 800 pixels (WVGA), 3.7 inch display, Samsung S3C6410 800MHz processor including a dedicated graphics accelerator, 2/8/16 GB storage, 256 MB RAM and a 1500 mAh Li-Ion battery.  Currently this is the one I’m favoring, the AMOLED display, processor and battery makes it a good option.  It currently ships with WinMo 6.1, but will have a free (in most cases) upgrade to 6.5.
  3. Acer F900: Released under the radar earlier this year without much press attention.  Acer bought the PDA/GPS company E-ten and their range is based on the E-ten models.  It features a 65K color, 480 x 800 WVGA, 3.8 inch display, Samsung S3C6410 533 MHz processor,128MB RAM, 256MB ROM and 1530mAh Li-ion battery.  This phone offers good value for money since it is much cheaper currently than the others listed here.  It is a shame about the low RAM/ROM, but it compensates with a microSD slot and a good battery.  It is apparently more responsive than the HD Touch.
  4. Toshiba TG01: The much hyped and yet to be released model features a 256K color (65K effective) 480 x 800 WVGA, 4.1 inch display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8250 1 GHz processor, 256 MB RAM, 512 MB ROM and a 1000mAh Li-ion.  For me the screen size pushes the phone over the edge of being comfortable enough to carry as a phone.  The weak battery is also disappointing, hopefully this will be beefed up when the phone is released.
  5. Acer F1: Now here is an interesting phone I stumbled upon by chance.  It is pipped to be releases in October and there has not been much press on it, but check the features (not listed on GSM Arena yet, but can be found here): 65K color, 480 x 800 WVGA 3.8 inch display, Qualcomm 8250 1 GHz processor, 256 MB RAM, 512 MB ROM and a 1350 mAh Li-ion battery.  Very impressive.  The battery could have been a bit better, but this phone may actually be a contender.  The price is likely to be less than both the Toshiba and Samsung phones which makes it even more attractive.

Windows Mobile 6.5 also promises to have improved performance and responsiveness. I can vouch for this: I loaded a cooked 6.5 ROM on my HTC and must say was impressed with the responsiveness even on my old 200MHz phone.

Now for the difficult part – which one to buy: currently I’m leaning toward the Omnia II.  Once I have made the decision I will do a mini review on it.

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IDE vs. SATA (aka PATA vs. SATA / SATA II) in a nutshell

Saturday, November 22nd, 2008

I recently purchased a new notebook with Vista pre-installed.  Being old school, I decided to cross-grade (is that the right term?) to XP only to realize that the XP install doesn’t have SATA drivers included.  Needless to say I had to rebuild a new install CD with my new notebook’s SATA drivers.  You can find some good instructions on Softpedia here to get this relatively painlessly done.

Being my curious self I started wondering about the differences between IDE and SATA.  This is what I found (in layman’s terms):

Terminology:

  • IDE and PATA are synonyms and PATA stands for parallel ATA
  • SATA stands for serial ATA, while SATA II is an upgraded version of SATA (as in faster)

Physically:

IDE cables a broader and more cluncky than SATA cables.

Perfromance:

  • IDE/PATA offers speeds of up to 133Mb/second
  • SATA offers speeds up to 150Mb/second
  • SATA II offers speeds up to 300Mb/second

In real terms however it is said that a regular computer user will not notice a big difference between them.  If you’re doing serious RAM and hard drive intensive work on you computer (such as video editing), then the differences become more apparent with SATA and SATA II delivering better performance.  This is because of SATA’s ability to maintain higher average access speeds than IDE.

In Summary:

I wouldn’t run out and replace all my existing IDE drives with SATA drives! If I have a choice I would definitely go for SATA or SATA II if the cost implication is not too much.  Also IDE is older technology it is slowly disappearing with most new desktop computers not even having IDE slots anymore.  So if you plan to reuse a new drive you’re purchasing now as part of an upgrade it might be better to go for a SATA since you’d possibly be able to reuse it later if you buy new hardware.

You can find a good write-up of the differences between the types and some more technical info at HardDriveReport.com.


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