I picked up an Acer Aspire 5740 laptop a few weeks ago. Thanks to the forums over at Ars Technica I considered purchasing a Solid State Drive (SSD) to replace the traditional hard drive. Based on their recommendations, I picked up the Intel G2 X25M 80GB Mainstream SSD. The sale price was $220, down from the suggested retail of around $280.

Installation was very easy, and I put a fresh copy of Windows 7 on. Installation time was pretty fast. I got the impression that the SSD was faster overall, but was it worth $220 and 1/4th the storage capacity of my stock 5400rpm laptop drive?

Overall, life with the SSD was faster. I was interested in increasing my battery life, and decreasing my startup and resume times. I didn’t really care too much about faster reading and writing speeds, except how it related to opening programs and waking my computer up from sleep.

Benchmarks for SSDs concentrate on raw disk performance, but I didn’t really care about that. What was the impact of an SSD for a casual, daily laptop user?
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll be honest. I had laptop envy. It struck me pretty hard over the winter holiday, wherein my friends and family spent time cruising the Internet and doing work while all sitting within thirty feet of each other. I retreated up to my office to dink around on my workstation, labeling me both as anti-social and a gaming dork.

There was a problem with joining their mobile computing ranks, however. At the end of 2009 I bought a sweet Lenovo G450 laptop on sale for about 60% off the original price. It was equipped with an Intel dual core processor, 3GB of RAM, and had everything necessary for daily computing. It could play high definition video, had a built-in Web cam for Skyping, and plenty of output ports. I liked it so much I wanted to buy another one.

The issue was that Lenovo (and just about every laptop manufacturer, apparently), was about to transition to Intel’s new mobile processor architecture. That meant the dual core laptops were undergoing deep discounts, and that remaining stock (namely the then-top-of-the-line Core2Duo) was at full price. I waited a few months, checking deal sites and our employee purchase program discounts, but never found a comparable deal.

I resigned myself to waiting for the i3, i5 and i7 machines to come to market, get some age, and then lower in price as the second-generation of ix came to market. Essentially, I was going to have to wait for two generations to pass me by.

That is, until I saw the Acer Aspire AS 5740 i5 laptop on sale at Costco for $599.99.
Read the rest of this entry »

I run up to six computers in my house. I turn them off or suspend them in order to save money and reduce my impact on the environment. I recently discovered a problem when doing this, though. I want to watch a television show or movie when I power on my HTPC. When I shut them off or suspend them most of their “lives,” all of the system health stuff runs at the same time I am trying to watch a program.

For example, I run Grisoft’s AVG antivirus software and Windows Defender. Both run on schedules and both can take a fair amount of CPU, RAM, and hard disk I/O resources. If you leave the machine off long enough, it’s possible to have both programs running at the same time.

This makes the rest of the system run slowly. This is particularly annoying when watching a 720p HD show via Boxee, which takes a pretty healthy dose of resources up on its own.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve gone through a bit of an odyssey with my home theater personal computer (HTPC) setups in the house. I originally hoped to use my Microsoft 360 remote to control the Microsoft Media Center, but I wound up using a cheap USB remote instead.

There are many wireless keyboards on the market, but the suffer from at least one of the following problems:

1. They are very large and not suitable for use in a bedroom environment — they are too big to store on a nightstand or other accessible area.
2. They are too small and don’t have an integrated touchpad or trackball.
3. They have a “touch stick” similar to what IBM / Lenovo embeds on their laptop keyboards.
4. They cost a lot of money, around $80 – $150 depending on the model.

I had resigned myself to using the HDE USB remote for the majority of my needs and then getting up to use a USB keyboard when needed. Then I found a small wireless remote with integrated keyboard from Lenovo. Better yet, I found it on sale at 50% off.
Read the rest of this entry »

Torchlight by Runic Games is an isometric game for the PC that keeps in the tradition of Diablo, Diablo II, and Titan Quest, among others. The premise is simple: control your character as they fight their way down a very deep dungeon below a besieged town. When most video games are trying to cram in as much stuff as possible, Torchlight keeps things simple. And unlike those epic games, Torchlight won’t break the bank at $20USD.

Torchlight is a fun, one-dimensional game that happens to fit right into my gaming style right now, and I highly recommend it. Here’s why.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve run Windows XP for a very, very long time. To be honest, it was a great operating system, aside from having to reboot after installing driver or most patches. I passed on Vista for the first two years of its life until a Black Friday newegg.com retail special hooked me at $79 for an OEM copy of Vista Home Premium.

I liked Vista, for the most part. It seemed stable enough, and I had to reboot less. I think coming into the OS two years after retail launch colored my experience in a much more positive light than those who started with Vista on day one. I particularly liked the new implementation of the taskbar. I liked being able to hover over an open item and seeing a thumbnail of whatever was open.

Vista wasn’t all sunshine and roses, though. I had tons of compatibility problems when trying to run three monitors. The operating system seldom remembered window preferences. When I finally yanked my secondary video card out, the window for StreamRipper was forever lost where monitor three used to be. It was like phantom limb syndrome, but for computer desktops. I hated the implementation of User Access Control, and disabled it as soon as I could figure out how.

About the same time I was struggling with my triple monitor display the release candidate beta for Windows 7 went public. I played around with it, but the stability was lacking for a multi-monitor, multi-display card setup. I chalked it up to immature video drivers and went back to Vista. In the meantime, I suffered an unrecoverable operating system corruption, and my recovery disk made in Acronis TruImage failed to restore my system. I reinstalled Vista and waited for Windows 7.
Read the rest of this entry »