Entries Tagged 'hardware' ↓

“A former Dell kiosk manager writes us to share helpful tips about doing business with Dell. He has no particular problems with Dell, he just wanted to share some helpful tips for consumers looking to get the best deal.”

Read it on: “22 Confessions Of A Former Dell Sales Manager”

Não sei porque, mas continuo lendo sobre essas comparações entre LCD e Plasma, mesmo depois de já ter me decidido por uma LCD. Mais uma da série relacionada à TV digital.

Wow! Playstation 3 (PS3) is already selling in Brazil as an imported product (as already mentioned), and just confirmed that I can’t afford it.

Americanas.com is selling the console for the modest price of BRL$ 7.980,00 (aprox. USD$ 3,666.94)!!!

Dam you import regulations!!!

For those of you who don’t know how much that means, it’s equivalent of buying an used low-end late 90’s car. 22 times Brazil’s official minimum income. Its just too much.

Well, I can just dream about it for now.

Following the “what-should-I-buy” type of articles, I’ve just read one that intends to help deciding among Wii, Xbox 360 or PlayStation3 (pt_BR only). Nothing changed my idea about buying a PS3, I just realized that it would be more difficult than I thought because Sony won’t officially sell it in Brazil. Dam!

Well, besides it, here are my points that made me choose PS3 over the others:

1. PS3 comes with a Blue-Ray drive, which IMHO is much better than HD-DVD.
2. PS3 can run Linux (another article).
3. PS3 will run legacy games from PS{1,2} (even emulation from other platforms).
4. PS{1,2} market is very big in Brazil, so it will be easy to find games for PS3.
5. Xbox 360 is from Microsoft (big negative point).
6. Wii looks fun, but the graphics are just horrible (maybe I’ll buy one just to satisfy my geekness).

So, despite the fact that I will probably need to spend some considerable amount of money, PS3 looks much better to me, and it’s in my 2007 Christmas’s shop list. Why not now? Because I first need a decent TV.

I have a Pixelview PlayTV Pro Ultra which I wasn’t able to get any channels above 60 when plugged to my local cable TV company.

After some brainstorming on video4linux-list, Hermann Pitton came up with the final solution. He guessed I wasn’t getting it because of an incorrect tuner setup.

Well, the default setup for my TV card was made using YaST2. It added “tuner=27” to my modprobe.d/tv. Hermman suggested a new approach:

/etc/modprobe.d/tv
options cx88xx card=27 tuner=69 i2c_scan=1

So the trick is changing to “tuner=69“, and be happy! Now I get all my full 80 channels!

I just want to express a recent experience I had about thermal compounds.

My home desktop uses an Athlon 64 3000+, which was running on very high temps due to improper ventilation on the computer room. Unfortunately I can’t change the room, not even add an air-conditioner, so I have to find other ways of cooling it.

I’ve already tried adding more fans to the case, different configurations on the air flow inside, change the case position and location, but nothing did any great effect on the high temp issue. The best I could get was a 5ºC drop. After a little research, I decided to change the original thermal pad that came with the stock CPU cooler to some other highly recommended by overclockers. By the way, I’m not overclocking this processor as I did with my old Sempron. I simply don’t see the need for this.

So I decided to buy the Arctic Silver Céramique, along with their suggested ArctiClean cleaning kit. After half an hour reading the instructions, cleaning the processor and the fan very carefully and applying it, I’m very impressed and very happy with the results.

After the proper applying of the thermal compound I noticed a 10ºC drop on the idle temperature, and 1KRPM drop on the fan speed. That’s very impressive. So now I have less heat with less noise. Even on a steady 10 minutes 100% CPU usage the max temperature is still 10ºC less than when I was using the stock thermal pad, while the CPU fan runs 500RPM slower.

Bottom line, having big CPU fans or big cases with many noisy fans aren’t always the best ways of cooling a processor down. Some times you just need to help the heat reach the heat sink properly so it can be quickly dispersed, and that the Arctic Silver Céramique does that easily.

By the way, I’ve been also recommended the Arctic Silver 5, which some say would do the work much better, but since it’s 90% silver, an error when applying it may cause shot circuit on the processor. So I prefer to walk on the safe side and choose a ceramic compound. But if you plan to overclock or want even lower temps, maybe you should give AS5 a try.

O IDG Now publicou uma matéria interessante com o título “Como escolher uma TV de alta definição“. A matéria é muito pertinente no Brasil, já que em 2007 iremos começar a enfrentar o processo de migração para a TV digital. Também a época do ano é muito propícia para essa discussão, já que nesse natal o mercado está demonstrando uma forte tendência para o aumento da venda de TVs LCD e plasma. Foi legal ler essa matéria, porque acabei pesquisando mais algumas informações relacionadas, e achei interessante compartilhar.

• Como escolher uma TV de alta definição
• Dúvida na hora da compra: TV tradicional ou widescreen?
• Qual será sua TV no ano 2020?
• Dúvida cruel: Tv de plasma ou LCD?
• Cronograma de implantação da TV digital prevê início das transmissões em dezembro de 2007
  

Não adianta eu ficar aqui versando sobre vantagem disso, vantagem daquilo, se alguém deve ou não comprar seja lá o que for. Cada um sabe a profundidade do seu bolso, o seu interesse por novas tecnologias e, acima de tudo, quando vale à pena investir nisso (vide o último link). Mas se realmente alguém quer saber minha opinião, ano que vem (nas liquidações pós-natal) eu vou comprar a minha LCD (só não decidi se 32″ ou 42″). Depois que eu comprei meu notebook com widescreen, não consigo mais viver sem o espaço extra (vou até trocar o monitor do desktop em casa por um 19″ wide, mas isso é assunto pra outro post).

Yesterday I was thinking how much space I have available to myself counting every single piece of hardware I can remember (except my office’s servers). So here are the numbers:

• Fixed storage:

• 200GB on the desktop
• 40GB on the laptop

• Portable storage:

• 2GB on a pendrive
• 1GB on an MP4 device
• 1GB on an MP3 device
• 1GB on a memory stick (camera)
• (My cell phone doesn’t have any storage space)

• Variable storage:

• 2 DVD/RW devices
• 1 CD/RW device
• 10 DVD/RW media
• 10 CD/RW media

• Total: aprox 296.5GB

Although I know some people would even have two 160GB drives (or more) on it’s desktop, the current number is already a lot of space. And if I’m not forgetting anything, I’m currently using only 60% of this.

Here comes the laser TV… An I don’t even own an LCD yet…

Readmore at: “Laser TVs Set to Take Down Plasma“

After having glxgears reaching about 1500 FPS on my old FX5200 card (128MB AGP), my brand new GeForce 6600 (256MB PCI-E 16x) makes me very happy with it’s 3500FPS. Yes! I guess now I can have fun with Xgl.