Before I get on to the main point, a bit of history, well my history. Since the age of 6 we’ve had a PC here, one that generally has gone through a replacement every 2 years, and each time it has been quite a bit of a significant upgrade. The first computer had a “very powerful” (for the time) Pentium 133MHz processor with a “MASSIVE” 16MB of RAM (factory upgraded from 8MB, quite a nice upgrade at the time) and everything was fine. It was acceptably fast, and as i remember, was characterised by the sound of the floppy and hard drive that ran in there. The amazingly massive 1.2GB of storage, something you’d never fill up. That was replaced with a new machine with an AMD 300MHz processor in 1998, I can’t remember how much RAM and a 6GB hard drive, which was a massive upgrade across 2 years, I actually even needed to use partitions at the time, due to the limitation of 2GB partitions under FAT. That was my main machine for a couple of years, 4 even maybe until being replaced with a 1800MHz P4 with 256MB RAM and a 40GB hard drive, still a massive upgrade for the time.

That was the past, this is now. I currently use a 2530MHz Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM and depending on what’s in there at any time, somewhere between 500GB and 3000GB storage. I built this machine in 2008 and the only changes have been the hard drives, as my capacity has grown and then moving the drives off into a different machine better suited to serving files. It is now 2011, approximately 3 years after building the machine, it is usually now that I start looking at what it’s replacement will be.

So lets look at PC technology over the past three years, I could move from a Core 2 Duo to maybe a Core i5, or even a Core i7, that would provide a speed upgrade, of course that’s just the Intel side, there is also the AMD side of the same fence, mid-high range systems would give a speed upgrade. As for RAM, the standard is either 6/12GB with a i7 or 4-8 with others so we’ll take that, and I’m happy with my disk capacity so we’ll leave it at that. I use my current PC mainly for gaming so I’ll add a graphics card to that. And for the sake of not doing too much maths (as the price changes all the time), we’ll assume it comes to £something.

So what do I really get for my money in 2011? A small upgrade speed compared to my current setup (compared to upgrades of the past), and more RAM, but what for? I have plenty already. As for the graphics update, I don’t really see anything being that over-taxing on my current system, so that’s a useless upgrade. Beginning to notice a trend? None of these updates are really worth getting, in fact in my (possibly bigoted) opinion, I haven’t seen an update in the past 3 three years to the PC space that’s been really worth it. Maybe solid state drives somewhat, but they are far too expensive for their capacity at the moment. It is this that I think is the issue with PCs these days, it has reached a point where it has matured and is at a stage that is “good enough”, and while that is good for most everyone, it has made the space boring, no really exciting developments, nothing really taxing a machine to make it worth getting an upgrade in the near future.

Now back to the point I brought up in the title, why I might not build a PC again. Put bluntly, there’s no point. Why put in the effort when for little to no cost difference I can just buy a PC that does what I want? Ok, so its “tradition” to build your own PC, especially in the gaming space, but really what’s the point? Where is the real benefit? It is also clear that the PC space is changing, the gaming space is changing, the technological world as we know it is changing. I sometimes like to make predictions for what we shall see in the few years ahead, I will write that soon, most will be clear why I think that, some maybe a little far out, but we shall see. But for now, this PC I am writing on will likely stay my PC for a long time, or at least until I change form factor.

Well, as you may or not be aware, I recently bought a new laptop, a HP Pavilion tx2530. It doesn’t have multi-touch or any of the other naff that the latest TouchSmart tx2 series has, but who uses multi-touch after two days of use anyway? It does however have single touch and pen input, as Windows keeps reminding me. It also has a Windows Experience Rating of 4.3, which isn’t bad for a laptop I reckon.

The laptop came with Windows Vista Home Premium, but hey there’s a release candidate of Windows 7 floating around here, so why don’t I install it? So that’s just what I did, and now I will discuss what works and what doesn’t.

Installation

First step of any system, installing the operating system. In case things went south, I decided to keep Windows Vista installed as well. This would allow me to at least have a working system if things went wrong. So the first thing I did was to take an 80GB chunk of the main hard drive and called it my Windows 7 install, as you can see in the image of Computer.

Now that has been installed, it’s time for some driver installs. But wait, Windows 7 isn’t released as RTM yet, so what drivers to go for? Well, Microsoft claim to have 100% compatibility with Vista drivers, so a nice trip to the HP Driver Download site to get some drivers. Looking down the list, I grabbed everything, apart from the ATI graphics drivers which were very out of date, so I grabbed some dedicated Windows 7 drivers from the AMD site. Good hour of installing, and only one catch, the drivers for the sound chipset wouldn’t install because I’m running an “old” version of Windows. Thankfully Windows Update is a dream so that just fixed that problem.  Now that everything’s installed, lets see if it works.

Testing Previous Features

Now, the first thing that I need to make sure of, is that I have not lost any functionality by this move, but have indeed gained functionality, so I will test original features.

1. Sound buttons
   Now, as you may or may not be aware, the tx2530 has backlit buttons that are blue by default, but the mute button turns orange when the sound is muted. Before installing drivers, muting the sound did not cause the colour to change. After all the driver installs, this appears to work perfectly. Orange to blue and blue to orange, button or mute via windows, it all works. Not a stopper if it didn’t but nice that it does.
2. Tablet and touch
   The main point of the laptop, the touch screen and (more importantly) the tablet. After testing in Windows Journal, the pressure sensitivity from the pen, the rubber on the pen, right click, having touch enabled, all works perfectly. However I have one problem with it, and that is pen flicks. Basically you use gestures, throw up and down to scroll up and down, left to go back, and right to go forward. But wait… in Windows 7, left is forward and right is back. Sorry that doesn’t make any sense at all!?!?!? This is easily fixed however by enabling the 8 directional pen flicks and changing them manually, but that is just weird how it is in reverse by default.
3. Multimedia Remote
   This laptop comes with a tiny remote (that is almost guaranteed to be lost). Before the upgrade it used to control everything perfectly, it controls Windows Media Centre and also the QuickPlay software. After the new install, and mashing of every button on the remote, this still works perfectly, which is good.
4. Screen Image Auto-rotate
   A feature that at times has been a pain when I haven’t wanted it to automatically rotate the screen around. But heck, its still useful if you want to switch to tablet mode and not want to rotate the laptop. Shutting the screen here causes the same correct effect to happen which is good.
5. Other Features
   I have tested other features, but they are not worth of a full note, and all work perfectly. The SD Card, the monitor connection, TV out, network all work. I haven’t tested if the modem works, but then again I don’t use dialup or a modem for anything, so this really doesn’t need a test for me.

Now that these have been checked, let’s see what’s new.

New Items

The first item is quite useful, the new tablet pc input screen. Firstly, the on screen keyboard has some nice effects, firstly the buttons look nicer, and they now have a nice effect when you press them, which makes it easier to tell if you have hit the wrong button.

The pen input differs from Vista as well by as you write it does text recognition on the words and shows it where your writing once was. There are new gestures to split and merge words, and the best feature (in my opinion is if you click on a word you can view it in character mode and change letters as you go.

Summary of Part 1

Is Windows 7 worth it on my laptop? I would say definitely. Installing this has been very good so far, and in Part 2 I will be comparing battery performance as well as other features in Windows that should hopefully make it worth the switch from Vista to 7.

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This is the end of part one of this post and I will get back to this. But for now there is more Windows 7 testing to do on my laptop.

Unfortunantly for some, my exams are more important than other stuff, including the failed Pic-a-Week, that unfortunantly is postponed until futher notice. Yeah, I know, I must suck and be fail or something but pah, sod it, I don’t care, you’re getting new websites soon, which should be awesome

So now for some content, what have I been filling my time with? Well, exams are what take the number 1 space in wasting time as I have had 8 lovely (not!) exams in 18 brilliant(-ly boring) hours. I swear thats almost more than there at the end of Sixth Form, and well, that declares the end of that. How did they go? Fine. (I hope!) Results are on next Friday (19th) so it will be one last trip back to Bristol for that before I run away going “dammit, I only got x% in this exam” (hopefully higher than the pass percentage ) Apart from that, Lolgasm recordings have taken up some time, even more now considering that it seems each episode, something else goes wrong in Audition so maybe it’s time to just give up on that. After all these exams some time is due to just doing sod all. My flat mate and I went to Bristol Zoo, it was quite cool. Got some nice pictures, look at the spam-a-lot-gallery if you wantto see them (oh and see the Fail video ) (note to self: dont write turtle or tortoise you will ALWAYS be wrong).

Exams over, I’m back at home. (barely!) Two bags that weigh OVER NINE THOUSAND grams each (well about 20 each) carrying 3 miles to BTM wasn’t the most fun in my life. All of my body aches and stuff which just makes the day go wrong. When I got home it’s starting to spend. Ordered my new laptop, my new graphics card, RMA’d (for refund ftw) my old graphics card and bought a new wireless adapter. Yeah Skillers, not quite a tx2 (more like your model) but for the price feck it I’m happy. Then hell came. <No one should know this (except DHR) so please don’t go asking>. Thus concluded Friday.

So, when does my stuff arrive? Monday for the laptop, Tuesday for the gcard pickup, friday for the gcard and wireless arrival. I will soon be back in business. But wait, I hear you cry (Dragon) how was I playing TF2. Well, for saving buying a Techious Subscription for other people, TF2 and L4D on my dads pc is in order (@Will_Anderson lol ). Now to not spend anything else (until Wii Sports Resort comes out of course!)

Plans for the summer, well theres three projects on the go, spage, SiBot and AdminBot. Yes, the server is self-aware (well will be when I’m done ) MWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA I HAS BUILT SINET </bs>. Then comes the TECHIOUS LAN 09! Bring it on bitches I PWN J00. Folding will hit a full going over here (at 2500ppd atm 24/7 (and thats just on one pc)). Finally (of course) will be trying to see all my friends alot this summer (unless this bs fude bs starts again :@). Oh yes, I am also planning a special new mp3 release, my voice artist show Morally Objectional?)

There has never been a better time for anything in life to happen. The interwebs will be our friends (and other technorubbish). I hope this small reply is good enough for you, and I will be writing alot more from now on (I promise!)

Arrivederci!

For once I am free from having half a million and one things to do for University so I have the time to catch up on some stuff, namely my website and launching lolgasm this weekend (hopefully!)

As for things, well having so much to do means I have had no time for anything else. I know the theme is a bit borked on here at the moment. This I believe has something to do with the WordPress beta I am running all the time so for now this is something that has to be lived with, but when there is more stuff that I can post about, I will be. This weekend after the lolgasm launch has been taken for, I will be writing a blog post that I have had drafted up for a while about some Techious2 features, so look out for that!

Anyway, yeah have fun and fear the lols (could that be a catchphrase for lolgasm?)

I think if I spend an hour revising each day and an hour doing work each day, that should prepare me enough for everything and should still leave me enough time to do whatever it is I want to.

So what shall I be doing during the holidays? Well I have no idea, apart from seeing people a couple of times, i think we’ll just have to play it ear, which should be good. Oh, and plenty f sleep, I need to sleep alot this holiday too

That’s about it, just keeping ye olde blog ticking over, oh and Techious2 is now synced up to my laptop so I can work on that remotely too which I’m sure some people will be glad of

Well, more sleep needed so cya.

Oh yea, theres also a 720p YouTube plugin in here now so once that works, I will be porting that not only here, but also into the main Techious Forums for funs and lols!

I use a Fedora 9 server, which I can’t get to, so the normal method of putting a disc in and letting anaconda do all the work just isn’t suitable for me, so using yum I “upgraded” by telling yum to use the Fedora 10 repos and then getting the system to update from this. This method is somewhat risky, but for this case it seemed to turn out well. Previously this method has caused funny problems with X-server, but as I don’t use any x applications (everything is just command line for me) this wasnt an issue.

The steps I used to set up this system was as follows.

1. Firstly, make sure your Fedora 9 installation is as up to date as possible. This is done in the normal way, and for this, it is probabily best if you clear your cache of any repos.

   yum clean all && yum update && yum clean all

   You will notice I clear the repo cache twice, this is to make sure that when we get it to do the upgrade, it doesnt try to use any old F9 repos.

2. Remove any extra repos other than the default Fedora ones, to minimise package conflicts even further. These files can be found in /etc/yum.repos.d/
3. Run the following command into rpm to get fedora to believe it is Fedora 10 and then to update itself to it:

   rpm -Uhv http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/10/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-10-1.noarch.rpm http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/10/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-notes-10.0.0.1.noarch.rpm

4. Run another yum update, this time it will download a lot of packages as this will now upgrade you to Fedora 10
5. Reboot using the reboot command
6. Pray (a little)
7. Say hello to Fedora 10

You should now be running a proper version of Fedora 10. Note however that using an installation disc and upgrading using anaconda is still the recommended method of upgrading, but for those that cannot do that, at least this offers an alternative.

Note however that due to to some changes that happen between versions, you might notice some slight bugs running a new version upgraded in this way. I have yet to see any of these probems, but that is not to say that there aren’t any. Problems that are found will have to be fixed some other way, and I cannot be held responsible for any of these. Basically, here is a method but it is unsupported so it’s at your own risk.

I hope these instructions will come in handy to someone at some point, but basically if you need them, they are here.

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#include <stdio.h>
 
int main(void){
  printf("Hello World\n");
}

Yup, that seems to work

Right now I am using the Planets theme, its offering me quite a good mix of image and transparency, though I think I may settle on the Shiny theme or some other theme that resembes a normal Google blank page.

Anyone else seeing this at all? To see, go to your Gmail settings page, and look for the “Themes” tab.

Edit: This is only showing on my Gmail account, not my Google Apps account at the moment, so it appears its a gradual rollout (I have give me beta stuff turned on in Apps)

For the lols, here is a nice picture of my internet’s speed here:

Edit: I’ve added a picture of it being even quicker

Well, I better go off finding stuff cyas,