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I’ve waited almost five weeks for it and today I finally took possession of a new gaming laptop I order back in the dim and distant past from Irish computer manufacturer, Alienware.
I was initially very displeased with my order when, after three weeks and more, it still appeared to be in a queue awaiting production. This state suggested, at minimum, another three week wait. Not good.
I called Alienware with a serious threat to cancel my order because of the delay. This, as you might expect, bought action. Lo and behold, within a couple of days of my telephone call, I checked the order’s progress and it had been shipped!
Of course, now I had that ever present problem of coinciding my being at home with DHL deciding to deliver the thing. Some minor shenanigans and another couple of calls to DHL later and we find ourselves at midday today, with my at the door, grin from ear to ear signing for a large box.
The machine itself is quite lovely and does what I bought it for with panache – play games. I’m slowly coming to terms with dirtying myself on Vista but will resist the nagging desire to wipe and downgrade to XP.
I’ve enjoyed the odd snatch of Crysis this evening and it runs at a good whack at a very decent setting so I am officially happy.
Now to report the problem.
One of the minor selling points of the Alienware M17X (my model) is its aesthetics. Sure, I’m a sucker for flashy hardware but I did actually buy it for its performance.
That said, the coloured lights, alien head (see above) engraved plaque and, importantly, customisable backlit keyboard sure would turn heads and I was looking forward to showing them off.
One of the first things I did was to fire up the software for configuring the lights. What? There’s nothing for the keyboard and it’s remaining stubbornly dim.
A lot of messing around and I couldn’t figure it out. I searched the web and found that I should have purchased an extra add-on for the backlight of the keyboard at £33.
I’m not exactly a web virgin so I couldn’t understand how I could miss such a requirement. Sure enough, upon revisiting the customise pages of the laptop, it is very misleading and there’s actually nothing at all to say that the add-on is required to light up the keyboard.
To be honest, I could actually live without a backlit keyboard but the problem is that this is how the laptop has been designed. Where as a normal keyboard would have white lettering on its black keys, the M17X has clear letters on a black key making them all but impossible to see in anything other than pure daylight.
I’m using the laptop to write this blog entry and if I couldn’t touch type I’d be royally screwed. The intentionally meager light from a couple of LED lamps on my desk does nothing to illuminate the keys and I can’t actually see any of the letters on them.
Disaster.
Now the good news. I called Alienware, complaining that the requirement for the keyboard upgrade is far from clear (actually, it’s not even approaching clear nor is there even any room for confusion – it simply doesn’t say that you need it).
The guy at Alienware was initially defensive but when I told him to look at the ordering page he ended up agreeing with me.
The thought that I might have to send my laptop straight back only to wait another five weeks for it to be returned didn’t exactly fill me with joy but Alienware actually offered to send me the backlit keyboard separately!
They made me promise to call customer support once again and have a hardware tech talk me through the installation (which I’ll do – they’ve been good so far) but it looks like it should be pretty simple to do.
So I’ve now got a fully functional new gaming laptop that’s playing games at a whacking pace and in a few days I’ll have it tricked out with the backlit keyboard.
Points off to Alienware for the initial delay. Some of those points are earned back after they hastened the delayed order after my phone call. They now get a few more points off for their lack of clarity on the keyboard situation but a few back for sending me a new one.
I’ll reinstate their final missing points (and may actually leave them in the black) if they change the design of their cusomise pages on their website so that others don’t make my mistake. Apparently they were going to do it before and now promise me that they’ll do it now.
I’ll give it a few days to see if they actually do.
You can’t really call the EeePC from Asus a laptop unless you’re in possession of a particularly small lap.
This diminutive notebook computer isn’t much bigger than a paperback and yet manages to sport a solid, rugged build quality that could easily see it thrown in and out of a bag on a daily basis.
It’s all solid state so rather than a traditional hard disk drive it stores all its data on flash memory chips which helps allow it to boast a battery life of about three and a half hours.
Most incredibly of all, you can pick one up for about £200.
So is it worth it?
It comes with a preinstalled version of Linux, the free operating system. Not paying a fat fee to Microsoft certainly brings the price down and it’s easy enough to use but for the sake of my test I installed the familiar XP on it and handed it Mollie, my ten year old daughter, who put it through its paces for a week.
Here’s her personal verdict.
The EeePC’s keys are small so they are great for children but for people with bigger fingers it might be hard because they could press the wrong button.
When it is switched off the screen looks bigger than it actually is because of the black speakers either side of it and it can be hard to find a picture to use as wallpaper because of the odd rectangular shape of the screen.
On the start menu you cannot see all the icons because it doesn’t stretch as far as it does on a normal computer.
The style of this laptop is very uncomplicated with a white cover, plain keys, and a straightforward layout.
I took it to my friend’s house who thought it looked cool but found the keys hard to use because she is fast at typing, but for me I could imagine writing a long essay on it because I have small hands and don’t type as quickly.
In conclusion, the EeePC is interesting because it is so cheap, compact and light, making it very easy to carry around but I prefer my bigger laptop so I don’t want to swap!
Technical specifications:
The EeePC comes with a reasonably impressive set of specs, including:
A 900MHz Intel Celeron processor
512MB RAM
4GB Flash memory
It has three USB ports, a built in camera and microphone and is 802.11b/g wireless capable.
You’ll notice the lack of a hard drive. That’s because the EeePC stores everything (software, files and documents) on solid state memory – and it comes with a fixed 4GB – not exactly colossal by today’s standards. To make matters worse, almost half of that 4GB is already taken up by the operating system so if you’re planning to install a lot of software of save lots of files you will need to invest in extra storage – whether it be in the form of an external USB hard drive (which kind of defeats the portability point) or, more like, an SD memory card that can sit in the computers dedicated card reader.
SD cards have dropped dramatically in price over recent years so you could buy a 4GB card and double machine’s storage capacity for under £15.
Alternatively, of course, there are USB pen drives which are also cheap and plentiful.
Next to an Apple MacBook Pro, the EeePC shows off its diminutive dimensions
In order to make Mollie feel as comfortable with hers as I could, I sold my soul to the devil and installed Windows XP on my EeePC. As there’s no CD or DVD drive this requires using either an external disc drive or, as I did, copying all the files from the XP disc onto a USB drive. It’s a relatively simple process if you want to do this and the web is full of step by step guides.
All in all I like the EeePC as much for its novelty as anything else. XP is coming off and I shall be installing Ubuntu so that I’ve got something to tinker with. I can’t see myself actually using the thing in any real work or personal capacity as it’s just too small. But I shall be showing it off to anyone with a passing interest in technology because it gains plentiful wow points.
There was good news for Sony and its supporters last week when movie making giants Warner Bros switched from it previous allegiance to rival HD-DVD and said it would be releasing all its future films in Sony’s Blu-ray format.
Although primarily touted for their ability to store high definition film, the storage capacity of this next generation of disc also means they are what will see as the optical storage in future computers.
The battle to determine a standard format for high definition has been raging between the two sides for a long time. It’s a state of affairs similar to the original video clash between VHS and Betamax back in the late 1970.
As is recorded history, VHS came out the winner over Sony’s Betamax technology despite the latter being more technically advanced.
If we are to believe the trend it appears that the Japanese electronics manufacturer has managed to win the day this time around.
An undecided industry, some portions of which sing the praises of one format while others back a rival may initially appear to be healthy competition but actually goes no way to benefit the consumer who, mindful of being left with the 21st century’s Betamax player, holds out on buying either.
Indeed, the uncertainty over which camp will eventually win the war has meant very few people own devices capable of playing either and there are already prototypes of the next, next generation discs with even an greater storage potential.
Warner Bros’ decision now means that over 75% of movie studios will now only release on Blu-ray seems to be based, at least in part, on support for the format being built into Playstation 3 game consoles.
Depending on your point of view, Sony decision to base the PS3 around its own HD format was either very smart an unfair attempt at dominance.
Of course, once enough consoles are out there in people’s homes and ready to play Blu-ray movies, Sony can start making some weighty claims about take-up of their technology.
I’m a PS3 owner and my Blu-ray movie collection amounts to one Sony freebie.
Casino Royale in high definition is jaw-dropping and I look forward to the day when I can record discs with up to 50GB of data, but I’m not sure how comfortable I am with one company owning the patent to an industry-wide standard format.
My job requires that I make the occasion trip to the company’s head office which is right in the heart of London.
It’s nice to get out the office and see some different faces once in a while but the time spent travelling to and fro really takes a chunk of productivity out of my day.
Some time ago I made the clearly sensible decision that getting to our nation’s capital during the week is easier conducted by coach.
Yes, the journey will take longer but at least I’m assured a seat and it’s far easier for me to leave my car at the Park and Ride before picking up the coach.
I also choose to take Oxford Bus Company’s espress service (that’s the green bus) rather than the red Oxford Tube because it stops at Baker Street thus saving me a slow crawl through the city traffic.
However, I always looked on enviously as Oxford Tube passengers sat inside a bus that boasted wifi connectivity – something lacking on the espress.
Until now.
It may have taken them a little while to catch up on their rivals but Oxford Bus Company says the interim period has allowed it to test various available networks and find the best one suitable for the job.
Providing mobile wifi is tricky because, by definition, you’re always on the move. The new espress service does its best to combat any signal dropouts by using two satellite dishes instead of the usual one. The claim is that this results in just one brief spell of a potential loss of signal around junction 6 due the lie of the land.
Given that a return trip to London can mean around four hours on the bus, the ability to work and stay connected for that time is of immeasurable benefit. I’ve tried the odd bit of offline work before but its invariably only minutes before I need access to the internet to continue.
The inclusion of on-board power sockets will also ensure that I don’t turn up at the London office frantically seeking the nearest plug.
By the time you read this I will have made my first trip on the espress since the service was in put in place so expect a brief review of it in next week’s column.
I stopped to think the other day and realised that March 2007 is something of a red letter month for me and this column as I’ve now been writing it for a full ten years.
Aside from the almost mandatory remarks such as “Gosh, doesn’t time fly?” and “Where have all the years gone?”, it is quite remarkable to look back over a decade that has seen the web evolve in such dramatic fashion.
1997 was my second year as an Internet user. 1996 saw me initiate my online life by surfing the ‘information super highway’ (remember that?) on an old 28kbps external modem that had been given to me by some crazy, bleeding edge futurist friend of mine who had recently made the jump to the light speed experience of 56kbps.
Of course, back in those days, web pages were considerably more simply in their layout (though Web 2.0 is returning us to the sane days of clear presentation and quality content, thankfully) and productivity wasn’t affected by the distraction of incoming emails as practically none of my colleagues, family and friends had one.
It would be easy to look back on those days with dewy eyes, breath out a sigh of contentment and mutter that ‘ah, those were the days’, but how great were they really?
On the positive side, the Internet had a pioneering feel about it and it did feel special to be a part of that, though I’m not sure I realised how much at the time.
I also felt part of a community, however geographically distant we were from each other. The Net wasn’t taken for granted. Instead it was a unique place you ‘went to’.
But a limited web where if something did exist it was difficult to find (Google was still a couple of years off) and incredibly slow to access just doesn’t hold a candle to today’s experience. Bulletin boards and chat rooms were fun but ultimately pointless and trivial.
I feel as though I’ve matured with the Internet and I hope this column has reflected that. Online innovations don’t only continue, they grow at a steadying pace and if we could hardly have imagined the impact it would have on today’s world ten years ago, imagining how things will be in another ten years is incredibly exciting.
Taking the Virgin Media bait once again
December 28, 2009 in Comment, Technology | Tags: 50Mb, cable, virgin | Leave a comment
It’s coming up to the one year anniversary of my attempt to have a Virgin Media cable broadband connection into my house.
Actually, the installation of the cable went perfectly smoothly, it’s just that it refused to carry a signal greater than one 100th of the advertised speed.
My encountered shenanigans with the company were well documented both in this column and on my blog which ultimately prompted the head of Virgin Media’s public relations to contact me directly and apologise that my so-called 20Mb service trickled in at 0.2Mb.
His admission that the capacity on the line that ran outside my house was seriously overstretched resulted in my recommendation that nobody should consider signing up for cable until the problem was sorted out.
Taking the bait again
From what I am led to believe, the cable providing the 50Mb connection is separate and dedicated for just that service.
If that’s true (and I’ll be checking) then I stand a reasonable chance of getting something close to what I’m paying for and I’ll willingly hand the company my money.
If my experience is the same as before, the outcome will be equally similar; I will cancel the service and Virgin Media won’t see a red cent from me.
Watch this space as I report my progress in what has become an annual drama.
Fingers crossed for a happy new year!