Steaming ahead
Whoops....late again this week. I think I am just getting slack in updating on Mondays.
I have an excuse for not updating last night though!! I bought my very first computer!
That's right....the very first full computer that I have ever bought for myself.
My father supplied my first C64, and then a second hand university PC when I was in highschool. Since then, I have pretty much been upgrading the same box piecemeal since about 1990. Seriously, this PC I am using now, has shared components with the previous generation every single PC I have ever "owned".
My Xebec XT PC with 8088 CPU, 20Mb HD, 5.25" Single Density Floppy, 1Mb RAM and a Hercules (Orange type) monitor is now currently more or less state-of-the-art (I started typing the stats in and gave up halfway through since there is no basis for comparison anyway).
Anyway...my first PC is a NETBOOK! w00t!
The latest and greatest Eee PC from Asus.
It is the Eee 1201n featuring 12.1" screen, dual core Atom processor at 1.6GHz, NVidia ION chipset and GPU 2 Gb RAM, 250Gb HD, 802.11n wireless, VGA and HDMI out and Windows 7 Premium.
I have been waiting for a few months for this particular model to come to Australia because of the ION chipset. It means I can play full 1080p video on it and do most of the decoding in hardware on the GPU. I have given this a blast and it seems to be working beautifully on all of the HD content I have.
I was quite chuffed to finally be able to use my 802.11n access point at full speed finally as well . Was getting a 150Mb sync speed which I figure is about as good as I will get with my limited MIMO arrangement.
I love the little multitouch mouse pad on this too. It is completely flush with the body of the laptop.....well, there isn't a pad really....you just touch the bumpy part of the case...very neat and no way for crud to get caught in it :).
Windows 7 is pretty cool too. I am finding my way round it still, since it is just a weeeee bit different to Vista. I like the new network tray icon, and the applicaiton launcher. The smart icons caught me by surprise...I had forgotten about that feature of Win7.
I have installed most of my basic stuff on there and will have to play around with some of those bookmark synchronising plugins for Firefox and Chrome.
As a test I have installed Unreal Tournament 3 and Guild Wars onto the little beasty. UT3 with all of the graphical fruit turned off and running at 720x480 is acceptable, but not great. Tweaking the graphics down doesn't help much, so I think the poor CPU is not up to the task. I know that UT3 is a fairly heavily CPU dependent engine, so this makes sense when it is running on a low power box. The mighty Guild Wars proves that it runs on pretty much bloody anything and is seamless with full details turned on at native resolution. I did turn off Antialiasing and Anisotropic filtering, but I hardly need that on a 12" screen right? It might be a different story if I plugged it into my TV and ran at full 1080p, but for now that pleases me :).
Now the really funny part of me buying my first PC is that I bought it from Myers!! *pause for laughter*. BUT. For one, they are the only retailer to actually have it in Australia as far as I can see. Secondly, they had a very reasonable price, $700 with a bonus USB DVDRW (since the 1201n has no internal drive). Now seeing as this thing retails at $500 in the US, and all the pre-pricing in Aus that I have seen is around $1000, I think that $700 sounds about right.
Mind you, all the discount chains will probably turn me into a fool and all release the damn thing at $600 on the weekend now ;).
Ok...weight time. I have clawed back some of my loss and posted a loss of 1.1kg this week, and am closing in on 85kg. I am also having a somewhat "skinny week" and hope that this translates into another decent loss next Monday.
I have an excuse for not updating last night though!! I bought my very first computer!
That's right....the very first full computer that I have ever bought for myself.
My father supplied my first C64, and then a second hand university PC when I was in highschool. Since then, I have pretty much been upgrading the same box piecemeal since about 1990. Seriously, this PC I am using now, has shared components with the previous generation every single PC I have ever "owned".
My Xebec XT PC with 8088 CPU, 20Mb HD, 5.25" Single Density Floppy, 1Mb RAM and a Hercules (Orange type) monitor is now currently more or less state-of-the-art (I started typing the stats in and gave up halfway through since there is no basis for comparison anyway).
Anyway...my first PC is a NETBOOK! w00t!
The latest and greatest Eee PC from Asus.
It is the Eee 1201n featuring 12.1" screen, dual core Atom processor at 1.6GHz, NVidia ION chipset and GPU 2 Gb RAM, 250Gb HD, 802.11n wireless, VGA and HDMI out and Windows 7 Premium.
I have been waiting for a few months for this particular model to come to Australia because of the ION chipset. It means I can play full 1080p video on it and do most of the decoding in hardware on the GPU. I have given this a blast and it seems to be working beautifully on all of the HD content I have.
I was quite chuffed to finally be able to use my 802.11n access point at full speed finally as well . Was getting a 150Mb sync speed which I figure is about as good as I will get with my limited MIMO arrangement.
I love the little multitouch mouse pad on this too. It is completely flush with the body of the laptop.....well, there isn't a pad really....you just touch the bumpy part of the case...very neat and no way for crud to get caught in it :).
Windows 7 is pretty cool too. I am finding my way round it still, since it is just a weeeee bit different to Vista. I like the new network tray icon, and the applicaiton launcher. The smart icons caught me by surprise...I had forgotten about that feature of Win7.
I have installed most of my basic stuff on there and will have to play around with some of those bookmark synchronising plugins for Firefox and Chrome.
As a test I have installed Unreal Tournament 3 and Guild Wars onto the little beasty. UT3 with all of the graphical fruit turned off and running at 720x480 is acceptable, but not great. Tweaking the graphics down doesn't help much, so I think the poor CPU is not up to the task. I know that UT3 is a fairly heavily CPU dependent engine, so this makes sense when it is running on a low power box. The mighty Guild Wars proves that it runs on pretty much bloody anything and is seamless with full details turned on at native resolution. I did turn off Antialiasing and Anisotropic filtering, but I hardly need that on a 12" screen right? It might be a different story if I plugged it into my TV and ran at full 1080p, but for now that pleases me :).
Now the really funny part of me buying my first PC is that I bought it from Myers!! *pause for laughter*. BUT. For one, they are the only retailer to actually have it in Australia as far as I can see. Secondly, they had a very reasonable price, $700 with a bonus USB DVDRW (since the 1201n has no internal drive). Now seeing as this thing retails at $500 in the US, and all the pre-pricing in Aus that I have seen is around $1000, I think that $700 sounds about right.
Mind you, all the discount chains will probably turn me into a fool and all release the damn thing at $600 on the weekend now ;).
Ok...weight time. I have clawed back some of my loss and posted a loss of 1.1kg this week, and am closing in on 85kg. I am also having a somewhat "skinny week" and hope that this translates into another decent loss next Monday.
