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Showing posts from 2006

Firefox 2.0 is awesome, but could be better

Soon after Internet Explorer 7.0 was release, Firefox 2.0 was also released. Now both these browsers have tabbed browsing with ability to close tabs without actually activating the tab since they have the little close button on each tab. Firefox has an excellent feature to re-open previous session if it was not closed properly. I discovered how useful and perhaps risky this feature is. At work I use a windows laptop (yeah I know, it is unlike me, but the tools I need are available only in windows). So I installed firefox 2.0 and liked it a lot. Ever since I used eclipse (the java IDE) with its close button on each tab, I have hoped firefox would do it one day. At that finally happened. Anyway, after installing a certain patch to the windows machine (forced down the throat by corporate update system), the windows machine wanted to restart (so what is new). It gave me 1 min to close all windows. I frantically saved all my work (I usually have a minimum of 10 windows landscaping on my tw

PC Mark 2005 results...

After a long time... Dell E1705 Dell 9300 This is the continuation of the previous post. Just a couple more images to show the difference between Pentium M and core 2 duo and computing power. And again Core 2 Duo is almost 2 times faster than the equally clocked Pentium M. Awesome, just awesome. I am able to play Need For Speed: Most Wanted and Age of Empires III, with full visual effects and they still keep up a very good FPS. Finally I am able to play with bloom effects in AoE III. That said, I guess I spent way too much time with my new laptop, so this will be the last post about it ;-).

Dell E1705 vs Dell 9300, 3DMark 2005 results...

Dell E1705 configuration * Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz * 1 GB @ 667 MHz * NVIDIA 7900 GS Dell 9300 configuration * Pentium 2.0 GHz * 1 GB @ 533 MHz * NVIDIA 6800 3DMark results This is Dell 9300 stock GPU (290 MHz / 590 MHz) Dell E1705 stock GPU (375 MHz / 507 MHz) Dell 9300 overclocked GPU (375 MHz / 761 MHz) I did not try overclocking E1705 for 2 reasons. First the clock is locked, and the only way to override it is to flash a new BIOS into the GPU. The second reason is that the GPU is already running hot and I did not have faith in Dell's cooling. In any case all the games that I have run very well even with high settings. From the snapshots above we can see that the overclocked NVIDIA 6800 is still slower than NVIDIA 7900 stock.

Gentoo, Xgl, Xen and Windows

So I got my new Dell E1705 (again). And this time everything was perfect. As usual instinctively I decided to install Gentoo after wiping all the partitions. However I did not purchase the windows backup cd from dell, which hindered my intense desire to wipe out everything. I carefully repartitioned around winXP partition and was able to cut out 25 GB for my Gentoo. After going through the normal process of compiling everything with CFLAGS="-march=nocona -O2 -pipe", I decided to install Xgl. A very good tutorial to follow is available at http://www.gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_XGL . I already used it on my old laptop, so getting Xgl to work is not all that exciting. Xgl brings all the super cool effects to Linux. My Gentoo looks better than Mac OS X! With the Beryl window manager, I can get the cool looking transparent window frames or a frame that looks like Windows Vista theme. Here are some screen shots Next I installed Xen following the HowTo from http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Xe

Dell E1705 LCD swap with Dell 9300

I received my Dell E1705 laptop and as I said in my previous post. One of the first things I wanted to do was to swap the LCD screens. Well I started out with confidence, but ended in a futile result. The whole ordeal lasted less than 15 minutes and left me devastated (well I really didn't need such a strong word just because it didn't work). Anyone who has experience in opening dell laptops already know all this but just a picture story goes here. I opened the plastic covering and then the keyboard, its connection and the LCD controller connection. Since the WiFi antenna resides inside the LCD display I also had to remove the connections from WiFi at the back of the laptop. I proceeded with the same steps for my Dell 9300 laptop too, and swapped the displays. Now is the time to know the truth! After I switched on my E1705 with it's UXGA screen from my older 9300, I saw the screen go all white, then BIOS messages appeared as normal, no indication of any errors or anything.

Finally I will have Core 2 Duo

After waiting for a long time (from July 27th, till September 12th), I finally ordered a Dell E1705 with Core 2 Duo Merom processor (not to be confused with the older Core Duo Yonah processor)! It is such a happy feeling, to finally be able to use a dual core processor. Configuration Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 processor running at 2.00 GHz, 4 MB Cache, 667 MHz FSB 17" XGA+ (I will swap this display with my UXGA display from my Dell 9300) 1 GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667 MHz 256 MB NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GS 80 GB 5400 RPM SATA hard drive Rest of the usual stuff like CD/DVD, wireless, network card etc. I ordered an XGA+ display because as soon as the laptop arrives I will exchange the UXGA from my Dell 9300 which the E1705 will replace ;-). I called Dell technical support to make sure that they can be swapped and the result was a positive reply. I have to live with the slower NVIDIA 7900 GS since the GTX card was not available for E1705. Other than that I am very happy with the confi

Dell Recalls Batteries

Ahh the news could not have come at a better time. I was having problems with the battery that came with my Dell Inspiron 9300. Just 7 days before Dell recalled the batteries, I found out that my laptop battery was getting very very hot. I usually put my laptop on my lap and so I could feel the severe heat coming from right under the battery. It became very hot at one concentrated location. May be one or two cells in the battery has problems and were heating up. So I immediately switched off my laptop. Opened battery pack and inspected it for any leaks or burns. But seemed perfectly OK. So I put it back in and this time it did not get so hot. I though the issue might have got fixed. How wrong I was! A day after that incident occured, I unplugged my laptop's power supply to move it to a different room and that was my mistake (and my luck too). As soon as I unplugged it my laptop died because the battery was dead. I lost all my unsaved work :-(. I always leave my laptop on 24/7 and

This is my first stab at blogging!

Heard the good news about the latest Intel Processor? I have been waiting for this processor for a long time. The conroe (for desktops) and merom (for mobile platforms) are out. I am so glad that Intel finally did something new and innovative, lessons mostly learnt from AMD. The processor has better performance/watt. I love having laptops with the latest "stuff" and so usually end up purchasing one every year. But this time around I held off the though just to buy a laptop with Intel Core 2 Duo. Intel announced the new processors on July 27, but looks like the desktops/laptops equipped with this latest processors won't be out until perhaps end of August. Even then they will be in limited numbers I guess. Interesting to note that Intel announced the mobile version at the same time as the desktop version since initially the roadmap looked like the merom would be released towards the end of August. Here are a few links proving that this new processor is much faster than the