Today I received something special, a Gigabyte Readeon HD 4850! I’ve had this little monster on the test rig and it bitch slaps anything that Nvidia makes for less than £250. I’m putting together a feature for MIcro Mart on it, which will appear in a couple of weeks.

It’s one of the few decent days weather we’ve had this summer, so I’m sat out in the back garden. So I can work I’ve brought out with me a Celeron M powered Toshiba Satellite Pro. I’ve used systems like this one before and they can be quite snappy, but this one is like sludge working to rule! The reason being that the people who set it up put 512MB’s of RAM in it, which would have been fine for Windows XP, except they put Vista Business Basic on it. Doh! As the video sub-system takes some memory, you’re actually quite heavily in deficit before your opened any applications. I’ve turned off all the visual junk, installed Firefox, and now I can use WordPress without huge drive swapping delays. I may have to go and spend on some extra RAM for this if it’s to do much more than slow me down.

It’s been reported, first by Uberpulse that Cisco has decided to kill the Linksys brand. I have mixed feeling about this. While they always made an effort to get their equipment around to Journalists for review, every one of their boxes I’ve used is now dead, usually because of the power block failing. Nice while they lasted…might be a good epitaph.

For those that would like more information about how ‘Unleashed’ came about, I’ve talked briefly about creating this blog on pages 58 and 59 of this weeks Micro Mart magazine (issue 963), available at most good newsagents in the UK.
Welcome to anyone who’s come along here after reading it! You’ll find the blog a bit different from what I normally write in Micro Mart, but all in my typically reserved style. Enjoy!

I’ve just had a bizarre conversation with long time friend of mine Gary Allen about Thunderflies (also referred to as Thrips from the order Thysanoptera), and the trouble they can cause. It’s annoying enough to have them craw on your skin in the summer, but Gary’s having issues with them go into the space between the matrix and the backlight on his TFT. At first he assumed that the two dead pixels that moved where the result of PSS, or Post Stella Shock. But it turns out that this tiny little beetles just love to scurry around inside thin-film-transistor displays!
The trouble is getting them out, before they die and become a permanent visual fixture. His idea, for which I take no responsibility was to train Ninja Thunderflies to go in and kick out the blighters. My idea, which isn’t much better, was to use a powerful microscope to paint lipstick on a Thunderfly and use them as a romantic lure, in the manner of those Bugs Bunny cartoon’s where he does the same.
As neither of these plans seems like a sure-fire way to extradite the little blighter’s, we’re open to ideas about how to solve this problem. So tell us if you have any ideas.
This link shows it’s just not us with this issue.

I’ve added some new machines and pictures to the Crazy Computers page. Enjoy!

This is a new online publication I contribute to, please have a look!

I’ve been working on an SD memory group test today. Mainly because Pipex haven’t fixed by Broadband and it’s been going up and down like a the water level in Yorkshire!
It’s turned out to be an interesting exercise, because man of the card makers chose to send the latest SDHC flavours. The first problem I had was that my existing flash card reader wouldn’t accept them, which was thankfully solved by Lexar, who sent me a reader. The second, and more annoying is the lack of planning in SD technology.
Most of the cards I have are 4GB, with a few 2GB and the odd 1GB thrown in. I’ll end up keeping some of these, maybe the half I bought. But how useful will they be to me? Not sure. I’ve discovered that my beloved Nikon D50 won’t read the SDHC ones! Come on Nikon, you must be able to fix this with a firmware patch! I’ve been told that they will read some cards if they’re formated to FAT16, as SDHC are formated in FAT32 as standard. That’s great advice, until you realised that the biggest partition you can have on FAT16 is 2GB, so that’s not a huge help, is it? Even more annoyingly both the D40, D40x and D80 all accept them, so can’t see a reason why the D50 shouldn’t be able to work with them.

Early in the week I commented on the price cut in the USA, that took the people that made the decision by surprise.
But BetaNews has added extra spice to these events by revealing the cut may be temporary here.

Apparently it’s all a trick to get all the 60GB PS3’s out of the market, before leaving the 80GB model at the original cost. Sony isn’t winning this console battle, and the peel off of game developers is gathering pace. If they don’t take this situation seriously between them Nintendo and Microsoft will soon have an irreversible lead, if they haven’t already. The idea that Blu-ray will come along, Cavalry like, and save the PS3’s bacon seems fanciful at best.

The best bit for me of Betanews’ piece is where Sony Computer Entertainment Europe president David Reeves argues, implausibly, that the current cost of the PS3 in Europe is worth it. Yes Dave, and by Christmas sales will have overtaken the WII!

UK ISP Pipex, my ISP and the one that cut me off recently, has been acquired by competitor Tiscali, which took control of it’s entire Broadband services.
According to the wire, they paid £210 million for a company that made £13.9m before tax on a turnover of £231.7 million last year.
Based on the horror stories given to me by a friend who signed up to Tiscali, I’ll soon be leaving this ISP, I assume. Or, using pigeons to update this page!