At The Fair

Only 7 posts in November. Must do something about that.

Firstly, some news from work. Our new boy has been offered another opportunity to work for far more money. From the outside. Looks like we'll need to look for another new boy\girl. Which also means that I'll have to play teacher to said new boy\girl. Which means work overtime and less time to hang out and do nothing.

Sigh...

I went to the PC fair yesterday. It was BIG. Much bigger than the last one. I'm not sure how cheap it was though. It really doesn't matter much since a lot of consumer computer stuff these days is quite cheapish already to begin with.

It's still amazing how notebook prices have fallen. A brand new notebook costing a mere RM1700 would have been impossible only a year ago. I saw one low spec notebook at the fair going for about that much and when I say low spec I mean relatively speaking. For most people, even the most "sluggish" Celeron or Sempron notebook will have more than enough horsepower to handle most regular computer work. As long as you have enough RAM. RAM is life! Especially if you want to run MS Vista!

The great news is that RAM is so cheap at the moment it's bordering on the absurd. So in conclusion, now is a really good time to get into mobile computing.

Hard disks are extremely cheap these days too. I mean, RM285 for 350Gb? Sounds pretty good to me...

And the various types of flash memory are getting cheaper as well. Except for XD cards which are crazy expensive (1Gb = RM160!). I bought two USB drives yesterday, one for me and one for a friend. I got myself one of those teeny tiny Migo DT 2Gb Kingston mini drives. Despite knowing roughly how flash drives work, I'm mystified at how something so tiny can hold 2-4Gbs of data. It's bloody amazing when you think about it. For my friend, I got her a DT100 1Gb one. Quite nice and very simple.

It just occurred to me that I have a total of 4Gb of space with me all the time, 2 in my phone (M2 card which is smaller than my pinky fingernail) and 2 in the USB drive attached to my keychain...

I also bought a card reader. 15 bucks. Very cheap again.

I bumped into some friends and one of them just ordered a HP notebook. It's one of those tablet ones with the swivelly screen. Good deal at 2.7k. And I just found out yesterday that you can use a stylus directly on the display...

And all those brand new graphics cards...

Yeah, I had a good time at the fair yesterday and I could write thousands of words about it, which I won't because I'm at the office and I have to do some work.

I'm going back to the fair later to arrange an upgrade for my DSL connection. It's getting bumped up to 1Mbps.

A pretty good start to December I think...