If you’ve read through my blog you may of noticed that I own one of these little budget laptops. I originally had an ASUS 701 then a 901. The BG45 just stomps all over them.

• Getting the most out of your Easynote BG45-U-300
• See how fast it boots
• See it playing a game
• How to install a new hard drive
• How to upgrade the RAM
• Elecom ZeroShock III case for Packard Bell BG45-U-300

If you have recently re-installed your Easynote BG45-U-300 and accidently deleted your restore partition. You will need the following download to get your hotkeys working again. Once you download the file unpack the rar file then install the driver in ATK first then one in ATKAPP you may have to reboot once finished.

• ATK and ATKAPP for Easynote BG45-U-300

If you need any help with the Easynote just leave me a comment and I will get back to you as soon as I can.

Bah! It isn’t HAWX… but 4 games for £9 isn’t bad!

My favourite feature of windows 7 is something I have been banging on about for years since wide screen monitors made an appearance. “Wouldn’t it be great if you could divide the screen etc” I would say. But wait its here! Behold  Aero Snap. The reason that I like it is because for the first time in a long while I can actually see myself working on a single monitor and being very productive. Being a web developer I am constantly working between multiple windows usually photoshop, editplus, browsers and a media player. I am currently in the process of choosing a new monitor and I am currently considering a 23” 1080p offering the problem is i cant afford 2 off those. Aero snap actually makes it possible for me to consider working with one single monitor.

Thank you Microsoft…

I am a heavy Firefox user and my experience is made much more pleasurable by using foxmarks its actually in the process of changing its name to Xmarks. I presume they are doing this because they are no going to be supporting Internet Explorer and Safari aswell as Firefox. This is a good call in my opinion because if you work across multiple operating systems and are forced into using multiple browser types having this is just awesome. I have noticed some oddities in some of my bookmarks / favourites in Internet Explorer with some entries that look like this… “—“ etc I presume these are dividers which have been pulled over from Firefox.

However what I am going to do is have a massive cull of bookmarks and see if I can keep my bookmarks in order across a multitude of computers browsers and operating systems.

One issue that’s bugging me though is that I will have to install clients for each browser on each machine. I already use Live MESH to sync Internet Explorer favourites but mesh doesn’t extend to Linux (unless you use some cunning virtualization).

Is the best solution here to start a clean slate delete all your default bookmarks / favourites? Then get syncing!

Official Old Site: http://www.foxmarks.com/

Official New Site: http://www.xmarks.com/

Below is a video of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 running rather well on my Packard Bell Easynote BG45-U-300. The laptop has the Intel 965 chipset and is running Windows 7.0 build 7057.

I promised I would do a video of how fast your laptop can go with a good SSD drive. Here it is…

Here are very different products that would potentially be used for the same purpose. Working on the move. I’ve had these photos sitting around for a while so I though I would pop them up here so people could see a comparison between an ASUS EEEPC and one of DELLs Ultraportable offerings. Although the specs are very different the DELL comes in at around £1000 the EEE901 was £300.

Here they are side by side…

Here they are on top of each other!

Sorry that the pictures are slightly blurry I had a dumb moment with my camera!

Woooooo… its Ubisoft week on Steam. One game is being revealed each day with 50% off.

Monday: Assassins Creed Directors Cut
Tuesday: Prince of Persia
Wednesday: Brothers in Arms Hells Highway
Thursday: Far Cry 2

Then a weekend deal… I’m hoping that HAWX makes an appearance. HAWX for weekend deal? If HAWX doesn’t make an appearance I’m buying it from Play.com its only £17.99 anyway.

How do you make you laptop go superfast you ask? Well we all know that upgrading a laptop is a pretty limited affair. Most people just put more memory in their laptop and hope for the best; more is better right? How many people actually know that more isn’t always better but just cant help getting sucked in by that laptop with 4gb of ram. Well for the most of us 32bit operating systems are the norm and actually some of that ram is wasted.

I recently purchased a Packard Bell Easynote BG45-U-300 now I usually wouldn’t be seen dead buying such a brand but I paid £280 for this little beauty it has a dual core pentium (T2390@1.82GHz), 1GB of ram and a 80GB SATA HDD. It has an INTEL 965 / X1300 and 12.1” screen with a resolution of 1280×800. This machine replaced my much loved ASUS 901. In my opinion a 12.1” laptop beats a netbook anyday

One of the first things I did was upgrade the ram. I had some laying around and a few minutes later I had 3GB of memory on my laptop more than enough for my portable needs. The machine then in its current state was used for a month or 2 I could even use the laptop to play back 720p video with the correct codec’s installed. As time progressed I started to find the 80GB SATA drive a little restrictive so…..

The next upgrade I did was change the hard drive to a 320GB WD Scorpio Blue I choose to put a big disk in because I thought I would use my laptop to store my multimedia collection in another place (you can never have enough backups). I did this for a while and it worked well all of my music is ripped in WMA Lossless so it took up a lot of space!!

Then SAMSUNG did that viral marketing campaign “SAMSUNG SSD AWESOMNESS” and I had to find out what all the fuss was about I couldn’t afford 24 drives as shown in the video I could however afford 1 Samsung 64GB SSD MLC so I took the plunge.

How good are they you ask? Well in my opinion its one of the best upgrades you could make to a laptop computer not only has the SSD made this laptop superfast it boots Windows 7 in 35 seconds including the bios on the 320GB WD Scorpio it was just over a minute. It also has reduced the amount of heat that my laptop produced people who own an Easynote BG45 will know that its not the quietest of beasts but you look past it because it was cheap! Well the SSD makes the laptop noticeably cooler and the fans aren’t as noisy.

Very very soon I’m going to post some videos of a budget laptop booting with an SSD. The most amazing thing about this laptop is that all in its cost me £400 a far cry from the prices of the Mac Book Air, Dell Adamo and other ultra portables.

Friends will know that I got an amazing deal on a server machine from Ebuyer - £149 for a Xeon-based Acer Altos G330 Mk2 – currently available from Memory Express for £445!!  I’m still not certain that the deal I got wasn’t a pricing error!

Getting a server PC is better for Windows Home Server because you want something expressly compatible with Small Business Server (SBS) 2003 on which WHS is based.  I have to tell you, my server – even with 1gb of RAM – EATS WHS alive.  It’s a wonderful experience.

Well, I got my Ebuyer email today, and there’s another special on a server at the moment which would also make a superb, if not rather overpowered, WHS box:

HP Proliant ML115 G5: £199.99

Team that with WHS: £99.99 (has become MORE expensive over time?!)

Then you would do well to shove in a couple of Western Digital GreenPower HDD’s to supplement the 160gb system drive:

2 x 640gb Western Digital GP: £105.88

That’s just £405.86 for a machine with a QUAD core Opteron, and ready to run WHS and the new WHS2 (‘Vail’ - when it becomes available) for many many years while breaking no sweat!  Compare that to the undeniably lovely HP Mediasmart, which tends to come in at around £350 with 512mb or RAM, 500mb storage and a 1.8ghz SEMPRON CPU, although newer models have been announced.  This self-build is therefore amazing value.  I suppose the one thing that the HP has is it’s size – it’s tiny!

Let me know if you’d like a Proliant WHS though, and I’ll build it for you for a very reasonable premium

Dan