This cake was actually made to mark the end of term of one of our Academic Secretaries however it also coincided with the launch of Faculty of Law’s University of Cambridge 2nd website. The website boasted many features before its time and has now been replaced with more modern and more feature packed site.
If it’s not entirely obvious, the unboxing pictures were not taken with the new camera! I’m on a roll at the moment when it comes to spending money, but this was a birthday present from my wife and I to me!
Handling the camera is lovely – it’s quick, and the results are sharp, albeit a little under-exposed. I’m going to be looking into that.
Might post some picture examples at another time, and this camera will be doing my unboxings from now on!
Dan
Ok, so here’s the heart of my new HTPC system. I realised that IGP (integrated graphics) are finally at the point where I can ditch my graphics card (and get good money on Ebay!) and still get top Media Centre performance – this thing will do HD MKV and Blu Ray decoding smoothly with its built-in ATI HD3200, and uses less electricity and generates less heat. All good for the living room HTPC!
Dan
Again, does it count when I don’t actually get the thing out of the box?! It’s a processor and a heatsink – what’s the point?! This is going into my new HTPC build. It’s the perfect CPU – 2.6ghz so plenty of horsepower for Vista HP for now, and Windows 7 once it’s stable enough for the living room. The other benefit of course is that it’s 45nm, so runs very cool, sips lightly at the electricity, and requires very little cooling (therefore very quiet).
Dan
New background spotted on the installation process in Windows 7.0 Build 7057.
Sorry no posts recently – too much fun playing the SSD! Lots of unboxing to come though…
It occurred to me the other day when I was testing the SSD that the most significant element of the boot up period was actually the Dell initialising it’s BIOS, and obviously that time is a constant on the boot whatever the hardware attached. So I thought I’d time it, and it turns out that the BIOS takes a full 16 seconds to initialise!
That means the final scores on the doors are:
Vista 64 + Seagate Barracuda: boot up time (excluding BIOS) = 3 minutes 0 seconds
Windows 7 64 + Samsung SSD: boot up time (excluding BIOS) = 0 minutes 25 seconds
Does make me wonder if other motherboards get through this quicker – anyone have any other experiences they’d like to share? Pop them in the comments.
Dan
For the next few days I am giving an interesting service / application a go, its called Spotify. My friend Stephen recommended it to me. It streams music over the web directly to your computer it could be just the thing out there for all those netbook and SSD users!
Check back soon for a review!
In mean time get streaming:
Can you do it? Join me and let me know how you get on. I’m uninstalling photoshop right now!
Thats right you can have the power and control of Photoshop for free. All you need to do is download the Gimp its available from:
http://www.gimp.org/downloads/
If you are familiar with Photoshop and like the keyboard shortcut layouts then a useful option is the ability to install the Photoshop’ish shortcuts for the Gimp. They are available from:
http://epierce.freeshell.org/gimp/gimp_ps.php
Initial reactions are - it’s amazing…
My brand new Dell Studio XPS i7 is a beast, but I suspect it has a rather cheap and cheerful hard drive. It’s never been that quick to do things, which is rather surprising given it’s a Core i7 with Vista 64bit (SP2RC) and 6gb RAM! The drive is a Seagate Barracuda, but with Vista it just isn’t that quick:
Vista 64 cold boot: 3m16s
Of course, that’s with all my apps, Antivirus and MS Mesh installed.
I installed the Samsung 64GB SSD, and Windows 7 (build 7048) 64bit, and the result was:
Win7 64 cold boot: 41s
Wow! Of course that’s a clean install of a new OS, but the difference is significant.
It’s worth adding that the install takes up 18.4GB on the disk, and that the installation took 18m48s in total.
More to come I’m sure tomorrow, when more hardware arrives 
Dan
