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!

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

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

Thats right! The perfect small low power media centre has just been born!

For more information:

http://www.dailytech.com/ASUS+Adds+HD+Capability+to+New+Eee+Box+Models/article13584.htm