Is it possible to upgrade a notebook? Until a few days ago, I’d say only hard disk and memory. But guess what, there is more! I’m not talking about PCMCIA cards here, no, real upgerades just like in your desktop pc.
Scratches are the one thing you definitely don’t want to have when you get a new PDA. A screen protector is a must have. There a 2 kinds of screen protectors in general. One kind are the cheap ones, €1 for 10 protectors. The other kind, the kind that actually protect your screen, costs €10 for 1.
I got a new phone! Well… it really is more of a mobile computer than a phone. Lately, I find myself more and more addicted to the internet. I used to do so much stuff offline, now everything I do on my computer has to do with the internet. Right now I’m blogging, online, of course. It’s not hard to see that my addiction had to be satisfied when I’m not home or in front of a computer. That’s why I bought myself the O2 Xda Diamond, which is the branded version of the HTC Touch Diamond P3700.
Many people have a GMA as their graphic card on their notebooks. There are usually some special drivers shipped with the notebook for the graphic card, which usually work just fine with office programs. But when you start using 3D-acceleration, you might encounter weird graphic bugs. So the normal action an experienced user would take would be updating the driver. But a lot of suppliers don’t allow switching to official Intel drivers, like Dell or mine: Toshiba. When you try to install them, an error message appears and the setup exists. What then? Well, you can either wait for them to release a new driver (which won’t happen usually) or trick the Intel driver into installing. With new drivers, everything might even work worse than before or break your windows, so be sure you really-really need the update.
If there is something I don’t like about wireless technology, it’s Bluetooth. It never worked the way I wanted. Some say it’s a matter of the stack (Bluetooth software) and some say you need to buy the best dongles. I used BlueSoleil, then Widcomm and now Toshiba, started off with Bluetooth 1.2 with a cheap € 2 dongle from eBay, then the Logitech diNovo Bluetooth 2.0 EDR dongle from my € 200 keyboard/mice set and now the internal Bluetooth 2.0 EDR chip from Toshiba in my Portege R400. Did it work well with any of these combinations? Not really…
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I’ve been using my R400 for a while now and I have to say it’s simply great! I won it in Toshiba’s “Love to Lead” Contest, so l didn’t pay the € 3499 it is worth. But if you look at its specs, the price seems to be adequate for a convertible Tablet PC: Intel Core Duo ULV, LED backlight, 1.8″ hard disk, 3G HSDPA connection and UWB Wireless docking station with DVI (not included in the price). But that’s not all: brand new Active Notification SideShow Display, Windows Vista Ultimate, Fingerprint Reader, a beautiful and robust design and much more. The perfect notebook? Where is the catch?
I used to have the “Genion S Online” plan from O2 Germany, which costs € 10 / month. For € 5 more each month, I had a “Wap & Email Flatrate”, which allowed me to surf and email on my mobile device. With 100 free SMS each month, I was even satisfied with € 0.19 I have to pay for each minute on my phone. My contract started December 2003 for 24 month and has been extended once (which is done automatically). But lately the prices have been dropping like crazy. For around € 4 each month, calling could be as cheap as € 0.05 a minute!
A few days ago, I received a letter from T-Com confirming my order of T-Home Entertainment Comfort with VDSL 25. I never ordered it, especially not on September 10th, where I had been in China. Anyway, I didn’t want VDSL 25 when I already have VDSL 50 and I didn’t want IPTV either because I have Cable. That’s what I told the T-Home Hotline yesterday and now they offered me Entertain Basic with VDSL 50 + ISDN for € 63.95. I checked their website and saw that this combination isn’t even possible. It seems that this is only a special combination for customers who request it. Well, it’s perfect for me.
After some problems I had with VDSL at the beginning, it now is pretty stable. Even though the highest download speed I ever got was around 3 MB/s, uploading files with over 1 MB/s is just great! Browsing the net has become really comfortable.
Modifying your PPC (PocketPC) software is called “cooking” in the PPC world. People who change the software are the “chefs” and the development environment is of course the “kitchen”. But the result is called ROM.
Last Thursday, my new cell phone arrived. It’s the O2 Xda Orbit, a branded version of the HTC Artemis P3300, filled with useful features like GPS and Wireless LAN. As a Nokia fan, it was really hard to resist the N95, but I’m more than happy with my choice.
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