I recently upgraded from my old notebook - an Acer AMD Turion TL-50. I got one Dell XPS, Centrino T7500, Dual Core, 2.2GHz, 4 MB L2 cache, 800MHz FSB, 3GB Ram, 160GB Sata HDD, a basic NVidia GeForce 8000 with 128 MB memory and other regular stuff.
1. Most of the brands come packaged with no scope for upgrading components, other than dell.
2. I have used AMD throughout and I abused my acer notebook (TL-50) and home PC to the max. so no complaints. But I couldnt find a notebook with TL-60 or above (within my budget), and AMD has been lagging in the notebook processor compared to Intel. Hence the decision to go with a Intel Centrino.
3. Most branded and packaged notebooks, came with hi end graphic and audio cards, and additional multimedia, of which I have no use. Only dell allowed me to adjust the configuration, and I cut down on video and audio cards.
4. Pricing: Any decent notebook with a T7300 or above came close to 100,000 INR or above. Like Mac, Ferrari, Fujitsu, HP, Lenovo and Sony included. Sony did have one with T7250 costing about 56K, but the notebook seemed like a tin-case.
5. India Models: Many of the brands will market the same model with downsized configuration and still equivalent to Euro prices. For example Acer 5920 Gemstone (yeah - the beige keyboard one), US model comes with T7300 processor but in India its T5450 processor. Same for some HP pavilion notebooks. This is blatant coning!
6. I could not wait for someone to come down from US to get me a notebook. I needed now.
In the end I found, none other than dell provided value for money and option for configurability. Upgraded, it cost me ~63K. It would have been only about 54/55K, if not for the excise duty on components, which for other brands are not applicable I guess. Anyway, I do not think I would have got such a config with other brands for less than 100K. Btw, whats the need for a 2MP webcam??
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Saturday, February 9, 2008
now devcamp ..
I went to attend the first devcamp 'unconference', held at ThoughtWorks , Bangalore premises.
Devcamp is offshoot from Barcamp, (foocamp->barcamp->devcamp!), intent towards the developers. As Barcamp India went on a different tangent, Devcamp intended to connect and capture the imagination of the developer community.
Martin Fowler was present and set the context of unconferencing mode of ideating, brainstorming. The ‘unconference’ took place at TW office. Organized in terms of talks, discussions, and Lightning talks, sessions happened simultaneously at TW’s various discussions/conference rooms and open working spaces. Subjects were varied from semantic web to android programming to LINQ to ruby for gaming, symbian PIPS etc to discussions of ‘if facebook an enterprise app’. ?? (Whatever..)
Discussions were sometimes too loosely-coupled and I used the extra time to hop at other talks and discussions!
Microformats and Semantic web talk was very interesting, although I am skeptical about feasibility of standardization process and implementations. Checkout Poshzone (Plain Old Semantic Html zones) .
I attended an interesting session by Karthik Ramachandra on Load testing with Erlang. Some more work and will cut jmeter like butter. :)
I missed out Ravi Mohan‘s talk on ‘Monads’. The session was on placeholder, and I went to attend another session. I wanted to speak to him about scala and osgi, but he left soon after.
Lightning talks were interesting. 3 minutes of talking about virtually anything, and people demonstrated/spoke about handheld gaming device, to online video mashups to just ideas etc.
For many developers, focus seemed to be in RIA development. Bringing the web to the desktop! Lots of activity around AIR, Silverlight, Django.
Time allocated per talk/discussion was 30 mins, which hardly left scope for detailed discussions. For example, talking about say advanced Eclipse Plugin development, within 30 mins? Nor is the time enough for forthcoming technology talks on Adobe AIR, for eg.
I should have done a talk on OSGi or Spring dynamic modules, as there turned out to be some slots available by absence, but I wasn’t prepared with demo-able code samples or slides.
Sidu did a commendable job in organizing the whole meet with other Barcamp volunteers. Although it had its share of photography-‘enthusiasts’, web 2.0 innovators, publicists etc, I look forward to attending Devcamp next year.
info: LinuxAsia is conducting an event of open source technologies at Bangalore next week. Check out www.osiweek.com
Btw remembered this .. “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.” - Richard Feynman
Devcamp is offshoot from Barcamp, (foocamp->barcamp->devcamp!), intent towards the developers. As Barcamp India went on a different tangent, Devcamp intended to connect and capture the imagination of the developer community.
Martin Fowler was present and set the context of unconferencing mode of ideating, brainstorming. The ‘unconference’ took place at TW office. Organized in terms of talks, discussions, and Lightning talks, sessions happened simultaneously at TW’s various discussions/conference rooms and open working spaces. Subjects were varied from semantic web to android programming to LINQ to ruby for gaming, symbian PIPS etc to discussions of ‘if facebook an enterprise app’. ?? (Whatever..)
Discussions were sometimes too loosely-coupled and I used the extra time to hop at other talks and discussions!
Microformats and Semantic web talk was very interesting, although I am skeptical about feasibility of standardization process and implementations. Checkout Poshzone (Plain Old Semantic Html zones) .
I attended an interesting session by Karthik Ramachandra on Load testing with Erlang. Some more work and will cut jmeter like butter. :)
I missed out Ravi Mohan‘s talk on ‘Monads’. The session was on placeholder, and I went to attend another session. I wanted to speak to him about scala and osgi, but he left soon after.
Lightning talks were interesting. 3 minutes of talking about virtually anything, and people demonstrated/spoke about handheld gaming device, to online video mashups to just ideas etc.
For many developers, focus seemed to be in RIA development. Bringing the web to the desktop! Lots of activity around AIR, Silverlight, Django.
Time allocated per talk/discussion was 30 mins, which hardly left scope for detailed discussions. For example, talking about say advanced Eclipse Plugin development, within 30 mins? Nor is the time enough for forthcoming technology talks on Adobe AIR, for eg.
I should have done a talk on OSGi or Spring dynamic modules, as there turned out to be some slots available by absence, but I wasn’t prepared with demo-able code samples or slides.
Sidu did a commendable job in organizing the whole meet with other Barcamp volunteers. Although it had its share of photography-‘enthusiasts’, web 2.0 innovators, publicists etc, I look forward to attending Devcamp next year.
info: LinuxAsia is conducting an event of open source technologies at Bangalore next week. Check out www.osiweek.com
Btw remembered this .. “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.” - Richard Feynman
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