Gear

LCD Monitor

Today I did what I like to do on Fridays – Check out the Garage sales. We also have another place in Wisconsin I like to go on Fridays – it’s called SWAP – Surpluss With A Purpose. The place is basically filled with government and University discards – including computers equipment. I have purchased many an item from SWAP and have been happy with what I got. Heck, you can even build a “Mad Scientist Lab” through this store.

However, the one thing that I have been seeing lately is LCD monitors. Lots of them for $40 each. Apple LCD’s and newer monitors for $75. And what’s even more interesting is I’ve not only seen them at SWAP, but at garage sales as well.

Last week I saw 3 Dell Flatscreen 15″ monitors for $20-$30. This week a buddy picked up a 17″ monitor for $25. He plugged it in and it worked like a charm. No dead pixels, no spots.

It really begs the question that if you have a CRT on your computer, why hasn’t it been replaced? Now before you can say “I cannot afford $40 for a LCD”, think of this: Within 2 years, your CRT monitor will have eaten up more power to cover the LCD. An LCD produces less heat than a CRT, which will be nice in the winter, but may not be in the summer. Even if you get the brand new LCD, that will save you more than keeping the CRT.

Now when you go “Saleing”, it’s important to find out why they are getting rid of the monitor. Most of the time, they just got another one – maybe even a new computer. However, if you get the chance to turn it on and look at it – even if there is no computer attached – then do so. You might just see something you don’t like.

We all love finding deals – especially in this day and age. If you hunt right, you will find some great stuff for your computer. So happy saleing and don’t forget – dispose of those CRT’s in a proper manner.

So I decided I wanted to update my TV Capture card. I use it only for one thing – to capture my camera for live streaming. I don’t care about remote controls, I only care that it had an antenna and S-Video input. I got a deal on an ATI Theatre 550 capture card – which is a PCI Express card – And should push the video better than my old Hauppage card I bought years ago.

I have yet to be impressed.

Let’s start out in saying I stopped buying ATI years ago because their video has always had problems. I had an ATI Rage 128 card and the performance never hit what I expected. I ended switching up to NVidia graphics cards and never looked back. NVidia has some solid hardware and software that has never really failed me.

But my last ATI card I bought was years ago. Maybe things changed – ATI was bought out by AMD, new technologies and advancements could make things better. It didn’t.

I got the card yesterday. I need to preface this by saying it is a OEM card. I was able to download and install the main drivers. However, the other software wouldn’t install. It kept telling me I need a specific piece of software.

I went to the webpage and scoured for software. The pages took me from ATI pages to AMD pages and back. When I finally got frustrated, I found the customer support phone number. Only thing was it is AMD’s support, not ATI. I called the number and AMD said that there was another phone number, but it wasn’t on the website. He gave me the number and said that they were on the East Coast and are closed for the day.

This morning I called to find out what I can do. Instantly after I mentioned the card the support agent goes “This is an OEM version”. He then told me that ATI doesn’t support and there is no way to tell me who I can get the drivers from.

I was floored. Not the fact about the OEM part – OEM items are sold to companies like Dell to put in their machines. There is usually no support from the main company. I WAS floored that he couldn’t turn me in the right direction.

What is more annoying is in this day and age software and drivers don’t take up much webspace and could easily be cataloged for customers. So what if it’s OEM? Put it all on one FTP site.

I did download some free software that lets me tune into my video feed. When I went to broadcast, the video was latent. When I spoke, the audio came through first, then 2 seconds later the video pushed through.

The funny part is after this guy pretty much locked up his stance on the card, I said “Ya know, I stopped using ATI years ago because of quality and support. I guess things haven’t changed”. He replied with “Thank you.” We ended the call there.

I took a chance at getting an OEM card. Granted, I didn’t spend that much, however, when I ever bought other OEM cards I have always been able to find drivers and software and never had a problem. I am switching back to the old card and taking that ATI card back.

There’s a new gadget out that will let you charge multiple electronics with only one USB port. I don’t think it’s intended to charge everything at once, and I wouldn’t expect it to. But what a gadget like this would do is cut down on the number of cables you need in your laptop case.

Which could be very helpful, if many of our devices were standard. I have one USB cable for my iPod, one for my phone (a Sony Ericckson Walkman), and one for my digital camera. If I could carry one cable for all three, I’d be a pretty happy camper. I’m always foraging around in the pouch on the front of my laptop case trying to pull out the right cable for the job. It gets annoying, as well as being a time-waster. I carry all three of those devices any time I travel, and to have it all in one cable would be wonderful.

I do wish there was more standardization in the market. There is no reason to have a different style of cable for each device; why can’t all cell phones have a standard charger connection? Back in the day when we were buying a/c adapters, you only had to know the voltage and you could use whatever cord you had that matched that voltage. I often used one a/c adapter on multiple devices to cut down on the clutter.

It’s about time that comes to our electronic gadgets, too.

The Minister of State for Higher Education, D. Purandeswari, along with the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and the Indian Institute of Technology in Chennai have announced that they will be developing a $10 laptop as a part of their “National Mission in Education through ICT”. The Government is working on making a low cost PC and free bandwidth so India can build a “Knowledge Network”.

Later in the day a spokesperson for D. Purandeswari, corrected the Minister and said the laptop would cost $100, not $10. There are no specifications of the laptop, but research is being conducted to build the machine.

Interesting note: India did not join the OLPC bandwagon. While the telecommunications provider did a pilot test, The Ministry felt that giving a laptop per child “pedagogically suspect”.

Three days ago I received my new laptop at work. We get new ones every three to five years as part of a normal replacement cycle.

The laptop the new one is replacing is a Gateway M275 convertible tablet, which I have to say is the best machine I’ve ever laid my hands on. I wore out two keyboards and cracked the bezel around the LCD, all of which were replaced as part of an extended warranty. It was dropped on the floor at least twice while on, traveled all over the country with me, and went from my home to work and back every single weekday. On the weekends it went with me if I visited family because I used it to troubleshoot and fix their PC problems, or to share the gazillions of photographs I was keeping on its hard drive. (And before you worry, yes, I had everything backed up, I’m a Good Girl when it comes backups.) It played movies in the car and on the plane for my kids, allowed me access to my emails and web site work no matter where I was, as long as I could find a wireless connection. I used it to write my novels on the patio and in my bedroom, and almost every night it sat on my desk, aka the dining room table, and was my primary machine. It read any memory stick/memory card/flash card I put in it, and its wireless antennae could pick up wireless signals from a pretty good distance. It weighed a little over 3 pounds, so it was easy to take everywhere, yet had a full-size keyboard.

Oh, I had a regular desktop machine running Vista, and I used it sometimes, but I much preferred the portability and ease of use of my trust Gateway. It has been affectionately called “The Baby” since I’ve owned it, and it is now 4 and a half years old. It was my primary machine.

Moving to the new machine, a sharp Dell Inspiron souped-up 1525 , has been bittersweet. The new machine is running Vista, which I’m getting used to. It is fast, with 4 gb of ram, compared to the 2 gb on the old Gateway. It has twice as big a hard drive, and reads most memory sticks and flash drives with no issue. It also has four USB ports instead of two, and has a standard VGA monitor port, which the Gateway didn’t have. It weighs just over 6 pounds with the 9-cell battery. It has incredible battery life (in excess of 6 hours of hard usage in the field). But I miss my Gateway already. I miss the keyboard with all the letters worn off the keys, and its finicky way of needing to be rebooted if I changed out memory cards in the slot.

The worst part about moving to a new machine is getting all your stuff off the old machine and onto the new machine. I had to reinstall everything, and I’m still messing with that. I had to transfer all of my Thunderbird email data and settings over, which turned out to be a major ordeal (I’ll put that in a separate post). The worst part is that I won’t be able to reinstall the little programs I downloaded as freebies of the day. Some of those programs I use a lot. So I will have to pay for them if I want to keep them. The other bad part is resetting all of my FTP client info; I maintain information on 17 websites and therefore, have 17 sets of logins and passwords that have to be added into my FTP client all over again.

Maybe that’s why I resisted a new machine for so long. I could have had a new one last year, but I elected to wait. This year I had no choice as we needed to move to Vista, and the Gateway won’t handle it. But transferring all this stuff is just an aggravation. I’ve been playing with it for the better part of a day, trying to get the Dell up to speed.

Poor little Gateway. I’m sure The Baby would cry real tears if she good. She’s been a good little machine and I will miss her, even with her quirks. How is it we go so attached to our technology?

USB will be getting an upgrade in 2009 as we move to the USB 3.0 standard. This will improve the speed up to ten times faster than USB 2.0. That is approximately 4.8 gigabits per second, or about 600 Megabytes per second (USB 2.0 runs up to 480 Mbit/s). It will even surpass current Firewire standards (The Firewire 800 standard can run up to 3.2 Gigabits per second).

Intel has been controlling the specification and so far is not giving the new technology to any competetor. An unofficial AMD source announced they are working on their own USB standard. It will be an “open” specification, but an Nvidia representative says it will also be “productized”.

What does this mean? Simply put we might see “Intel USB” and “AMD USB” – and the remote possibility that they won’t work with one another. The greatest part about the USB standard was that we could use it on any PC – whether Intel, AMD or other – on an Apple product or any other device that contains the standard.

It’s items like this where universal standardization should be implemented. We don’t need these standards “segregated but equal”. It hurts production – especially for the independent companies that make USB peripherals. Will your Intel USB 3.0 Flash drive work properly on an AMD USB 3.0, or will it corrupt your data?

Opening the USB standard is key if we want to continue using it. No one company should be able to “hoard” the technology. After all, “Open Productization”. Is that an Oxymoron, or what?

I can’t remember the first time I used a computer mouse. I was switching between an Amiga and PCjr (the one with the chicklet keyboard). They both had mice and when I used it I thought “there is no way this will work”. I pushed it aside and started typing.

The first time I really started to use the mouse was with a Mac Classic. I could move around the GUI with the keyboard but the mouse made it more useful. The keyboard, after that point, took a back seat.

One button to two – ball mouse to optical. Scrolling mouse, trackball, trackpoint, joystick and everything in between.

Now the new idea is a multi-touch screen. A picture of a future OLPC laptop a few weeks ago suggested not only the screen was multi-touch, but the keyboard side was also going to be turned into a touch-screen. The idea would be to turn your laptop into one big multi-touch for pictures, programs, music and games.

So it turns to the question, is this the final days of the mouse? Is this the final days of the raised button keyboard? Most important, with these touchscreens, how will that change your desk?

Laptops gave us portability. Heck, as I’m writing now, I am on the laptop instead of my desktop. I can sit in my living room, outside, at the coffee shop, in the car or a whole host of other places and get work done. My laptop is an important part in my production. Yes, I have even been in a bathroom with a laptop – although I wasn’t doing what you might think.

My main desk is big. It’s a corner desk – 6 foot long by 3 foot wide. The side desk is 4×3. I wanted a desk that could handle my computer and still have room for more than a keyboard and mouse.

The first thing that gave me more desk surface was the switch from a 19 inch and 17 inch CRTs to a 20 and 15 inch LCDs. I could put both my computers behind the monitors. The addition of a USB KVM switch gave me the opportunity to connect 4 machines without seperate keyboards and mice.

With multi-drive storage devices like Drobo and Iomega USB to Ethernet devices, I could easily stuff all my computer gear in another room and get rid of that big desk for something smaller. So who really wants a keyboard and mouse? Who needs a desk?

Even your work desk could possibly change without those extra input devices. You would need to be closer to the screen to move items around. If you need to type, bring up the screenboard and start typing.

Working with pictures and photoshopping would be much easier. I believe I’d use a stylus more than my finger, but I could carefully erase, mask or paint the lines I need. I could also do it in half the time than with a mouse.

The only downside is if there’s a problem with the screen. You might loose those devices because the screen or touchscreen isn’t working right. Try plugging in a mouse or keyboard AFTER the fact.

All in all we are seeing the machine condense and become more functional. There are some that will oppose the technology. I will even have to change some of my ideals. I like raised buttons and I never touch my LCD screen. Some people will not change. But how cool would it be if you open up the laptop, turn it 90 degrees and put it on a stand to use as a dual monitor? Just plug in a mouse and keyboard and work. And if you need the functionality of the touchscreen, then just use it.

Note to self: Better buy some stock in screen cleaner.