Monday, March 30, 2009

I'm not cool enough to be a Mac person

Mike Abundo dissects Microsoft's new ad. I felt it is genuine and real. While price is not everything, I believe that one is more likely to find value for money with so many PC's (choices) on the market.

Just last week, a friend was shopping around at the SM Cyberzone, looking for a laptop. He was totally drooling over a macbook pro but accepts that he can't afford the Mac with the specs he needs. Lo and behold he found and bought a laptop for just P28,000 ($600). That laptop was a centrino core 2 duo with 2 GB of RAM and 160GB of HDD. When he told me, I couldn't believe it either. Note, though, that the price does not include the OS. He needed to shell out an extra P5,000 for Vista, he decided to save the P5,0000 and installed Ubuntu on it instead. ;-)

DISCLAIMER : I'm a PC ... a Linux PC :-)

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Swappiness, virtualziation and a faster system

I've been know to keep my workstation up and running for at most a week before rebooting.

I find it necessary because I notice a significant slow down in the performance of my workstation after that period of time.

I haven't been able to figure out why until a few weeks ago.

My workstation has 2GB of internal memory and as per the rule of thumb, I have a 4GB swap partition allocated on a 250GB hard disk drive.

I really can't claim to know what's happening in the background but my hunch is that the stuff that the virtual machines and applications I keep open that are initially on internal memory are gradually being moved to the swap partition.

Swap is generally slower because it's on a disk drive.

I found this article from FOSSWire that suggests turning off swap to speed up your system.

Its working well for me so far :-)

Monday, March 02, 2009

5 Inspirational Workspaces

Simon Mackie over at Web Worker Daily lists 5 inspirational workspaces. My personal favorite on that list is the Rambling Renovator's Office Space primarily because of the lime green on the walls.

However, a single laptop will probably not suffice for me. I have found that I need 2 monitors to be productive and I am contemplating on getting a bigger 3rd one to get Aptana IDE to fit.

I would probably throw in a few elements of Stefan Didak's Home Office into it and it would be perfect :-)