In a little over three weeks it will be my 32nd birthday. Irina asked me to have a think what I might like as a present, and my first reaction was an SSD. In case the acronym means nothing, it is basically a hard drive with no moving parts. Rather than a disk spinning around and around, it is like a very large and fast thumb drive. Sadly, the shops in Astana at least don’t seem to have decided they are worth stocking, and the price for ones we could order in are just too prohibitive. I could always try and look at ones smaller than 64Gb, but by the time you’ve installed Windows and Ubuntu, installed a few essentials apps, a 32Gb drive just isn’t going to be enough. Also, the model that White Wind found wasn’t recommended for installing an OS onto, as it was a multilevel cell version. If money was no object (ha ha), I had thought about the possibility of getting something like a Galaxy Tablet PC, though more likely a generic Chinese no-name version. I don’t need the phone capabilities, nor GPS, but something for light browsing on the sofa could be useful.
One other possibility is to finally utilize the holes and cabling we had installed whilst this flat was being built, and install some sort of surround sound system. Sadly, the three shops I’ve looked at so far all had systems built by non-audio specialists, and weren’t particularly cheap. If you pay a lot, you want to have a good brand (and a wide selection of customer reviews online to look for issues in advance), if you’re taking pot luck with a company that normally makes keyboards and mice, you don’t want to be risking a lot of cash.
Obviously a faster CPU for this PC would be great, but that would mean a new motherboard, and therefore most likely new memory (DDR3 instead of DDR2), and cost way too much. Similarly a nice big wide screen monitor would be great, but as well as the prohibitive cost, our current graphics card only has two DVI connections, with our TV using one; not continuing to use our current monitor would be a waste, so until it gives up and becomes BER, a new monitor seems too frivolous.
Mar 29 2011
March 29th, 2011 4:15 am
I’ve heard the Nook is actually fairly hackable and can become a decent Android tablet. The Galaxy is also hackable but the Nook is supposed to be easier and more functional.
March 30th, 2011 7:58 pm
Thanks for the heads up, looking at it now.