A few months back, I left my public sector role. I had to return my notebook and desktop computer, of course, and so a top priority was to replace them. For myself, a notebook is everything, and I remain ecstatic over my Alienware M17x R3 purchase. It's simply an awesome piece of hardware, and it's served me brilliantly.

I just reminded myself, though, that I never reviewed the desktop computer (I'm glad I took my time, though, as time has changed my opinion for good reason, as you'll see). I suppose that the simplest reason is that I don't use it - it's primarily used by the rest of the family. I had to have a desktop PC to work from home previously, to satisfy OH&S requirements, but otherwise I'm perfectly happy to use my notebook. The same is largely true with my wife and children - unbelievably, they each have notebooks, leading me to reminisce on "ye olde days" when the first computer we had was a Commodore 64, plugged into the lounge room TV - computer usage was a pure luxury.

No ...

I recently moved on from my IT Manager job within the NSW Government, and a top priority for me was to buy a new notebook and desktop computer - the old ones having gone back to my employer. I don't use a desktop myself, but the family does for various purposes, and they've fallen in love with the All-in-one touchscreen style; I'll review that one next. I'm in the habit of using a notebook for everything, and I find I need a fairly high powered specification to meet my many and varied needs, including;

While my work notebooks have grown ever greater in power, they've never totally suited my needs - the closest I'd come was a HP Elitebook, but I've found the HP offerings can be quite inflexible and limiting within my price range. There are plenty of HP notebooks that do suit people, and I feel they're quite good for business use (with a decent SOE), ...

If you've been living under a rock, you would probably know that Apple released the iPhone 4S on the 14th of October, to much noise and hullabaloo. I was one of those who trekked out early to pick one up on the day of release. Now the noise has gone away, and I've had it for just over a look, let's take a look at it and see how it goes.

As a point of reference, I had an iPhone 3GS for over 2 years, didn't upgrade when the 4 came out, and have been struggling with iOS 4 on the slower processor for some time. So naturally, an upgrade to a 4S would be a sizeable one, regardless of the features of the new phone.

Image (c) Apple, 2011

The Apple iPhone 4S is the latest smartphone from Apple. In many ways an upgrade from the iPhone 4, the new device sees Apple enter the dual-core mobile processor era, with the 1GHz A5 dual core chip with 512MB RAM. Apple claim the A5 processor improves graphics performance by up to 7 times, and while it's hard to ga ...

Hi,

Thanks to Telstra, I've been given a 4G card to trial - so let's see how we go! This is just a quick 'Out of the box' experience and not intended as a full review or guide. 

First, I've put the SIM into the rather short and fat 4G modem, and plugged that into my laptop. It's autodetected and kicked off an installer.   Several minutes later, the installer is done and launches the Telstra Mobile Broadband app! But, it's saying 'Cannot detect SIM card'. What have I done wrong?  

I pull out the modem, open it up and switch the SIM card around the other way. It's not too clear as to which way it's supposed to go, but looking at the manual it does confirm I had it incorrectly inserted.   Back in it goes, and look it's now detected and showing me signal strength!   I click the 'Connect Now' button and am instantly connected.

The Telstra Mobile Broadband program pops up a top news story, as well as giving me links for some Online Services - BigPond H ...

Cross-posted from my blog, ClubDUH!

WARNING: Contains rude words tweeted in anger; adult concepts and immature computer hardware. Sharing a few hours of my life that I’ll never get back in the hope that I’ll save someone else from enduring the same saga.

It was shortly after 6pm on Thursday night and I was about to leave the office. I checked my mobile and was excited to find a new gadget, that I hadn’t heard of before, was available at Officeworks, here in Australia. Wh0o0o0o!

I immediately went googling and quicky found a video of the LG LSM-100 in action. Naturally, I tweeted my excitement at what I’d found:

I was lucky enough during my orientation at my new employer to get a look at a modular server. Yes, it is another ASI product, and yes, this is my opnion, not that of my employer.

 I have had experience over the years with blade servers, from the IBMs to the HPs, I have seen a broad spectrum of these devices. I have even visited blade.org to get an idea of the baseline design structures of these servers, and what makes them so interesting. I like the idea of running multiple blade servers in a chassis to increase performance, throughput and uptime.

When I saw the ASI Modular server, I immediately thought it was another Blade server. I was wrong, and realised my mistake only after the product manager pointed out that the blades have no hard drives, so cannot really be called blades. They are compute modules. Made me think that I was back in my youth, learning about technology in school - compute module sounded like a different way of saying CPU, as we knew it back then.

So I go ...

[UPDATED 9th February 2012 - see end of the review]

If you’ve read past product reviews of mine, you’d know that I tend to avoid reading other articles on a given product, at least until I’ve done my own. So it is with the Fritz!box, in spite of the impressive buzz that’s been going around ever since Internode announced their partnership with broadband specialist PCRange to bring the German product to Australia. I’d already known that Internode was looking for hardware that could sustain National Broadband Network (NBN) speeds of at least 100Mbps, with most routers on the market being unable to sustain these. The Fritz!box 7390 is their solution to this, along with the cheaper – and lower throughput – 7270 model, which provides sub-100Mbps throughput.

The Fritz!box 7390 has an impressive range of features that certainly make people sit up and take notice;

In response to an article by Mark about how he's configured his new Mac Pro for TTFN's video system, I posted the following comment.  I figured, after reading it, that it has wider appeal than just in that thread, so I have re-posted it below.  Please note, Mark had configured his Dual CPU Mac Pro with 4GB, 1GB, 1GB modules per CPU, which is what prompted my reply.  Also, the following information applies equally to Intel-based Mac Pro systems (and possibly other Mac systems) and Intel-based PCs and servers.

.-=-.-=-.

G'day Mark,

I need to bring you up to speed on how RAM performance works with Intel chipsets and Nehalem/Westmere CPUs as it seems you're a little confused here.

Without knowing exactly what chipset is in your Mac Pro (or which CPUs) as there's no mention of this information in your article, I'll need to be a little more general than I could if I had more of this information available about your particular system.

The exact type of C ...

Ever since its release, I'd been excited about the new model Xbox 360 S - the S standing for Slim or Small, although @themolk likes to call it the Stealthbox. I really wanted one, primarily to take advantage of the quieter running in our lounge room, but also to make use of the larger 250Gb drive and the 802.11n wireless. There's still nothing wrong with my original launch-day Xbox 360 - still works perfectly, and the 100Gb upgrade I gave it a while back has helped in extending its lifetime, especially with the ability to copy games to the HDD.

Although I was keen to get hold of a 360 S, money has been tight, so I had resorted to trying to trade an unused drive for it. Through the generosity of a few AuTechHeads members, though, I was lucky enough to get an offer of a steeply discounted brand-new 360 S - part of a Kinect bundle, where the owner already had a 360 S and didn't want a 2nd one - and the cash to pay for it! It's sometimes overwhelming to see how generous people can be - thank you, you h ...

My Mozart experience has been surprising. Windows Phone 7 as an OS is by far nowhere near as bad as the memories of Windows Mobile x.x - but it's no iOS. That's likely an unfair comparison though, as Apple have had 4 years to get their OS to this stage and this is Microsoft's first iteration of WP7. Sure, there are some rough edges, but over the past two weeks it grew on me.

I couldn't abide the onscreen keyboard. My fat thumbs struggled to type on it accurately, and while the autocorrect built into WP7 is very slick... re-editing a tweet or e-mail afterwards is not what I want to have to do. I prefer it to be right first time 99% of the time. A friend suggested I should just type fast and it will catch up - and it did, mostly. I still found it hard to be looking at the keyboard and having letters next to the letter I want show up in words when I didn't want them to. Oh, teh lulz.

The gaming component of this WP7 device was pretty cool. Lots of great games, lots of cool gamer points to coll ...

The Marketplace implementation on Windows Phone 7 is actually pretty good – the apps are categorised in the first instance and also listed by in other formats (new, top, etc). The background changes to promote specific apps from visit to visit too, with the same ‘peek’ navigation style as employed with other WP7 natively designed apps. And there are some cracking apps too.

I’ve download a few apps, and a bunch of games(!). While I’ve had my share of hassles in downloading them – either through the app not wanting to download at all or not being able to purchase the app – that’s seemingly been atmospheric. Wait a few minutes and start again. Similar to the AAS (Apple App Store) the Marketplace will not allow you to download a massive app when you’re not on WiFi, with the aim being to minimise your telco data usage. This is necessary as some games are decidedly sizable and you could easily eat up your monthly data allowance by downloading a c ...

 I won't bore you with unboxing details or first impressions. Enough of the Social Review team have delivered that far more eloquently than I (damn there are some good writers in the group).

I've really been enjoying following the reviewers and hearing their successes and failures. Finding the common ground. Hearing their pain. A review like this takes balls on the part of Telstra (and Microsoft) and I applaud them for having a go and allowing 25 opinionated people loose with their gear to do with as they want and say what they want. Our opinions as reviewers are what they (and I'll assume you reading this) want to hear. So hang on...

I intentionally didn't read the manual as I figured most people won't. It bit me in the bum a little, as I had some questions that I'm sure people who'd read the manual wouldn't have asked. I'm a seasoned Windows Mobile user, having owned and used a number of devices for years. This couldn't be too much different. WRONG.

The Metro UI is ...

Yep. I applied here, and got selected! I'll be dropping my blog posts here at AuTechHeads and tweeting somewhat obsessively about the experience over at @themolk - and I'd love to know both what you think about the HTC Motzart running Windows Phone 7 (I willingly accept tips, hints & pointers) AND what you think about my experience using it...

It's not just me invovled, either. You can see the full list of people involved over here, and keep up with the goings-on from the social review and other Telstra Exchange blog happenings here. This is gonna be a lot of fun.

I was going to wait for the new AuTechHeads After Dark section to post a review of my Windows Phone 7 experiences. That's still waiting on some final software features, though, and I've had a number of inquiries as to what I think, so I thought I'd give you a snapshot of what I think so far.

Some caveats here - I already predicted its failure, so it's difficult at best to claim objectivity. I have indeed tried to be objective, apart from some (mostly) joking around on Twitter. In spite of personal misgivings, I have made a genuine effort to use the phone on an ongoing basis, and taken feedback and suggestions from others where it's been offered. I also refused to form a solid opinion over it after just a few hours, because that's not a healthy way to review any phone.

I am also at a disadvantage with my review. The only model we were able to acquire via our business account with Telstra initially was the HTC Mozart, and this was not available until early November. I have ...

Today I picked up a HANVON BC10C.  I was listening to a “Frankly Speaking” podcast and the guys were discussing a HANVON that one of their guests Shane Morris had.Purchased from Officeworks.  For those that know me, I’m not to be outdone, so I went out to get one.

There was no way that I was going to head to #auteched this year with an iPad, and I needed a new toy.  I’ve had an iPhone 3GS now for almost 12 months, and I’m on my eighth replacement, and with the experiences I had dealing with Apple support and the "Genius Bar", I’m so over it.  Deep down though, I’m finding it hard to get rid of it because of some actually functional apps I’ve purchased and use religiously.  It’s a bit like that relationship you form with that flea-bitten rampant dog you once had (your yard ends up like a mortar practice range with all the holes, rips-ups and destroys every ...