Still to this day, ATI has refused to fix the problems that we all encounter each day with our ATI cards. When you first use the card the Catalyst Control Center (CCC) works fine. After updating the card drivers or the CCC, CCC refuses to work at all.
Double-clicking the tray icon does nothing. Right-clicking and clicking on ATI Catalyst Control Center does nothing. I cannot think how else you can possibly open this.
The CCC is a real letdown for ATI. Perhaps they should spend some more time focused on their software development teams. Still, my 5670 is running beautifully compared with the HD Pro 2400.
I have an idea, perhaps Intel should start to manufacture dedicated graphics cards and AMD should focus on using their acquisition of ATI better.
I finally tried HDMI on a computer graphics card for the first time and I've tried DisplayPort for the very first time. Obviously there is no major difference between them and DVI and to be honest, I feel that they both have one major let down - no screws to hold the connector in. This quibble may be seen by many as an advantage, but I personally see this as a disadvantage as I move the monitor around a lot (from landscape to portrait).
I got myself an XFX Radeon 5670 graphics card. It's slimline so it doesn't block any of those important PCI slots, but it's not exactly the most powerful card in the world (although it has thermal design power of 75W which is very low for a dedicated card these days). The card features DisplayPort, DVI and HDMI.
I will be using DisplayPort for my LCD monitor and HDMI with my LCD TV.
I personally back DisplayPort over HDMI because it's royalty free, hence why I chose a monitor with DisplayPort instead of HDMI. Clearly the different target markets are shown here in that HDMI is for the consumer electronics market whilst DisplayPort is designed for the computing industry.
Despite being royalty free, DisplayPort seems to be slow at taking off compared with the more expensive HDMI connector.
I've also noticed that Apple (and their lovely MacBook Pro range) have started adding Mini DisplayPort connectors to their devices. These connectors can be converted to full DisplayPort, DVI, HDMI or VGA. HDMI can only really be converted to DVI but adapters do exist to convert to VGA from what I understand.
On the subject of Apple, I am hating my iPhone more and more day by day and I am thinking about a Windows Phone. Anything but Apple!
Yesterday, Michael Crick of Newsnight, interviewed Stuart Ritchie, the Lib Dem candidate for MP in East Lothian. Now, as I feel strongly about change in East Lothian I also offered to come along to do some campaigning that day, and to my shock and surprise, I was on television! I do not know if they will actually show any of me in the background, but they might, it just depends on whether they cut my part out or not. We shall see tonight.
Update
There was no footage of me.
This monitor, which I have now had for just about a month, cost me just £200 and wait until you hear how awesome it is. First of all, its resolution is 1920 by 1080 and it runs at a refresh rate of 60Hz.
The monitor features VGA, DVI and DisplayPort, so it makes it ideal for those who need the ultimate in connectivity. The monitor also features a built-in four-port USB hub, two on the rear and two on the side for devices such as USB flash drives etc.
The panel is 23 inches and it is exceptionally wide. The aspect ratio of the panel is 16:9 but it also supports 4:3 if necessary. Finally, the monitor also supports portrait mode, so web browsing and word processing become much easier as more fits on the screen at the one time going vertically.
As previously mentioned, this monitor features the sort of new DisplayPort technology and I am looking forward to testing it out. DisplayPort or DP is an amazing royalty-free technology that can convert to VGA, DVI or HDMI very easily, and in my eyes is by far the best display connector. I'll primarily be using DVI at the moment as my current GPU doesn't have DisplayPort but I am thinking about buying a new GPU and possibly a Mac (and Apple have endorsed DisplayPort for a long time, so of course it will have a way of connecting to the monitor).
It features a TN panel which means that unfortunately, you cannot quite see the screen in its greatest beauty when it is in portrait mode. I would recommend for what I paid for it.
Finally, a change in the politics of this country! The Lib Dems seem to have taken a large majority of Tory and Labour voters for themselves.
Essentially, we could become one of the two largest parties again, if however we can keep this going to the election. Nick Clegg did exceptionally well at the First Leaders Debate. This has reinforced Vince Cable's excellence at the Chancellors Debate.
We actually have a strong chance this time! Come on Liberal Democrats, let's make the change the country needs!
This TV capture card is a very feature-rich DVB tuner. It also features composite video and stereo RCA audio connections to allow capture from a camera or other AV device in standard definition. The main reason I chose this one, however, was the fact that it supports Windows 7 x64 which seems rare in most TV cards these days. Also, this card is just PCI 32 bit, not PCI-e so I can leave them free for more expansion such as SATA 6Gbps and USB 3.0 when they come along. I still cannot wait to test this on my television and LCD monitor simultaneously with my Media Center remote.
Finally, the long awaited MacBook Pros have been released. The new range sports a Core i5 and i7 configuration in the larger 15 and 17 inch models. The standard configuration of the 13 inch however still features the old Core 2 Duo and now 4GB of RAM. Pricing starts at £999.99 for the 4GB Core 2 Duo and the battery life has gone up to 10 hours from 8 on the 13 inch model.
I must say that I am getting more impressed by the MacBook Pro range every release now and I am edging towards actually liking these notebooks. Anyway, the 250GB hard drive is now standard but 500GB comes at £120 more which is actually a rather good deal considering Apple's high pricing. Solid-state options have also increased in capacity and decreased in price here. However, as with all Apple products, you pay such a high premium to get their devices that consider premium goods and I do not see myself ever going down the route of buying one, to be honest. I also do not particularly like the Mac OS X Snow Leopard operating system personally (I'm a Windows fan and nothing more!).
The 15-inch and 17-inch models feature Intel's relatively new Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs. These have been a considerable performance improvement over the Core 2 series. Probably because the i5 and i7 are too power-hungry at present, the 13-inch model only features a Core 2 Duo.
They all still feature the same connections (FireWire 800, USB 2.0 x2/3, SD card reader, mini DisplayPort, Ethernet and that awesome combi-port that combines a microphone and headphone jack). The 17" features an ExpressCard 54 slot as well. They all feature the usual DVD SuperMulti drive.
The resolutions are just the same; the 13" is 1280 * 800, the 15" is 1440 *900 and the 17" is 1920 * 1200.
Now the really good feature is the graphics card. The Nvidia 330M is now included but what makes it really cool is that Apple has developed a smart system that switches graphics cards (only in the i5 and i7 configurations) between the built-in graphics included in the 15" or 17" and the 330M which will result in significantly longer battery life (as the integrated Intel graphics use less power than the 330M). The 13 inch features the 320M with up to 256MB integrated graphics.
Nothing else appears to have changed drastically.
This enclosure was one I purchased about 2 weeks ago to make the transition of data from my older computer to my new one a smooth ride.
I originally only purchased it because it was the only option with FireWire and USB on it without a hard drive included and intended to use it only for this task then get rid of it.
However, after discovering its true potential, I have actually discovered possibly the best priced enclosure out there. This enclosure comes with short USB, FireWire and eSATA cables and the power adapter.
More importantly, it comes with a free eSATA backplate for those who do not have eSATA. I discovered, and this to my amazement, that FireWire far outperforms eSATA on this drive gaining around 90MB/S (even though it claims to be capped at 400Mbps) on FireWire and around 55MB/S on eSATA.
None the less, this was a significant improvement over my previous drive that had only USB 2.0 which can only transfer at 35MB/S.
For more information on this enclosure search for the CiT 35M17SEF.
Perhaps the reason I chose this drive was the fact that it was an LG, but it does not mean to say I am going to be biased.
This drive is a very good drive for the price margin I found it in, £70 - £90. Other drives however boast the 8x speed but come at a higher price; generally about £80 - £90. 6x is fine for me. I intend to purchase a writer when more features are brought to them and use this only for watching stuff whilst burning etc. So the writer will put this out the window eventually anyway.
The drive is great, perhaps one of the little problems I experienced was the installation. It took 15 minutes, which is a great deal more time than any other drive I have installed in my computer. The main problem was that the screws would not sit into the screw holes and then the SATA power lead kept falling out. Other than that, the drive is a charm! Works superbly, and the software that comes with it seems decent as well.
A little introduction
First of all, welcome to my first blog. This blog is hosted on Blogger.com, which I believe is owned Google.
I hope sometime soon I will have my own website dedicated to these kinds of posts, but for now I'm just using this (really nice) blogging system as I used for my summer school course.
After a bit of research I discovered I was correct in thinking Google bought Blogger.com some few years ago (ok 2003, 7 years ago) and they did so from a company called Pyra.
What this blog is
I am proud to say that this blog will be my own way of talking about technology, politics and all the other things I love. I hope you enjoy reading my blog.
FireWire and Windows 7
The main body of this post is about FireWire and Windows 7 in terms of compatiability.
Today I had a strange experience with FireWire 400. My external drive was not recognising on Windows 7. I had never experienced this on any OS before, including Vista.
FireWire is one of the fastest connections out there.
So how did I solve this?
I found a nice little solution: you must first go to the Device Manager and run the driver as a legacy driver. Currently, the OHCI (Open Host Controller Interface) standard that is going around is replacing the legacy drivers (hence why they are referred to as legacy) but is currently not fully ready to replace the original FireWire drivers, lacking backward compatibility that actually works. This is because the majority of new drives do not use the legacy connection anymore, as I discovered with my new external drive, which I will talk about later.
FireWire is currently my connection of choice for data storage as it is a speedy, efficient and all-around well-designed connector that follows a tree architecture rather than a polling system.
Some thoughts
I've always liked the idea of docking stations - ever since I was a child I was buying USB based docking stations to add more connectivity to my laptops and then with other laptops that came with a dedicated bus docking solution the options became even better. But what if there was a connection that took the bus speed like a docking station connector but wasn't proprietary? What if we could use a single connection to do this?
Well, there already exists that! Did you know that ExpressCard is both USB and PCI-Express in one connection? This means that it gets full bus speeds and would allow us to use an external graphics card using the PCI-Express bus as you do on a desktop. How amazing would this be?
I recently bought a new laptop and it features ExpressCard, which I think is the most amazing standard of all. But I also realised that it's been fast at disappearing from the market, which seems a shame.
ExpressCard is a really awesome standard
Comment below and let me know what you think!
