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!
I found this in 2017 whilst clearing out my old 1TB hard drive in my computer in a folder named Blog Posts - 2009 and thought I'd post it on the date it was written. I'm actually amazed at my writing skills back then, too!
I'm almost at the end of my time at Ross High School; I thought I'd reflect on my last few years here. I've had a great time here and want to point out some great teachers who have inspired and helped me on my journey.
I want to start with my Computing Studies teacher, Mr Tennent. Mr Tennent has been an inspiration to me throughout my time as a pupil here. He allowed me to take on in-class support with his S1 class last period on a Friday, which allowed me to be a teacher, which, as you may know, I've always wanted to do. Mr Tennent was there for me when I was locked out of my school account during my Advanced Higher Computing project, and I could have failed had it not been for him. He's one of those teachers who is easy to get on with, can chat with me about geeky things and is also good at what he does. He's a real people person. I want to stay in touch with him.
Mr Laird cannot be forgotten. He was inspirational beyond any other teacher and will always remain my joint favourite teacher with Mr Tennent. He was brilliant, and he and I were both in tears when he left. He taught History to S1s and Modern Studies from S2 onwards. I'd have probably picked Modern Studies if he was still here. I'll never forget him.
Then there's Mr Stanfield, who has been truly brilliant for me this year. The man is an absolute legend. I'd be failing Physics as my teacher, Mr Laud, isn't a very good teacher and doesn't seem to teach us anything in Higher Physics! In fact, I failed the first NAB, but Mr Stanfield helped me revise, and I passed it on my second attempt. Mr Stanfield has been my Physics teacher since after the fantastic Mr Morrison left us in Standard Grade Physics. He helped me get an intense 1 for Physics back then. He's giving me extra tuition on period six on a Thursday, which is excellent. I cannot thank him enough for the help he has given me this year.
Then there's Mrs Barbour, who has always been lovely and caring too. Before becoming my teacher, she ran the History Club, which I enjoyed attending in my first year. As my History teacher in S3 and S4 and then the second part of S5, and now all of S6, I've known Mrs Barbour for a long time, and she's always supported me. She was also a fantastic History teacher and has been the best of the four English teachers I have had this year (well, Ms Edmonds is utterly useless and very unfair, too - don't get me started on that)
And then there's my favourite English teacher, Miss Gould. Miss Gould has been my English teacher from S3 to the end of S5 and has always been one of the nicest teachers. We always laughed, and I'll never forget how she said hostel instead of hospital last year. I also will always remember the day when I kept telling her she needed to type faster, and she turned to me and said, "Jamie, will you just do the typing?" and I was commissioned to do the typing of the stuff that was going on to the board. Everyone in the class, including Miss Gould, mouths were wide open at my typing speed. Haha
My Business Management teacher for S4 and S5, Mr Potter, is also fantastic. He's such a cool guy and one of those teachers I feel I'll stay in contact with after I leave school. I also really hope he comes to my leaver's party as he'd be great fun to have then! JP, as I have always referred to him is one of my favourite teachers of all time.
There's also Mr Punton, my Maths teacher in S2 and for Int 2 Maths last year. He helped me get an A for a course I did one year prior and didn't manage to get anything from. Int 2 Maths was so easy this year because of him (and I actually got a very strong A, like 98%). He was also a very cool guy. He was a fantastic teacher and taught things in such a good way.
My final mention is Mrs Collins. She was my ICT teacher only in S1 and S2, but she was a great teacher. She also was very supportive of my brother when he was in S3 and helped him in Computing Studies. I always really liked Mrs Collins.
A few more teachers who I also should mention who were an inspiration to me:
- Mr Murdoch
- Mr Gill
- Miss Hird
- Miss Williamson
- Mrs McNaughton
- Mr Carrol
- Mr Falconer
- Mr McCallum
- Mrs Wheeler
- Mrs McKinnley
- Miss Woodhead
- Mr Morrison
This is an old post I wrote for a blog in 2008 and found in 2019 brought forward onto my own blog.
One of the most prominent changes over the last few years is the move from parallel communications to serial communications, but did you know that although parallel ports were once faster than serial because of the multiple lanes that were used to send data, that serial is now a faster option?
[P]ATA is slowly being replaced by SATA and parallel printer ports (LPT ports) have almost disappeared from even these desktop computers we have at school these days which seem to be the only place you'll see them.
RS232 is still commonplace on business laptops however, and so it should be. Whilst it's an old and pretty slow connection, did you know it's also incredibly easy to use and to program because of it's almost entirely binary/hexadecimal communication?
New data connections will continue the trend that USB 2.0 has made, and USB 3.0 is already in the works, expecting speeds of up to 2Gbps - 5Gbps! FireWire is also a serial connection that offers up to 3.2Gbps currently - making it the fastest connector out there (although Intel LightPeak might overtake it since it's using optical connections).
But why is serial with one single lane faster than multiple? Here's why:
With parallel everything is sent in chunks. E.g. 10 binary numbers were sent across a parallel 25-pin DB-25 connector in one go whereas a serial 9-pin DE-9 sent just 1 binary number in one go. But here's the issue. Parallel means that the data might get there in different times. For the computer to be able to reassemble it, it has to wait for the slowest bit, so even if 9 of the binary numbers arrive, the last one might take a few nanoseconds longer - thus to be able to rebuild it the computer needs to wait. Next, the issue of order. Parallel data might come in to the computer in the wrong order and needs to be repackaged in the correct order. To do this the data comes with a checksum number that the computer can verify the data against to make sure it is in the correct order. If the order is wrong it means that the computer has more work to do.
Serial data has no checksums, no worries of order being wrong since it is a queue of data with one coming after the other. There's no waiting for the bits to arrive, they arrive when they arrive.
PCI-E uses multiple lanes, so it must be a parallel connection. Wrong. PCI-E uses several serial lanes subsequently to send data but they do not work on the same data. The controller on each end breaks the data down into chunks the same way as parallel ports did, but those chunks themselves are combined later.
And that's why serial ports are on the rise. It's a sad thing for me to see the old LPT parallel port disappear, and it's sad to see it's no longer on any custom motherboards that are designed for top end (though headers are available on most of these) but it's the right way to be going.
