VC’s Techie CockTail

This week, I was able to spend some time with my friend’s laptop a Compaq Presario V3777TU . Nowadays the “Value for Money” of laptops has been HOT in India with all major brands competing in the price range between 32000/- to 37000/- bucks but if you can stretch it a bit you can even have a Sony VAIO starting at 40,000 bucks. Before my thoughts on the Compaq laptop here is the specs at a glance,

• Intel Core Duo 1.73 GHz processor (Oops …didn’t note the processor number)
• 2 GB DDR2 RAM
• 14.1″ WXGA Display
• 120GB HD
• DVD Burner
• WLAN, Bluetooth, 5 in 1 Card Reader, USB, Firewire ports
• Windows Vista Basic

As my current notebook is the Lenovo Y410, I will compare it with this compaq in certain areas. First & foremost the finish of the laptop is sleek & stylish with a black glossy look with a wavelike pattern at the top of the lid. The finish is more appealing than my Ideapad but the hinge and overall solidity is better in my Ideapad. The keypad area is finished with a black matte look and sufficiently spaced but according to my friend the Y410 was bit better for typing. The 14.1″ WXGA screen was bright with good color reproduction.

The Core Duo processor was OK for all the mundane office work like e-mailing, word & spreadsheet processing and lightweight multimedia functions. The 1.3 megapixel webcamera was good with the bundled Cyberlink You Cam software pity that my Y410 doesn’t have a preloaded software for using the webcam. Even though the Y410 is supposed to have sub-woofers & all (honestly i haven’t tried it yet), the JBL speakers of the compaq was louder.

Connectivity shouldn’t be a problem as I’ve mentioned the various options available in the specs column. The DVD burner should suffice for reading / writing CD’s and DVD’s. I didn’t have enough time to test its battery strength, but at a price of 38,000 bucks (by the way 2000 bucks costlier than Iphone’s official price in India) it is worth a buy for people looking at a basic laptop with enough power to do all their regular PC stuff.

written by Vignesh \\ tags: Laptop

Its been more than 1 year when I shifted my blog from Blogger to Wordpress, my initial attraction being purely professional reasons since wordpress had a lot of demand in the market and also to have more technical control of the workings of the blog. After some initial hassles and some bugs midway while upgrading wordpress the ride has been smooth so far. Here are some plug-ins which I found to be useful,

• Wordpress Automatic Upgrade - According to me a god send, to avoid your upgrading blues
• Wassup - Track your visitors
• Feedsmith - Automatically redirects your feeds to feedburner feeds
• cForms - Create forms to enable visitors contact you from your blog
• Akismet - To aviod the ever increasing problem of spam in your comments
• AddThis - A social bookmarking widget to help visitors spread your blog

That’s all in this post, in time i will come back with some more plug-ins and themes to “spice up” your blog further.

written by Vignesh \\ tags: blog, wordpress

I’ve always found installing various Instant messengers for Yahoo, MSN, Google etc as a irritating affair and it tends to clog up my system. So I was mostly using Yahoo! IM coupled with Google web based IM, but on the lookout for a all in one IM i stumbled on quite e few. Here are some of those,

• Trillian - Trillian was one of the very first I’ve tried a long time back. I haven’t yet tried its latest version but its quite handy but has a basic and a paid version so not every feature will be free
• Pidgin - Pidgin is gradually gaining popularity these days. Its free and has support for lots of networks.
• Digsby - But here is the one I am using for the last 4 months. Suddenly stumbled on it one day from a article on the net, so downloaded it and started using it. It not only supports various IM’s like Yahoo, MSN, Google, ICQ, AOL etc it has a email notifier and social networking tools.

  The installation and setup was quite straight forward. After signing up with digsby for a account, you can log-in and setup the various IM’s you want to use. It has option for chat, email and sms. But there is no support for voice chat. Multiple file transfers are supported. One cool feature is the unobtrusive pop-ups near the start button of your taskbar for various notifications. Even the contacts view can be customized and managed so that it is easily understandable and avatars / status notifications are only a click away.

  The email notifier is quite a useful utility which we can setup for Google, Yahoo, POP,IMAP,AOL mail accounts. Its social networking utility has support for facebook, myspace & twitter. I’ve configured my facebook account and it lets me in all my friend’s activities and much more with pop-ups on the taskbar. It also integrates a digsby chat on my facebook profile.

So all in all a good multi faceted IM for all your chat and social networking needs. Let me know which is your favourite multi-client IM ??

written by Vignesh \\ tags: digsby, Instant messenger

Hello Techies !!! Hope July is off to a wonderful start for all

One of the problems in a town like mine is the dust, and for a gadget like laptop dust can be a major enemy to the laptop’s longevity and error free running. The worst time with my previous Acer Travel Mate was the TFT screen, a combination of small greasy spots, dust & finger smudges made it a mess. First of all I had a soft lint cloth, a new paint brush to wipe and brush all the dust from the laptop screen and keyboard area. Then I got this iKlear thru my friend in America…and cleaning with this made my screen better .

But as I changed to my Lenovo Y410, the first thing I did was to get a screen protector. So on my last trip to Chennai, I went to Landmark, Spencers Plaza and got me a ScratchGard screen protector for 999/- bucks (23$). The shopkeeper after a brief struggle did a good job of sticking it or people with a certain level of skill and patience can stick it by themselves. But now i dont dread about my laptop’s screen, its easy to clean and the screen maintains its brightness and clarity. So its been a worthwhile investment.

The next thing I thought of buying was a USB vacuum cleaner, but after a extensive research on the web and from people who used it I came to a conclusion that its actually doesnt serve the purpose of cleaning keyboards. But a decent alternative in the web was to use a hairdryer in cool mode to get the dirt out.

So my laptop maintenance kit now has a lint cloth, a paint brush and some laptop cleaning kits to do the job. If you have any more ideas please share your thoughts here ….

written by Vignesh \\ tags: Laptop