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Archive for December, 2009

Building a Gaming Rig – Kuwait – December 2009 (Part 1)

December 26th, 2009 No comments

(I’m sorry I won’t be able to continue with the next post)

I’ve decided to buy a high performance PC for gaming and heavy tasking that would last as long as possible and could play the latest games with the highest graphic settings. And since I’m from Kuwait I have limited choices as the online markets are off-limit because of the customs here and the extremely slow mailing system. After purchasing all parts and finish building  the PC all by myself, I’ve decided to share my experience for whoever is looking to buy a new gaming PC in Kuwait.

Since I went to college my need for better and faster PC grows at a greater pace. For the second year of college (2005) I bought my second laptop which is Fujitsu Siemens M4348G for the pure purpose of gaming. It was a big mistake because it was heavy and bulky and it is pain to carry even for short distances venturing within the college walls. And the 17 inch laptop looks stupid on me since I’m a short guy.

The year after that (2006), I’ve learned from my mistake and bought an Asus A8js which was the best laptop performance and graphic wise within the 14 inch range and it weights around 5.5 pound which is considered great for travelling or, in my case, the need for the laptop almost all the time in college. I was able to stick with this great laptop for 2 years which is the average age of laptops nowadays.

By 2008 I’ve decided to buy the Vaio Z laptop which is according to my research, it is the best suitable laptop for me! Great specification for such a small laptop (13.3 inch). Decent graphic card, 6 hours of battery life, very lightweight, core 2 duo and 2 GB of RAM… what more could I ask for? Luckily I was in Toronto, Canada, that time and they do sell new Vaio PCs early at a good price compare to Kuwait’s prices. I grabbed a laptop from the store few days before it was displayed in the store… and I lived happily ever after!

By December of 2009 I was about to explode of anger due to performance problem I’m facing playing new games and with my regular usage of a computer. I’ve decided to get a new PC and my aim was to use it for the following:
 

  1. Gaming, thus I need a better graphic card.  The Geforce 9300 GS for my Vaio Z laptop wasn’t able to play even some of the old games with decent graphic settings which really suck. I’m a heavy gamer and I love games and my laptop isn’t nearly enough to satisfy my appetite for new games. After playing Dragon Age: Origins for awhile tweaking settings and all it wasn’t a pleasant experience. The bad frame rate even with the lowest settings and it still go for 10 FPS or less. I had to go for a new PC with better graphic card, I don’t want to play the upcoming games like Supreme Commander 2, Command and Conquer 4 and Final Fantasy XIV with low frame rate.
     
  2.  Browse smoothly! Nowadays websites are more complicated and requires more resources than old days with all the Flash, Javascript and rendering duty it perform. Google Reader is a performance hug when there is hundreds of articles awaiting in the stack. Working with multiple browsers is required for an I.T. professional.
     
  3. Multimedia. I can’t complain about Vaio Z when it comes to play HD content even in stamina mode. I’m an HD freak and I watch every show and movie in HD and Sony geniously created this laptop to fit a heavy multimedia user. Amazing HD playback capabilities, built-in Toslink/Optical audio output, decent speakers and full HD HDMI output port.  The only drawback is that I only have 240GB of HD space which get filled with the basic applications and music files that I install as soon as I format my machine. So, with the new PC I need to go up one more level of home entertainment with enough amount of disk space.
     
  4. Virtualization… RAM killer! Virtual machine eats a lot of memory and when you’re only with 3GB of memory, you won’t have enough memory left to work within the main OS smoothly. Windows 7 comes with a new feature called Windows XP Mode which allows you to run Windows XP on top of Windows 7, it could be helpful when you are running applications that are compatible with Windows XP only but you’ll need a chip-level virtualization which is supported in the Vaio Z.
     
  5. I’m a programmer. Programmers and web developers generally do not need cutting edge CPU and high amount of RAM except in some situations, however, a smooth working environment for a programmer is certainly a big plus. It is not like I’m developing a game or something big but it feel more comfortable to work when you run your website on a GlassFish or MAMP local server and it executes fast enough to do a fast testing and get done with your work quickly. Some big IDEs like Netbeans and Visual Studio 2010 requires more resources when you start developing a mid-sized applications because of all the background processes happening during the development period. I know some programmers still uses Pentium 3, but I’m not really patience when my fingers start writing codes.
     
  6. Designing. I use Adobe Flash, Flex, Photoshop and Swift 3D. Photoshop is pain in the ass when I start creating posters and flyers. It starts getting slow when I go to large designs and as deep as 300 DPI and beyond. Certainly a memory of 3GB is not enough with all other applications working on the background. Also rendering is freaking slow on my Vaio Z which is another drawback.

 

To be continued…

Life at Microsoft

December 16th, 2009 No comments

I’d like to share some great and funny videos about working at Microsoft.

Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3

Categories: Computer and IT Tags: , ,

TechED Middle East Website

December 6th, 2009 No comments

As mentioned before, TechED is coming to the Middle East and now the public website is live for registration for $595 US for early registration which is $230 cheaper than the standard fee.

That’s around 170KD which I think is still expensive. There should be a student registration with cheap registration fee or maybe make it free since Microsoft are marketing their products after all!