Tech QQ

I have been moaning a good while that my old laptop is unusable, and talking of buying a new one. Yesterday I finally made good of my promise to myself.

My old laptop was from the early 2000's. I decided to reinstall it a few months ago and put Windows 7 on it. I also got a USB memory and used it for Ready Boost(I've written about it in a very early post in this blog). But in the end it just had to little memory to be usable for anything more than one program at a time. (And if I didn't want to multitask I could just get an iPad, right?)

After thinking a lot about what to get, going from the low budget across the spectrum to the high end gaming laptops. I finally concluded that what I wanted was a rig with 4GB memory at the very least, a decent processor and an SSD drive for rapid application loading and also to help with battery life.

As I want the laptop to code on I figured I didn't need any real graphics power, and the processor I felt would be good to have at least a dual core to if I need to test any multithreaded applications. So even though it would been nice with an core i7 processor, it felt like overkill.

Eventually I ended up getting an Acer Aspire 5739G. With a dual core 2.2GHz processor, the power felt acceptable, and it has 4GB memory as I wanted. The battery life was stated to be around 2 hours, which I felt was a bit weak. So the aim was to extend on those two hours. The machine itself was refurbished, and hence cost less than 25% of the listed price!

Before I even booted it I swapped discs in it, and replaced the drive with a Kingston SSD Now V+ 128GB drive. I gave a it a fresh Windows 7 install without all the crapware regularly being installed on laptops by manufacturers. And after a session of finding out some undervolting limits, I now have an expected battery life (at low processor usage) of over four hours!

I was a bit surprised that it wasn't faster when I was installing Windows and my developer tools. But I'm surprised at how fast it is to boot the OS and to load all applications! I must say I'm very happy with the performance, and I think it's about time to get an SSD drive for my gaming rig as well.

So now that I got my machine sorted, I no longer have an excuse for working on my Windows Phone 7 app, hopefully it will be done by release time :)

Rumor has it that Sandforce is pushing their next version chip release forward one quarter to Q3 this year.

The Sandforce controller has been the all the rave this year for SSD controllers. They have been improving performance in leaps compared to the old Indilinx controllers. With the use of the Sandforce 1200 and 1500 series a lot of SSD manufacturers have been producing better and better SSD units this year. So the expectations for the next revision is naturally set high.

If the rumors now hold true, then the next version Sandforce controller won't let any one down, as they are claimed to support the new sata 6Gbps interface and reach performance of up to 520MB/s for both reads and writes. This means that they are almost maxing out the new sata 6 interface with the first incarnation of the new controllers.

As there is only one other SSD sata 6Gbps drive in action now, the Crucial RealSSD C300, we might finally get some price competition in that segment as well. Hopefully the sata 3Gbps SSD's will become cheaper too, as a result of not being king of the hill anymore.

And I can't belie I made it through this entire piece without a single Star Wars quote...