Tag Archives: laptop

Dear Diary, Techie Geek

The Hunt for the One Laptop

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So this morning, I was trying to transfer a captured video from my brother’s computer to good old Ginger ((My 3 1/2 year old Toshiba Satellite A20-S330 laptop)), but because of Ginger’s old age, it was obviously slow. And because Ginger was running iTunes, Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 all at the same time on Intel Pentium 4 2.66GHz and 256MB DDR, I knew that Ginger would give up on this. And true enough, I had to wait a minute or so before I could finally close down Premiere and iTunes.

I’ve mentioned before that I am starting to look for a new laptop, but to be honest, I’m kind of clueless. I’ve heard of many laptops, including Toshiba, Neo, Acer Aspire and all, but I really don’t know what is the best one. I know what I want, but I don’t know which should I get so I can get what I want. Simply speaking, I have a set of specs that I want for my next laptop, but I don’t know which to get that has the same specs. So…I need your help. You, yes, you, the readers (Hello, is there anyone out there? :D).

I have no laptop in mind just yet, but I do have the following specs updated from my last wishlist (must be at least these specifications):

  • Intel Core 2 Duo processor (I don’t really care about the CPU speeds, as long as it is Core 2 Duo. But 2.0 GHz would be nice :) )
  • At least 1GB RAM, expandable
  • At least 120GB HDD (I used to want 80GB only, but let’s be realistic — I’m really going to need more than that :p)
  • Graphics card do not really matter to me as much as it does to my brother, but I’d like it if it’s at least 64MB. I don’t care if it’s shared, especially if my memory is 1GB already.
  • Bluetooth and/or Infrared (But I like Bluetooth better)
  • WiFi and Ethernet LAN (which laptop doesn’t have this?)
  • DVD+RW (what speeds are available?)
  • At least 2 hours battery life (Because Ginger has two hours…and I’d need that for loooong writing moments)
  • At least 12″ screen size. That’s already small, I know.
  • Firewire port — just to make my life easier when it comes to getting videos in case of a shoot.
  • Finally it must be light enough to bring around. Trust me, having a 3.6kg laptop is not fun.
  • EDIT: How could I forget this? OS must be anything BUT Vista.

That’s about it. Now I know people would say it depends on how I would use the laptop. So here’s how I usually use my laptop:

  • Web design and development – PHP, MySQL (this is a must!), JavaScript, CSS, XHTML, some Perl
  • Flash animation/programming (Action Script)
  • Photo editing
  • Video editing (this is mainly for my brother if he wants to borrow the laptop)
  • Writing (as in long hours of writing, that’s why I want long battery life *imagines myself writing away in a coffee shop. Yes, it’s so elitistang burgis :p*)
  • Internet, obviously
  • And the usual movies, music and some games.

Programs I make use of a lot:

  • Firefox
  • Yahoo! Messenger
  • iTunes
  • Photoshop
  • Flash
  • MS Word, Excel
  • XAMPP (PHP, Apache, MySQL)
  • And if I get enough funds to pursue this photography thing, then I’d use that laptop forthat too.

I think…that’s it? Yeah, basically that’s it. Now this is where I need your help. Suggestions on brands, models and better specs? Are my specs list impossible to achieve? Haha. Oh yeah, my budget for this is up to PHP 70K, including the necessary (original) software I would need (yes, let’s really say no to piracy once and for all :p). I can’t spend more than that because I’d be bankrupt then. :P Sorta.

Sooo…what do you say? To those who just bought a new laptop, why’d you buy yours? And to those who know more about laptops than I do, what would you recommend?

Dear Diary

Post-Switchfoot thoughts and some detox

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Again, sorry for the lack of entries. The work week was kind of crazy, not to mention that I still have a hangover of what happened last Monday night, I pretty much pushed blogging out of my mind. Seriously, how could you think of anything else besides that? Haha okay, I shall stop talking about it because I’m supposed to be on detox mode now, but obviously I’m not.

*Is currently listening to Oh! Gravity album* :D

But before I stop talking about it, I’m honored. My previous entry has been mentioned here and here. :D I am honored. Again, it’s been an amazing experience, and we all can’t wait to have the guys back here for a longer stay. :)

Oh, and can I just say? I can’t help but feel so kilig when I see switchfoot.com referrals to my blog. :D Wheee!

Continue reading Post-Switchfoot thoughts and some detox →

Dear Diary

Stupefied

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Yes, that’s Harry Potter language. I’m not yet done reading, so DON’T spoil me please.

An update on what happened to Ginger’s HDD — all my files are gone, gone, gone. Hay. Well, searching my old CDs, I do have some kind of backup for my layouts and my writings but it’s last May 2006. So anything in between that and now is gone. Except for those I managed to store and email online (thank you gMail for having so much space) and for Triskal for having my videos and my songs. And Multiply for keeping some of my pictures.

I’ve been trying to make some kind of inventory of the files I have that are either retrievable somewhere, someway and those that are not…and here’s what I came up with so far:

  • MP3s – that’s 12GB worth of music. Maaaan. But thank goodness, they’re pretty much replaceable since 7GB of it is in Triskal. Maybe now I can choose which mp3s to store, instead of having a hard time what to delete.
  • Photos – No new pics in between the year that I did not upload in Multiply, except maybe for the graduation photos, which are so few. Hmm.
  • Videos – now thank God I have these in Triskal…but I did lose my copy of Thr3e and Meet the Robinsons. Plus Joan of Arcadia Season 2 Part 1. Ohwell. Back to torrents.
  • Layouts – All the layouts I’ve done for the past year are gone. That’s really, really bad. :( I don’t have a backup copy online too since I deleted them already. That’s just sad. Oh well. I guess I can still reconstruct them when I want to make them again. And make it better this time.
  • Old Blog Entries – This is also quite sad. I have about two years’ worth of blog entries stored in Ginger’s MySQL database, which I already deleted online. Goodbye. :,(
  • Writings – I’m trying to recall which of the things that I wrote for the past year that were saved online through gMail or whatnot…thankfully, I think I have a full copy of A Page is Turned in my gMail, but I’m not so sure about Fall Like Rain. I might have to start that from scratch (hay), but then I do want to make some changes there, so I guess this is where I should start.
  • Chats – Oh well, not such a big loss. I guess.
  • Resume – in gMail, retrievable.
  • Audiobooks – Oh well. :( Retrievable somewhere, I guess.

That’s all I could think of for now. Jomar put it nicely: refreshingly shocking. Yeah, it is. And a bit freeing too. I don’t know what else I lost, but I bet it will hit me in a few days but I’m ready. So I guess that’s okay.

Right now I don’t want to tinker with it yet because I want to install Service Pack 2 first before connecting online and installing anything else, so I guess Ginger will be quiet until Monday night, when I get home and do the recovery thingie.

Sooo. Back to Harry Potter 7, I guess. I’ll survive.

And yes, I will buy that external HDD. As soon as I get paid. Any suggestions what to get? How much is an external laptop HDD? The 80GB one? Or even 160GB? Is it more than 5k? Or should I just get a normal HDD instead?

No mourning for me, promise. But please do help me let go. Time to start over.

Dear Diary, Techie Geek

Stunned

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My laptop Ginger decided to act up this morning.

It was working perfectly well last night, but when I turned it on a little while ago, I got a blue screen which said, Unmountable_Boot_Drive. I shrugged it off and restarted but I got the same thing. And again. And again. I can’t even get into the OS.

So I went online on my brother’s computer to check how to fix it…and they said that I should use my XP CD to repair it. I only have my Product Recovery CD from the laptop package so I inserted it, followed a couple of warnings that my hard drive would be erased, thinking that it will ask me once again if it will do just that, then it showed the screen that I always see when I was reformatting.

Uh-oh.

Then when it was time to insert the second disk, I put it in but for some reason, Ginger didn’t read the CD and the process was aborted. I tried restarting it again and now I’m not seeing the blue screen, but a warning that my LAN card wasn’t installed and nothing else.

Uh-oh again.

I have this really bad feeling that I have to reformat Ginger to work again…and yes, she is due for reformat.

But here’s the thing:

I DID NOT BACK UP ANYTHING! 

Okay, my last reformat was May 2006, and I do have somes files backed up there…and my iPod has my music and some of my videos. But that’s it! And I did not backup everything because I used my brother’s old iPod to save some of my files, which are all inside Ginger already…plus it’s been a year! My music! My videos! My photos! My just downloaded Joan of Arcadia season 2! My writings! My layouts! Gone!

I’m still stunned. I don’t know what to do. I turned Ginger off already and told myself to work on her tonight, because I’m about to go out and get Harry Potter 7 and go bowling with some officemates…and then I’ll go back to her tonight. I’m still hoping that I could recover the files inside Ginger, even if it’s only my writings and the web stuff I did…but I’m getting myself ready for the fact that I may have lost all my files. :(

Hay. Please say a prayer for Ginger for me?

The first thing I’m going to buy myself when I get my salary is an external HDD!