Hijinks Inc.

Category: Technology

  • Eggs make electronics shopping memorable

    Newegg.com review

    I’ve been using NewEgg for the past several years as my main source for computer hardware and almost refuse to buy anywhere else. Between personal and business I’ve purchased close to $15,000 worth from them and still counting.

    Their prices are hard to beat and their shipping is some of the fastest I’ve ever seen. They have an egg-cellent search engine for drilling down exactly what you’re looking for and the user interface is simple and no-nonsense.

    They specialize in electronics and computer hardware and software but sell a variety of other products including household appliances that range from refrigerators and microwaves to washers and dryers. Imagine Best Buy being crushed by a giant egg falling from the sky and you get a good idea. Oh, and for all you Mac fans out there, they’ve got those too.

    *Disclaimer*

    NewEgg.com is not in any way associated with this, though maybe they should license it as their theme song

  • Vista Vs. XP

    I’ve often wondered just how bad Vista really is on system performance, so recently when I purchased a couple of Acer laptops I decided to install XP on one and leave Vista on the other for a few tests. Basically I’m just running Geekbench and a battery life test, nothing crazy.

    For the battery test, I merely pointed the browser to a URL set to auto refresh every 30 seconds and disabled all power saving features.

    Both computers are the follwing:
    Model:     Acer Aspire 4715Z
    Processor: 1.73GHz Pentium Dual Core
    RAM: 2GB RAM

    [ Vista ]
    First, I ran Geekbench. The system scored a moderate 1911, but of course the system shipped with a bunch of bloatware, so in the interest of fairness I removed all the pre-installed software and ran Geekbench again, it then scored 1922.

    The battery life gave out after 1 hour and 45 minutes of doing nothing but browsing the internet, that’s pretty sad.
    [ XP ]
    Running Geekbench on XP with no drivers installed, resulted in a score of 1939, only slightly higher than the Vista machine.

    After installing all the drivers and re-running Geekbench I ended up with a much more statisfying score of 2168. Not as large of a difference as I expected, but still a noticeable improvement.

    The battery life saw a huge jump though, ending with 3 hours and 14 minutes while browsing the internet.

  • equinux releases TubeStick hybrid

    On May 1st, equinux released their new TubeStick hybrid for the modest price of $129. The TubeStick hybrid is a new TV receiver for the Mac, designed exclusively for North America. It features two receivers: One to watch digital over-the-air HDTV broadcasts and one for digital HDTV (QAM) cable or regular analog cable TV.

    It’s a pretty sweet piece of hardware, that actually makes me wish I watched TV, just so I could buy one.

    $129 (with free shipping) will get you the following…

    • USB 2.0 Stick for ATSC, Analog and Cable TV
    • TV Software “The Tube 2”
    • Printed quick start guide
    • Extensive PDF manual
    • Antenna with magnetic base
    • External antenna adapter
    • Break-out Cable (S-Video; Composite)
    • USB extension cable

    The TV software “The Tube 2” seems pretty robust, offering a timeshift buffer that allows users to go back and record a show from the moment they started watching it. It also includes automatic synchronization with iTunes, so as soon as you stop a recording it converts it to your preset format and adds it to your iTunes library.

    Another great feature is their free TubeToGo service, it allows you to upload clips to a web gallery and view them on your iPhone, iPod touch, or another computer. It also includes the ability to add, remove and even schedule recordings.

    Turns out the TubeStick also ships with a Windows driver, and works with Windows Media Center. Not bad at all.

  • Hard drive problems

    wdfdesktop_se_aajs.jpg

    Greetings, and thanks for reading my first post as a Hijinks Inc. author! My name is Jared, and I hope to be posting fairly regularly, but I have a busy schedule, so we’ll see.

    My rant today is about my computer, which apparently lacks the capacity to be scanned by Ad Aware or AVG without hanging. I have a 160GB SATA drive partitioned for my operating system and programs, and an additional 500GB SATA drive for storage. I figured since it always hangs while scanning the C: partition on the 160GB drive, that there was something wrong with the 160GB drive. I tested my theory by loading a fresh copy of XP Pro on an 80GB ATA drive, thus running on a completely separate hard drive on a completely separate controller, and it still hanged while scanning the C: drive. I then proceeded to un-plug the 500GB storage drive and then it scanned fine.

    What’s confusing me now is why it hangs when scanning the C: drive when it seems that the 500 storage drive is the problem. Or course, then I thought I’d figured it out, so I plugged the 160 back in, kept the 500 un-plugged and assumed it would work, but this time it hung. So now there’s either a problem with both drives, or it’s having a problem with the fact that both drives are over the magical ‘137GB’ mark.

    What’s really weird is that it’s successfully scanned with the newest 8.x version of AVG when I scan manually, but when it runs the scheduled scan, it hangs for like 20 hours.

    I’m stumped, irritated and tired, so we’ll tackle this one another day. Was that too negative? Probably, but it’s truth, and I think the truth is what we need a lot more of in this world. 🙂

  • Firefox 3 Beta 5 Released

    The latest version of the Firefox 3 Beta was just released today, head over to their download page to grab a copy.

    Edit: After running it for the last few hours, I think I can safely say this version is a solid improvement over the last build. Although memory usage seems to have increased slightly over the previous build.