Opinion Road

By upgrading an old laptop or desktop using a Solid State Drive (SSD) from an HDD, what performance improvements can you expect? This article outlines my experience upgrading a four year old Dell 640m with an A-RAM Pro 120GB SSD, the result of which was a snappier machine -measured to be 3-4 times faster across the board. Definitely a worthwhile upgrade.

When I buy a pair of Sennheiser’s on EBay, am I getting a knock-off (counterfeit), a factory ‘back door’ model, or the genuine product? I’ve gone through quite a few pairs of Sennheiser’s CX200, CX300 II and one CX 500 ear-canal earphones, most of which (though not all) have been bought through EBay resellers. For the most part, they have been good quality – with the occasional store-bought pair being indistinguishable in listening or packaging quality.

The ‘Bloody Hell Dell’ Run-around I had a simple question for a local Dell staffer – “when will the Zino HD be released in Australia?”.  You’d think that calling a local 1800 or local exchange number might actually get you a local , wouldn’t you? However, after several calls during which [I swear] I was [...]

LX197 & EX490 for Australia – no EX495 Just got off the phone with HP Australia (Melbourne and Sydney) … HP will release LX197 & EX490 Windows Home Server based machines on the 19th October 2009 (less than two weeks).  That’s right, no EX495 (Grrrr! HP).  This is contrary to reports on the OzziCom Blog [...]

CAUTION: Harsh Restaurant Signage Follows ;-o Yes yes, it’s the online equivalent of a fart joke – immature, boyish and likely to stunt my intellectual development (not to mention skew the readership of opinionroad), but if for no other reason than to liberate it from the giddy roundabout of endless ‘fwd:fffwd:re:’ emails, here are the [...]

In this [first of a series] I cover some random photographic observations made during the forgoing week. This week’s includes hot salami love, death marketing success for Michael Jackson, Chinese quality control (or lack thereof) and deceptive advertising.

Following the migration of a number of my websites from physical servers to virtualised hosting, many of the sites experienced worrying outages. I subsequently went in search of a decent web server monitoring service that could shed some light on the actual downtime. The following is a review of the top 3 of those services, along with screenshots and recommendations.

Despite the tragic loss of 228 lives on an Air France Airbus A330 plane with 228 people on board disappeared over the Atlantic on Monday on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, air travel is still the safest mode of transport. Like shark attacks, aviation accidents make ‘good’ news.  This is a shame [...]

HD, SD, 720p, 1080p & Upscaling – wheat from chaff I once penned an email to my friend (Sarah) extolling my perspective on the relative quality a range media and TV hardware resolutions.  The data was far from scientific, but it’s based on a reasonable exposure to a range of media and output formats.  The [...]

The Google Reader iPhone App (or any reader application for that matter) and Desktop Readers are the types of interfaces [and if not the model for those] that will eventually the replace age-old practise of scanning broadsheet newspapers, the writing for which is already on the wall.  This makes these types of UIs crucial in [...]