December 19, 2009

Quite busy since November (start of school, for me.)

U.P.’s been okay. I like the freedom compared to Ateneo, especially the secular/militant vibe - the religious demographic is more Traditional Folk Catholic compared to ADMU’s, though. What I regret from the break I took was that I wasn’t included in a block, so I start school with initially less ‘mates’. I also have to overload and petition for summer classes so I can have a chance of finishing with the 2009 batch. I’m also in a bit of a dilemma on whether I should even go through with my Bachelor’s on Computer Science at all. I can see myself having a hard time with future iterations of Math and Physics and I’m not really feeling Programming at all. My first choice in ADMU was Euro Studies and it seems I want to switch to Euro Languages in UP. The irony of it all is that ADMU is the best choice when it comes to ‘soft’ courses like BA EU.

Now on to my random ranting…

Worst part of the holiday season is the neighbor douches setting off firecrackers even when it isn’t the 25th or the 1st yet. And so are the carolers who I liken to child beggars, they don’t make the least bit of effort to convince you to give them even your pocket change. They sing a stanza and a half at shaky double time then they won’t bugger off with their pleading, which takes twice as much time as their singing. The good ones are a rarity so it’s a pretty sad situation.

The second worst part is escaping those awful noises and going to the province. My grandparents live beside a sloping thoroughfare (30 degree angle?) so that tricycles (main form of short-distance transpo. there) constantly overwork their single-cylinder two-strokes and make a smoky racket all the time. The rooms are dusty, you wake up and sleep early (like weekdays!), and because you’ll eventually wake up late, the food will be cold.

Now for the ranting: Even if there is a newfound interest in the 20k-40k sector, notebook manufacturers are still having a hard time making that perfect budget computer.

On one side we have the default non-netbook cheapie (like the Presario I’m typing on right now). They have mediocre WXGA screens, adequate dual processors (we’re talking 2GHz Pentium Dual Cores or old Penryn C2Ds), and (the worst part) the obligatory Intel graphics. In this category you’ll find some quite-decent Blu-Ray capable 14” Acers. My friend bought one at around 35k. I’m not looking at this space primarily because you’re getting a heavy (6.5lbs), small-bag-unfriendly (14-15”), Intel-graphics (4500MHD) appliance.

A nascent category for this holiday season is the thin-and-light. They have ‘all-right’ ULV Core 2 Duos, 12” screens, no optical drivers, but for the most part the same Intel 4-series graphics or the equally underwhelming Radeon 3200/GeForce 7300. The thin-and-light I’m eyeing right now is the popular Asus UL80vt. It comes with a 1.7GHz OC’ed ULV C2D and (the best part) a GeForce G210M. The problem is that it retails at around 54 thousand right now.

Another emerging niche is the ION netbook. Powered by a chipset that features NVIDIA’s MacBook-grade 9400M, these netbooks are almost perfect but are letdown by the asthmatic Atom CPUs (even the upcoming Pineview chipset won’t solve it). Examples are the top-of-the-line Lenovo S12, the HP Mini 311 and the Asus EEE 1201N. The HP and the Lenovo have the all too common N280 while the ASUS comes with a nettop-class dual-core Atom 330. The problem with the Asus is that the price starts at 35,000, a price point it shares with the over-priced yet more upscale VAIO X.

My plea to the manufacturers (and NVIDIA, to develop ION for Intel CULVs), in the form of an easily achievable spec sheet:

13/14” 1366x768 Matte Screen on a chassis not thicker than 1.2” and not heavier than 5.5lbs.

1.3GHz ULV Core 2 Duo (overclocked to 1.7GHz) CPU.

NVIDIA ION platform or GeForce 9300M or Ati Mobility Radeon HD 4330. (As I said above, no ION for non-Atom chipsets yet. If NVIDIA decides to make one for non-netbook platforms, consumers will effectively say goodbye to Intel graphics!)

2+GB 1066MHz DDR3 RAM (DDR3 is cheaper to make than DDR2 already).

250GB 5400rpm Hard Disk Drive (not really a priority of mine, I burn my downloaded stuff within a month on our networked desktop. 7200rpm mobile HDDs are still a rarity in this segment too.)

Synaptics multi-touch trackpad (better track record compared to ALPS’ multi-touch offerings.)

VGA-out and HDMI-out (VGA for school presentations and HDMI for  increasingly common LCD HDTVs)

Audio I/O.

3xUSB 2.0 (still too expensive to include SuperSpeed USB 3.0.)

Gigabit Ethernet.

Wireless A/B/G (though I hear 802.11N isn’t that much more expensive)

Windows 7 Home Premium x64 (w/o BLOATWARE!!).

6-cell 56+Whr battery.

Price: ~US$599

Rationale: The OC’ed CPU will be a bit weaker than the bargain-basement 2.0GHz PDC offerings today, yet it would be nearly as power efficient and a lot more powerful than a dual-core Atom. The GPU will be adequate for any HD videos thrown at it, yet it can play nearly all modern games at low settings with smoothness. The RAM is more than enough for even the base requirements of modern video games and has some headroom left for Windows 7 x64’s 1.5GB requirement. The 250GB HDD is the default included size in most bargain bin notebooks and is an easy step up from the 160GB one gets from the cheapest netbooks. The 6-cell battery is the same one found on the 9+hr netbooks (think ASUS 1005HA) but it will still be able to churn out 4-5 hours on a full charge on this particular notebook. As for the price, netbooks go for around $349-499, cheap 14-15 inchers ask for $499-599 and ‘cheap’ ULVs max out at $899: $599 sounds like a nice median for this kind of notebook.

I based my machine on the Dell Inspiron 14z. The 14z has 1GB more RAM and a better 2.2GHz C2D processor and it costs $749. If I had that budget I would certainly get it!