I ordered it earlier in the week, and it arrived today. Going to be loading Vista onto it soon. A review later in the week/month.
Posted in Tech | November 15, 2008 | No Comments »
So after a year, my WD MyBook failed. It has been studdering over the past few months, but I figured that it was no big deal, really. Today Finder nearly crashed trying to access the disk. A reformat did nothing to help it.
It’s a 500GB USB model, purchased in July of 2007. Just over a year old.
I’m quite surprised at the low quality of Western Digital’s external models, since I’ve never had an internal WD drive fail, at all.
Of course, if I would have simply Googled “WD mybook sucks” I would’ve found out about the mediocre quality of the Mybook series.
At least it wasn’t a mission critial drive, just being used as a Time Machine backup. I popped in a new-ish external WD disk, and the backup was done in a matter of minutes. I highly reccomend running Time Machine on an internal disk if you can, it backs up faster and uses less CPU while doing so.
As an expansion on my last article, I felt the need to expand on what I said about marketing by anti-virus companies, and software vendors in general.
I find it kind of disheartening that anti-virus companies market their products as the only way you can protect yourself from viruses. They play their software off as this magical thing that will stop every virus in it’s tracks. We know this simply isn’t true. Infact, most anti-viruses only detect 80% of infections, and that percentile is only dropping more and more every day.
The truth is, anti-malware software is really only there to alert you to a possible infection. 99% of the time you need to reinstall Windows anyways. This stuff roots in so deep it’s almost impossible to remove.
By giving consumers a false sense of security, they start to take part in more and more risky activities. This is just the opposite of what we want. Of course, this gives the anti-virus software a chance to step in and say, “oh look, we found a virus in that last illegal song you downloaded!”. The consumer thinks “well it’s doing it’s job! It caught it!”, and they continue on their merry way, not realizing that the malware might be doing more stuff the security software might not catch.
This seems to come off as false advertising. Wouldn’t a doctor be in some sort of legal trouble if he said he could cure your cancer without an invasive procedure such as radiation, surgery, or chemo? I thought so.
The most important anti-virus software is you. Yes, you. If you’re smart about what you do, such as not visiting risky websites, not downloading shady content (legal or not), not opening email attachments from people you don’t know, and keeping your software up to date, you’re golden. I know many people who run a Windows PC without anti-virus, and they’ve never had an issue.
If we taught people how to properly use their computers, instead of letting software cleaning up after them, we’d have a much safer online experience.
It occured to me recently that the magority of computer users don’t really see the computer as a tool - they see it as a challenge. A mysterious box that they don’t really know much about.
Back in July, Apple released the App store, and allowed a torrent of useful, and not so useful apps to take up residence on our iPod’s and iPhones. The developers have had time to work most of the kinks out, so I think now’s a good time to do a fair review of some of them.
This has been in the back of my mind for a while, but I never really had a fully formed thought about it.
Whenever I see or hear about a kid going to a “nerd/geek/computer camp”, the camp seems to be teaching them “website building”. By website building, I mean throwing Dreamweaver (and Flash) infront of them, and seemingly saying “go nuts!”.
This creates a few inherent problems, which I’ll go over here.
Over at Tom’s Hardware, they’ve posted a very interesting article, showing that a Mac Pro is indeed at a competitive price with an equivalent PC.
Keep in mind, this wasn’t priced out at the “very expensive computer parts store”, it was done at newegg, which is pretty much the cheapest place around for parts (At the consumer level.)
What is the cost difference you say? $200? Naa, think lower. $100? Still to high? Yep. Give up? Thought so. The actual retail price is… a whopping difference of $5.67! If you can’t afford that, well, maybe you shouldn’t be buying a $2800 machine.
So, about a month ago I finally ditched my PC. Now I’m using OS X on all my main machines.
Specifications - 8 core 2.8ghz, 6gb 800mhz DDR2 RAM, 320gb hard drive, ATI 2600XT
Moving from a 1.6ghz core 2 duo running XP, to a cores running at 2.8ghz is like night and day. Leopard takes advantage of the cores much better then my previous Windows computer does, with all 8 cores being used regularily.
Having 6gb of memory is a treat. I used to regularily come within 20mb of using all 2gb with Photoshop open, but not anymore. It runs insanely fast, completing operations that took over a minute on my PC in under 10 seconds.
As well, the thing is whisper quiet. It’s only a touch louder than my Macbook.When walking into the room, the only way you can tell it’s on is by looking at the tiny white light on the front. The only downside is my room gets really, really hot at night, due to the 8 cores. Although, for some reason, it’s not as bad as my old P4 desktop.
Another thing that blows me away is the design of the Mac Pro’s case. Everything has it’s place, and you cannot see a single wire. The memory was really easy to install, due to the removeable risers. As well, the 1/8th inch aluminun makes it really really studry. It must weigh twice as much as my old machine.
Finally, it looks like upgrading the pro in the future is going to be extremely easy. The harddrives simply slip into bays in the side, no cables required. The videocard pops right out, but with no cables in the way it makes things much easier. The cards that the RAM are on pop out, allowing you to insert RAM in a proper static-free environment.
Overall, this is an amazing machine, in both speed and design. I hope it gives me many years of reliable service in the future.
Now to decide what to do with my old machine… PVR? Media Server? Hmm…
Oh, by the way, you can catch some pictures of the unboxing, and the insides right here.
