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Merry Christmas!

Ashutosh — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 23:49:54 +0000

A very Merry Christmas to all our readers! Have a great day and enjoy the time with your families and friends.

My First Ever Hardware Review : The Samsung N150 Netbook

Ashutosh — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 09:22:20 +0000

I love gadgets. I didn’t have one until yesterday. Okay, I do have an HP laptop and an LG dumbphone since two years, but neither is the kind of stuff I’d call a gadget.

Yesterday, I got my first ever gadget gadget – a Samsung N150 netbook! I’m a big fan of netbooks – they’re tiny, light, and they won’t toast your crotches, like my Pavilion has frantically tried to do ever since I bought it. India being a poor country, you’d expect netbooks to be wildly popular and available everywhere. Nope. They are available, but for a I-want-this-model-only freak like me, this is not the place you go shopping for netbooks.

After reading tons of online reviews, checking out the design and battery life of various models, and asking 279 real world people about a good netbook (everyone was like, WTH is a net-thing!), I zeroed in upon the Asus EEE-PC 1005P. It was not to be found anywhere I and my sister and me brother-in-law looked, Bangalore included. My next choice was the Toshiba NB305, which is very popular with netbook critics for superb build quality and all. It was not to be found anywhere I and my sister and my brother-in-law looked, Bangalore included. My third choice was the Samsung N210, which promises EEE-PC like 11 hours of battery life. It was not to be found anywhere I and my sister and my brother-in-law looked, Bangalore included. Choice no. 4 was the Samsung N150. It was not to be found anywhere I It was found, and shipped to me!

So here I am, on my first ever netbook, writing my first ever review of the first ever cool gadget I’ve ever owned. I hope not to doze you off this post.

Specs

One reason why I was not so keen on the N150 was because the specs mentioned by Samsung were not quite up there with the other three models. It had a 160GB hard drive, no Bluetooth, only 8.5 hours of claimed battery life, etc. However the model I’ve received (still labelled as N150), has spicier specs, namely

2 GB memory, instead of just 1 GB
a 250 GB hard drive, that gets an impressive 5.8 Windows experience rating
Bluetooth (not that I use it much, but still useful for some quick file transfers with my dumbphone)
The Samsung battery life enhancer software, which allows your netbook to sleep using very little power

Software wise, there’s the disgusting Windows 7 Starter with a boatload of crap tools (and McAfee, for crying out loud!) which I’ve removed already. I’m also fancying a move to Jolicloud or Ubuntu Netbook Edition. So, all this software talk can be put to rest for now.

Heat

Heat was one of major issues with my HP Pavilion laptop (The CPU would get to 95C temperature, and the casing over 70C). That’s all but gone with this netbook. It just doesn’t get hot! The vent of the left side admittedly gets a bit warm, which is quite expected and not uncomfortable at all.

Keyboard and Touchpad

The keyboard is quite comfortable. It’s small for my huge hands, but I type with two fingers (still!) so that’s not much of a problem for me.

The touchpad is quite another story. It’s as big as a fifth of my palm, and it’s weird! Maybe it’ll be better after I peel the sticker off it, but it just feels so tiny and stupid. Those multitouch gestures are quite fun, but my two fingers are huge enough to cover the entire touchpad and cause undesirable clicks and all. I think Samsung could’ve moved the keyboard a little bit up and made the touchpad larger.

Display

Matte finish for the win! Seriously! With my HP laptop it was always frustrating to see my face on the screen all the time, unless I was in some super dark room doing super secret stuff. That’s totally gone, and I can even use this netbook on the balcony in broad daylight. I love non-glossy screens.

Battery

All of the other three models I was looking for would apparently last for 7 or more hours. This one doesn’t. I’ve been using it off and on since yesterday night, and so far it’s been running for about 5:15 hours on roughly 85% of the battery charge. Usually it should last 6 hours or more with the ‘Samsung Optimized’ or ‘Power saver’ power plans and normal usage, but for me it’ll probably max out at 5:30 hours as I plug in my EVDO modem to access the internet all the time. Still, anything above five hours is huge. My previous laptop lasted 2 hours on battery when it was new, and now it barely stays over six minutes.

Price

It cost roughly Rs. 18,000, which is quite cheap in my opinion. However, once again the ASUS 1005P is cheaper at Rs.17,500 and yet has longer battery life. Samsung’s hardware and design is quite better than that of ASUS, so that little extra cost shouldn’t hurt that much.

Everything else

That’s all I had to say in my review. If you want to read an actual Samsung N150 review, you’ll find it here.

Lets wrap it up

So here’s my view of the Samsung N150 in short -

PROS

Tiny and lightweight (applies to all similar netbooks)
Sturdy build; feels good in your hands
Non-glossy display
Nice keyboard
Enough USB and other ports, decent webcam, and all those petty hardware things
Doesn’t get hot
Fully supported by Jolicloud, and nearly fully supported by Ubuntu Netbook

CONS

Battery life could be better, especially as the rivals (and even Samsung N210) provide 7+ hours of battery life
Touchpad. Oh my God.
The Intel Pinetrail Atom processor. (applies to all similar netbooks)
Windows 7 Starter and all the added crapware

I’m very strict, so I’ll give the Samsung N150 a 7 out of 10, which should be taken as really good. Of course, I wish I had tried other netbooks so I could compare them all, but I haven’t and you’ll need to rush to Laptop Magazine and similar other websites if you’re looking for comparing stuff. And never come back for hardware reviews before August, 2012, because there won’t be one. Have a good day.

Fix Hardware Issues in Windows 7 The Easy Way

My First Ever Hardware Review : The Samsung N150 Netbook | PC Tonic

WTH is Happening!

Ashutosh — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 14:10:04 +0000

by Micky.!

It has become almost customary for me to update PC Tonic every couple of months, so keeping the tradition alive, here’s the latest update for the four of you still subscribed to this blog.

This time, I want to tell you guys that I’ve started writing for tech blog Guiding Tech (aka GT). I’m currently rocking a dusty old desktop from my high school days, so I’m very much part-time over there, but I plan to write more frequently in the coming months.

Obviously, the question you’re gonna ask is, what happens to PC Tonic? Well, PC Tonic dies. I’m going to stab it repeatedly on its ass while it’s sleeping, until it bleeds to death, then I’ll digg a hole and bury it to rot forever. Hopefully, that’ll prevent anyone from ever stumbling upon its corpse.

Okay, that was a complete lie. PC Tonic is very close to my heart, and it’ll live on. Once again, I’m saying that I’ll try to keep PC Tonic updated, but you guys probably already know what that usually indicates (hint: another hiatus!).

Now more about Guiding Tech. I’ve always liked this clean little blog (with the ‘little’ having everything to do with its age, and nothing to do with its size). The posts are always top notch, the layout is very pleasing, and it doesn’t have two dozen ads on every page. I have stopped using ad blockers of late, and it’s painful to see how downright ugly and unreadable a lot of blogs have become. Ads are necessary, and we all have them on our blogs, but there’s a line to be drawn. When you land on a page where you struggle to find the actual content, you know the line has been crossed. GT doesn’t cross that line, and I applaud @abhijeetmk, the GT admin, for that.

Anyway, I’m a GT intern at the moment. I’m learning stuff over there (have you noticed more paragraphs!), and I even wrote a post about my favorite μTorrent. Go read it, subscribe to GT and get all the awesome articles written by other authors out there.

PC Tonic will continue to exist, while I keep searching for that magic switch which will turn this also-ran into the awesomest blog. Evah.

Ah, dreams – so beautiful, aren’t they! But it’s the real world we live in, so I better get back to it and think of my next posts for GT and PC Tonic. Have a great time folks!

PC Tonic goes live on WordPress

WTH is Happening! | PC Tonic

Merry Christmas!

Ashutosh — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 16:03:48 +0000

A very merry Christmas to all PC Tonic readers. Now stash away your PC, get your ass out of the chair and have a blast this Christmas!

PC Tonic goes live on WordPress

Merry Christmas! | PC Tonic

How To Setup Home Surveillance With Your Broadband [Guest Post]

Ashutosh — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 11:43:58 +0000

This article is composed and edited by Eva K. She is associated with many technology and designing communities including Broadband Expert as their freelance writer and adviser. In her free time she writes articles related to technology, mobile applications, broadband dongle etc.

Ever had the nagging worry that you may have left the gas ring on, or that the dog is destroying the sofa? Perhaps you left the door unlocked and your home is being burgled? If the answer is yes, then you’ll be in the majority! Some may call it paranoia, some just a moment of self-doubt. However, this feeling that all is not well can easily get under your skin. It may even mean you can’t relax and enjoy a day out until you are sure everything is all right at home.

With the wonders of modern technology, you can feel more secure. You don’t need to look towards a hi-tech, expensive solution either. With just a few peripherals added toyour laptop and home network, it is possible to view any area in your home easily and cheaply. Given almost universal connectivity, you can remotely keep an eye on yourhome from anywhere in the world.

Most people have wi-fi at home these days and you can now buy a small, unobtrusive camera that works in both light and dark conditions and which will connect to a wireless network. This type of camera will usually come with its own CPU, so you don’t need to run the technology through a computer. With a power supply and a wireless link to yournetwork, you can point one at anything from a treasured possession to an untrustworthy animal and keep tabs on what is happening.

Of course, to monitor your home from anywhere you will need a mobile-connected device. Although at first glance this may appear an expensive option, it becomes both simple and affordable with a mobile broadband dongle plugged into your laptop.

The monthly cost of this solution may ring alarm bells. However, a mobile broadbanddongle can be purchased as part of a pay-as-you-go deal, without a monthly contract. By paying for the dongle and topping up with credit when necessary, you can avoid high bills and mismatched usage-to-cost ratios. You could also take out a rolling contract, which means you can cancel your connection with 30-days notice. This can cost as little as £7.50 a month.

Another option is to use a smart phone or tablet device to connect to the internet. However, although this might seem a simple solution, the cost of roaming data on a smart phone or tablet can be significantly more than through a mobile broadband dongle. In addition, given the size of a smart phone, you may find that any images or graphics are too small to be useful. Of course, if the size of an image is not an issue and you do not need large, high resolution pictures, then this could be the right choice for you.

With so many options for home surveillance with your broadband, it is easy to check in on your home and valuables easily and unobtrusively. You can even select different viewing options and change what you look at without any fuss or difficulty. For complete peace of mind, it is even possible to view every room in the house if required, by installing multiple cameras. With so many possibilities and with no need for wires running through the home, this could be just the thing to put your mind at rest.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/egazelle/2198164945/

No related posts.

How To Setup Home Surveillance With Your Broadband [Guest Post] | PC Tonic

Google Wave Invitation #2 Winners

Ashutosh — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 14:20:37 +0000

Two days ago, I told you that I was gonna give 8 of you an invitation to Google Wave. Well, guess what, I got no response. This is shameful for this blog and for myself. My last giveaway had some takers, and I was hoping that maybe a few more people would come up this time as well. I was wrong. This is really, really embarrassing.

Right now I really don’t know what to do to make this blog more popular. Anyway, I won’t start a sob story. The Wave giveaway is over. Have a good day.

Google Wave Invitation #2 Winners | PC Tonic

Google Wave Invites Giveaway #2

Ashutosh — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:06:23 +0000

Now that the Google Wave user base is starting to explode, I’ve received two more waves of 8 invites each. And guess what, I’m gonna give away one complete wave, i.e. 8 invites, to you readers!

My last giveaway was pretty straightforward – comment, be lucky, win. Unfortunately, two of the six winners in that round turned out to be ghosts / bots – they never accepted the invitation that I mailed them. So I’ve decided to spruce up things a bit this time. To be eligible for getting an invite, you’ve got to

subscribe to the daily email from PC Tonic using your Gmail ID. With this subscription you’ll receive all posts from PC Tonic, of any given day, in one single mail in your inbox the very next day! If there’s no new post on a given day, which happens quite a lot of times, you won’t receive any mail the next day. Convenient, ain’t?! Oh and you can totally unsubscribe after the giveaway is over, though it’ll be nice if you don’t!
retweet this line on Twitter (click on the line to tweet) : 8 Google Wave invites to be given away @pctonic – http://pctonic.net/wave-giveaway-2
leave a comment on this post, using the same email ID with which you subscribed to the email service. Your comment must include your Twitter username, so that I can confirm your validity.

Existing email subscribers can simply tweet and leave a comment to enter.

really

I’ll be declaring the lucky winners using list randomizer or otherwise, after 48 hours. In the meantime, count yourselves in and keep your fingers crossed for some wavy goodness!

Google Wave Invites Giveaway #2 | PC Tonic

Connect to Tonic with Google Friend Connect

Ashutosh — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 15:48:20 +0000

I should’ve added it ~~earlier~~ much earlier, but here it is finally! You can now keep tabs on the small, but hopefully growing, PC Tonic community by joining the blog via Google Friend Connect. If you haven’t heard of Friend Connect yet, it is a socializing tool with which you can easily connect with other members of this blog. The process takes less than a minute, and you don’t even have to create a new account – your existing Google / Yahoo! / Twitter / AIM / OpenID account will do!

To use Connect, just visit pctonic.net and you’ll find the widget in the sidebar. Click on ‘Join this site’, sign in with any of your existing accounts, and you’re done!

In case Google Friend Connect is not your piece of cake, stay tuned for Facebook Connect, which will be implemented very soon.

Connect to Tonic with Google Friend Connect | PC Tonic

A Glance at Internet in NIT, Rourkela

Ashutosh — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:44:26 +0000

[Alert : This is a hair-pullingly confusing post that gets nowhere. It’s possible that you won’t understand a word of what I’ve written.]

If you curse your ISP for their horrible service, do read this post and you’ll be amazed how good your ISP really is. Relatively speaking. Everyone else should read as well!

I’m an avid Internet user. I also happen to be a student at National Institute of Technology, Rourkela. Unfortunately, these two things don’t go together very well. Let me be frank – NIT-R is a top tier educational institution, providing us with excellent facilities (by Indian standards). We even get round-the-clock wired and wireless Internet access in our hostels and most of the institute buildings – something many institutes don’t provide. Still, our Internet facility sucks. For someone who stays a better part of the day online, life at NIT-R is hell. Everything about this place that makes me happy, simply vaporizes once I go online on my laptop.

I could go on and on about the junk service that we’ve to endure, but then I’d be boring you enough to flee from this blog! So I decided to put up a few screenshots to showcase how stupid, pathetic and traumatic our IT department is. Yes, the IT department controls when, how, and why we use the Internet.

We stay in Rourkela. We also happen to be in Bangalore at the same time.

You’ve probably heard of Wolfram Alpha and all the cool stuff it can do. A search for “Where am I?” on Wolfram shows that we are located in Bangalore. Yeah, this means that our institute routes all traffic through servers located in Bangalore. The question is : WHY? Bangalore is almost a thousand miles from here. If at all we’ve to route, why not through Kolkata! It’s hardly two-hundred miles away. That would certainly reduce a majority of the outages we face.

IT Department says :

1.We’ll block half the Internet.

Our IT department thinks we’re too young and innocent to stumble across the dark side of the Internet. In an attempt to protect us, it has installed the stupid Cyberoam software which blocks half the Internet. What those guys do NOT understand is that we’re all a thousand times smarter than they are, and we shall always find our ways through their walls. UltraSurf, Your Freedom, and Tor are a rage here.

2.We’ll redefine the purpose of websites by categorizing them (and then blocking them).

The gits think they know the purpose of a website better than the owner of that website. All the ridiculous notifications that we get on accessing a blocked website is probably a result of this. Have a look.

As you can see above, both Facebook and FriendFeed apparently are places you use for dating and then for marrying your date. Okay, I can (maybe) consider Facebook, but FriendFeed?! How on this goddamn earth is FriendFeed a dating site? I’m not sure if these rules are present by default in Cyberoam, or if they were added by our IT gits; either way they’re totally pathetic.

Oh, and it doesn’t end here.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————–

Digital Inspiration, probably the largest technology blog by an Indian, is apparently a source of endless entertainment. Other tech blogs like TechCrunch, Lifehacker, Gizmodo and Mashable don’t entertain at all, because they aren’t blocked here.

The most shocking blockade is yet to come.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————–The IT gits have decided that we shouldn’t allowed to use any security tool other than the institute licensed eTrust Security Management System. So they have promptly blocked access to home pages of security products like Norton, Avast, McAfee, Kaspersky etc. Even if you do manage to get your favorite antivirus from other sources, it won’t update because the update servers are blocked as well (you’ve got to use proxy tools to update them). eTrust, while not bad, is enormous and resource-hungry. Aimed at business organizations, it also provides tons of extra features that nobody is gonna ever use. Thankfully, some free antivirus like Comodo Security, Microsoft Security Essentials, and Avira AntiVir Personal do update without problems.

3.We’ll allow Twitter (for now). But we’ll disfigure it so much that you’ll start hating it.

That’s how Twitter looks here. This is the only reason I’ve almost entirely stopped visiting the web interface lately. Even TweetDeck and other Twitter clients don’t work perfectly – you can’t see profile pictures as they’re filtered by our servers.

Still, something’s better than nothing. Twitter isn’t blocked, and I use it regularly.

4.We’ve blocked a lot. We still won’t give you good bandwidth.

Almost all bandwidth-sucking sites are blocked in NIT-R. So you’d naturally expect we get good browsing and download speeds. No, we don’t. The maximum download rates are something around 30-35 kBps. Browsing is fine, but you stumble across a “This site is blocked” notification way too often.

Surprisingly, Internet life still rocks @ NIT-R.

As this article beautifully describes, I think we Indians are a powerhouse of endurance. We always find a way to get the most out of any adverse condition. I also think we’re quite foolish; we hardly ever try to get rid of those adverse conditions. The condition of Internet at NIT-R might drive you nuts, but believe me – online life thrives here despite all odds. Guys downloads tons of 720p quality movies, enormous games and entire TV series through a deadly combination of proxies, torrents and RapidShare. All this and loads more (about 25 tera-bytes of data, to be exact) is shared in our local DC++ hubs to make life easier for all those who can’t stand the slow download rates. Still, there are things you can’t share. Lots of things. If I could split myself into three thousand souls and possess every other student in the campus, I’d have started a strike long ago and forced the authorities to improve the bandwidth and remove that terrible Cyberoam. Alas, that’s never gonna happen and I’m stuck with it for almost three more years.

The post ends here. I told you – it’s totally confusing and doesn’t get anywhere.

A Glance at Internet in NIT, Rourkela | PC Tonic

The Google Wave Invitation Winners

Ashutosh — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 14:01:34 +0000

Finally, it’s time to hand over my Google Wave invitations. I’ll start with some good news – I’m giving away 6, not 4, invitations!

Now the bad part – 13 of you requested for the invites (11 comments, 1 FriendFeed comment, 1 Twitter mention), meaning only 1 in every 2.17 persons would get one.

Some more good news – two of those requests were from potential spammers (weird email IDs, weirder tweets etc.), and I’ve rejected both. That makes 1 invite for every 1.83 persons!

To decide the 6 winners, I put your names through the List Randomizer tool.

Hitting the Randomize button gave me this list :

So, here are the Google Wave invitation winners : Nigel, Bruno, Vasudeesha, Leif, John and RSG. I’ve nominated you guys for a Google Wave invitation, which you should be receiving in a few days depending upon the Wave team’s mood (they are holding off invitations from being immediately sent). For any problem, feel free to contact me.

I’ll also request one thing to the winners – once you get into Wave, please send an invite to the not-so-lucky 5 other guys out here. All of you should show up in my Contacts, and I can arrange a wave to decide who sends the invite to whom.

The Google Wave Invitation Winners | PC Tonic