Gadgetoid

I’ll always be a PC user at heart, despite my almost total migration to Macs, that’s why the temptation of the Vaio LV has kicked in and usurped my plans to wall mount a 24″ iMac in the bedroom in lieu of a SlingCatcher and 26 or 32″ LCD television.

My trip to the Microsoft Christmas Showcase has brought Vista, it’s superb Media Center and Vaio computers to the front of my mind. Microsoft were busy pushing their Media Center imbued Vista, demonstrating it on the delightful, round and quirky little Vaio HTPCs which are cute, but don’t quite cut it for me.

The Vaio VGC-LV1S, on the other hand, is a different story. It has a bigger brother in the form of the Vaio RT series, but it’s far too chunky, ugly and lacking in crucial features that the LV series boasts for my liking.

The trouble with Macs is that Apple make good laptops, and good absurdly-high-end-desktop-computers but the iMac and Mac mini, whilst beautiful OSX machines, are incredibly compromised and either difficult or impossible to upgrade.

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I’m sure most people are already well aware of Apple’s obscene RAM pricing, I have a tendency to rant about it from time to time. If you’re looking to buy a shiny new iMac then avoid the temptation to click that £94 upgrade to 4GB and bear with me a moment.

£94 for 4GB is about double what it’s worth, this isn’t too bad in itself but you have to be wary that you are, in fact, swapping from 2GB to 4Gb meaning that you’re actually paying that extra £94 for only 2GB extra.

That’s £47 per 1GB stick of RAM.

Multiply that by 4 and you have a whopping £188 cost for the pleasure of having 4GB of RAM installed in your iMac from the word go. That’s an insane price for something that costs only £45.81 elsewhere.

4.1 times more expensive, if you must know!

Not only that! But upgrading AFTER you purchase leaves you with two 1gb sticks of DDR2 RAM which you can shove into another computer or sell on EBay.

So, what’s it gonna’ be? 4GB RAM for £94 or 4GB + 2GB RAM for £46?

I thought so.

My ongoing crusade against Apple will probably never amount to anything remotely resembling success, but I have a strong objection to both their upgrade prices and spare/upgrade parts prices. A 250GB hard drive upgrade for the MacBook Pro, for example, costs about £70 for Apple and will cost you a further £60ish for installation unless you’re brave enough to attempt it yourself.

Yes. I recently investigated the cost of upgrading the paltry 120GB hard drive in my MacBook to 320GB. Now a 320GB, 7200RPM hard drive can be had for about £60-£70 and they wanted to sell me a 250GB one, with a spindle speed of 5200RPM no doubt, for the same price. Factor in installation and we’re talking over £130 for either option. Hint: a 1TB external hard drive can be had for about £90.

Why these disgusting prices when the Macs have already gained notoriety as premium products simply by their base purchase price alone? I find it hard to believe that Apple do anything more than buy off the shelf hard drives in bulk and re-sell them to their customers at absurdly inflated prices. There’s no need to shaft your customers over once they’ve bought into Mac, Apple. Stop it.

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Perhaps the most promising of upgrade paths for an aging MacBook Pro with only 120GB of internal hard disk space is an ExpressCard SSD. The idea of being able to instantly add up to 32GB of storage to the system without having to gut it, replace the hard disk and reinstall everything is quite appealing. But, unfortunately, every ExpressCard SSD on the market seems to be utterly missing the point.

Some key entrants onto the ExpressCard SSD market include Lexar with their drives reaching 16GB in capacity plus Transcend and Team who run up to a much more useful 32GB. Team even have a 64GB ExpressCard SSD on the horizon which means a massive 50% storage boost for MacBook Pro owners with a 120GB hard drive. It all sounds good so far, so what is the problem?

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Episode 1 of our Audio Podcast is up on t’internet ready for you to listen in. You can subscribe to our podcast with the following URL http://www.dxdec.com/gadgetoid/gadgetoid.xml

In this first episode we take a look at some notable games in the first half of 2008. It’s our first ever episode, so bear with us, we’ve made every effort to achieve good sound quality and, with the help of some Sennheiser microphones, a generous amount of filtering and some miraculous almost uninterrupted peace and quiet, we believe we’ve achieved it.

Enjoy!

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Although unpowered vocal microphones are not the best solution for Audio or Video Podcasting I have managed to get some pretty good results out of a pair of Sennheiser “e” series microphones hooked up to a mixing desk and mixed into Garageband.

The microphones are the Sennheiser e840 (£55.99 at DV247.com and the Sennheiser e815s (£25.99 at DV247.com), the “s” stands for Switch so the 815s boasts a hard on-off switch on the microphone itself whilst the superior 840 does not (there is a version of the 840 with a switch).

The two microphones are remarkably similar in build quality and both have an excellent, quality re-assuring weight thanks to their solid metal casing.

When recording a Podcast it’s worth spending a little cash- perhaps £100 -and getting yourself a reasonably good microphone and an audio interface. If you plan to have more than one host then a microphone per person is almost essential for the best possible quality. Crowing around a single laptop microphone will sound abysmal no matter how many filters you try.

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Now we’re talking. The sound issues are sorted and we’re still capturing on “Better” mode to eliminate interlacing issues.

Here’s a quick video of some interesting moments in BioShock captured with the Pinnacle Video Transfer Unit and edited together with iMovie.

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Things are coming along reasonably smoothly. I’ve managed to successfully obtain a 60hz PAL, standard definition capture of some Halo 3 gravity hammer fun. The sound is a little sketchy but can be fixed. The capture was taken with the Pinnacle Video Transfer unit to a 16gb Lexar Memory Stick (a very good and stupidly easy to use setup as it happens) using the medium quality setting. I think the next task is to try high quality, full frame capture for the best final video results- we’ll see!

The capacity indicator on the 16gb Lexar Jump Drive Secure II Plus comes in very handy here, even when it’s unplugged it is possible to tell at a glance if it’s full or not. Also, 16GB is enough space to record, at “Better” quality, over 24 hours of video, or a solid day of gaming. Not bad!

Combined with the Pinnacle Video Transfer unit we can capture more video that we’ll ever need without even having to think about it and without needing the clutter and bulk of an external hard drive or whole computer hooked up.

Yes, I’m a little rusty at Halo 3. I was one of the first people in the UK to play with the gravity hammer at the Microsoft christmas event prior to Halo 3’s launch, and I owned with it… this is embarrassing.

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In keeping with my run-up-to-Christmas accessory coverage I have acquired a couple of notebook coolers from Antec to give the Gadgetoid once over.

As I don’t have my laptop handy in the office I have conceived a genius alternative use for one of these, the Antec Notebook Cooler 200.

Foot cooling.

No. I’m not kidding. Mr. Farley himself has been known to place a desk fan underneath his desk for the purpose of keeping his feet cool and comfortable in the fluctuating office climate. The Antec Notebook Cooler 200 does a fantastic job of this, and this alternative use could actually warrant the creation of another product- a fan assisted, USB powered, posture aiding foot rest… if such a thing does not already exist. Antec, if you’re listening then a tiny redesign could yield you a whole new product that employees would lobby their employers to purchase!

I’m really not kidding…

And yes, I do wear my socks inside-out… I find the seams irritating!

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I’ve had an instruction manual free weekend with the TerraTec Cinergy PCI Satellite TV Tuners and, after some tinkering, have managed to receive several local satellite television channels.

Due to bad case design on Dells part I had to displace a PCI sound card to fit both the TerraTec Cinergy HD and SD tuners into my desktop, but once installed it was a fairly trivial matter of grabbing the correct drivers from the TerraTec website, installing them and then installing the TerraTec cinema software.

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It turns out that the Piel Frama HTC Touch Pro case has been lurking in the new office since Friday. Having opened it up this morning and tried the HTC Touch Pro fit I can say that I am not only suitably impressed, but can heartily recommend this case over the positively awful one that comes as standard with the Touch Pro.

Not only do you not have to remove the HTC Touch Pro from the Piel Frama case to use it, but you can even slide open the keyboard, which is protected by a plastic pocket, and use it without removing the whole phone.

The standard case, on the other hand, offers no such flexibility and must be completely removed before you can do anything more with the phone than charge it. It’s more of a very cheap leather sleeve than a true case.

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