Cheap Nike watch

Has been a long time since I last had a digital watch. Recently bought this Nike watch on Tesco Direct which has some of the best features I have seen on a digital watch at the price range. It is the Nike Mettle Blade Watch - Black/Sport Red - WC0037-012.



The watch has a aluminium face shield, stainless steel buckle and back plate. Another plus is the tough mineral glass. It also has a pre-curved polyurethane strap and rugged looking cross-cut metal buttons.

Features include dual time, chronograph, one-touch backlighting and is water resistant up to 100m.

It just cost me £20 with £5 postage. The original price was £40.

Upgrading the RAM on the Dell Inspiron 530

Of late my old Dell Inspiron 530 has been feeling a bit sluggish, especially when I run memory hungry applications like SPSS, the statistical software. Starting up seemed to take ages and opening up several windows would cause the system to hang as well.

The PC only had 1GB RAM when I bought it and I deduced the low RAM to be the cause of these problems I had been facing.

The first place I went to look was of course, eBay. There were some great deals but I didn't have the patience to watch, bid and wait. I somehow got to the Crucial site. One of the problems with buying RAM is the fact that different systems use different types of RAM. Moreover, you should know the maximum RAM that your system can take. I really liked the Crucial site because you can use their System Scanner tool to scan your PC and get recommended upgrades. However, I used their 3 step Memory Advisor tool. I found out that my Dell can take a max of 4GB even though 3GB is more than sufficient.



In the end I decided on two 1GB DDR2 667MHz RAM which cost me only £25.28

Opening up the Dell is really easy. All we need to do is unscrew two screws (purple arrows) and then slide out the cover.




The new RAM go into the two empty slots.



I can't believe what a difference upgrading the RAM made. The PC hasn't hanged even once and I have no problems running my statistical software - SPSS either.

I also had a problem with Firefox whereby it would suddenly hang. After closing it, I couldn't open it again and a warning would pop up "Close Firefox: A copy of Firefox is already open. Only one copy of Firefox can be open at a time."

Apparantly this is a known issue in Firefox. I tried all the possible solutions given. I even tried uninstalling and reinstalling but the problem would not go away.

However, ever since I upgraded the RAM, I haven't had any problems with Firefox anymore. If you are facing a similar problem with Firefox on your PC, you might want to try upgrading your RAM.

Guy Pearce Interview - Dirt 2 video game

Guy Pearce is Brand Director, Internal Studios at Codemasters. He talks about Dirt 2 the sequel to Dirt the popular rally game in a recent interview. You might be surprised to learn that Guy lives here in Coventry, UK.

Check out the cool preview video.



The game will be released on 8th September in North America and 11th September in the UK.

Twitter down

Noticed that Twitter has been down for a couple of hours now. I have no idea what happened. It went down after I had just crossed my landmark (or should I say web mark) 1000th post (or Tweet as it is known in Twitterspeak).

The Twitter Status blog just said:

We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly.

A later update informed that they were defending against a denial-of-service attack.

Hope they solve the problem soon. So many Tweets have come up in my head and gone.

O2 broadband review

Some of you may recall my previous post about moving from TalkTalk to the O2 broadband service. We finally got reconnected to the net at home via the O2 broadband connection on the 17th of last month.We had signed up for the standard package which promises download speeds of "upto" mbps.

As you can see from the two broadband speed test results, it is nowhere near the promised speed.

On Broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk


On Speedtest.net

The different tests show quite different results for both download and upload speeds even though they were just taken one after the other.

On the bright side, both test results indicate that O2 broadband is definitely faster than TalkTalk. The connection has been good with no drops so far. Had some minor problems connecting wireless to my PC in our study but is OK now after I changed the settings on the router.

So far so good and I would definitely recommend O2 broadband even though we have to pay slightly more than we had to for the TalkTalk connection.

First Commentator:
T_Volts