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On Thursday night, two computer geeks decided to test their laptops and see who’s was better. Rameez had a Dell Inspiron E1505, loaded with a 2GHZ Intel Core Duo processor, 1GB of RAM, an 100 GB 5400 RPM HDD and a 256 MB ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 video card. My laptop is an HP DV5000, which comes with an 2.2GHZ AMD Turion64 processor, 1GB of RAM, 80 GB 5400 RPM HDD and a 128MB ATI Radeon Xpress 200m video card.

Test 1: Harddrive Speed. My drive reads liner data at 24.7547 MB/s and Rameez’s reads it at 37.1329 MB/s. I did beat his score on the random read test: 2.439 MB/s vs 1.9704 (big deal). His seek time was 12.56ms and mine was 13.04ms. Overall, Rameez obtained a score of of 3035 and my drive received a 2112. Yucky, I’ll be replacing it with a 7200 RPM disk shortly.

Test 2: SuperPi. This calculates pi to millions of digits. It took Rameez’s laptop 02m 39s to calculate 2 million digits of pi. It took my laptop 03m 45s to do the same thing – 1 minute and 6 seconds longer. Why? Intel is better at number crunching and Rameez has more L2 cache (2MB vs my 1MB).

Test 3: WinRar compression. We used the benchmark mode on WinRar 3.60 b8. In 1 minute, Rameez could compress 46MB of data, with an average of 815 KB/s. My laptop compressed 36MB in a minute and averaged 499 KB/s

Test 4: Lavalys Everest Benchmarks

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To be very frank with you:



Not only did it pwn my laptop, but if you look at various computers I have tested, it outscored MANY of them – including 3GHZ Pentium 4s (which are kind of crappy) and a 2.4 ghz Athlon 64 desktop. You can compare all benchmark results with this text file. (I’m benching many people’s computers, as you can see)

I am very disappointed in my RAM. Even without comparing it to Rameez’s laptop, I was very pissed when my 5 year old Dell 1.9GHZ Pentium 4 with RDRAM (absolute trash) was faster… 5 years old!!! And it beats this. I’ll be replacing the crap ram HP gave me with some real RAM.

This was kind of an unfair benchmark though. I’d like to test Rameez’s computer with two different scenarios and see who wins then: My laptop running in 64 bit mode and a Turion 64 X2 (AMD’s dual core version of their mobile processors).

So Rameez’s machined pwned mine severely. Oh well. Mine works well and lets me do what I have to do, so I can’t complain. My laptop is also older – I jumped on a new one last February because my desktop was being slow and crappy, plus it was taken over and I couldn’t get on it that often. It’s amazing what has been accomplished since February… My next computer will be a custom built desktop and I will assure you that it will outbench everything in its time.

Jess complained that this wasn’t on my site so now it is:

In order to be a closet physics geek, you must:

• Calculate the distance from your house to Lake Isle using a stopwatch, your eyes, and your ears and fireworks
• Talk to Mr. Gruber and Mr. Ross about Mythbusters during parties
• Actually invite physics teachers to a party.
• Get yelled at by friends for being too technical.
• Get in trouble for doing physics.
• Post about being a physics geek at 2 AM when you have to be up at 6AM
• Explain how waves work while at the beach, or at a concert
• You know how 3D IMAX films work, and steal the polarized glasses from the theater because they’re cool
• Make computer programs that generate frequencies from 20-20,000 hz
• “Pwn” all physics tests
• Crash the Junior Stay Awake Athon and calculate how loud the DJs speakers are in decibels
• You own any of the following items
• Charge a capacitor to full capacity and then short it out to make that cool spark and pop sound.

Today, I am going to teach you all about a controversial issue of the current internet – Network Neutrality…

Congress is pushing a law that would abandon the Internet’s First Amendment — a principle called Network Neutrality that prevents companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast from deciding which Web sites work best for you — based on what site pays them the most. If the public doesn’t speak up now, our elected officials will cave to a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign.

This defeats the purpose of the internet. These big companies want to control internet traffic. How does this apply to ordinary people? Well, if Congress gets their way, companies can censor the internet, kind of like China does. For instance, they can allow fast access to websites that are advertisers, and slow down access to competitor sites. This can lead to a tiered internet. What do I mean by tiered? Well, think of your cable company. You buy packages with channels in them. Without Net Neutrality, your internet can become tiered. It will be awful just think. Do I get google with that package? For $20 more, I can get cnn.com? This is more proof that big business is controlling the United States with all of their money and it’s nonsense. What do redneck Texas hicks know about technology? Nothing, they just see green going into their political party.

Watch this video to learn more:

A good resource: http://savetheinternet.com