Category: Computer/ Tech Related

Haha You bought a Dell

August 15, 2006

Computer/ Tech Related

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This is going to be a very short post. As you know, Dells are utter crap. So that’s what you get for ignoring my advice and decided to get a Dell laptop for college. Have fun sending your batteries in. Noobs.

Laptop Benchmarking

August 5, 2006

Computer/ Tech Related

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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:

What a piece of shit

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.

Save the Internet – Net Neutrality

July 8, 2006

Computer/ Tech Related, Rants

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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.

A good resource: http://savetheinternet.com

MD5 File Hash Checking Tool

June 20, 2006

Computer/ Tech Related

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So I haven’t updated this site in a while and instead of telling about my life, I’m going to spend my time writing about a useless program I modded (so very early this morning).

I needed a program that checks the MD5 hash of any file. What the heck is an MD5 hash? There are two ways to describe this. It is an encryption algorithm that is mostly used to encrypt passwords stored in certain places (example online forums, etc). However, the algorithm can also be used on an input file to generate a unique string of numbers. Why is this useful? Well, it can verify that a file you’re downloading from the internet is genuine. If you rename the file, it makes no difference – the MD5 hash will be the same. However any change to the file will result in a different hash.

I found a little open source program known as MD5’Fer which calculated the MD5 hash of any file. However, I didn’t like the way it was programmed – it needed to be more user friendly. So instead of browsing for a file, I modded it so you can drag a file right into the program, or even drop in onto the exe before the program is running. Since the program is open source, I am forced under GPL to release the code to anyone who asks for it. So why did I bother modding this program? There are a few good checksum programs out there, but they annoyed me and needed to be installed. This is only 2 files and 44kb. No clutter and it works beautifully.

Download: Here (44KB) username and pw is login

MD5 Checksum (of the rar archive): 1B4890300E92C0406F83044B9E6E32D3

Simply extract the two files and then drag a file onto the .exe (or you can open the exe and drag a file into it, or you can browse for a file). It will tell you the checksum value.

If no one understands any of this, then whatever. Someone will have to find it useful.

Optimum Online Blocks Limewire

April 21, 2006

Computer/ Tech Related, Rants

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Edit: Limewire may or may not be blocked anymore. Some people are now reporting being able to connect.

It’s official. If you’re on Optimum Online, you won’t be connecting to Limewire’s network because they have taken measures to block all of peer to peer traffic. Besides Limewire, some other P2P applications are also affected.

In order to get around this, you kind of have to know what you are doing and it is beyond the basic skill level of average computer users. I am not giving detailed instructions here (Google it), but this is basic idea: 1) In Limewire options you have to change the default port. 2) Forward that port in your router control panel to the internal IP of the computer on your network.

This is completely uncool. Not all P2P traffic is illegal. There are perfectly legal things licensed under Creative Commons that are free to distribute (free internet shows, podcasts etc.). The whole point of P2P is not piracy, but rather to take a load off one central server and distribute the content among users. This is useful for linux distributions and other things of that nature. I lost most of my respect for Optimum Online and Cablevision as a result of this. For a while, I always thought cable was good because of it’s high speeds. However, many people started complaining that excessive bandwidth usage led to individual bandwidth capping restrictions. Optimum online is doing this because it is less expensive for them when customers use less bandwidth. And that is not the point of paying for internet access.