Da-Banana

For personal laptops I've had a Gateway Solo 2500 with a 4GB hard drive and currently have a HP DV2 with a 500GB drive. For work I've had a Lenovo T42 and currently have a Lenovo x60s. I've had the x60s for 2 years now and the 60 GB hard drive is showing its age. The drive was very slow and you could hear it when it was seeking. It was time for an upgrade. A decided to get a 120GB OCZ Vertex Plus because it was being offered at a good price. After purchasing, I began to read up on the drive originally thinking it had a Sandforce Gen1 chip in it. After some further research I learned it had a Indilinx Martini chipset. I looked over some benchmarks for this chipset and the results looked promising and since the drive is going into an x60s which only has sata 1, the speeds were more than enough to fully utilize the connection. I then began to read through forums regarding the drive and found lots of people with issues for the drive ranging from not being able to install ...

We have had 64-bit processors for 5 years now. We've had Windows available in 64-bit for 4 years although, Vista 64-bit was slated to be worse due to driver issues. Even though we've had the capability of 64-bit computing for over 3 years it has been a very slow progression. Most programs are still 32-bit and do not utilize the new 64-bit system. The main software most everyone uses is a web browser. Whether its Firefox, Chrome or IE, chances are you are using a 32-bit version. Why have these programs not been updated? The main reason is due to plugins. Adobe flash, the plugin used by most sites to provide video playback has only been 32-bit until now. Adobe has finally released a 64-bit version of there flash player for Windows, Mac and Linux. News has already appeared of Firefox testing 64-bit builds and IE 64-bit has been available for a while but it is not the greatest example because it has some major bugs in which is does not perform as well as it should. There has ...

Android has really grown and no matter what carrier you go too, they have a pile of phones running this OS. Android 2.2 was probably one of the largest and most popular releases of Android bring a host of features to the phones as well as many speed improvements. Each phone maker customizes the Android interface to there own liking as well as each carrier throws in there own applications to the stock phone. This can sometimes slow down the phone and take up unwanted space. This is why there are numerous custom versions of Android available for people to install on their phones in place of the one provided originally. These are commonly referred to as ROMS. Cyanogenmod 7 is a popular ROM of Android which is for the most part a base Android, but with a few custom features and small enhancements to make it faster.  I've been running Cyanogenmod for over 6 months now. Moving from Android with HTC Sense I noticed a huge speed improvement right away. I also very much liked the...

I have been using Firefox for almost 8 years. I have loved being able to customize it with a few extensions  and such. This was the major thing that kept me from change to Google Chrome when it was first released because I am a huge Google nut. Firefox has served me well but recently I have felt it has gotten sluggish and unstable. Recently most of the features and extensions I used to use are no longer required or invalid, the biggest being Better Gmail to enhance my Gmail experience. Now most of the features it are supported directly in Gmail. With Firefox no longer missing any features added by extensions it becomes a direct battle between speed, usability and stability for me. For me this battle was quickly won by Chrome for several reasons. First is that Chrome has a few nice extensions that offer nice features for me like Google Voice and Flixter. Something similar is available for Firefox but it just works so nice in Chrome. Second is Chrome's syncing ability...

Today was the release for the new Android 2.2 to the HTC EVO 4G on the Sprint network. In this new version come many new features and I have been very anxious to upgrade. I ran the upgrade which was easy and went smoothly. Upon first boot, there were no noticeable differences but that was to be expected since the EVO has the Sense UI for the GUI. Since Android 2.2 had been out for a while, most of the major new features have been well known and can be easily found on many sites but I went through to test most of them anyways. Everyone know about the key new features: Flash 10.1 Faster Browser USB & Wifi Tethering What is less known are all the little changes that really add to the experience. After doing a quick overlook of the key new features it was now time to find all the little enhancements that aren't as known or popular. The first major thing I noticed was that the home screens swapped very smooth. Now, the EVO compared to other phones was faster, but 2.2 now makes it ev...

There are a plethora of free Linux games out there. Numerous FPS based on the Quake 3 engine along with numerous arcade style games and so on. As great as all these free games are the question still remains, can Linux be a profitable commercial gaming platform. Windows has controlled the commercial games market for years. Even Mac OS is lacking in this area. There have been some commercial games released to Linux. ID Software is well known for bringing its title Doom 3 and Quake 4 to Linux along with Epic Games and there Unreal Tournament 2004. In recent years there have been several startup companies that are handling porting games to Linux however most of these titles are older and lesser known. Linux Game Publishing is one of these companies. It was started back in 2001 and has ported Cold War, Shadogrounds, X2: The Threat and many more. If you look hard enough you'll find plenty of diamonds in the ruff like the new Linux port OSMOS that will provide hours of entertainment to bo...

OSMOS is a indie game released by Hemisphere Games. This game was released last year first to Windows (August) and then to Mac OS X (December) but it now has been ported to the Linux OS. The game costs $10, is DRM free and once purchased you have access to the Windows, Mac and Linux versions if purchased directly from the OSMOS website. If purchased through Steam, only the Windows version is available. The same applies for direct2drive. The game itself is simple in concept but surprisingly fun to play. This game can be easily played for a short time so you can quickly load it up and play a round or two if you only have a few minutes. The game doesn't require the latest computer either. I was able to play it on my HP DV2 with no issues on its mobile ATI 3410 graphics using the binary drivers. I also found it plays fine on my desktop with an ATI x1950 running the open source ATI drivers. This is quite awesome know that the open source drivers are able to handle this game since the AT...