Tuesday, 15 December 2009

The Joy of Tech

I’ve been on a bit of a techno-rampage over the last couple of weeks; firstly T-Mobile were doing a big sale on PAYG handsets which brought the price of the Pulse, an Android phone, under £100 so I couldn’t resist that, especially as they actually offer sane data rates for people who don’t bother with any of this “talking” nonsense (£5 for a month, £20 for 6 months of “unlimited” internet access). The Pulse isn’t the fanciest of Android units, but it’s more than up to the job of keeping up with mail and the web while out and about, and with the camera, GPS etc. it can still do nifty tricks like scanning a barcode and finding the cheapest local price for the item.

I’ve also changed the home broadband connection to an ADSL2+ option, which has speeded things up somewhat, though at the cost of a bit of stability so far. Hopefully that’ll settle down, otherwise online gaming is going to be a pain. Good thing I had the Pulse around during the changeover as well, though I could’ve probably survived for an evening or two with no internet. Maybe.

Finally, as a bit of an early Christmas present, I picked up a new gaming PC. Scan’s 3XS systems got good write-ups online, and they’re happy to configure systems to your precise custom spec, so I sorted out a Core i7 build that arrived at the weekend. It’s really rather lovely, and I’ve been having fun with the obligatory “install all games and whack the graphics sliders all the way up”. I also figured it was finally time to move on from Windows XP, so the new system is on the 64 bit version of Windows 7, which so far I’m rather impressed by. No incompatibility issues yet; Dungeons and Dragons Online sulked a bit when I tried to just move the directory over from the old PC, but everything else seems happy. Only difficulty now is finding to the time to set up and play with everything, let alone write about it!

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