I got a new work computer

It's a Dell Inspiron 530s.  It's got two gig of RAM and 500 gig of disk space.  It has a Radeon HD 2400 video card and a 22" LCD monitor.

It's pretty nice.  I got it today and got it somewhat setup.

I'm disappointed by one aspect, however.  It doesn't support two monitors.

I'd grown accustomed with my laptop to having a second monitor attached and being able to use both monitors.  So I specifically asked the salesperson before I bought the machine if I could run two monitors.  They assured me that I could do so.

They lied.

Or more  likely, they just didn't know the truth.  So they told me what I wanted to hear.

I have a DVI output on the Radeon, that connects to the 22" LCD.  Works great.  There is a VGA on board, but you can't connect a monitor to it, you get errors on bootup.

There is another connector on the card, it looks like a video (TV) cable, maybe SVideo.  I don't know if I can connect a second monitor through it or not.

I hope I can.  But if I can't, the 22" LCD is pretty big with good enough resolution I can almost do what I was doing with two monitors with just the one monitor.  But I prefer the two monitor solution.

Once I get it all set up and working correctly, I'll run some benchmarks to see if it is really faster than my old work machine.

Technorati Tags: Dell,Inspiron,530s,Radeon

Amazon Unbox Experience

I recently tried the Amazon Unbox experience on my TIVO .

With Amazon Unbox, you can download a movie from the Amazon unbox store either for rental (24 hours from when you first start to watch the movie) or for purchase.  We rented a movie last night, as the snow was coming down gangbusters and we didn't think there would be a softball tournament that was supposed to happen today.

I didn't want to run out to the local Blockbuster to rent a movie, so I tried Amazon via the TIVO.

Once it was set up, it was a very painless process to download the hour and thirty five minute movie and start watching it.  I think it took less than an hour to download via my cable connection.

Picture quality was quite good.  Price was reasonable, $3.99 for a 24 hour rental period, where you can watch it as many times as you want within that rental time period.

There were a couple nitpicks I have with the service:

• You can't start watching the movie until it has completely downloaded.
• You aren't given an indication of how long it will take to download the movie.  It just downloads. 

But other than those nits, it is a very useful service.  You have to tie it to your Amazon account, but once that's done, you just select the movie you want, enter your PIN number and the movie starts downloading.  You never have to leave the house.

The selection at this point is pretty abysmal, in my opinion, but we were able to see a decent movie (Mr. Magorium's Toy Emporium) and the girls enjoyed it.

We will probably use it again, but Amazon needs to kick up the selection so that there is more of a variety.  I wanted to rent Michael Clayton and The Good Shepherd but saw neither of those movies as selections that are available at this time.  Oh well.

Technorati Tags: Unbox,Amazon Unbox,TIVO

Things I hate about my Treo

My cell phone recently started rebooting itself every 12-15 minutes, 24 hours a day. Usually not during a phone call.  But it would consistently reboot itself, making it very difficult to use.

Being the cheap person that I am, I didn't want to buy a new phone.  I just wanted to make the old one work.  That got frustrating, as much as I love the phone, due to the fact that it DID reboot itself a couple of times while I was on a phone call.

So I started using my wife's previous phone, a Treo 680.  It's a smart phone that runs on the Palm OS.

I'm a Windows Mobile guy myself, my previous phone is a Cingular 3125 that I absolutely loved.

Anyway, so I'm slowly getting used to this Treo.

Here are issues I hate about this phone.  If you have ways to resolve these issues, please leave me a comment

• Battery life is abysmal.  I can barely go a full day before I have to recharge the phone.
• Importing my contacts from my SIM card lost all the address data.  Not a huge issue, as I can synch from Outlook.  But still.....
• No voice dialing with Bluetooth.  I find this essential and I really miss it.
• Bluetooth on this phone is quirky, at best. 
• I have to turn the bluetooth off in order to not use the headset (even when I've turned the bluetooth headset off by closing it (HS850).
• After I've turned the bluetooth off, when I turn it back on, I have to resync it to the phone.
• No voice dialing.
• If I could get to a point where I could flip my bluetooth headset on and make it work, and flip it off and make it NOT work, that would alleviate a lot of hassle.
• The Palm interface.  Very diferent way of doing things.  Not necessarily better or worse.  It will just take some time to get used to this new interface and way of doing things.

Comments?  Solutions?

 

Technorati Tags: Treo,Palm,Bluetooth

Derek, are you smiling?

I know you are.

Tonight was the final game of the Men's Final Four for 2008.  Kansas versus Memphis.

The former pastor of our former church was a *huge* Kansas fan.  Huge.  Talked about them quite frequently.

I know he's definitely celebrating tonight. 

It was a great game.  It was Memphis' game to lose, and they certainly had their chances to win and just frankly didn't play as well as Calipari probably thinks they should have.  But it was a good game and they should be proud to be #2 in the nation.

There is always next year.

Technorati Tags: Derek Duncan,Kansas,NCAA,Final Four,Basketball

Need a faster switch or something

I have a wired TIVO box and a couple machines that are hardwired into a 10/100 switch (same switch for all three machines).

I can copy shows off the TIVO just fine.  But it is (seemingly) very slow.

I copied a 1.82 gig show off the TIVO this evening in 28 minutes.  Seems exceedingly long.

I don't know how to check the switch to see if it is in 10 or 100 mode.  It's a generic switch that I got quite some time ago, it works well for my purposes.

Thoughts?

I'm running XP Pro, all the patches.  I know that the card in my laptop is a gigabit ethernet card.  Not sure what is in the TIVO, but I'm fairly positive it is NOT gigabit ethernet.  I'd just like to see faster speed, maybe 2, 2x what I'm seeing now, which is about 9meg a second I guess.

Technorati Tags: Networking,Ethernet,Gigabit,Transfers

The time could be now for Vista (64)

Adobe released beta one of Lightroom 2.0 yesterday or the day before.  I've downloaded it and looked at it.

It's pretty awesome.

One of the things that it adds which is ultra useful for me is dual monitor support.  I've written about this before.  I have a second monitor at work that I attach to my laptop.  It makes some things, like using Outlook on one screen and other things on another so much more useful.

Well, with Lightroom 2.0 (beta 1), you can utilize two monitors.  You can have your grid on one screen and your main photo view on the other (bigger) monitor.  Very very very useful.

Another thing that version two will give you is 64 bit support.  IE, it will use more memory.  Theoretically, this should speed it up on certain operations.

I'm thinking that a nice Quad machine running 64 bit Vista with dual monitors and 500 gig of disk space would be a nice photo processing machine.....yum, yum, yum.  Only difficulty is that it isn't portable.  Oh well.

Check it out if you use Lightroom.  Very cool stuff.

Technorati Tags: Lightroom,64 bit,Vista,Dual Monitors