I haven’t played with my blackberry much lately, that doesn’t mean that I don’t use it

I had a very good friend of mine send me a link to BlackBerry Messenger 5, very cool. Here is a link to the good stuff…

When I bought that Acer Aspire One on Saturday I started to mess around with it right after I got back home. I had a lot of problems getting the Acer to book from the external I was using before. So I went and bought this LiteOn eSAU208. Mine is a horrible colour (Wine Red) but I don’t care too much about that. It has a rubber coating on it which I suspect will start to peel off sooner or later. Unfortunately the device require 5v@1.8A, that means that it doesn’t work correctly on just one USB port (which is 5v@0.5A). In the box they include a USB ‘Y’ cable as well as a AC/DC Adapter and a copy of Nero 7 Essentials. If you are like me and always have things plugged into the USB ports (Logitech VX Nano, USB flash drives & USB HDDs) you may need every last port you can get, so you might be a little disappointed by the need for extra power. Other than that, the drive also supports DVD-RAM and LightScribe both features of dubious use, but they are there. The drive is fairly quite, no noisier then the average internal laptop slim drive. Internally it is a mini SATA connector, so anyone looking to upgrade an older machine and get an external drive too is out of luck.

Pictures coming tomorrow.

So I have tried to resist the netbook craze… but at some point a tech needs a new test mule. So this past Saturday I purchased a refurbished Acer Aspire One. Now I know a lot of you are still considering the netbooks. I understand you, the lure of a new computer that is cheaper than most people’s rent. I really do get it. I still don’t recommend them to my clients though.

The one I purchased is the ZG5, it comes with a 6 cell battery and the crappy .3MP webcam. I have already ordered the 1.3MP part and will install it as soon as it comes in. It had the customary 160GB HDD. I also promptly removed that. It was a Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD1600BEVT (so 8MB cache and SATAII) the I switched for another Scorpio Blue but this one is a 320GB. The computer boots a little bit faster and that is good enough for me. In the process of fondling the innards of this machine I was surprised by the overall build quality.

I plan on replacing the Atheros WiFi that came in this unit for the Intel 4965AGN or the Intel 5300, as well as adding the components to enable the use of a 3G modem. Most likely I won’t be using it for a modem though. I was looking at a Broadcom HD Decoder to enable the use of all the HD content I have been backing up.

I haven’t taken any pictures of the unit because there are quite a bit of them already, but if anyone wants I could take some high resolution shots.

So, by now most of you have figured out that:

A) I don’t like to post much
B) I have a thing for the high-end gadgets

Well I have some new information for you then, you are 100% correct. Ok, maybe it isn’t new information.

I have had to disable new user registrations. My blog keeps getting bots trying to harvest my email address.

Ok, so I may have made some mistakes regarding the picture quality of the Tear Down posts. I may have made the files too large. That would explain the costs with running this blog. I am ok with it though. The bills are paid and everything is good.

So while trying to get this new WD TV loaded with videos and music. I discovered that alot of my files were showing up as 0KB in size.

We bought some of these (4 of them actually) Seagate FreeAgent Go 500GB to use with the WD TV. I will have some pictures of this device up in the next few days.

This is a very interesting unit. I have been using this now for about 2 weeks solid. I am much happier with this than the Apple TV. Although the Apple TV is a very nice product and is suitable to the home theater department.

I have been using the BlackBerry Bold since I got to the Dominican Republic. It is not a bad phone. But I have been using this time to experiment with the newer builds of the firmware. One thing I noticed about the Bold here is that it is un-branded. So when it is turning on or launching the browser it just shows the BlackBerry logo. That makes me happy.