Miscellaneous Knowledge

During the last week, it seems the AC adapter for my Vostro 1500 Laptop that I purchased 7 months ago has developed a fault meaning that the AC adapter is not detected by the laptop. It still charges and powers the laptop fine however on every boot it makes a very loud beep and requires you to strike F1 to ignore the warning. In addition, the performance of the laptop is reduced to a minimun.

After looking around, it seems the AC adaptor contains a proprietary 1-wire device that transmits a serial number to the laptop. This is meant to prevent you from using 3rd Party adapters, only using Dell’s own adapters. However, the chip and communications are very prone to breakage, which is what seems to have happened in my case. This is not an isolated incident.

Thankfully, it’s still in warranty. A replacement is arriving tomorrow. Congratulations to dell on getting a replacement to me quickly, but I am disappointed that they have made the laptops only compatible with their own power adapters by use of the proprietary 1-wire device inside the power adapter.

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Owned. I’ve left BT over their illegal privacy invading Phorm system. I will not have my privacy invaded to increase the bonuses of overpaid BT executives and shareholders - I suggest others do the same.

I recently got talking with someone about Paid to Click (PTC) schemes. These have been around since the early days of the internet- the concept being that you are paid to click on links and view websites, simple right? you’ll be earning money like no tomorrow.

Or not. It is possible to make money from PTC, and i’ll go into that later. However, for the most part, you’ll be earning small cash and wasting a lot of time. Mostly, there is a minimum view time requirement and you have to enter spambot-style picture codes to prove that you’re not a robot. At best, you’ll be earning $10 a month for a couple of hours work, even burger flippers earn more!

There are 2 ways to make money in PTC, the secret being to get someone else to do the work for you, i’m talking about referrals. Almost every PTC scheme has a referral program, you get a percentage of your referral’s earnings, and some even go down several levels. So, you can potentially earn money for doing nothing, get a few referrals and let them click away, and encourage them in turn to refer users. Now, this isn’t simple, but there are systems out there to help you. Forums such as Get Paid Forum have threads where you join using the referrer’s address above you, then post your own and people sign up under you and so on, this is a great way to start building your referral tree. From then on, it’s your own responsibility to get people to sign up under you, think of a few innovative ways to get people to do things for you.

Personally, I gave up on PTC, building a referral tree isn’t easy and while I was getting paid, it was peanuts, especially when those referrals under me also gave up and the money stopped coming in. Sure, I could have got more, but it was more work than I was prepared to do. I might retry it though, talking to this person has made me think about trying PTC again and test a few ideas i’ve got floating around to get lots of referrals.

There is however one “get paid for doing nothing on the internet” scheme that’s done well for me, and also has a minimum of effort. It’s the Gomez Peer, the concept is that you get paid for running a program on your computer. If the alarm bells are ringing at this point, turn them off. It’s not spyware, adware nor does it impact your system performance. The company that makes Gomez Peer, Gomez, are a large website testing service. They test the websites of big companies such as Microsoft, Google etc to see how they perform from many different internet connection types all over the world. While Gomez could buy computers and situate them around the world, it makes much more sense for them to get real people to do this and give them a little bit of money, Gomez saves money and people earn some, not bad I say.

So, if you want to try it out, click here to sign up. Once you’ve signed up, you’ll be asked to download the program, it’s 20mb. Once installed, it will start testing websites. You will not earn money until Gomez “approves” your account. This takes around 1-2 weeks, they use this period to see how committed you are going to be, they see how long your PC is on and when and if it matches their ideals, you’ll be accepted and start getting paid. I get paid around $10 per month just for running the program, plus in June they are going to start paying people 60% more - excellent. You can install the program on multiple programs to help increase your earnings.

So, if you want to make money for nothing, I strongly recommend the Gomez Peer. It might take time for them to approve your account, but they’ve always paid me on time and the right amount, plus i’ve done no work to earn it! Not bad at all I say. Also, they have quite a few methods of paying you, including PayPal.

And if you want proof, have a look below. This is screenshot form the account section of Gomez. As you can see, so far i’ve got $56.41 out of them, for doing nothing. I’d also post the PayPal payment as proof, but I can’t find it, next time I get paid I will update this post with the proof.

Gomez Peer Lifetime Earnings

(Oh, all the links in this post are referral links in case you didn’t notice. If you sign up for Gomez Peer and get accepted, I get $1. If you don’t want to give me this (doesn’t cost you anything remember) then simply remove the referrer bit from the URL)

Recently, I got myself a new laptop. After much searching around, I decided on a Dell Vostro 1500. Considering the price and specifications, it seemed like a good buy, and positive reviews outweighed negative ones. For a grand total of £609 delivered I got:

• Processor: Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz
• 3GB Ram (1x 2GB, 1x 1GB. Reports operation in dual channel!)
• nVidia GeForce 8600M GT 256MB
• 250GB SATA Drive
• Wifi
• Bluetooth
• 15 inch screen with resolution 1680×1050
• Vista Business

A pretty beefy laptop in my opinion. It’s essential for me to have a beefy laptop; I do more than just websurf. My laptop goes almost everywhere with me and I like to play 3D games. Hence the graphics card. Having had it for just a few days, I’ve not had much of a chance to test it out much, but it seems to me like a pretty impressive laptop.

Gaming Performance

I tried a couple of games (Poral, TF2 etc), maxed out the settings (except AA) and ran them. Outstanding performance, little if any lag.

Input

The keyboard is excellent, really gives a feeling that the key has been pressed, as they go quite deep. They do make some sound, but that’s not a problem for me, when touch-typing having a sound help confirm that you did actually press the key. The touchpad is fairly standard, well integrated into the unit and has the usual scrollbars you’d expect. The Left/Right mouse buttons, like the keyboard, go deep and make a sound.

Screen

Having this resolution of screen on such a small screen is absolutely amazing. The picture is so clear and high quality, it puts to shame every other monitor I’ve seen. The screen itself has a higher resolution than Low HD (which most ‘HD Ready’ TVs are, and they are anything up to 40 inches remember). The text is a little small, but that doesn’t affect me and even if it was a problem, I’d just turn up the DPI. In fact, it’s probably better for someone with poor vision to get this screen and crank up the DPI than a lower resolution one since the characters are much clearer. The brightness isn’t as bright as I hoped, so you can only really use it in direct sunlight or shade, otherwise you see all the dust on the screen.

Sound

Usually, sound isn’t something important on laptops, you either have headphones or plug into a proper speaker set. Laptop speakers are notoriously tinny and horrible. However, as long as you have the laptop on a flat surface such as a desk, the speakers on this laptop reproduce the sound pretty well. Any other surfaces though, and you just get normal laptop sound. Audio lovers will wish of course to plug into the Hifi System or use their headphones. The quality of the sound that was produced really did surprise me.

Vista

Yes, I could have got XP on it but I caved into Vista, after all, this laptop should be powerful enough to run it and in fact, Vista isn’t that bad at all. I’ve used it occasionally, with mixed results, but with SP1 I cannot fault it much. Everything works perfectly, for a change!

Wifi

The Wifi used is the Intel 3495ABG chip. So if you still have an 802.11A network for some reason (I’ve never known anyone who has one) you’ll be fine. The performance it outstanding, I get an excellent signal almost everywhere, and the throughput seems good too. In addition, the WiFi switch has a 3rd mode, the Wifi Catcher; this will quickly scan all the networks and show their signal strengths in a dialog box. Not too useful unless you want to quickly see what networks are around.

LAN

The LAN connection is somewhat disappointing. It is only a 100mbit connection compared to the 1000mbit LAN card in my previous laptop. Not too much of a disappointment, but Dell could have easily put in a faster LAN card for not that much more!

Bluetooth

I chose to have the Bluetooth module installed, mainly for communication with my phone. Yes, I could use the USB cable etc but for working with other people’s phones etc, having the cable isn’t always an option. Plus it was only £15 extra.

Battery

I haven’t had a chance to test the full capabilities of the battery yet, but it seems to last around 3 hours going by the estimates. One interesting feature is a button on the bottom of the battery which lights up 5 LEDs, depending on the charge of the battery. Useful if you have multiple batteries and don’t want to plug each one in to find the charge.

Power Adaptor

The power adaptor is dell’s standard one, with the large white tipped connection to the laptop. The power brick itself comes with a strap, which is useful for keeping the cord tidy when carrying it around. A lot better than stuffing the cord into a bag and having to spend ages untangling it next time it’s taken out. Update 10th October 2008: The adapter has broken.

Media Buttons

On the front of the laptop are several ‘Media Keys’ for Play / Pause / Next / Previous / Volume etc. Very useful and they light up when you press them. Would be nice if they where lit all the time in AC mode.

Size

The Vostro is fairly thick and heavy, but considering the power of it (and hence the cooling requirements) I’m not surprised. Weight is not a huge problem for me, I have a laptop backpack as opposed to a shoulder bag so it distributes the weight more evenly (I highly recommend these to everyone). The size is that of a normal 15″ inch laptop, just a little thicker, which is not a problem! I don’t see why people are obsessed with having a laptop as thin as possible, it doesn’t really matter that much!

Well, that is it. My review. Overall, I’m very pleased with this laptop. Hopefully it will stand the test of time. If you’ve got any questions about it, ask me!

Update: Here are a few (rather bad) pictures.

Update: Couple of Weeks Later

Now that i’ve had this laptop a bit longer, it’s time for an update!

I eventually wiped the laptop of Vista and put XP on, with Service Pack 3. This included wiping all of Dell’s partitions including the MediaDirect one. I never use recovery partitions, nor media direct so no loss there and I’ve regained around 30 GB of disk space. XP runs a lot faster too, gaming performance has improve. There was nothing especially wrong with Vista, apart from the fact that it slowed down the computer a bit. The only thing I miss from Vista is seamless off-line files sync, but I can cope without that and would rather have the performance boost any day.

The laptop has performed flawlessly though, there was a slight issue with getting bluetooth working. To use it, the drivers had to be installed. However, it could only be installed if it was switched on, but switching on requires the drivers! Hence, you can’t use bluetooth. However, I came across a file on Dell’s FTP that enabled it, I can’t remember what it was but a Google search will probably find it.

So was it worth it? Yes, completely. However, it seems now that Dell have stopped putting Graphics Cards in the Vostro 1500. I don’t care if you don’t game - you have to have a graphics card! Therefore, I recommend the 1700, which is identical but is 17″, less portable but just as powerful and roughly the same price as my 1500 was.

Update 2: A friend of mine has recently got the 1710. He left it in my care to upgrade it to XP and i’ve got to say, it’s a great laptop. Only slightly bigger than my 1500 but i’d still be ok with carrying it around, plus you’ve got the bigger 1920×1200 screen and full keyboard. It’s also somewhat thinner. The 1710 is now my reccomended vostro for purchase!