Nikhil Dev

I was soo excited the whole of this week about the performance improvement in Windows 7 that I decided to finally take the risk. I downloaded the RC from the MS website, burnt it to a DVD and finally started the installation today. The installation went really fast and smooth. But what annoyed me the most is the installation of the drivers. The problem is not with Windows but with the Dell website. It does not have a complete list of software for the laptop. But I managed to get almost all of them working.

This time I decided to partition my drive. One solely for the OS and the Apps and the other only for all my data. Right now I am in the middle of formatting the data partition so that I can copy all my stuff back. Everything seems to be so zippy on 7. The boot is incredibly fast, no unnecessary notifications, beautiful visuals and I simplete LOVE the new taskbar. It just like the Apple doc.

Will keep you posted more about my finding as I start installing more and more softwares on it.

Right from the time Windows Vista was released I was wondering what would be a GOOD score of Machine assessment. When I bought my Dell Studio 1737, that was the first things that I did. And I am really happy to brag about the results on my blog.

Windows Assessment score of my laptop

Today morning I was convincing myself that I will have to wait just another couple of days to receive my new laptop. But then at around 10AM I received a phone call. The caller said that he was from BlueDart. I knew what it was. I was really excited. I signed the papers and took the box. But the security at the gate would not allow me to take the box inside saying that it was a personal laptop which was not allowed inside. I told myself that I can talk him out of this situation. So I opened the box at the security, checked all the contents and left it with them. I finished my work real soon and left for home by sharp 5:30pm. My first impression? This baby is friggin huge. I weighed almost twice my old Compaq laptop.

I started it up and the screen was enormous, I think I dont have to connect my laptop to the LCD now to watch a movie. Anyway, I set off to do what I usually do on any new computer. Reinstall Windows. This thing came with Windows Vista Premium shipped with it. So I could get all the Aero effects with the 256MB ATI card that was powering them.

Anyway, there is one thing that I havent been able to find on. I saw that a lot of users complained about the reinstallation of Dell Media Direct. They said that you have first install the Media Direct CD which will then take you through the Windows Vista installation. I tried following the instructions but this one came with Media Direct 4 and the CD was not bootable at all. The Vista CD booted pretty well though. So where was I going wrong? I tried contacting the support on chat but they were closed for the day. So I did a little reasearch and found out that in Media Direct 4, there was no longer a seperate partition for Media Direct software. In fact you have to boot the whole of Vista and the only function that the Media Direct button would do was to boot Vista and start the Media Direct software automatically.

So the process is that you have to go with the regular Windows Vista installation process and install the Media Direct software from withing Vista.

But I was really impressed with the performance of the laptop. This baby has some serious firepower in it. I think I can start with my Audio recording and production as well as I get to use this darling to play at a party this Saturday.

If anyone is thinking of getting the Dell Studio 17 (1737) in India or Hyderabad, I would ask you to just go for it. This thing costed me about INR 58,500/- after a few discounts and taxes. The upgrades that I did was to opt for a backlit keyboard and the Creative Audio drivers which I think are worth the money.

Now the interesting part that I noticed just a while ago. I started writing this post after starting the Windows installation on this machine. It’s done now. This baby flies. I think this is what I call “Money well spent”

Do leave comments if you think you need more information on this laptop, its features or its performance.

This is the best way to start a monday. Finally the day has come. The first thing I saw today when I brought up my Firefox 3 windows was the sweet windows of updating Firefox.

This is how the update window looks. The next thing I did was to visit the getfirefox.com site to see if it was mentioned. Atleast they have a link there to try the new version

For everyone who havent tried it yet. ITS  A MUST

Download FireFox 3 RC 1

At last the long ordeal has ended. I am the owner of an apartment. Need to get some things done before moving into it. Wasn’t able to post because of this.

But the updates are that I have started praticing quite some mixing when it comes to hip hop. Got a lil better at it. Learning to sync manually. Still need to put up some money to go to the DJ school. Mostly might make it by end of this month so I can start the classes next month onwards.

My setup for DJing is pretty much the same. The same Compaq laptop, Numark Total Control and Numark DJIO. Got a new pair of Sennheiser HD202. These are quite isolating on sound but are a lil trebly. Thats why I am shifting back to the Sony Studio Headphones. Heard that the Technics RP1200A are pretty good. But they are pricey as well. About 120 dollars. I think I am gonna get a pair in a couple of months.

Will try to postmore frequently now.

I tried Digsby after reading about it on a website. This is one Instant Messenger that exceeds expectations for me. I dont have a Mac so have not tried Adium that people talk about so much, but I compared Digsby to the features that Adium had to offer and there are hardly that these people have missed out on. Beautiful skinning, ability to reply from the pop up and not have to deal with the main window. Support for almost all the popular protocols, Video chat and many more. What else would you want.

When I tried it, it was open for download for a restricted group. But it is open for download for all here.

It is totally worth at least one try.

P.S: Its available for dowload for all platforms. Windows, Mac and Linux.

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Update(Thanks Mark for letting me know that)

The Mac version of Digsby is not yet available. They have a mailing system setup where you can be intimidated when it is available. I think iChat and Adium are good enough till then

This is something that people have been waiting from a long time. The next LTS version of the most popular Linux distro might soon be released in another months time. The beta is already up for download here.

Looking at what all has been talked about this new distro, this definitely pushes up the expectations. Let me just highlight some of the new features that are offered in Hardy Heron.(thats the code name for 8.04)

Brand new Xorg – People at canonical have the latest xorg 7.3 put into this baby. It allows greater customizability with minimal effort.

Linux Kernel 2.6.24 – Thats an impressive effort of upgrading the kernel. For some reason when I upgraded from 7.04 to 7.10 on my laptop, the new kernel refused to work on my laptop. Hopefully, the new kernel works this time.

Gnome 2.22 – I’ve heard great things about the new gnome. Still have’nt had a look at it. Lets see how good it is.

PulseAudio – People say this is the best thing that ever happened to Ubuntu. They have upgraded to a lot more stable audio handline software.

Firefox 3 Beta 4 – I use the new version of Firefox and it simple kicks ass. It was an obvious thing for Ubuntu to include the new Firefox.

Transmission – I have used Azureus on Ubuntu and its an absolute wastage of effort and is very ineffecient. Transmission was an obvious thing to include.

World Clock Applet – One of the most noticeable changes is the world clock applet which provides a lot more information than the previous one.

There is one huge upgrade in the 8.04 Hardy Heron. Its called Wubi. This is what the Ubuntu website has to say about it.

There is a new installation option for Windows users. Wubi allows users to install and uninstall Ubuntu like any other Windows application. It does not require a dedicated partition, nor does it affect the existing bootloader, yet users can experience a dual-boot setup almost identical to a full installation. Wubi works with a physical CD or in stand-alone mode, by downloading an appropriate ISO to install from. It can be found on the root of the CD as Wubi.exe. A full installation within a dedicated partition is still recommended, but Wubi is a great way to try Ubuntu for a few days and weeks before committing dedicated disk resources.

I am waiting to lay my hands on this thing. There are lot of things that the new version would be teaching to other distros.

My previous title was misleading but its just the beta which has been released. Sorry for the misguiding information

One of the main reasons that I did not install Firefox 2 on my freshly reformatted Windows Xp laptop is because I have used it for more than an year at my work on a workstation that has about 4 gigs of RAM. My experience shows that the average browser used memory of Firefox 2 is about 650 mb. Now that is a Huuuuuuuuuge number for a single application to be using up. My laptop has just about 1 gig of Ram and I would not want half of it to be eaten by the browser itself.

I then heard about these great reviews about Firefox 3 and its memory management. I gave it a try and it exceeds my expectations by a huuuuuge margin. It tends to load pates as fast as Opera does and way too faster to IE 7.

Some of the main features that I like in Firefox 3 are its ability to remember the page titles, its new crash recovery, Download manager(my favourite) and the design. On the whole I give it a 8 out of 10.

In fact Cnet recently rated it as the best browser in the industry as of now. I tried giving IE 8 a try after I got to know about it but ended up getting dependency problems of other software. If installing a BROWSER is such a pain in the ass, then I can do without the internet.

The present version of Firefox 3 is Beta 4. You can download it here.

At first I was concerned with the extension compatibility of Firefox 3, but I you have read my post on making old extensions compatible, you will be able to get most of them working just fine on Firefox 3.

Its a MUST download.

Allright then. Came home really late last night(in fact, in the morning) so wasnt able to post the picture. But here it is

I was provided a Pioneer DJM-800 mixer by the resort guys. Apart from this I used my Compaq laptop which was running Traktor DJ Studio 3.2.2. I then use the Numark Total Control USB midi interface to control Traktor DJ Studio.

When it comes to output routing, I used the Numark DJ/IO to split the output in terms of monitor and master.

The setup is pretty straight forward and one of the easiest to control. There are not many effects possibilities though. The few effects that i use are Delay, beat masher, flanger(i use this a lot) and the T2 filter. I thought these are good enough for a small show. You can play around with the T2 filter quite a lot as well as the delay. The only limitation I felt was having to use the mouse every time i wanted to change the kinda effect. Otherwise the effect control are very easy to use.

The best part about this setup is the ability to load songs faster. The middle knob of the Total Control allows you to quickly scroll through the tracks in the view. Pressing the know down preplays it on the monitor o/p. Each deck has its own set of load track buttons. which loads the selected track in the particular deck.

I will post a detailed video of the basics with this setup and a few simple mixes. Hangon till then.

As for any aspiring DJ, I would like to say that this is a VERY portable setup. Its a must have actually.Its worth the money at least.

Cheers till then

Ok,

Yesterday went out to an offsite with the team I work with in the office. We did not want to invest on a DJ so I(chance pe dance) agreed to DJ for the evening. This was the time to test my new gizmo. It was pretty easy tp carry it. The laptop went into my laptop backpack and the mixer along with Audio interface fitted neatly into another laptop sling bag. The setup was pretty straight forward and took just about 5 mins. I have a lotta USB peripheral connected to my computer right now leaving me no extra unused USB port. I will find some time today to post a picture that I took yesterday from the console. Will explain how I did the whole shit. Hangon till then.