I have noticed that people are searching for Karmic Koala and the video card ATI Radeon HD3650. As a user of both (the os and the card) I can say that they work great. The only problem with mine was that when I installed the driver The screen resolution was too big for my screen and in between flickers of my screen I set the resolution low enough for my monitor. In the end it works out though I couldn’t use Ubuntu 9.04 on the computer with the ATI Radeon HD3650 because it did not support it.

I find it is good to know since I use this computer a lot and is in need of being really fast. I find Ubuntu much faster then any other OS that I have tried except Xubuntu which is a lighter weight OS.

Ryan Orser.

I have been using Windows Vista for over a week now. Why I chose to review Windows Vista I am unsure, but for reasons unknown I installed it. In the future I will review Windows Vista SP1 even though it’s likely the changes will be small.

The specifications of my laptop are as follows:

• AMD Turion 1.6 GHz tl-50 Dual Core,
• NVidia Geforce Go 6150
• Broadcom wireless
• 1GB of RAM
• 80 GB Hard Drive

I’ll be covering these topics:

• The Hardware
• How does it run?
• What I like and dislike

I was not surprised to discover that Vista is a resource hog. It takes about 2 minutes to boot the OS, log in, then load wireless, sidebar, and a whole lot more stuff. The Windows side bar takes the longest to load its five widgets. I use a clock widget, weather reporter, CPU usage monitor, calendar, and currency converter. The CPU usage stays over 10% all the time, even when I’m not doing anything. That makes me sad.

Vista: a turtle could probably crawl up and down the stairs a couple of times before it loads. There is nothing that is clearly slowing it down, except maybe all the sidebar widgets. The overall visual theme is a lot better in my opinion than XP’s and previous versions. Applications seem to load quickly, though they should be with all the RAM and CPU power this computer has.

Here are my likes and dislikes about Vista:

First the good:

• The default wallpapers are very nice
• The visual theme is pleasant to the eyes.
• It runs smoothly, without any stability problems.
• No BSODs!

And now the bad:

• Takes almost 2 minutes to load.
• The lack of visual customization makes the interface get boring after a while.
• Microsoft need to find a way to get it to run faster.
• The Microsoft help line always asks you to restart your computer.
• The wireless can get screwed up after waking from hibernation.

Overall, Vista is better then XP but does not beat Linux. I may be biased individual, but I think that Linux loads and runs faster as well as being more customizable. I do like Vista and I may come back to it, but I can’t help liking Linux a lot better after all the problems that I have been through with Vista and other Windows versions.

The ratings:
3/5 for usability
4/5 for GUI
1/5 for customizability
3/5 for performance

Overall rating:
11/20. An okay OS, but it can’t beat the competition.

If you would like to give feedback, please use the “leave reply box” to leave me a comment.

Here is another thing thats biting Intel in the butt again:

Hardware: Server Benchmarking Lone Wolf Bites Intel Again

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday September 07, @02:53PM
from the everyone-loves-a-homecourt-ruling dept.

 

Ian Lamont writes “Neal Nelson, the engineer who conducts independent server benchmarking, has nipped Intel again by reporting that AMD’s Opteron chips ‘delivered better power efficiency‘ than Xeon processors. Intel has discounted the findings, claiming that Nelson’s methodology ‘ignores performance,’ but the company may not be able to ignore Nelson for much longer: the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp., a nonprofit company that develops computing benchmarks, is expected to publish a new test suite for comparing server efficiency that Nelson believes will be similar to his own benchmarks that measure server power usage directly from the wall plug.”

Here is a good story from Slashdot:

  An anonymous reader writes “Sun Microsystems is set to announce its eight-core Niagara 2 processor next week. Each core supports eight threads, so the chip handles 64 simultaneous threads, making it the centerpiece of Sun’s “Throughput Computing” effort. Along with having more cores than the quads from Intel and AMD, the Niagara 2 have dual, on-chip 10G Ethernet ports with cryptographic capability. Sun doesn’t get much processor press, because the chips are used only in its own CoolThreads servers, but Niagara 2 will probably be the fastest processor out there when it’s released, other than perhaps the also little-known 4-GHz IBM Power 6.”

that is all for today.