Christian Loizeau

My good old Apple Macbook Pro (late 2006 model) recently passed away. I had the logic board replaced once under warranty due to the fact that I kept seeing pixelated squares all across the screen (as well as on the external monitor). This time the same problem happened again but it also prevented me from booting Mac OS X altogether. Symptoms included the Macbook Pro not booting up at all or getting stuck at a blue screen. It was impossible to boot from the DVD or into safe mode. Target mode did not work either.  I did some research and found a few logic boards selling for under 100$ on eBay but they were being sold as is withe the comments describing the same symptoms I was having with mine. I thus accepted its fate and gave up trying to fix it.

Being unable to justify the absolute need of getting another Mac OS X machine, I opted to use my Acer Aspire One (AOD250) netbook hooked up on an external 23 inch display. Windows 7 Premium was intstalled and configured for best performance as opposed to better visuals. I have to say that for a Netbook powered by a 1.6Ghz Intel Atom with only 1GB of RAM, it ran Windows 7 very well. I did not notice any horrific slowdowns or whatnot. It satisfied the basic needs of web browsing and other minor work such as Word document editing. Things obviously slowed down once you started to demand more out of the system. I am not a gamer nor do I use virtual machines but I still needed a bit more power than that. Luck was with me since Future Shop, Best Buy, La Source (Radio Shack) and even Wal-Mart were selling an HP G62 for 399$. I managed to get the last one (it was the store demo) at La Source during lunch break. The regular price on this notebook was 599$.

So for 399$ here is what you get:

• 2.1 GHz AMD dual-core P320
• 3GB of DDR3 RAM (expandable to 8GB)
• 320GB Hard disk @ 7200rpm!!! (not 5400, wow)
• ATI Radeon HD4250 with up to 1405MB of RAM
• LightScribe SuperMulti 8X DVD±R/RW with Double Layer Support
• 15.6 inch screen (glossy)
• 56k Modem (I’m not sure if people still use this but it’s included)
• 10/100 Ethernet LAN (too bad it’s not 10/100/1000)
• b/g/n WLAN
• 5 in 1 media reader (very useful for camera memory cards)
• 3 USB 2.0 ports
• 1 VGA
• 1 HDMI (awesome!)
• Integrated webcam and microphone
• Windows 7 Home Premium

This is obviously not the top of the line system but for 399$ it’s very hard to beat. I would have preferred and Intel CPU with at Gigabit LAN card but these aren’t deal breakers for me. As for the graphics card, well the last PC game I played was Diablo 2 in a whopping 800×600 resolution so it tells you that I’m not a LAN party kinda guy.

Since the machine was the floor demo, the first thing I did was to perform a full system restore of the pre-installed Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) and removing the pre-installed little annoyances such as Norton Internet Security.

The verdict so far: this was an incredible bargain. I feel like I practically stole the machine at that price. So far I’m very satisfied with the performance of the G62. The Windows Experience Index rates the G62 at 4.1. Everything is running very smoothly. This machine will certainly meet and exceed all the demands of most regular users out there.

I have not tried any gaming on the system but I’ll post some feedback if I ever get around to it. In the meantime however, I have tried to install Mac OS X Snow Leopard via VMWare but have failed. It seems much harder to tweak the system to run on an AMD chip. I’ll give it another try eventually.

Don’t hesitate to get the G62 (220ca), it’s a sure deal.

The web hosting business has known quite some growth in the past years. When I decided to get my domain name a few years ago, I opted for GoDaddy since they had some good reviews and they were pretty cheap. I’m obviously not the only one who made that decision and it now shows. The option I went for was a shared Linux hosting account. Everything was smooth and I did not have any problems at all . Then again, I have a blog with an average of 2 users a day (if I’m lucky) so I do not really have big requirements. Things were pretty smooth until late 2009 when I started noticing periods of slowdown. Since I’m not running a business or any mission critical services from my site, it did not really bother me at all. That changed in the past few months as GoDaddy’s amazingly slow response time sometimes took my site completely offline. I’ve had a few people report to me that the site often timed out. Some people only reported extreme slowdowns while others did not notice any change at all.

I have contacted GoDaddy’s technical support twice and both times I was told that everything was fine and that the site responded very quickly. I’m guessing that the tech doing the tests was actually on the server itself or on the same local network since everyone else that I talked to reported incredibly slow response times. The tech even went as far as to tell me that it could be errors on my site or that my files were too big. I did give him the benefit of the doubt at first and I re-installed WordPress from scratch and even with an empty blog, I still had uber slow response times. I asked the tech to tell me what kind of “test” he did exactly but he declined by saying that he cannot discuss internal practices. I informed him that I had been testing everything for a few weeks on both Mac and PC, that I tried at least 3 ISP providers, that I ran the tests from a direct Internet connection without proxy or firewall and even sent him tracert and ping information but I don’t think he really cared. I didn’t feel like arguing with the guy so I stopped trying to prove to them that there was actually a problem. I then started my search for another provider.

A few days ago I was shopping for another hosting provider when I fell upon an interesting blog post. Someone else had the same nightmare I was having with their WordPress blog on GoDaddy. His solution was to switch over to their new “Grid hosting” solution. This was still in beta back then (might still be today) and I read a few bad reviews about it. I investigated further and noticed that GoDaddy was offering me the possibility of upgrading to their grid hosting for 1.83$ more per month. Despite reading some horrible experiences with GoDaddy’s grid hosting solution, I decided to make the move anyways. I was pleasantly surprised when a discount was automatically applied on my purchase, bringing it to 12.49$ instead of 22$ for the year.

It’s been a few days and so far this has been the best move I’ve ever made concerning my hosting solution. The Deluxe Grid hosting packages has resolved all the issues I was having regarding the performance of my site. Everything is now blazing fast. I have been testing the site for a few days at various times of the day and haven’t had any issues at all. So far, everything seems to be working as intended in WordPress.

In short, if you are using a shared hosting account with GoDaddy, you should know that they have probably hundreds or maybe thousands of websites hosted on the same server as yours and each one of them is competing against each other for the server resources. The machine is basically overloaded and sometimes cannot respond to the demand in time. I do not know the exact technicality of the grid hosting functionality but I’m guessing it’s more or less a cluster of machines dividing up the workload to offer better performance and faster response time to the users.

So far, I have to say that I do recommend the grid hosting solution to some. However, businesses or individuals with more specific needs or more demanding sites might want to study this solution a little bit more carefully than I have (or better yet get yourselves dedicated servers).

Welcome to the Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow. Yep, that’s what EPCOT means.

This sea serpent can be seen at Legoland in Downtown Disney. It’s obviously made from thousands of Lego blocks. Pretty impressive as were the other Lego sculptures.