Its been a while I had any update on the web site. I came to India two weeks back and staying in Bangalore and having fun. Last time I visited in December, 2006 and from that time to now; the things are totally different and real estate prices are sky high; I regret not being an active investor on lands in the right time; if I was; then I had a chance to retire from my current job field.
After seeing the current situation, I decided to visit Bangalore for every 6 months to look into different directions on investment side in parallel by keeping my software job.
Last Friday I received this brand new Dell Vostro 1310 laptop and it did not disappoint in anyway. I opted for this model, which is released on May 1st instead of XPS in the last minute as this is new model from DELL with completely redesigned to make it thinner and lighter than all its current models.
The laptop came almost fully loaded with the following spec:
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Intel core 2 duo 2.1G
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3G RAM
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160 GB 7200 RPM hard drive
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13.3″ 1280×800 WXGA TrueLife glossy display
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I ordered 6-cell battery, so the weight must be ~4.6LB
The major change in the system (even in DELL product line) includes:
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Sleek and attractive (the first series of Vostro is really bulky and ugly looking)
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Touch based Media controls
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Touch based dedicated eject button for CD/DVD
The laptop seems to offer reasonable battery life based on the CNET lab tests (At least when I pulled the power, it shows 4:49 hours left on a fully charged battery).
The only disappoint is the keyboard; with home and end buttons are now controlled in combination with ‘fn’ key. Also, it could have been nice if the laptop had touch based mute button aside volume buttons instead of making it in keyboard (fn+delete). Even though I like normal 14″ laptops as it offers 1440X900 resolution; but DELL seems to be following the foot steps of Apple (13″ and 15″ models).
At least this is a welcome change from Dell concentrating on less expensive sleek and thinner design models in the business line of products which can attract college grades as well as home and business users.
You can find nice reviews about Vostro 1310 model from here:
As you might have noticed in my blog, there is no entry for quite some time..the reason is, am not getting enough free time to blog..swamped with mysql bugs and issues from various properties, stuck with new 5.1.23 build due to issues on 64-bit environment with configure.in and finalizing the mysql benchmark tests for best hardware recommendation etc…
And lately with lay off news @yahoo, things get more worst on spending time to talk about this with friends etc..and answering calls from recruiters..the first day the lay off news came in, I got totally 6 recruiter calls and today I got 3 so far…
Looks like time for me to post some updates on latest things soon to my blog to keep it live
Yesterday here at Yahoo my mail server was migrated to new Microsoft Exchange server 2003 from the earlier IMAP server. As usual all my mail clients (Linux Fetchmail/Procmail and Windows Outlook and Thunderbird) failed to connect. It was a big pain to setup the whole thing back and re-creating the old IMAP rules to new Exchange server as there was not any auto migration.
Anyway, after configuring the Outlook with the new Exchange 2003; I re-wrote all my existing IMAP rules to server side and re-created all the folders. Once that is done, I can even access the new mail using Outlook Web Access (OWA). Once this step is done, I re-configured my Thunderbird client by subscribing to all folders in the exchange and things are back to normal. I prefer Thunderbird over outlook because of one of the internal Thunderbird plugin that allows to complete details of the sender if the sender is a yahoo employee.
By default the Fetchmail did not work on my Linux box where I fetch and forward a copy to another IMAP account which is accessible via my iPhone. And noticed that the old IMAP sub-folders which were like “INBOX.BLABLA” is not working with Exchange and instead needed to change it to “INBOX/BLABLA” in order to get rest of the sub-folders. I also needed to get rid of SSL support in order to get fetchmail to work.
As am driving this new Mercedes Benz C300 model since couple of weeks, thought of writing what I like and dislike in the car.
So far I did not regret for the purchase of this model as Car is really cool to drive along with I got a very good deal when compared to what was offered by Lexus, Toyota and Acura when I initially considered them.
What I like:
- Exterior Body style and Look
- Interior Design and seating and space in small size sedan
- Blue-tooth enabled hands-free calling with easy calling
- 3-way controls for Audio and 2-way control for rest.
- Low highway noise
- Good storage area for driver and good cargo area space
- Pretty much very comfortable drive and ride
- MP3 playback
- Aux playback
- Auto Folding mirrors
- Night interior lights
- 7-speed manual cum automatic gear shift
- Reading lights for both driver and passenger is neatly positioned that the rear or side cars will not notice the light
- Multi purpose Steering wheel control for the Audio, telephone and speedo meter.
- Good that there is an option in the steering wheel control to stop day time running lights.
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What I dislike or wanted in the car
- Could have been better if it had better sound system which is part of multi-media package along with equalizer
- May be optional built-in navigation system
- Scrolling ID3 tags display when playing MP3
- Artwork display when playing songs
- iPod integration (may be I will add this support after a month or so)
- Could have been nice if it had 5-spoke Alloy wheel as default (either 17″ or 18″) instead of optional AMG 18″ 5-spoke
- The speedo meter setting from the steering wheel resets back to original state once the car is turned off. It should have kept its original state when the car starts.
- It was bit confusing initially to use the left and right signal handle as its normal position is occupied by cruise control.
- Cruise control should have been better if it was integrated with the steering wheel or positioned on the right side.
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