Time for an upgrade

It’s been almost 5 years since I last upgraded my PC. How times change, I never would have thought I’d be considering a laptop to replace a desktop machine any time soon but that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

When I’m not in the process of upgrading I pay little attention to PC hardware so I was surprised to see one terabyte disks available (for only £230!) and even solid state disks (SSD) are now financially viable.

I’m seriously considering upgrading to SSD in Q4. The only downsides are write performance and lifespan.

When it comes to deframentation, SSDs are deliberately fragmented to prolong disk life. Each cell has a limited number of reads/writes (approximately 1 million) so data is deliberately spread to maximise the lifespan. Therefore defragmentation is discouraged!

I’m waiting for Sony to release their SZ5 notebook which is based on Intel’s Santa Rosa platform (marketed as Centrino Duo for consumers and Centrino Pro for enterprise).

Just a week after deciding it’s time to upgrade, my main PC develops a weird problem where the monitor will go to sleep while I’m using it, even when listening to music or watching a movie. The audio can still be heard when the monitor is in sleep mode.

First thing I did was to set all power management to ‘Always On’ and not to power down the monitor. Didn’t work. So I switched out the graphics card with a spare one I had. Didn’t work. I’ve monitored my PSU voltages, no spikes.

So while I wait patiently for the SZ5 to hit the streets I’m working off an old laptop my Dad has kindly lent me, which I use to remote desktop to my Windows machine.