About a month ago I exercised my “new every two” option and picked up a brand new LG VX8700 phone from Verizon. As customer service rep transferred my contacts from the old handset to the shiny new VX8700 I found out that downloaded applications do not get transferred and you have to Buy/Download them again. Not that I had too many of those, but there was one which I used to use a lot - Downtown Texas Hold’em. It was a challenging application until I discovered a huge weakness in the bot’s (robot’s) algorithm - once a bot makes a call, it gets pot-committed. You can immediately re-raise (even go all-in) and no matter how bad the bots cards are, it will make the call. So, once I figured it out, the entire game went down to exploiting that weakness.

This time I decided to get VZW Texas Hold’em instead (VZW Exclusive Texas Hold’em). The first thing I did was I switched Front view to Top (Front was just too annoying with constant scrolling thru all the players), then I switched the rest of the options to Off and entered a championship. I must admit, the logic/algorithm of the VZW Texas Hold’em is far more superior to Downtown’s. Bots are constantly “shifting gears” (or at least it feels that way) - some are playing pretty tight, while others are constantly bluffing. I’ve been playing for two weeks now, and so far - the game keeps me on my toes :) Overall, application’s user interface is very nice. I also like the fact that you can speed up the game significantly by constantly pressing “Skip” button (especially if/when you’ve folded). So, the bottom line - I definitely recommend this game to any Texas Hold’em fan :-)

Since I sold my DELL Inspiron 1150 laptop on ebay last week, I’m now shopping around for a replacement. I did have my eye on the new Dell XPS M1330, however when configured according to the minimal Vista requirements it costs around $1500 and that is way above my budget. I just don’t want to spend that much money for a laptop, which will be used for the most part only when I’m on the go. The primary computing power in my household still remains my Athlon 3700+/1Ghz FSB/2Gb/750Gb dual monitor desktop PC.

So, I decided that I should stay under $1000, preferable around $700-$800. My other two requirements were - 1) thin and relatively light laptop (hopefully not heavier than 4lbs) and 2) Battery life would have to be at least 2-3hours (more is better :-).

With that in mind I went out to Circuit City, Best Buy, CompUSA, Staples and Dell outlet. I looked at HPs, Sony VIAOs, Toshibas, Acers, Dells and Gateway lappies. One thing I realized right away - I’m not going to get a decent laptop under 5lbs in this price range. So, I had to “relax” weight expectation to “under 6lbs”. That pretty much translated into “14″ or lesser” screen size.

One of the Toshibas caught my eye - it was a 13″ (or even lesser) screen laptop, very small, probably weighting under 4lb. I was going to seriously consider it, however it had one major drawback which I could not get over - quite poorly made keyboard. Closer to the center, the keyboard was flexing inside so much that it was really hard to type. The rest of the tochibas as well as all of the gateways simply did not appeal to me aesthetically. Acers looked and felt very cheap. There were some very nice Sony VIAOs, however the ones I really liked were priced around $2k while less expensive units looked just awful.

Finally, there were HPs. One thing I do not like about HPs is the metallic looking finish on the inside. Also, I find somewhat annoying shiny bezel around LCD screens. I did like however one of the models they had on display at BestBuy - the dv2550se, also known as Hewlett-Packard Verve Special Edition Notebook, which apparently is only sold at BestBuy stores. The design looked gorgeous. I loved the imprinted finish. The specs were quite good as well - Intel Duo CPU, 2Gb of RAM, 160Gb hard drive, bright screen LCD, wireless, memory card reader, and so on - basically, it had all the bells and whistles. However, even while on sale it was priced at $999 (which with tax, would put it a little above $1k). ReviewPub has a wonderful review of this beautiful HP Verve Special Edition Notebook.

Once I got the feel of what local retail had to offer, I went online and did some research. I found terrific site which from now on I plan to use as my primary source of reviews and information on anything that has to do with laptops and/or notebooks - Notebook Review (http://www.notebookreview.com). I surfed its forums for few days and came to realize that I haven’t even considered yet any of the DELL products (other than the XPS I saw in the outlet). There was absolutely nothing that would interest me in the Home section of DELLs online store, while Small Business line of products definitely had few promising units. D630 was one of them. Equipped with a decent 1.8Ghz/800Mhz FSB, 80Gb hard drive and 14″ screen it weights only 4lbs! It’s 9cell battery life is reported to be exceptional (more than 5 hours) and it iss not a bad looking laptop overall. But then again, even with only 512Mb of RAM it costs almost a grand. On the plus side - it comes with 3 years manufacturers warranty - something you don’t see very often.

I finally decided to go with a less expensive Vostro 1400 model. It’s a bit heavier than D630 (probably weights similar to HPs Verve), but armed with 2Gb of RAM, 160Gb HDD, 14″ TrueLife XGA+ screen and long lasting 9cell battery it only costs $695 (tax/shipping included). $300 less than the Verve, yet with virtually the same tech specs. Notebooks Review forum has a very nice analysis of the new Dell Vostro 1400.

I really wanted my Vostro with matte panel, and with a lesser resolution - I didn’t want TrueLife XGA+, which is 1440×900, I would much rather prefer XGA’s 1280×800… But this particular pre-configured laptop was deeply discounted ($300 less than similar configuration w/o discount with cheaper(!) XGA panel!) - so I decided to give it a shot. This is the configuration I ended up ordering:


Intel Core 2 Duo T5470, 1.6GHz, 800Mhz FSB 2M L2 Cache
14.1 inch Wide Screen XGA+ TL LCD
2GB, DDR2, 667MHz 2 DIMM
Intel Integrated Graphics Media Accelerator X3100
120G 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive
Integrated 10/100 Network Cardand Modem, for Inspiron
8X CD/DVD Burner (DVD+/-RW) with double-layer DVD+R write capability
Integrated High Definition Audio 2.0
Dell Wireless 1390 802.11g Mini Card
85 WHr 9-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery
Genuine Windows Vista Home Basic


Considering the fact that I got almost $360 for the old Inspiron I just sold on ebay, for extra $340 I’m getting quite an upgrade. Order has been placed, DELL is promising to ship it to me on September 7th… I CANT WAIT :-)

Getting my Nuvi fixed was easier than I though. After relatively painless (and rather quick) call to Garmin’s customer support, I shipped my 4 months old refurbished unit to their factory address and exactly 6 days later I received a brand new(!) replacement. Guys, register your purchases!! They did not ask me for ANY paperwork whatsoever (receipts, warranty sheet, etc - nothing!). Once customer service rep located my registration record and confirmed my home address - I was immediately issued an RMA, and that was it - end of story :-)

My 20.1″ DELL 2001WFP monitor served me quite well for the last three, may be even four years… It felt huge when I first got it, but kinda “shrunk” overtime as I’ve been seeing more and more larger monitors piling up on shelves of my favorite Circuit City store at fractions of the price I had paid for my DELL back in 2004. Also, lately my job responsibilities shifted quite drastically - I went from a heavy unix scripting to a very involved windows programming. Dozens of SSH sessions have been replaced with a bunch of Remote Terminal sessions and overall I’ve been doing a lot more clicking than typing. The feeling that my desktop was getting too crowded was growing stronger and finally I gave into the idea and decided to make the move. I figured I could pick up a brand new primary monitor and demote my current DELL to being a secondary. This is where it all began :)

I googled around and noticed that monitors up to 22″ in size were literally dime a dozen. Especially the 22 inchers seemed like the best bang you can get for your buck. After reading reviews on circuit city’s web site as well as customers feedback on newegg I zeroed in on one particular model - Samsung 226BW. It also had quite promising reviews on cnet and behardware.com. This was shaping up to be another one of those impulsive purchases and frankly, I didn’t mind, because doing all that research, comparing options, buying and exchanging one model after another, all of that was just very tiring and time consuming. Besides, we were getting dangerously close to deadlines on a couple of projects at work and I simply didn’t have time for any of this. So I decided that Samsung 226BW it’ll be - trusted brand, widely praised model - I got nothing to worry about. Little did I know :-)

When I went to Circuit City to pick it up, another monitor caught my eye - the HP w2207. It was a 22 incher which really grabbed my attention right away. Windows wallpaper looked incredibly vibrant on it… colors were so saturated and bright that images were almost jumping off the screen. It was also one of those glossy screens which I thought I could not stand. Lately, as I’ve been observing more and more laptops introducing glossy screens I was getting really concerned - the time was coming to upgrade my Dell Inspiron and I was running out of options as far as laptops with non-glossy screens. So, as you can understand, looking at the w2207 I was getting very mixed feelings. Stunning pictures with darkest blacks I’ve ever seen and vibrant colors were most definitely the result of the glossy LCD surface, which I thought I will be avoiding at all costs.

Unfortunately, they did not have the 226BW on display and no other monitor came anywhere close to the way w2207 looked. I was seriously puzzled. Right there in the store I went online and googled for “226WB vs w2207″ just to find out hundreds of pages, blogs and forums where people were debating which of the two was a better buy… Obviously, there was no obvious answer to this question :)

Right about that time I realized that I’m not going to be able to decide which monitor to go with unless I compare them both side by side. And since the store I was in didn’t have the 226BW on display… I decided to do the same thing that many other customers did - I bought both monitors with the intent to return one of them later, thanks to Circuit City’s “30 days no restocking fee” policy.

First of all I’d like to note, that when I brought the monitors home I was quite bias - I knew I didn’t like the gloss and I kind of felt that my mission was to tweak and tune the 226BW to look if not better but at least just as good as the w2207.

Right out of the box Samsung 226BW looked awful. Excessive blue which I couldn’t get rid of rendered any images I tried to view on it completely dull. I’m terrible at calibrating displays “by eye” - I can see any color imperfections easily, but I’m having hard time making the appropriate adjustments. In the past, I often regretted that I didn’t have some kind of hardware monitor calibration tool. This time I decided the situation was critical enough to invest in one. I went to CompUSA and picked up the ColorVision’s Spyder2 (Exress version) monitor calibration device. Once calibrated, 226BW looked a LOT better, but still on the “cooled” side of the spectrum (still, as I felt, there was a bit too much blue and red.. at least to my taste).

HP w2207 looked almost perfect straight out of the box. I could sense a little excess of green/yellow colors. Unfortunately, calibrating with the Spyder didn’t help much in this case. In fact, I wasn’t and still isn’t quite sure if this display looks better calibrated or set to its original factory presets.

So there I had it - both monitors connected to DVI outputs of my nVidia GeForce 7600 GS, side by side sitting on my desk. The difference was quite clear - HP w2207 was blowing away the Samsung 226BW in displaying pictures, which to me was quite important aspect since I’m into photography (I own a D70 with 20-200 VR and 70-200 VR), while Samsung had a firm edge in displaying text, which is just as important to me as image quality since I work from home, which means MANY hours in front of the monitor reading, writing, and coding. Both monitors, even after calibration and excess of certain colors - 226BW had too much blue/red and overall looked a bit cooler than w2207 which was on the wormer side, yet exhibited a little bit extra yellow/greenish. No matter how hard I tried to fine-tune colors manually, I could not get either monitor to give me the “perfect colors” I was looking for.

This was a bit disappointing, so turned to google again and that’s when learned about TN panels… and S-PVA panels… and ISP panels. As it turns out, ALL 22″ monitors on todays marked are built based on TN LCD panel. While this panel is very fast it delivers the worst colors ever. ISP panels are considered the best as far as color representation goes with S-PVA panels being somewhere in the middle… yet they are still A LOT better than TN panels when it comes to “true color” reproduction. But once again, unfortunately for me, ALL 22″ monitors seem to be a TN panel. To me that meant only one thing - I needed either to give up the idea of extra real-estate on my desktop and go back to 20-21″, or shell out few extra $$ to be able to go up to a 24″ monitor.

Back to the drawing board. After some more research I found out that DELL has recently dropped the price on their well respected 24″ UltraSharp 2407WFP-HC displays to $570. And in addition to that, a local DELL kiosk at Brandon mall was running two weeks “back to school” special where they didn’t charge tax on any purchases made until August 13th… and shipping from dell.com was free… and they had 21 days satisfaction guarantee (no questions asked/no restocking fee) return policy…. AND :) the new version of the 2407WFP (the HC version) was a “wide gamut” unit which could display 92% color gamut unlike any other “traditional” monitor, which was only capable of representing 72% color gamut. So, as it appeared, for only a couple of hundred dollars more I was getting a LOT better monitor, so I decided to go for it.

3 days later (apparently DELL ships to Florida from Nashville TN, so even DHL ground shipping took only 2 days) I was unpacking the new, huge 24″ display. What can I say… DELL lived up to my expectations - superb quality of the monitor, slick design, AWESOME colors - very vivid, sometimes may be even a bit too saturated (can be easily adjusted), very bright and contrasty. Perfect white after calibration! No further tweaking required. The only thing that bothered me from the very moment as I plugged it in was the fact that my eyes were feeling strained. Either native resolution of this monitor (1920×1200) was too high for my eyes or something was wrong with this particular unit. It almost felt that my eyes were having hard time focusing… Tomorrow I plan to make another trip to the DELL kiosk and take a look at this very same monitor they have on display. I will also look at Samsung and Gateway 24 inchers to see if things are indeed too small for my sight with such screen size/resolution. I would really hate to give up this monitor because of I really have no other options… I can work on a TN panel… and I really don’t want to go back to 20″… and 27″ PVA is still out of my price range. I might consider upgrading my glasses first :)

This wasn’t supposed to happen, I’m pretty sure… So far I’ve been lucky buying electronics off of eBay, realizing that the compromise I make to get good price was the warranty. Nevertheless, I bought my DELL 2001WFP monitor four years ago on ebay, my floor standing speakers - the great Infinity Alpha 40’s, lots of PC components, cell phones, laptops - never had any issues, never regretted the fact that I didn’t have the warranty. This time it happened…

Half a year ago when Toys-R-US began featuring plastic replicas of GPS units for kids to play with (you know those, similar to the fake “cell phone” toys), I finally decided to catch up with the progress and bought myself an adult version of the gadget, the real deal - Garmin Nuvi 350. It was one of those impulsive purchases when I didn’t really do much research, simply went to a Circuit City store and looked at units they had on display.

I rejected Tom-Tom right away - the name just didn’t sound serious enough… Lowrance, as I heard, was a fine unit but packed lots of extra features which might only confuse a novice rather than help (and which, I’m sure, I now wish that my Nuvi had)… So that narrowed down my options to Magellan and Garmin. Since Garmin’s aesthetics appealed more to me than Magellan’s, when I came home and googled for Garmin vs Magellan I primarily concentrated on pros of the Nuvi model and cons of the Roadmate. As a result, the Nuvi 350 came out as a clear winner :)

Few months went by, and I was very happy with the purchase. So far the Nuvi 350 have performed quite well. I primarily used it in my car and on few occasions took it with me on business trips. That’s where it really proved to be an invaluable. It’s one thing cruising around in your hometown, purposefully deviating from your “usual” route to work just to see how It would react or what It would say… :) and totally different when you’re driving in an unknown city, looking for a client’s office, or your hotel, or simply a place to eat. That’s when you appreciate having GPS the most.

Things were going great and I couldn’t be happier with my new “assistant”. However, a week ago, something terrible happened…. All of a sudden the Nuvi would not power on or off. It looked like the only button it had - the Power switch - simply stopped responding. I could still power the unit on by hitting the Reset button (a tiny “bump” hidden behind Nuvi’s GPS antenna) and it would boot up and function as if everything was alright. But then later I could not power it off. Although, I finally did figure out a workaround - if I hooked it up to an external power source, and then disconnected it, Nuvi would detect primary power source loss and automatically shut itself down in 30 seconds unless it was commanded otherwise. So, again, it looked like its “brains” remained intact, the screen, its memory and whatever else was inside it worked just fine. It was just the power button that malfunctioned. Technically, I could still use the device, but it was extremely inconvenient.

And right away I knew I was in trouble. Having purchased this Nuvi on ebay meant I most likely did not have any kind of protection (manufacturers warranty or anything like that). However, after careful inspection of all the paperwork that came with it I discovered that unlike most of the manufacturers of other electronic devices which I have purchased on ebay during last few years, Garmin doesn’t specifically state (in their warranty booklet) that units sold on “online auctions” are exempt from the warranty. So, there was hope. Nevertheless, their rules posted on customer support web site were pretty clear about one thing - “online auction receipts are NOT considered as valid proof of the date when the product was purchased”. To me, that almost sounded that I was out of luck. Fortunately though, in addition to the online auction receipt I also had paypal transfer confirmation with the product name on it as well as my AmEx statement, confirming the payment and the amount along with the date when it happened.

Armed with every piece of evidence relevant to my Nuvi’s acquisition I could find I called Garmin’s tech support. First question they asked me was whether or not my unit was registered with them. Thanks God I did that the very first day I got it - I went online and registered it. That turned out to be a sufficient evidence for them as far as my date of purchase goes… second and last piece of information they needed was the serial number of my unit and next thing I know - I’m writing down an RMA number and being told that my unit will be exchanged to a brand new one under manufacturer’s 1 year warranty. Way to go Garmin! That very same day I shipped my Nuvi to the address they gave me and now I’m keeping my fingers crossed they don’t change their mind and goes thru :)