Technology Metro

Sony VAIO laptops usually cost a lot of money. Compared to the same specification laptops from other companies, a Sony VAIO laptop’s price is sky high. Well, I found a cheap Sony VAIO laptop. Bestbuy is selling the Sony VAIO T2310 Laptop for just $550. The specifications of the Sony VAIO T2310 Laptop looks pretty good except for the processor’s L2 cache. Sony VAIO T2310 Laptop just has a 1MB l2 cache which will effect the performance if you are operating multiple processor hungry programs at the same time (specially installing two or more softwares at the same time). Bestbuy hasn’t listed the battery specification, I don’t know the detail on that either. Sony VAIO T2310 Laptop listed at bestbuy is only available in Granite color.Here are the details of the Sony VAIO T2310 Laptop.

• Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core 1.6GHz processor with 1MB L2 Cache
• Windows Vista Home Premium Operating System
• WXGA widescreen Display with XBRITE-ECO technology (1280 x 800)
• 1GB PC2-4200 DDR2 RAM (Expandable up to 2GB)
• 160GB Serial ATA (5400 rpm) Hard Drive
• 1 ExpressCard/34 PCMCIA Slot
• 4 USB2.0 port, 1 Firewire port
• Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator X3100
• Double-layer DVD±RW/CD-RW optical drive
• Built-in high-speed Atheros wireless LAN (802.11b/g), a 56k Modem, and a network card

The Sony VAIO T2310 LaptopWeighs 6.2 lbs. so it is pretty light. Shipping is not free and a standard shipping will set you back $20. It will take about a week to reach the destination. Not the cheapest laptop but the Sony VAIO T2310 is certainly the cheapest Sony VAIO laptop around.

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LCD monitors are gaining in popularity in recent years. Just a couple of years before, a 15 inch LCD monitor would cost a fortune but now they are making bigger and bigger sized LCD monitors at very cheap and affordable prices. From time to time, online as well as offline shops give some electronic products at huge discount prices. Just a couple of weeks ago, HP was giving away a $500 discount on their laptops. That deal ended sooner than expected (I suspect, HP couldn’t handle all the discount orders). Well here is another deal on a Soyo 24 inch Widescreen LCD Monitor. OfficeMax is selling the Soyo 24 inch Widescreen LCD Monitor for the price of $280. The Soyo 24 inch Widescreen LCD Monitor’s original price was $400. Here are some of the features available on a Soyo 24 inch Widescreen LCD Monitor:

• Obviously, a 24 inch widescreen display
• has a resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels
• offers a 1000:1 contrast ratio
• Response time of 6 milliseconds
• 170 degrees Horizontal, 160 degrees Vertical Viewing Angle
• has an aspect ratio of 16:10
• 40,000 hours of back light lifespan

The Soyo 24 inch Widescreen LCD Monitor also has two built-in speakers (2 watts). This product also has a 1 year limited warranty provided by the manufacturer. The design of the Soyo 24 inch Widescreen LCD Monitor is simple yet looks good. The integrated speaker is placed at the bottom frame of the monitor, so it is not visible and won’t take up extra space on your desk. For a 24 inch LCD monitor, the price of $280 is reasonable.

Are you looking for a website hosting provider that allows you to run whatever scripts and features you want and still save some money while doing so? There are a lot of hosting providers out there on the web and knowing about it take quite a bit of research. There are quite a few hosting review sites you can look at to find all the information you need but not all of them are easy to use for novices. WebHostingSearch provides an easy platform to search for all the best hosting deals and companies. You can use the database on WebHostingSearch.com to find a perfect match for your budget as well as the space and bandwidth you need. They have an impressive database with all of the best hosting providers in the world with the list of prices and other configurations they provide. WebHostingSearch reviews and ranks all kind of hosting plans including reseller web hosting and dedicated hosting. Shared Hosting will satisfy beginner but for a bigger site that receives a lot of traffic, dedicated hosting is the way to go. I recently got a one year hosting from a new web hosting company. It was a shared hosting plan and I didn’t have much knowledge about it. Within one month, I started getting a lot of traffic (10-12k per day) and they suspended my account because my sites were using too much CPU power. I got a VPS which till now is working perfectly for me. I think a good VPS can handle about 100k hits per day so I don’t have to worry about it for now.

Well if you are planning to earn some money on the web then you can get a reseller web hosting which you can sell to your friends or create a website and start selling it on the web. It is a neat way to earn some money. Visit WebHostingSearch.com to find out the best hosting of any kind.

Hard Drives has been with us for a long long time now and it is about time our regular hard drives are replaced by something more reliable, less power hungry, smaller in size and has a faster data transfer rate. We are used to the old PATA hard drives and its successor, SATA which basically transfers data a lot faster than the old one. Well some the above traits are found in a Flash Drive but the one thing that is keeping it from replacing a Hard drive is its size limitation.

Now SanDisk and Toshiba have teamed up on a project for a new 43-nanometer SSD manufacturing process. The SSD ( Solid State Drive) will have the same capability as a regular 2.5″ hard drives we use. The advantages of a solid state drives are

• Less power consumption
• Smaller in size
• Generates less heat compared to a Hard Drive
• Faster data transfer rate

The solid state drives can be used on a ultra small and thin notebooks, in fact this has already happened. The MacBook Air and the Asus Eee PC. While the MacBook Air comes with an option to choose a 64GB flash based solid state drives, the Asus Eee PC provides SSD by default. There is one defect in a flash based solid state drives, the write cycle is limited so eventually, a SSD will wear out. If this issue can be fixed, SSD will definitely replace the old, bulky hard drives we use today.

Solid State Drives are kind of a new thing and obviously it is going to be quite expensive and it is so. A MacBook Air with a 64GB SSD costs $3098 while a MacBook Air with the regular hard drive costs $1799. You can see the huge price difference right!

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We have all seen the UMD drives that is used on a Play Station Portable (PSP). Now there has been a similar kind of development in the cell phones department and other portable devices. The new Vmedia Optical Disk Drives will surely might change this industry in the very near future. This device can be used in mobile phones, personal media players, mobile internet devices, ultra-portable PC’s and home TV. Don’t know if a 1GB Vmedia disk drives will be popular as there are 32GB SD Card available. Neat idea though. Cell phones occupy the biggest electronic market so obviously, the new technology will be added on it. India already released a phone that has a built-in Vmedia Optical Drive called Spice Movie Phone.

The Vmedia Optical disk drives can be used to sell movies or musics but I don’t think it will replace the SD Card market any time soon. Well, one good thing about the Vmedia optical disk drives it, it can be mass produced at a low cost than SD Cards. Vmedia disk drives are just 36mm square but still have the same quality as a DVD. Vmedia optical drives is the world’s smallest blue laser optical drives right now on the market. I fear that this drive might use up lot of battery power as the disk itself needs to spin operate whereas an SD Card has no movie parts. A disk drive is also prone to scratching and damages. Right now Vmedia disk are ROM drives but there will be a recordable version will be available soon.

We will see what will happen to this new technology. Are the new Vmedia drives here to stay? Personally, I don’t think Vmedia will survive in the long run as it can only hold 1GB of data whereas an SD Card can hold 32GB (and still counting).

Mobile text messaging has become cheap and they also offer a easy solution to contact anyone with a cell phone. Even thought text messaging is quite cheap, some subscribers charge a bit more price than the usual text sms price. There are other options you can choose for SMS service if you think your mobile subscriber is charging you too much for a plain text sms. The site called sja mobile offer a cheap SMS subscription option for all cell phone users. You can opt out of your current text SMS service from you current subscriber and start up with sja mobile. They will charge you $4.99 to $9.99 depending on the option you choose.

You don’t have to worry about paying SJAMobile.com separately as you will be billed on a monthly basis through your current mobile subscription provider. You can try this service out as it they offer a money back guarantee without asking any question for up to 60 days. To cancel the subscription, you will have to manually do it by visiting their site and you won’t be billed after that month. If you need more information on this, you should contact them by sending and sms HELP to 23907 or call them at their toll free number (1-800-559-9313) or email them. Calling them would be the best option as the response will be quite quicker than any of the other two.

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Lots of webmasters and business are turning to vps hosting as it the the next best thing after dedicated server hosting. Dedicated Servers are a bit expensive and for a site that gets around 100k traffic per day, a VPS would do the job very well. The price of a virtual server depends on what specification you want. I almost moved to a VPS just a month ago after my shared hosting account got suspended for using too much CPU power and bandwidth. I was just about to move to a VPS and I was doing some research on it because I had never used a VPS before. Then I found a great deal on digital point for shared hosting and they helped me optimized my sites to use less CPU power. There has been no problem since then. Well if the similar problem occurs again, I will have no other choice but to move to a virtual private servers.

Some VPS companies charge a bit high price but this one is pretty cheap compared to some I found when I was looking for a VPS to shift my sites. This business web hosting uk solution provides VPS for a very affordable price. The lowest VPS they offer costs £15 per month. The specs for this VPS server is pretty low but it should satisfy people who don’t need that much dedicated memory and disk space. Well 7GB is enough for almost any sites. They provide three packages to suit all kinds of requirement, a value pack, extra and pro package.

VPS 2008 Value Pack:

• 128MB of dedicated RAM
• 7GB Disk Spave
• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Root Access

VPS 2008 Extra Package:

• 512MB of dedicated RAM
• 10GB Disk Space
• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Plesk 8.2 with the option to add 30 domains in total
• You can select these Linux OS: CentOS 5.0, Debian 4.0, Fedora Core 6, and Ubuntu 6.10 or even Windows but the price is a bit higher

VPS 2008 Pro Package:

• 768MB of dedicated RAM
• 20GB disk space
• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Gets the most CPU priority than other packages
• Plesk 8.2 with 100 add-on domains (Free)

All the servers on above packages comes with a 2 x Intel Quad Core Xeon CPUs and 4 x 146GB SCSI RAID 5. The value packages gets 1 IP address whereas the other two gets 2 IP addresses. One thing I don’t like about their packages is they only offer Plesk control panel. It uses a bit more RAM than other Control panels. Lxadmin is the best control panel for vps or any other option as it takes very little RAM. Cpanel is the most used control panel but it also takes a bit of the dedicated RAM but it is a lot better than Plesk. FYI, all the data-centers are located inside United Kingdom.

This is a gadget that can really come in handy. Unlike Tempo’s External Recycle Bin, there is a good use for Soldius 1 Solar Charger. I have had trouble at times charging my iPod Video when on the road. I don’t have a adapter that plugs in to a wall power outlet and I have to use my computer every time the iPod’s battery is low. Sometimes I even travel to remote locations where there are no electricity at all, this gadget will surely come in handy in those situations. Soldius 1 Solar Charger will solve this problem once and for all. You don’t need a power outlet, just the sun which is readily available to use this solar charger.

Soldius 1 Solar Charger not only charges iPods, it also works on cell phones and PDA. Here are the list of all the devices compatible with Soldius 1 Solar Charger. All in all 250 cell phones are compatible with Soldius 1 Solar Charger. Soldius 1 Solar Charger works with all the popular cell phones. In a direct sunlight, Soldius 1 Solar Charger will fully charge your device within two to three hours. Here are some of the details for Soldius 1 Solar Charger:

• Output power: 6.58 Volts - 320 mA (max) in direct sunlight
• 5.4″ x 3.2″ x .43″ in dimension when closed (pretty small and can be carried around easily)
• Weighs about 4 oz.

The price for the Soldius 1 Solar Charger is $90 and is available at Thinkgeek. Two colors are available for you to choose from, black and white. Soldius 1 Solar Charger also comes with a one year warranty. You will find a Soldius charger, USB cable and adapter tips (for charging different cell phones and iPods) inside the box. Soldius 1 Solar Charger looks cool, is useful and also helps save energy (helps the environment in a small way). People on the go should find Soldius 1 Solar Charger a very useful and handy gadget.

An unlocked cell phone are very expensive compared to a locked one provided by cell phone service providers like T-Mobile. Actually, they give you a cell phone for free if you subscribe to their service for a certain period of time. Well some service providers change a very high monthly subscription price and they require a longer contract period. And some mobile service providers have a very few cell phones you can choose from.

I was looking around Dial-a-Phone site and found a good selection of cell phone at tmobile section. Almost all the popular cell phones are available through T-Mobile subscription. Most of the phones are manufactured by Sony. Maybe T-Mobile have a deal with sony, well and most of the best offers were on Sony Cell phones, specially Sony Ericsson W810i. A friend of mine has a Sony Ericsson W810i and I borrowed it for a couple of weeks. I was pretty satisfied with the functions found on a Sony Ericsson W810i. It is not my number 1 favorite cell phones by any means but if you were to compare the price of a Sony Ericsson W810i unlocked phone and other cell phones, it is satisfactory. My favorite cell phone at this moment of time is a Nokia N95 but the price of an unlocked Nokia N95 is too high. You could get a Nokia N95 on O2 subscription but the price is a bit high. The cheapest subscription price of O2 for a Nokia N95 8GB cell phone is £31.67 and you will have to commit to 18 month’s contract. You should visit Dial-a-Phone’s t mobile page to look more closely at all the phone available via T-Mobile subscription. Sony Ericsson W810i cell phone has:

• 2 Mega Pixel camera
• GPRS for connecting to the WEB
• Bluetooth v2.0 to transfer data
• Infrared Port
• Battery life of up to 350 hours on standby and up to 8 hours of talk time

Sony Ericsson W810i is good and has all the features to make a good cell phone. An unlocked version isn’t that expensive either. At Dial-a-Phone, you can get a great deal on Sony Ericsson W810i, the best one I found is a free 512MB memory stick with a subscription fee of just £7.5 per month for 12 months.

Dial-a-Phone also has a unique search feature that allows you to search for free gifts such as Apple iPod Touch, Play Station Portable, Xbox 360 and lots of other gadgets which is available on certain subscription deals. So you will be getting a cell phone and one of the devices I just mentioned for a mobile subscription charge. Dial-a-Phone is a large company that provides cell phones and subscription plans to the residents of United Kingdom. All the cell phones manufactured by the top cell phone companies are available at their site.

Getting a web hosting can be a big confusing if you are a novice. Just a month ago, I got a shared hosting from a company and my account got suspended in just one month. The reason for this was “I was using to much of their server’s CPU”. I absolutely didn’t have any idea on this. I got around 10k traffic the week my account got suspended and they told me that was the cause of the problem. Now I know a lot more about hosting than just a month ago. I did a lot of research on the topic and found out some very useful information.

I was about to get a VPS, as suggested by my previous host but then I found a cheap linux hosting on DigitalPoint forum that I couldn’t pass up. If the traffic starts to increase again, I will have no other choice other than to get a VPS. A regular VPS can withstand about 100k hits at a time so that would be totally sufficient for me. There are some sites that get absolutely huge amount of traffic and to manage that, they usually start their own server (which can be a bit of a hassle as you have to maintain it all the time) or they get a dedicated hosting.

VPS and Dedicated hosting has become a huge market as millions and millions of users start their own sites. There are huge amount of web hosting and server providers and it can sometimes be a bit confusing when it comes time to commit. I have a link to one of the server companies. It is a UK based company so people who reside in the UK or have huge traffic from UK should benefit from it. All four of their data centers are located inside UK. Their price is a bit high for me but small company should be able to easily afford it. They provide managed web hosting uk for its clients. They have four packages available, which should meet the requirement of almost any company. Their dedicated hosting UK solution has three packages (Value, Extra and Pro). These packages are perfect for uk small business web site hosting or even for a large business.

Value Package Server Specs:

• Intel Server System Server Model
• 1 x Core2 Duo 1.6GHz Processor
• 80GB SATA Hard Drive
• 1GB of Dedicated Ram

Extra Package Server Specs:

• HP Proliant 360 G5 Server Model
• 1 x Quad Core Xeon 2.33GHz Processor
• 2 x 146GB SAS Hard Drive
• 2GB of Dedicated Ram

Pro Package Server Specs:

• HP Proliant 360 G5 Server Model
• 2 x Quad Core Xeon 2.33GHz Processor
• 3 x 146GB SAS Hard Drive
• 8GB of Dedicated Ram

All these packages comes with unlimited monthly bandwidth quota. The Pro package includes 4 IP address whereas the other two has two IP address. There server will be up 99.9% of the time which is the standard in the industry. If you choose the Pro package, you will get a free PSP or an iPod Touch (you can can choose either one).