Of course I’ll probably not remember everything, but for this Blog posting I thought I’d take a look back at some of the highlights I may have blogged about in 2008.

We looked at a lot of Notebooks, and 2008 was the year that the Netbook created a category and a niche all of its own. Being an early adopter, I missed out on some of the more recent and more powerful Netbooks running Windows XP. For the moment Netbooks are a force to be reckoned with – the consumer saying “No!” to overpriced, bloated Notebooks.

Consumers also said “No!” to bloated Operating Systems, and Windows Vista bore the brunt of it. After defending Vista for a while, Microsoft announced that they were working on Windows 7, the next Windows after Vista. It is hopeful except that Microsoft wants to keep it compatible with “changes” in Vista, whatever that means.
I put my money where my mouth was and ordered a new desktop machine with Microsoft Windows XP Professional pre-installed, paying more than I would for Vista.

Just after mid-year I moved from the iPod Touch to the iPhone, and discovered what all the fuss was about. The iTunes App store is also a major highlight.

While this may not be the freshest of news, it does have an interesting back story.

On around December 4, numerous websites began reporting on the possibility of Wal-Mart selling a 4GB iPhone for $99. From iPhoneBuzz “Walmart to sell 4GB iPhone 3G for only $99?” , From MacNN : “Walmart to carry 4GB iPhone?” and from Ars Technica: “Rumor: Walmart to sell 4GB iPhone 3G for $99 with contract“. Ars Technica gave its source as the Boy Genius Report, some of the others could be traced back there as well.

Then, on December 8, 2008 iPhoneBuzz reported “Walmart 4GB iPhone 3G rumor debunked“, citing none other than Bloomberg.com as his source. Engadget.com seemed to confirm this on December 17 with “Walmart iPhone on sale the 28th for a lot more than $99“.

Okay, so as not to put my foot in it (in case there is actually a new 4GB iPhone out there),  the 4GB iPhone was one of the first iPhone models, along with the 8GB. Apple discontinued it in September 2007 when they dropped the price of the 8GB first generation iPhone from $599 down to $399.  Does Apple re-introduce products it has discontinued?

AT&T announced yesterday that for three days they would be selling refurbished iPhones at $100 off. This would mean a $99 (8GB) iPhone, except their wording wasn’t clear and “On its Web site, AT&T Mobility seemed to indicate it was offering a refurbished 8 GB iPhone for $49 through the end of the year. The carrier subsequently said it would clarify the site to show the device’s true price of $99.” from RCR Wireless.

Now, is there any truth behind that iPhone Nano rumor? (see “What is the deal with the iPhone nano?” at Engadget.com)

At the end of my last blog entry, I was stuck with a dead monitor. After a family meeting (not “the family“!), it was decided that I could get a replacement monitor due to the exceptional circumstances.

Unfortunately I did not just need a new monitor - I needed one or more cable(s) which would connect the PlayStation 3 to an LCD monitor. If I got a monitor with DVI input, then I could get a HDMI to DVI Cable, as the PlayStation 3 has HDMI output. However, since DVI does not carry sound, I would need an audio cable. Whatever LCD monitor I bought. I would have to buy additional cables. A replacement LCD monitor plus cables would work out at a little over $200.

Then I noticed something. Small HDTVs, that is ones with screens of 19 inches or so were not much more expensive than LCD monitors. The HDTVs had multiple inputs, ranging from HDMI to VGA. Finding a small HDTV which had a VGA input and a component AV input was relatively easy. The switching between the inputs would be done on the TV itself. The main advantage was that I didn’t have to buy any additional cables.

There was a 19 inch HDTV on sale at a Best Buy within 10 miles, one similar to the Coby TF-TV1913 19 inch LCD TV. Two hours of post Christmas Day shopping later we had the HDTV.

Setting the HDTV up to work both as a computer monitor and a PS3 display was relatively easy.

Continuing from yesterday, I thought a description of the YPbPr to RGBHV VGA Box might be helpful:
It is a small box, only about 3 inches long by 1 inch wide, and less than a 1/2 inch thick. At one end is a VGA input adapter, and at the other end a VGA output adapter. At the bottom are three inputs that are labeled Pr, Y and  Pb and colored red, green and blue, into which a standard AV cable like the Belkin Component Video Cable could be plugged. Finally there is a switch that toggles between VGA input and AV cable input.

I had tried connecting it to my primary monitor going from VGA in to VGA out, and for some reason it did not seem to remember the settings and made the picture quite dull.

Before hooking up the PlayStation 3, I decided to use my secondary monitor – which is a smaller LCD monitor hooked up to Desktop PCs I don’t use that much. My Xbox 360 was also connected to it, so I had to disconnect all its cables first. When I hooked up the VGA box to my secondary monitor, it also made the picture quite dull.

It was then that I should have stopped. Of course I didn’t. I connected the PlayStation 3 to the VGA input. When the PlayStation 3 started, something flashed on the screen, a message about reducing resolution to 16xx by – I could not make out the rest of the message. After that the LCD monitor was blank, even though it was on. The On Screen menu did not display. I connected the LCD monitor up to a Desktop PC. Nothing, it was dead.

This Blog Entry was going to be called A Christmas Story - more with the irony of Jean Shepherd than the true Christmas Story, but one needs to be politically correct in these times.

So, I got my Christmas present (”Holiday/Seasonal Gift?”) and spent some time figuring out how I was going to hook it up to my LCD monitor. Unlike the Xbox 360, for which you can buy a VGA adapter cable, the Sony PlayStation 3 has no similar simple solution. About 18 months ago, when I was choosing a gaming console, my first choice was the PlayStation 3, until I came up against this problem of no VGA adapter cable being available. Then I chose the Xbox 360, this time I chose the PlayStation 3. I had found the “YPbPr to RGBHV VGA Box”, which supposedly takes YPbPr (component input, that is from the PlayStation 3) and converts it to RGBHV (Monitor, LCD, TV) output.

First I connected the YPbPr to RGBHV VGA Box to my current LCD monitor and two desktop PCs setup. Something wasn’t right. Not only was my Windows Desktop on both machines duller and harder to read, but every time I booted on of the PCs I had to fiddle with the LCD monitor’s onscreen menu to get it to auto adjust. Okay, just a minor problem, I thought…

 (to be continued)

Firstly, I haven’t forgotten those handy folk among you who build your own PCs, including Gaming PCs. My expertise is in software - when it comes to hardware the most complicated thing I have done is install a second hard drive. I salute those who can build a PC or take one apart, diagnose it, and put it together again.

For a Build Your Own Box person, an Antec Three Hundred Gaming Case Midsize Tower is probably a good starting point.

The gaming PC featured today is so exclusive it is not listed on Pricegrabber.com. Actually, the reason is more to do with the fact that this gaming PC is not sold through retail outlets, only from the maker’s website. They are also among the most expensive Gaming PCs around. I refer of course to the Falcon Northwest Mach V (Intel Core i7-965 Extreme Edition). Falcon Midwest can be found here. For pictures of the Mach V, see the review here on Engadget.com.

I tried configuring a Falcon Northwest Mach V gaming desktop on the Falcon Midwest website. A “Budget” Mach V starts at about $2,600, and the midway “Bang for the Buck” system at $3,200, and the “Bragging Rights” Mach V starts at $11,000. Starts at is a relative term, as the cost can go down depending on your configuration choices. I reconfigured this by changing the SSDs (Solid State Disks) to a pair of raid 0 Hard drives and a 1 Terabyte drive (wow!) and some other minor changes and brought the price down to $8,100. The hardware techs I mentioned above could probably build their own machines with similar specs for a fraction of these prices.

In Part I and II of this series I left out something rather important – prices. The Pricegrabber pages I link to do have prices, but for the small percentage of blog readers who don’t click on the links, I’ll give an idea of relative pricing. At the time of blogging  the Velocity Micro Edge Z-55 went for for just over 2,000 US dollars. The Alienware Area-51 ALX Desktop I mentioned in Part II goes for over 4,500 US Dollars.

The gaming PC in this blog entry  is one of the cheapest. The Dell Studio XPS Desktop is a “Gaming-friendly System” which can be configured quite nicely for 1,500 US Dollars. This configuration would include 6GB RAM, a 500GB 7,200 rpm hard drive, and a 512MB ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics cars. The icing on the cake is the Intel’s Core i7 desktop CPU – currently the best “bang for your buck” quad-core processor.

The only thing this package is missing is a monitor, which is going to push the $1500 price tag up a couple of hundred dollars

The next gaming PC we are looking at has a distinctive shape, and a name that evokes images of space invaders of some sort.

It is the Alienware Area-51 ALX Desktop. People either love or hate the shiny “Alien’s head” case, which is actually plastic and not metal.

The specs are almost out of this world: starting with a quad core 3GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650, paired with 2GB DDR3 RAM and two 1GB Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics cards, around a Terrabyte of hard drive space, DVD±RW DL, and 32-bit Windows Vista Home Premium. There is also the option of a Blu-ray burner.

The description from the Pricegrabber entry bears repeating: “The Alienware Area-51 ALX represents the best, the elite in computer performance. Overclocked for superior processing power and offering a choice of either NVIDIA SLI or ATI CrossFireX multi GPU graphics, the Area-51 ALX stands well above the masses. Low latency memory, 7.1 surround sound and Blu-ray compatibility are just a few features contained within an aggressively-styled, chrome-trimmed case that’s guaranteed to turn heads.”

According to Wikipedia “Alienware was originally established to tap a niche in the high performance game market“. Since 2006 Alienware has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Dell.

First I must admit that I’m not much of a PC gamer. Console gaming is more my thing, Xbox 360, Sony PlayStation and handheld consoles like the sony PSP and Nintendo DS. The closest I have to a gaming computer was a Tapwave Zodiac, and that is a gaming handheld computer, which doesn’t count with these mean machines.
I do see the attraction with PC Gaming (as opposed to console gaming): the actual hardware and software tweaks made to the Gaming PC are going to have some influence on whether or not you win.

The first gaming PC I’ll look at is one CNET refers to as “upper midrange“. For me this would be beyond my upper range, but I enjoy going over the specs of these PCs the way I would a Porsche 911 Carrera.
The gaming PC in question is the Velocity Micro Edge Z-55, it has an Intel Core i7 (Quad-core) processor, 6GB of DDR3 RAM, and the CPU has been overclocked to 3.0GHz. The machine uses 64-bit Windows Vista. Oh yes, and 2 (that’s right two)  512MB ATI Radeon Graphics cards. Finish that off with a 500 or 750GB hard drive, and this is one fast machine.

About a month ago I made the mistake of leaping onto the cutting edge of firmware updates and almost ended up being left on the bleeding edge. Version 2.2 of the iPhone firmware had just been released, and instead of doing the cautious “wait and see” for a week or two to see if there were any problems, I went blissfully ahead.

Possibly it was the promised Google Street View which caused me to throw caution to the wind. It definitely wasn’t the on the go downloading of podcast episodes, as I have had this feature on the Haier Ibiza Rhapsody for ages. Everything seemed to go well.

The following morning I turned on the iPhone to be greeted by this screen:

Now, I never had a first generation iPhone which could be activated a home, but I do remember that a similar screen was displayed the first time I turned on my iPod Touch. Basically it meant “Synchronize with iTunes before using this device.”  My first was that the firmware upgrade had messed up the iPhone and it would have to be re-activated. Then I took a deep breath and rebooted the iPhone. The following screen was displayed:

I was relieved. This was more familiar territory. The iPhone was working and hadn’t lost any information. The message abut the iPhone being activated was a bit puzzling.

The strange this about this is that I have not seen any mention of it on the forums. There is a possibility that most iPhone owners just never turn their phones off. I do, every night, and it is only when the iPhone has been off for a while that this might happens . This has only happened on a handful of occasions since then, and I can’t seem to duplicate it - which really bothers my logical cause-and-effect computer brain…