Eko Wahyudiharto :: It's All About Works

In less than a week, I try to figured out how to turn on my old rusted passed away Pentium III based PC I found on my warehouse. Got to revives & bring it to life as a semi-complete home multimedia machine. My PC was dead after a kind of “disaster” happened couple years ago. Lots of it’s component devices are totally inactive such as the 800MHz Intel Pentium III processor, Realtek Ethernet, 450W PSU, A-Open CD-RW drive & also the monitor. Somehow, comes an idea to revive it back & make it as a useful things: An entertainment box in a my own living room! Just for hear MP3 songs, watch DVD movies, storing pictures album & playing favorite games. Yeah, why not?

Finally, I brought home the devices I needed after passing by & looking around on a very cheap computer flea market someplace in Jakarta. Now, my PC are back with still old-fashioned technology. A Pentium III 750MHz, 2x128MB SDRAM, 40GB IDE storage, PCI SoundBlaster sound card, 3Com PCI Ethernet card, ASUS 16x DVDROM, 150W PSU & NVIDIA GeForce4MX 440 with TV-out + Sub Video 7 pin VGA card. It’s a complete box without the monitor! So where’s the monitor? Well I’ll used my 29” Sharp TV as the monitor.



Anyway, I installed the PC with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 Roll-Up 2 (MCE), a Windows XP family series with multimedia enhancement. It’s a more light-weight hardware resources needed than Windows Vista with Media Center module. However, the installation took about nearly 1 hour. It’s a long long way time wasted installation with the old hardware. The interesting things was I don’t even need to provide any single devices driver since the MCE had all the built-in driver. What a nice hardware combination I got, huh?



Now what? Turn on the TV, turn on the PC, switch the TV to AV channel & here I go: the media center has come to my living room. Don’t set the TV resolution higher than 640x480 & you’ll get a finest & clearly display picture. Take a relax sit to hear songs or get ready to watch DVD/VCD movies or stay tuned with games (Need for Speed: Underground is my favorite); all available in just one box.

Labels: Windows Media Center

After waiting months from it previous shipping, here comes again a check from Google. Somehow, I trust this business well than others existing internet marketing. However, not so much but it’s pretty enough to fill-up my wallet once in 2 months. I’m not dreaming about become a millionaire or become a pro Ad sense advisor but it’s a well-to-do business in my free times. You don’t have to know about web programming, economy or management skills & others flustered things such as SEO (Search Engine Optimization), CPC (Cost per Click), CTR (Click Through Rate), MW (Magic Words) or others freaky words. All you need is free internet time & creativity. In my case, what I have to do is just filling my several website with some purposes articles & wait for the dollars fall from the sky. Well, it’s a investment based on time. Don’t expect dollars will comes in a short days. Just pray & patient.



This time, the check arrives within 2 weeks from the delivery date. It’s shorten than I expect in 3 weeks or more. The nominal is $133.75 & it’s payable via local banks. I used to cash it in Citibank with it’s easier procedure than others. Well, enough from now folks, hope this articles may fires you up & considering you about an alternative way on how to make money from internet.

Labels: Google Adsense

By a chance, I’ve been tried to upgrade my own Travelmate 6291 laptop series from it’s standard 512MB memory size into 1GB. However, there is no difference performance happened significantly after using both of memory (2x512MB DDRAM) except a faster loading when more than 5 applications are loaded in a same time.

Anyway, a new piece of 512MB PC2700 CL2 DDR has come with VISIPRO brand name. At first I doubt that the memory will compatible to the system but it did work fine. I recorded some of benchmark tests before & after the memory plugged onto the laptop with SiSoftware Sandra Standard just want to know the numeral result difference. And finally below here is the result (Memory Bandwith Benchmark, Cache & Memory Benchmark & CPU Multimedia Benchmark):










Note that I’ve done the above test twice to make sure that the statistical result is more real. From the benchmark record, I can concluded that the additional amount of memory will increase the performance of multimedia application since the cache & memory space are also grown up. Moreover, the memory bandwidth seems to be falling several digits. AFAIK, the use of dual plate of memory may become the cause since it will take a delay to transport the packet from & to between memory & system.



The good thing is, the are no more disk-swapping process happened even on Fedora 7 as shown on picture above.

Labels: Acer TravelMate