December 19

Away for holiday
Not blogging for now. Will be back soon! :)

5:24 AM GMT  |  Read comments(1)

October 21

The Most Powerful Wireless Router I've Tested. Period.
Have you ever felt the frustration of using your laptop in areas outside your wireless router's signal reach? The dropping signals and frequent disconnections are enough to drive you mad. In my case, I've tried everything from building my own tin-foil antenna to positioning my wireless router as high above my bookshelves can go. Still the measures only marginally improve the signal strength, if that's any comfort.


For example, place a wireless router in Room 3, while trying to get a signal at the Kitchen/Service Balcony, is a sure case of poor, “full-of-disconnections” wireless signal.

Best part is, my router is unfortunately positioned at one far corner of my 5-Room HDB flat. When I need to use my laptop at the other FAR END of the flat, signal strength literally went flat. Sure there is an option to use homeplugs, which uses power sockets to transfer internet data across the power grid, but I wanted freedom of Wifi every corner in my home when I needed it the most. The current solution is to purchase a router with "longer range attennas" or N-routers which promises better coverage. From what I've gathered, the range yields substantial improvements. But is it worth paying SGD$90+ to replace my router which is working fine all this while? Some people do, but cheapskate me feels its kinda wasted.



Fortunately, I own a Linksys WRT54G Wireless Router. And I've discovered the God-like powers of a custom firmware called DD-WRT some time ago. It performed so well, geeky me just have to blog about it. Although it might be nothing to other techies, to me it is mankind's greatest invention after condoms sliced bread.

Not only is this custom firmware able to improve my wireless signals alot, it also gave me a wealth of options that allows the administrator to block websites based on keywords, prioritise internet traffic for specific apps, set bandwidth allocations among the connected PCs, overclocking, etc. I've seen routers and managed switches with such functionality costing several hundred dollars more and usually used in corporate environments! In where I worked previously, my ex-company faces a problem of users complaining of slow access to our internet-based ERP software. The real problem is that most of them are loading facebook and youtube pages, occupying valuable bandwidth! Some prioritization is definitely needed and our current modem/router does not have those features. Oh wait, we do. But it requires tinkering of Cisco commands on the modem which we are not trained in and we can't justify the cost of the replacements. Ho-hum, I might just sell this to them and make them happy. :)


A snapshot of the administration page.

But please exercise caution in flashing custom firmware on your wireless router as there are chances that the router can be BRICKED. It is definitely not for the average "Im-good-with-computers" joe-schmoe or those who are afraid of breaking things. That said, you can find all the information right here at their website.

I can also help anyone who wants their router upgraded to this awesome custom firmware. Drop me a mail or give me a buzz. Cheers!



7:26 AM GMT  |  Read comments(2)

September 25

My Image Hosting Site Goes *Blank*
Man, it has happened for a few days already. My images in this blog suddenly went poof! True enough, this is the main page of www.Picoolio.co.uk:


Well some good things must come to an end.

Fortunately, it's just some of the pictures. Looks like I got to find another free webhost to put my pictures in. Hmmmm, I might give photobucket a try, after finding out they offer mass uploads and a 1GB online space for photos on their free account.

Now I've to start digging for my pics.



7:35 AM GMT  |  Read comments(0)

September 22

“My Hard Drive DIED!” **Insert Vulgarities Here**
During my course of helping my clients solve their PC problems. It eventually dawned on me that users typically do not know or rather choose not to perform any kind of backup, knowing very well that it's important to have a backup plan. It's those kind of things that you go "Yeah OK, I'll do it later". The plan gets delayed ad-infinitum and then eventually the inevitable happens. The hard drive just can't work anymore and they scream "My Data is gone!?!"

True enough, I've received calls to help bring a system back to life due to some hardware fault and it's usually the hard drive that went bad most of the time. I've witnessed many small companies' operations halt because of their over-reliance on a single system with little or no redundancy/backup plan in place to accommodate a hard drive failure. I've seen client's memories, photos and school work get wiped out in an instant and have paid the price to get them recovered.

For those who had experienced data loss from a failing hard drive. Have no fear. Data Recovery Centres are here to help. "That will cost only $1200 and we'll burn the data for you on DVDs." Well.....that's nice to hear. But why wait till disaster strikes before one realises the true cost of data recovery?

Ignorance can be costly.

A backup needn't be tedious or complicated to run. Furthermore, some backup programs can even support synchronised backups so that your backup copy always remain updated. For the purpose of simplicity all you need is:

1.) A portable USB hard drive (It's so much affordable now. Compared to the cost of recovery), brands like Seagate and Maxtor have built-in backup programs that can synchronise/backup folders and files.

2.) ...if your portable hard drive is of those DIY-kind or without any backup programs inside, a good freeware like Allway Sync Personal Edition fits the bill.

3.) Using any of the above programs, install it, select which folders you wish to have sync-ed, set the mode to "one-way backup" and finally point your destination to the portable hard drive. With it constantly connected, any new file changes will be copied from the source to destination folders! A real-time backup solution. Simple and effective.



Note that this only assure data protection. There are more advanced solutions that can do cloning which protects your entire drive or partition against Windows crashes/hard drive failure by creating a image snapshot which can be restored without reinstalling Windows and drivers. I shall probably blog about it later when I have the time :)



9:18 AM GMT  |  Read comments(0)

August 23

My ordeal, review & test results of my 64GB Samsung SSD
Hi guys, its been awhile since my last update. I recently purchased a Samsung 64GB Solid-State Hard Drive (SSD) for my laptop because I really wanted that speed boost badly. You see, I get frustrated when things go slow, and when I'm frustrated, I tend to splurge buy things to solve my frustration. Its not that my laptop isn't optimised, it is in fact very much in good shape. But being a techie, I acknowledge that the slowest part of any PC is actually the hard drive because its slow mechanical nature. The fact that it is vulnerable to bad sectors and "The Click Of Death" make me realise that I shouldn't take chances with my data. After all, I get a speed boost and better battery life in the process so why not? I went ahead and bought a Samsung MMCRE64G5MXP for SGD$399 at Bizgram.


This SSD is very light. Looks pretty too.

Now I've done my homework before. I recall from the OCZ forums that SSDs need to have their offset aligned before imaging/installing XP over. Vista/Win7 users are exempted because the offset automatically changes to 1024k. That's because XP uses the ancient 63k offset by default which causes heavy fragmentation and severely degrade SSD performance.

So I followed the steps faithfully and got my partitions aligned to 64k. Then I used Acronis True Image to restore back my backup partition. Bad move. After the restore, I found out that Acronis reset my offset to 63k! I was pissed because I just wanted my data restored so why did Acronis mess up my carefully aligned offset? Turns out, the sector-based clone technique wipes it out and there is no way to prevent it.

Anyway I used HD Tune Pro to see how my misaligned SSD performs..


My C drive benchmarks. Write speeds aren't fantastic.


My D drive. Write speed is a lot better 'cause the misalignment happens on the C partition only.

I've spend almost $400 bucks for a degraded performance of a SSD? I'm determined to set the record straight. Long story short, I finally managed to get Acronis restore my data without affecting my offset. Here is the new C benchmark:


Finally. Looks similar to my previous D benchmark now.


The Random read test. True enough, the random read speeds of ~100mb/sec lives up to expectations.

For comparison sake, I used a Fujitsu 320GB 5400RPM 2.5" Hard drive on an MSI X slim 340 running Vista.


C Drive Results.


D Drive Results. Read/Write speeds look more consistent.


Finally the IO Results. What a huge difference! SSD has the clear advantage when it comes to random access speeds.

With figures like these, I noticed my startup (<30 secs), shutdown (<10 secs) and loading speeds have improved very significantly. I've seen even more improvements after doing some additional tweaks like adding a RAMDISK for my temp files.

But the price of being an early SSD adopter is still very high. Given that the XP offset needs to be aligned and other tweaks have to be in place before you even see any visible results is something not all XP users want to go through. Vista users have it much easier due to it's offset auto-alignment of 1024k..just backup and restore. Also after some days of testing, contrary to advertisements' claims of longer battery life, it actually shortens it! Thats because SSDs have only 2 states: On or Off. Compared to the matured power saving features on mechanical hard drives when the PC is left idle, SSDs consume more battery under the same usage circumstances. I've noticed my battery life dropped from ~2.7 hrs to ~2 hrs on my SSD with Power Saver Mode. Desktop users of SSD drives will definitely have no problems.

Frankly, although I enjoyed my newly-acquired speed, but at the high price of ~SGD$400, reduced battery life and preparation work needed to align the offset on XP makes it rather hard for me to recommend SSDs for the average laptop user. The misaligned offset is tantamount to buying an Audi sports car with a 50km/hr speed limit. The upcoming Windows 7 promises better support for SSDs and if it improves battery life, I will definitely go for the upgrade.



9:27 PM GMT  |  Read comments(0)