DoesWhat

a2z2r.com… that’ll be £50,000 please

DoesWhat — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 23:42:32 +0000

Recently we’ve discovered an eBay category home to the cheekiest, confused and optimistic of all eBayers. The sub-category ‘Domain Names’ within ‘Computing’ holds a vast array of astoundingly over-priced ...

Western Digital 1TB My Book Review

DoesWhat — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 19:23:03 +0000

Back in December of 2007 we purchased the USB version of Western Digital’s My Book Essential Edition 1TB external hard drive for £159.99 from Amazon. Since then the price has dropped to £89.98. Ouch. Having always purchased Western Digital hard drives and never seeing any disk or cable failures it becomes difficult to understand how so many people see these drives fail. Its either pure luck on our part or people are not treating these things correctly. In reality it’s probably a mixture of the two. Issue number one, putting all your eggs in one basket, one terabyte is still a significant amount of data. If you have the desk space and an extra socket it may be smarter to spread the risk and purchase two 500GB hard drives for a similar price. Almost 11 months have passed problem free, the drive looks great, its very quiet, fast and we get 931.5GB of actual storage. The software that comes with device is fairly abysmal, as long as your computer is relatively new (less than 8 years old) it should work out the box without the need to install any software or drivers. On Amazon you might find some odd reviews and some plain untrue, this one probably slots into the ‘odd’ category. Ms. S. Johnson explained how her 6-month-old hard drive failed,

“Apart from the occasional rebooting of explorer from this 'My Book' I thought well that’s a quirk - today there was a bump it jumped about an inch in the air (NOTE - IT JUMPED BY ITSELF - I did not knock it - the inertia of the internal failure was that bad).”

Mr. R. C. Dawson stated,

“If you use Mac, do not buy a Western Digital Drive. It will not partition and cannot be reformatted for Mac. There are tutorials available trying to solve this. They do not work. WD support is useless. The drive is a waste of time and money. Avoid.”

This statement simply isn’t true. Our drive is formatted with NTFS and is fully readable by our Mac Pro. Mac doesn’t come with the ability to write to NTFS out the box. However software is readily available that allows you to write to NTFS as well as read from it. Although our experiences have shown Western Digital to be only a shining beacon of reliability (our 250GB WD external hard drive purchased June 2005 works as if new) there seems to be an overwhelming number of people who would disagree. Beware when purchasing hard drives, due to moving parts they will never be 100% reliable.

Too many Vista versions… mistake?

DoesWhat — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 00:19:46 +0000

Apple has always kept three words in mind, “keep it simple”. Microsoft (market leaders in confusion) take the opposite approach. With eight different versions of Windows Vista they like to keep customer mystification ...

Garmin Forerunner 50 Review

DoesWhat — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 00:38:34 +0000

Gadget geeks need exercise like anyone else, however in the time between leaving their place of residence and partaking in a run they can suffer withdrawal symptoms. No longer, thanks to the ‘Garmin Forerunner 50 + Footpod’. The watch acts as a regular, yet rather sleek digital device used for presenting the time. The real beauty comes when pressing the ‘mode’ button that moves you into ‘train’ mode. While running its possible to check your speed, distance travelled as well as time taken, all this data is wirelessly transmitted from your footpod to your watch. The clever part comes next. Once you’ve cooled down and showered its time to meticulously analyse your journey. This is made possible with the Garmin Training Center, insert the USB dongle (included along with the watch and footpod) into your computer (after previously installing the required software). ANT Agent will allow you to wirelessly transfer the data from the watch to the USB dongle, once the data has been transferred Training Center allows you to view the statistics and a graph of your run or cycle. Our only gripe is that we purchased too early, bought at Amazon for £64.99 (roughly $100), a few days later we noticed it dropped to £37.99 (roughly $60). Pros are that it’s affordable, sleek, easy to use, reasonably accurate and wireless. Cons are a less than one-year battery life and an undersized manual.

Flickr… 3 billion photos

DoesWhat — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 11:52:58 +0000

Flickr is the Internet's most infamous photo sharing site and is one of the most heavily visited websites on the web. Three days ago a member of Flickr, Garrett Ryan Smith uploaded a black and ...

Things are looking up… Windows 7

DoesWhat — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 23:02:41 +0000

Windows Vista has had its fair share of ups and downs, the lack of success whether perceived or genuine has made Microsoft reflect on its mistakes, not only putting them under pressure to improve their software, but also the way in which they market core products. Microsoft seems to be realising that this improvement isn’t [...]

Gmail for mobile 2.0… much better

DoesWhat — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 19:18:38 +0000

Today Google announced the release of Gmail for mobile 2.0. The updated application for J2ME-supported and BlackBerry phones is a vast improvement on previous versions. On the Nokia E71 it’s a joy to use… unlike previous editions that have been somewhat clunky and slow. It seems Google has realised that their previous attempts were ‘a [...]

Not a great start… Android Source

DoesWhat — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:18:08 +0000

Just under a month ago Google, HTC and T-Mobile unveiled the T-Mobile G1 to the world, the first phone to run Google’s new Open Source mobile operating system named Android. Tomorrow the G1 will be available at T-Mobile stores. Today however is an almost as big occasion (mainly for geeks) because Google have released the full [...]

Bag of hurt… Apple October Event

DoesWhat — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 20:14:19 +0000

Apple’s “spotlight turns to notebooks” event finished up a few minutes ago. Some analysts believed that due to the economic climate Apple would release a low-cost netbook to combat the likes of …

Sneaky OpenOffice 3 Download

DoesWhat — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 20:20:48 +0000

OpenOffice.org is hosting a get-together on October 13 in Paris to mark their eighth anniversary and the official release of OpenOffice 3.0.0. OpenOffice is a free and open source productivity suite that is seen ...