AfterDawn.com: User profiles: Agent

October 2009

My slow laptop hard drive

(15 Oct 2009 10:09)

I have this thing called Toshiba mk6034GAX inside my laptop. And it is damn slow hard drive. Last week I got two new USB flash drivers and I wanted to compare how well they compete against my Toshiba.

Toshiba
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Verbatim
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Kingston
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I ran CrystalDiskMark and it seems basic USB flash drives can beat my Toshiba on some tests. Toshiba is still much faster on sequential writes and on 512KB writes but specially on 4KB reads Toshiba gets beaten.

I would like to test out those new Kingston USB flash drives to see if they are really faster.
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Laptop Sempron - Turion update

(06 Oct 2009 12:51)

My laptop needed more CPU power so I decided to update old Sempron 3400+ CPU to Turion X2 TL-56 CPU (Turion price on eBay was about 26 euros). Because I have Acer 3053WXMI laptop (Acer 3050 series), I could use nice tutorial that explained how to open up my laptop and change the CPU. Disassembly wasn't that hard, but there were few points that got me puzzled. First problematic part was WLAN antenna cables, which were easy to remove, but difficult to put back. Second problematic part was n. were you have to disconnect the touchpad cable carefully, I didn't know that there is a locking mechanism in that, but luckily this YouTube video saved me.

The assembly part didn't went perfectly because I forgot to check WLAN button when I put motherboard back in. So I had to remove button after assembly with knife and move the switch once. (now I have non-working WLAN button)

I didn't even have to mess up my Windows XP installation, it just automatically detected dual core CPU and turned ACPI Uniprocessor kernel to ACPI Multiprocessor kernel.

Anyhow the poor laptop has much better usability now because there is two CPU cores it can use (web browsing doesn't stall that often anymore and even Windows Explorer opens faster). wPrime time got halved [1] [2] (CPU frequency is same on both Sempron and Turion) and I can even play games better than earlier (both TF2 and Heroes of Newerth are playable on lowest detail levels).

SSD would be a nice addition, but unfortunately they aren't cheap enough and specially IDE models are rare.

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