Last weekend I ran out of space on my primary computer hard drive.  My computer is a laptop and its about 18 months old.  When I purchased it, it was not quite the latest model, but it had a 120 gigabyte hard drive and a centrino duo processor and was fast enough for what I was doing at the time. 

It came with 1 gig of ram and the hard drive spun at 5400 rpms, which was slower than my previous laptop, which I had upgraded to 7200 rpms.  I always meant to upgrade the hard drive but just never had the time or extra few bucks to get to it.

Well, last weekend, my computer finally hit the 111 gigabytes full level and the computer wasn’t running right in my Dock-Office (Dockffice) because temperatures here are in the 90’s.

I’ve been doing more and more video work and that just fills up hard drive space very fast.  I hit the road and headed to Office Depot when I picked up a flyer offering a clearance deal before they reset for back to school stuff at twice the price.

I made it there and picked up a new router and wireless card.  Its a 1 gigabyte linksys router and card.  Then I headed to Best Buy where I picked up a 7200 rpm 200 gigabyte replacement drive for my laptop along with a 1 terabyte external western digital hard drive.  I intended to get the networkable drive from western digital but opted for the $140 cheaper drive that plugs in via usb. 

Next time the networkable drives drop in price, I’ll buy a 1 or 2 terabyte drive and then connect my existing 1 terabyte drive to that future drive and have 2 or 3 terabytes of space on my network.

I also picked up a high speed laptop cooling base station thing, to keep my laptop cool while it runs in my dockffice desktop (essentially a high top stocked bar).

All said and told I have a great deal more capacity and even more speed than I had before, which is definitely helping me get and keep things organized while I work more efficie ntly and effectively.

It has been a long time since I was impressed with a hardware buy ( I seem to recall with awe buying a 100 megabyte hard drive about 12 years ago thinking that was amazing). 

Now I have more space on my computer arrangement than I my entire company had working in a high rise in Atlanta including 30 some laptops and 3 servers running a $100 million dollar distribution business (owned by crooks in China that I turned into the IRS but that’s another story . . . .  ;)  ).

I’m sure this space will seem like a drop in the bucket after my video production moves to hi definition and I start working with multiple video inputs plugged in to a HDMI switch output to god knows what.  Maybe I’ll have to rent an exobyte (no idea how to even spell that ) from Google located in their new server room on the dark side of the moon operating at close to absolute zero temperatures or something.

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Last winter when I went to the consumer electronics show in Las Vegas, I saw a technology that seemed impressive, but didn’t seem necessarily useful.

It was the Sling Box, and it basically lets you watch movies on your TiVo from anywhere in the world if you’re connected to the Internet. Back then I saw the technology I thought that it was executed very well and look pretty cool, but I couldn’t envision the practical use.

Sometimes you just have to let a technology sink in within your brain and give yourself time to envision a use for it. That’s kind of way it is for me with the Sling Box. More and more of my mobile computing is un-tethering myself or my office and for my home and I’m starting to see the uses of potentially having a connection to movies or news recordings on my TiVo.

In part this is probably due to the fact that I do a lot of work with news and media need to stay in touch with things. It definitely has something to do with the fact that I have a WiFi office on a fishing dock and also because I use an air card quite a bit these days as well.

Back in January I couldn’t envision watching TV for my computer very often. But now it seems like every time I turn around I think of a new use for such technology and it makes they consider or reconsider other technologies that I have rolled my eyes at in the past because I wasn’t quite wise enough to figure out a good use for it.

I haven’t purchased a Sling Box yet, so I’m not going to be putting it to the test probably before the summers out, but I have seen that the prices are coming down rapidly. If you take a look at the Sling Box on buy.com its featured in their weekly sale, you can see that the price is coming in under $200 now down from almost double that price not so long ago.

And consumer-electronics terms, that is a good sign that the product is popular with people and that they were buying enough of the product so that the overall cost of manufacturing can come down and the subsequent cost of sales of the product can come down as well.

It wouldn’t surprise me to see this product offered as part of a basic cable lineup package sometime next summer. Dish network already offers its as an accessory, but is not a standard item yet maybe someday and maybe then I’ll pick it up.

If I haven’t purchased at all ready.

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Many of  remember a few years back, if you had a laptop and wanted to upgrade the memory, it often times cost more than $100 and $200  $300 for 512 mb or 1 GB wasn’t that strange.

But these days laptop memory is cheap,cheap cheap!

If you have a laptop there is no better time to max out your ram memory and wash down those memories of expensive ram with a beer.

I’ve loaded my laptop up with 4 gigabytes for next to nothing.  Now, my XP laptop will only recognize 3 gb even though the hardware can handle 4gb, but at about $20  - $40 at Buy.com, who really cares! 

Max it out and forget about it.  It is then just one less thing to worry about when you are running to many applications on your computer.  If you have Vista on your machine the OS can recognize a lot more RAM too.

These days it costs less to fill up your laptop with RAM whether or not it is on sale or not than it is to put a half tank of gas in your car.

Besides with the money you save from running a faster machine, you might then be able to invest that money in gas or even in going mobile completely and picking up an aircard.

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Last month I picked up a little hard drive, and it has rapidly become my favorite new electronic gizmo.  Its a hard drive and that may not sound glamorous or even as fun as GTA IV, but it just might be.

Its a 320GB Western Digital hard drive.  Its completely powered by USB, so I do not need any extra power cables or anything.  Its just a little longer than my Treo 700 and its half as thick!

This drive works with USB 2.0 and the drive is fast.  One of the things that I like about it is that its easier to add on to a laptop than doing a hard drive upgrade.

My current laptop has a 120 GB hard drive, and its pretty much full with pictures and video (from all of the tutorials and Camtasia videos that I create.

Upgrading a laptop hard drive is expensive and a little tedious.  But you can just plug in and play this micro monster.

Plus, its generally cheaper than upgrading your laptop hard drive too.

This only costs $135 at Buy.com for example.

Other Sizes

Now, I needed a lot of space because of my video work, but you can get smaller sizes (for less money too).   The 160 GB version from Western Digital is featured as one of Buy.com’s weekly deals with free shipping no less at a total of $79.99. 

Its the same size in physical dimensions and looks the same as well.   Or the in between size is 250 GB and costs about $113.  Color is not important for me, but if you are looking for color, they come in just about everything under the rainbow from black, red, blue, yellow, orange etc.  If you want sturdy and tough, there is a titanium cased version that typically costs an extra $10.

Now if you go looking for these, they are in the ‘My Passport’ Line.  There is also a ‘My Book’ line as well.  The My Passports are the thin little USB powered hard drives.

When You Need a Terabyte Drive

The My Books are named because they are about the size of a thin Harry Potter Book, but they have the added capability of being able to hold up to a terabyte of data and they can be configured to run on a network all by themselves.  I’m looking at getting one of those terabyte drives next.

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This weekend I doubled my RAM on my laptop computer going for 1 GB to 2 GB.

I have a number of memory resource hog programs on my computer and I wanted to see if more RAM would improve the accuracy and speed of Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9.  I’m writing this article right now using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9, and it’s the first time I’ve used Dragon since upgrading my RAM.

Here are some of my early first impressions:

1. Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 put up time is a lot faster
2. fewer small word errors (such as an instead of and or in instead of an or and)
3. Much faster response time for commands like ‘wake up’ and ‘Go to Sleep’

I was worried that I would upgrade my computer and not see any benefit at all.  Fortunately, I am seeing a benefit.  For what it’s worth I didn’t upgrade my computer just for Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9.  Firefox and Dreamweaver and Outlook are bigger resource hogs in Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9.  Unfortunately, I use all of those programs the most and usually at the same time, that is why I upgraded my RAM.

I intend to create a new user profile and test the new user profile with the additional RAM.  I have been curious if my profile has picked up a few bad ~ less correct words lately.  I have a suspicion that I might improve my accuracy if I start fresh.

I will probably use this for a few months while I work at home and travel and then upgrade my RAM again to four gigs before too long.

Keep your eye open for a new speed typing test I am curious to see if I can do better on the speed typing tests with more RAM and a more responsive Dragon Naturally Speaking9!

Past Articles with Typing tests

1. Video Running Dragon Naturally Speaking in a Typing Test
2. Hit 130 - 150 Words Per Minute with Dragon Naturally Speaking!

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