Stocks

A new stocks app. Looks pretty nice with good graphs. No ASX stocks available yet though

Windows Developer Build Windows Explorer

The new windows explorer is only available in the desktop mode. It does have the ribbon interface which isn't too bad but it should be better integrated

Windows Developer Build App Store

The marketplace is full of apps as you can see!

Connect 5 game

A kind of boring connect 5 game

Windows Developer Build Paint

I'm not actually sure whether this is the official pain app but it looks pretty good

Windows Developer Build Podcasts

A new podcast app integrated into the OS. The interface is good with podcasts able to be sorted into groups. It is similar to Windows Media Centre

Internet Explorer 10

A new version of Internet explorer. It opens websites full screen with the address bar at the bottom and tabs at the top. These pop up when you hover near them. Not so sure about the address bar at the bottom though. It seems a bit strange and unintuitive

Measure

Kind of like the measuring app on iOS where you take a photo, set a scale and can semi-accurately measure objects as king as you have no need for depth measurements

Search menu

A nice layout for the new search menu

Piano app splashscreen

Here is an example of the app full screen splash screens

Piano app

A nice piano app for touch screens, not so for mice and keyboards

RSS reader

An RSS reader with a similar layout to the podcast app

RSS reader gesture

If you look on the left side of the screen you can see a pop up of another app. You can just drag another open app from the left side of the screen and bring it up as full screen. Supposedly there's a way of making them split a screen but I haven't figured it out yet

Here is a quick overview of some of the apps included in the developer build of Windows. Most have pretty good concepts but need a bit more work to make them useful. Overall, it gives you an idea of how the OS works and the power of the system.

More pictures will come soon as I discover new features

Windows Developer Build Installation

The initial screen once the computer is started and files are loaded. Pretty similar to Windows 7

Windows Developer Build T&Cs

Again, this screen is pretty similar to the Windows 7 install

Windows Developer Build Installation

This first part of the installation is extremely similar to Vista and 7

Windows Developer Build Installation

20 minutes later...

Windows Developer Build opening screen

One of the first hints that you're installing a new version of Windows

Windows Developer Build Personalise

Finally, something new. The personalise screen is pretty easy to read and nice to look at

Windows Developer Build Settings

A convenient option for express settings is provided which keeps the installation moving along quickly

Windows Developer Build Login details

The login screen. Pretty standard

Windows Developer Build Welcome

Again, pretty standard stuff.

The new start screen

The awesome new start screen. It looks pretty similar to Windows Phone 7 but a bit bigger. There's a scroll bar down the bottom to go across to more apps

Start screen menu thingy

There is a menu which pops up which allows you to access settings for the home screen. It also pops up will you're in apps so you can press the start button to exit the app. I found it a bit difficult to get it to pop up with a mouse pointer as it wouldn't work if I let the mouse hover in the area, only if I moved the mouse to the bottom of the screen quickly. I guess it could work for tablets but not so sure about desktops

The new control panel

Although it looks nice and is easy to use, a lot of the time it would need to go to the desktop version (Windows 7esque) to get to more advanced settings such as changing the screen resolution. i found this a bit unintuitive and clunky

Windows Developer Build Desktop Mode

Desktop mode opens like a regular app. It basically looks the same as Windows 7 with a few slight changes. Everything works the same way and you can access everything as normal. It's a good idea for backwards compatibility but honestly, the new stuff should probably all go into the Metro interface so you don't have to keep switching between the modes to get to more advanced settings

Windows Developer Build Lock Screen

You drag the picture up with your mouse (or finger) to get to the actual logon area. It has the capability to show information from apps but none are available yet. The dragging gesture is awesome for tablets but not so good with mouse. The layout is very touch oriented and doesn't work as effectively with mouse and keyboard

Windows Developer Build Weather App

This is the new weather app. It looks really nice with a video playing in the background depending on the type of video. It can get a bit bogged down if you have too many cities added though. Overall it's nice and easy to read and quite good to look at as well. This also shows the new right click menu along the bottom. Pretty awesome, I'm confused about how you would access this with a touch screen. Maybe I should buy a touch screen computer to find out....

So the new developer build of Windows looks pretty cool. It is pretty similar to what you've been reading in the news lately. There are a few bugs for example, after leaving it on for a while, the screen goes black and the computer freezes. It also sometimes randomly crashes while in any app so it isn't something you want to use permanently. Overall, its a pretty good idea but needs a few improvements. There are a few preinstalled apps which I still have to look at and I'll make another post with more information on that stuff. For now, enjoy the slideshow!

UPDATE: Another small flaw is how difficult it is to access the shutdown button. It is hidden away in the most difficult to find spot. It probably should be located somewhere on the home screen

UPDATE: Here is the download link if you want to install it yourself. I used virtualbox to install it but beware that it will probably run a lot slower than what it should

With more and more manufacturers updating their products to include SSDs you might be wondering if it is time to make the move.

SSD stands for solid state disk. It is essentially the same as a hard drive except instead of using magnetic storage and moving parts, it uses flash memory which has no moving parts. Less moving parts means less mechanical components to fail as well as significantly faster read and write speeds. This makes SSDs highly shock proof since there is nothing mechanical to break inside. Although SSDs have been out for quite a while, for the most part they have been eye-wateringly expensive and, depending on how you look at it, they still can be. The reason for the high price is that flash memory is quite expensive but is slowly becoming cheaper. This is why RAM is coming in large quantities on computers now. 5 years ago it would have cost a lot of money to have 12GB of RAM, today it is considerably less and fast becoming the norm. As time goes on, capacities such as 128GB and 256GB will come down in price which should allow SSDs to replace the hard drive.

One of the benefits of SSDs is the speed. In many systems, the hard drive is the bottleneck of the system meaning that your computer can have the best and fastest of everything but it will be held up by the slow transfer speeds of your hard drive. For example, if you think about old hard drive based iPods, you would remember them being okay to use but sometimes they got laggy and certain items took ages to load. Then, when you make the transition to an all flash iPod it would have been a lot snappier and overall a better experience. This is because of the flash memory. SSDs should bring a similar feeling to PCs which is why manufacturers are starting to use them more and more.

One of the biggest turn-offs though is the incredibly high price when compared to the amount of storage on offer. A 320GB Western Digital hard drive for notebooks costs around $50 while a 60GB Corsair SSD costs around $115. You can already see that the price per gigabyte is quite a bit higher than the regular hard drive. Then, sticking to the same product line, the largest SSD you can buy is 240GB which comes in at a whopping $560. For the same amount you could buy 3 or 4 regular 1TB hard drives. Clearly SSDs are not ideal for those with large file libraries.

One way of getting the performance of an SSD without spending a fortune is to consider getting two drives. One small (around 80-100GB) to install windows on as well as put your install files for programs on. These are the files your computer uses regularly and having them on an SSD will give you the most benefit. The other disk should be a large regular hard disk to put all of you other files on (videos, photos, music etc.) as you don't access these files regularly and are unlikely to see a huge performance boost if you put them on an SSD anyway.

Another solution is to consider a hybrid hard drive. These are regular hard drives with a small flash storage cache (around 4GB on Seagates). Files can be temporarily put in the cache to be accessed and you will get significant performance improvements over a regular hard drive. Manufacturers claim that you can get SSD-like performance from these drives. The Seagate 2.5" Momentus XT with 500GB of storage and a 4GB SSD cache costs$116. You do pay a price premium for them but you get huge performance increases for a fraction of the cost of an equivalently sized SSD so you can't argue with that.

The final obstacle is, what if you want to put an SSD in your desktop? Since SSDs are mostly available in 2.5" sizes there are two options. One is to buy an adaptor like this one to allow a normal 2.5" SSD to fit inside a regular ATX case which usually only houses 3.5" disks. The other option is to buy a PCI Express SSD. These are SSDs which fit into the PCI-express slot on your desktop (x4 or greater). They are currently only made by OCZ but they are a pretty novel idea. Unfortunately these are significantly more expensive than a normal SSD, costing $400 for the base 100GB model.

The OCZ Revodrive - PCIe SSD

SSDs are here to stay but it's going to take a while for them to catch on. Most people who use them are enthusiasts or people who can afford expensive(ish) laptops. As time goes on storage capacities will increase and prices will come down bringing them into the main stream.

Pros

• Feels faster than OS 5
• Better UI
• Social Feeds is awesome
• Improved Camera application
• Less Loading Times
• New Browser

Cons

• The new home screen works better on a touch screen
• Uses too much application memory

Review

After hearing that the new OS for Blackberry was out, I really wanted to try it out but unfortunately it hadn't come out on the Bold 9700. After a few months wait, a carrier in the US released it for their customers and I found a way to download and install the new OS regardless of what carrier you have. This is especially useful for those in Australia where OS 6 will probably never be released to the Bold 9700. Continue reading after the break.

The installation was easy but it took about 1 hour to do completely. Here is a link with instructions for those outside the US or UK who want to install OS 6 on their Bold. When I started the OS, the first thing I noticed was that it everything looked much cleaner. The UI had better graphics and the transparency and new icons really made everything look slick. It was noticeably faster than the old OS. For example, before when locking the phone, it used to show the hour glass and take a few seconds to lock. now it locks instantly. The new menu also opens much more quickly than before and everything feels a lot smoother.

The new Social Feeds application allows you to have all your feeds from Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and all the IM clients in one place. This makes it easy to quickly see updates from your friends and also allows you to update your status on all the clients at once which is pretty handy. The new browser is a huge improvement over the old one. I actually got sick of using the old one as pages were slow to load and it would randomly not respond sometimes. The new browser has a speed dial function to quickly launch your most visited sites and has tabs so you can open multiple pages at once. Zooming into a page is now much easier and when you try to scroll around a webpage, there is inertia scrolling so it doesn't take forever to get from the top to the bottom of the page if you want to do it quickly.

The new settings menu is a big step up from the previous one. It has become a lot more user friendly as there are no categories and icons to make it much easier to use. Previously there was just a list and it was daunting to those unfamiliar with the Blackberry OS.

The universal search function is very handy and you can search almost anything and it will search contacts,calendar, applications and the web to find things for you. It is launched when you start typing. One major gripe I have with this is that when I try to dial a number by just typing like I did on the old OS, it launches the search function but still shows the number below it. However, when i type a number out like this, it doesn't let me add it to the contacts so I have to press the call accept button in order to go to the phone application so that I can type a number and add it to the contacts. This is a bit of a pain but you get used to it after a while.

Another problem with the new OS is that although the new home screen has a lot more functionality, it doesn't work as well on non-touchscreen phones. For example, on a touch screen you can just swipe to go from one menu to the other (e.g. from All to Media) but on a non-touchscreen you have to scroll up and then swipe to change menus. Also, there is a lot of scrolling involved to go to connections and check the notification bar. You can tell that the home screen is much more suited to touch screens.

All the new programs which come with the new OS are amazing but one thing it really does impact on is the limited application memory of Blackberrys'. The Bold 9700 has 128MB of memory to use on applications which is not expandable. Before upgrading, I had 80MB free. After upgrading I only had 20MB free. The fact that I can't install apps on the media card makes this a severe limitation but the new Blackberry Bold 9780 comes with even more application memory so for those looking at a Blackberry, I would recommend upgrading to this phone.

Conclusion

Overall, the new OS has a much better interface and is significantly faster than the old OS. Despite the tiny gripes, All the new features make OS 6 a worthwhile upgrade for Bold owners.

Ever wanted to try and build your own computer or you just needed a new computer but couldn't afford one. Well, here are the specs for a well rounded system which has decent speed, the latest processor and is perfect for normal everyday use. With Intel HD graphics you can do a bit of video and photo editing but no games at this price. Of course, the motherboard is compatible with a video card so if you want to add a video card on later, it is possible. So not only is this system cheap, it is flexible and pretty powerful. All for under A$600.

All of the parts I have chosen are good quality and like I stated in the previous post, I have gone with a reputable case manufacturer. The other components are made by trusted brands. One potential downside is that to get it this cheap, I have had to use Linux instead of Windows. It is pretty good if you give it a go and it is free but some people absolutely must have Windows in which case the whole computer will cost another $150-250 extra depending on the version.

So if you are on a tight budget but are looking for a computer which will last you 2-3 years (depending on how much you hate having outdated components) and has a bit of flexibility for future upgrades, then consider a build like this.

Depending on the store you buy the parts from, you can also bargain and get it for even less. Try StaticIce to see if you are getting the best deal on your parts.

You may be wondering why I have done the name change. Well, as most of you would have noticed, the URL of this blog is www.buildyourown-computer.com/blog . This is because my website also shares the same domain name as this blog. The original plan was to have the website and blog integrated into one. Well, the fact that there were no links from my blog to my website and most people who visited my blog had no idea about my website and vice versa, I decided to integrate everything into one. This blog is now part of the Build Your Own Computer Website and as you will notice, the navigation bar at the top has changed to be exactly the same as my websites. The blogs topic will still be exactly the same so nothing has changed apart from the name.

Sony is currently holding an event in Tokyo which, if rumors hold true, could be the unveiling of the new PSP 2.

You can follow the event live here

Sony has announced Playstation Suite which allows you to play Playstation games through a PSP emulator and access Playstation content on Android devices. It is supposed to be available by the end of this year.

A new PSP repalcement has been announced with lots of social features. It has two analog sticks and a high resolution touch screen. (Photo from engadget)

The PSP features a 5 inch OLED screen with 960x544 resolution (About 4x the current PSP resolution). It has both 3G and WiFi and uses a new type of game media which looks kind of like a DS cartridge. (photo from engadget)