This baby was sitting just sitting here watching us go by. This was in a floating house along a river in Cambodia on our way from Batdambang to Tonle Sap Lake. This was taken with my Canon S50 zoomed in and then 4x digital zoomed too. The quality isn't the best, but works great on the web.
The British Columbia Legislature is quite pretty at night. It is all lit up and sits on the sound end of the inner harbour in Victoria, British Columbia.
This is another shot using my Canon S50 point and shoot. I had a little mini tripod made by Optex that did the trick for stabilizing it.
I purchased my first laptop. How exciting. If you read my article called Laptop Shopping - What Laptop To Buy from a couple days ago, you realize I was having a few issues finding what I wanted.
So I decided to head onto eBay and look around on there. In the end I found a display laptop in excellent shape that was located in Calgary. I was able to win it and go pick it up to void the shipping fees and actually see it before taking it home.
It is pretty decent. I ended up paying $622 for it and I can't really find a compareable one for less than $900 at today's prices. It is still warrantied through 2009 as well.
It is in awesome condition too. Not even a scuff and it looks brand new.
So the only thing I felt I sacrificed on was the processor. I did want Core 2 Duo, but at this price, I couldn't complain. It had more of a hard drive, the video card I wanted (equivalent to the nVidia 8400M GS), and is the right size. I would of liked bluetooth as well, but it wasn't in there.
I purchased it through the eBay store mindyourebusiness. When I went to pick it up, they are in a warehouse off of Memorial Drive and Barlow Trail in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
Here is the actual auction on eBay for my Acer Extensa 5420-5762 Notebook.
They sell a lot of different electronics and there shipping rates are really reasonable even through I didn't use them. If you are looking for something right now, they have more laptops and iPods up for grabs.
This giant billboard for Coke was one of my first introductions to Thailand and its weird alphabet. Still, I thought it was pretty neat. I took this photo with my Canon S50 as I was driving by in a minivan on my way to Kanchanaburi.
My wife had surprised me with a Valentine's Day trip out to Saltspring Island just off the cost of Vancouver Island. I had never been there before and it was quite interesting. I set up my Canon S50 on a little trip to take this picture while we were on the north tip of the island.
This lovely sight was along the streets in Phnom Penh, the capital city of Cambodia. I thought I would snap a quick picture of whatever kind of bbq birds these were. They definitely give you the "whole thing". This was taken on a Canon S50.
I purchased an Acer Extensa 5420 series laptop the other day and have been pleasantly surprised. I was looking for a decent laptop to handle my needs, but still be under the $1,000 price range. I ended up finding a display model on eBay for $620.
I have written a couple articles on it already that you can check out called Laptop Shopping - What Laptop To Buy and I Bought A Laptop.
Just an overview of how I will be using this laptop or how I use my current computer.
I have only had it a few days, but there are a few things I have noticed that I like.
I am not looking for the top end processor to play the latest games, but I do feel I sacrificed a bit on the processor end. I ended up with the AMD Turion 64x2 TL-58. I do a bit of video editing and Intel's Core 2 really performs better here in almost any review you read and offers better battery life.
That being said, the AMD processor I have has definitely been responsive enough for what I have done so far. Windows Vista is reasonably snappy and I was able to watch high definition video without a glitch. I have loaded up World of Warcraft and FarCry and they play well enough. I will try and do some metrics on it later and post the results.
I expect this as standard now, but a lot of systems will still only have 1GB and expect an upgrade fee to go to 2. Vista has a little memory usage widget you can add and I have yet to max it out so that is good.
This is a pleasant surprise I was not expecting. The laptop comes with twin 125GB drives. One has the Windows installation on it and has a hidden partition which includes a backup image of the laptop when you received it. if you ever have problems, then you can re-image from that partition and you only lose the Windows installation drive. If you keep all your data on the other drive then you still have it. Very smart.
They have included 1 USB port on the left hand side of the laptop and there are 3 on the back in the right corner. All of them are USB 2.0. I don't really know if this is an optimal setup but I have found it convenient thus far. The only thing better would be if they had USB's on all the sides I guess.
This was another requirement of mine. It helps out with video playback, editing, photo editing, and games. I don't do any of these religiously, but I do it enough to make it worth my while. Plus it is one less point to bottleneck the other features of the laptop.
The Extensa came with the ATi Mobility Radeon HD 2400 XT. This is a middle of the road card, but does feature 256MB of discrete memory. Not having shared memory like with the integrated cards was one thing I wanted to avoid.
This is just awesome. There is a hidden partition on the hard drive that keeps an image of how the laptop looked when it left the manufacturer. I already pooched my laptop once by fooling around too much with settings and I was able to restore from this image and start with a fresh laptop.
You can even capture images of your laptop periodically and save them to the drive or to DVDs. If you ever want to roll back to a previous image then you can do so.
I spent the morning blogging and had around 4 hours of life out of the battery. This would be basically light internet surfing so not very hard work. This is excellent for me since this will be one of the main uses.
This is probably standard on laptops now, but it comes with D-sub, DVI-D, and S-Video outputs. This covers off most of the possibilities for connecting your laptop to various displays.
Cables to connect to a television can run you up to US$40 in some stores, but check out eBay to get the right cables.
I just noticed this the other day. There is an infrared port on the front of the laptop for devices (like printers) that support it.
I am still trying to get used to a more cramped keyboard. The shift key on the left hand side is small and they have placed the backslash key beside it (which is normally above the enter/return key). The enter/return key is also narrow and you have to reach a little bit farther with your pinky finger to hit it.
I think with time I will get used to it, but it sure is annoying to be correcting spelling mistakes all the time. The most common is putting in a backslash every time I try to hit the shift key to capitalize a letter.
This is my biggest beef with package systems. The software they package with it is fairly annoying. There is a tool bar on the main desktop for accessing various features of the system that you can basically do through the Windows Vista Control Panel anyways.
You can disable all this from running on startup so this is not really a very big issue.
Maybe I am just not used to the speakers on a laptop but they are terrible. I can't play the music or video very loud before distortion and clipping kicks in. I will definitely be wearing my headphones more often with this system.
I think this depends on the specific model you have. My laptop has a button on the front for bluetooth, but when you press it, it tells you that there is no Bluetooh device installed. If you want this, make sure your Acer Extensa model has it.
If you don't know what Bluetooth is, it is a wireless communication technology. You can purchase a number of different Bluetooth devices that will work with your laptop without any additional hardware. Bluetooth tends to be very power efficient as well, so the batteries on a Bluetooth mouse will last for quite awhile.
For those of you who don't know what this is, it is a score for how well your computer can handle Windows Vista. It is a way to compare systems for what their overall performance is. Your computer can calculate this by going into the Control Panel and then Performance Information.
The Base Score is the lowest score off all the tested components. The Base Score for my Acer Extensa 5420 is 3.4. Here is the breakdown of the components.
| Component | What is rated | Subscore |
|---|---|---|
| Processor | Calculations per second | 4.7 |
| Memory (RAM) | Memory operations per second | 5.9 |
| Graphics | Desktop performance for Windows Aero | 3.4 |
| Gaming graphics | 3D business and gaming graphics performance | 3.9 |
| Primary hard disk | Disk data transfer rate | 5.2 |
Drivers can be found on their website or use this link to the Acer 5420 drivers. There is BIOS software and the other software applications that come packaged with the Acer on there as well.
Overall, I have really enjoyed this laptop and it has performed the tasks I need it for very well. I think it is a good choice for anyone wanting a basic to medium end laptop that offers some higher end performance for games and other applications.
Down the cliff along Dallas Road is a beautiful little stone beach along a bay in Victoria. Definitely worth a walk anytime of the day. It was approaching dusk here, but still a nice view.
If you ever have the opportunity to visit Ankor Wat in Cambodia, it is one of the most fascinating places to see. This photo was taken at one of the "compounds" built called Ta Prohm. Giant trees blast out of he stone walls. Scenes from Tomb Raider have been filled here.
There can be thousands of people visiting these sites, but it is so large that you do feel like it isn't very busy at all as you wander around. This was taken on a Canon S50.
This was taken on my parents' farm just outside of Vermilion, Alberta, Canada in the winter around February of 2004. It was a neat picture of the moon rising up from behind the hills to the east or our home. It definitely gives a sense of the cold as well. I took this photo with my Canon S50 and have taken it on trips to show fellow travelers where I am from.
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