Budget Computer for Indian

Well, I purchased my current computer nearly 3-4 months ago. And market has gone up and down, new technologies have come and what not. But for an average user like me who spend most of the time doing no major computing intensive job, this development serves only one purpose i.e. lowering the cost of currently bleeding edge components so people like me can afford it.
Also since middle income group people like me can't afford to upgrade or buy a new machine, it is essential to buy something which would be able to perform the job few years down the line too.
One of the mos common mistakes I have seen people making is that they go for latest processors while compromising on other components. Now this is really bad as you will not get the full performance and moreover you will be spending hard-earned money unwisely. So based on my experience and understanding I have compiled a more-or-less balanced system to give an optimum performance. I will not go into the cost details as it may change on weekly basis or even more promptly.
So here are my recommendation:-
1. Processor - With Intel leading the race right now with 45nm fabrication and cooler processor this is the way to go. If you are in gaming Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 will be the best value for money while people using more of a/v editing may also opt for Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 to utilize the functionality and power of multiple cores.

2. Motherboard - Being the control centre and nerve of whole computer it is always better to buy a good sturdy motherboard, if you are an overclocker then you know what to buy, but who don't want to go into tweaking and want to enjoy a stable performance; my suggestion is Asus P5 KPL-CM or may be MSI P35 NEO-F if you can spend a bit more.

3. Hard Disk - Nothing beats here Seagate SATA II 7200 rpm HDD with capacities exceeding 320 GB to avail the higher cache of the HDD.

4. RAM - DDR3 RAMs are becoming cheaper but is still out of reach of common man. I will stick will Corsair 1GB DDR2 800 MHz * 2 Twin pack RAM or may be Kingston (cheaper) or G-skill (costlier)

5. Cabinet & PSU - Zebronics Bijli with 450 VA Zebronics PSU is my choice but may not be available outside India. So better option may be from Cooler Master with lots and lots of fans.

6. Keyboard and Mouse - Logitech is well reputed to provided long lasting keyboard and mouse so go and get one.

7. UPS - No choices here, atleast 600VA APC UPS will do the job

8. Optical Drive - SAMSUNG / LG SATA DVD-Writer are known well to perform pretty well even after few years of usage and write at pretty fast speed. Blu-ray drives are really cool but will burn away a big hole in pocket, it has to be avoided for next couple of years.

9. Monitor - With monitors cost spiralling down at an unprecedent speed, it the right to go for a 19" Widescreen TFT solution from AOC or Dell or may be 24" to enjoy HD content (if you have some). Other options include Samsung to provide good product. You need to personally evaluate the models of your choice and budget to finalize one.

Well I hope this works as a good guide for people who are interested to buy a new PC in next few weeks.

Time Required to copy few files

I had a decently old PC in my office and wanted the copy few files in my pen drive (512 MB size). Well I started copying files and after roughly 3 minutes see what Windows tells me:



It seems I have to wait for more than 4 year for all the files to copy.

Sometimes Windows (R) really gives good time to laugh about.

Release info of various pirated movies

Let me confess something. I used to and even now watch movies downloaded from torrents or rapidshare or other file hosting services. Well, one thing is that I can watch the movies which are yet to release in India. Let aside legal and moral aspect one thing which always intrigued me was that what is all the details attached with the file name. After lot of reading on net and various other source I have learned a bit about the naming nomenclature. Infact, this info contains lot of information about the quality and source of film. Let me try to explain you some of the aspect of it:

CAM - indicates Source of rip- This indicates that the video is recorded using digital camera usually in a theatre, so quality will usually be poor, film may be shaking and full screen may not be covered iduring the shot. Sound will usually interpted by laughter or clapping or so. Peoples may also be seen sometimes walking.

TELESYNC - indicates Source of rip - This is same as CAM rip but audio is usually recorded through a isolated mic or is added later on, so quality may be better than CAM usually when the film has been cropped properly.

SCREENER, SCR, DVD-SCREENER, DVDSCR - indicates Source of rip - A pre-release tape or DVD usually distributed to retail chain or similar places for promotional purposes. Usually these releases have many markings including information about copyright infingement or similar information. Quality can be quite good sometimes especially when ripped to Xvid/DivX or SVCD format.

DVDRIP - indicates Source of rip - This is the best quality rip usually released immediately after release of commercial DVD.

PreDVDRIP - indicates Source of rip - This similar to DVDRIP but is released by rippers before release of DVD in market usually from some source in warehouse or factory.

VCD - indicates Quality of rip - This is MPEG1 format, quality of video is same as VCD ie 352 x 240 resolution video. Quality is usually poor to fiar but they are usually the first to be released in CAM, TELESYNC, etc.

SVCD - indicates Quality of rip - This is MPEG2 format or equivalent to DVD format with 480 X (200 - 480) resolution video. Quality is fair to Good.

XVCD, XSVCD - indicates Quality of rip - Usually are ripped by new rippers and don't follow VCD or SVCD standard like screen resolution may not be correct or bit rate may be low or high and so on. Not very popular. Quality can be poor to good.

DivX, XviD - indicates Quality of rip - DivX is a format designed for multimedia platforms. It uses two codecs,
one low motion, one high motion. most older films were encoded in low
motion only, and they have problems with high motion too. A method
known as SBC (Smart Bit-rate Control) was developed which switches
codecs at the encoding stage, making a much better print. The majority of
PROPER DivX rips are taken from DVDs, and generally up to
2hours in good to excellent quality is possible per disc.

PROPER - indicates the Scene Tag of rip - This tag is added by releasing group to indicate that the quality is improved then the first release in the class for example a file CAM-SVCD-DDD may be first release by group DDD but CAM-SVCD-PROPER-RRR is the release by group RRR after group DDD but group RRR claims to be better quality then they add the word PROPER in the filename.

SUBBED - indicates the Scene Tag of rip - This indicates that subtitle is hardburned into the video and cannot be changed. Usually the language of the subtitles is also indicated in the file name.

RECODE - indicates the Scene Tag of rip - This shows that a group has taken a release and improved upon the quality of the rip such as by removing the subtitles. cropping the CAM rip or adding fresh sound track.  This is looked upon as a low level act among release teams.

Usually the file name ends with with the release group name added at the end.

I hope you will find the information not only entertaining but also help you identify which print to download next time.

Hearty Seasons Wishes

In India, 14th / 15th January is celebrated by various names within India. Some places it is called Lohiri, some call it Makar Sankranti, Some Pongal and so on... Basically it signals the end of harvesting season with bountiful crop and ending of winter in India. Reason may be many but it is an occasion of joy and celebration and I wish all my readers and readers to be a very HAPPY & PROSPEROUS  MAKAR SANKRANTI / PONGAL / LOHIRI.

Finally an Unlimited Plan

Well, finally I have shifted to an unlimited plan provided by Asianet Dataline India Limited. It costs me roughly 450 INR per month including all charges for a 96 kbps speed. Well the commendable part is that they have blocked any port so no problems in using torrents for downloading stuffs. Also they most of the time provide the promised bandwidth.

Asianet Dataline is a Kerala based multiventure company which also provides good cable internet service. They also venture in cable tv distribution, DTH service, various malayalam channels and so on.

Lets come back to my connection: Assuming that I will run my connection for downloading 18 hrs a day (3/4 of the day), of course I will be using more. And I get 80 % of the commited bandwidth I will be getting around
  = (96 /8 (kilobytes))*60 (min)*60 (hour) *18(per day) * 0.8(efficiency)
  = 622080 kilobytes (kB)
  = 607 MB in a day

As I pay 450 INR per day it comes to 15 Rs. for a day. So I pay little more than 2 paisa per MB. Quite a deal I would say. So now I am going to go ahead and use the connection to fullest.

Best part of the deal, I payed for 12 months in advance and I get 3 month free usage thats 25 % extra. I hope to enjoy this to fullest.

6 month Avira home Premium Giveaway

I am an ardentent fan of Avira Antivirus. It is really light on system, lightening fast AV scanner and excellent online scanner. Of late I was using its free version which provides basic protection from Viruses, auto dialer and rootkits but not from many other malicious softwares like malwares, phishing sites, driveby malware etc. Well both of them are good products and use whichever you can afford.

Sometimes back, I learnt from a famous blog site of Raymond, about 3 month license file for avira home premium edition and I grabbed it for free. Now the 3 month is getting over, so I looked on internet and found yet another exciting offer - 6 month Avira Home premium licence.

Here is my guide to get 6 month license for free. Note that the site is in german and use it in same language, I faced problems while trying to browse through google translate.

Step 1. Go to the Avira Promotion Page.

Step 2. You will see a form like this

Fill as mentioned in the figure, change the first drop box too to anything else.

Step 3. After submitting the form you will get a confirmation button. Click on it to see your license download link

Step 4. Clicking the box above opens the page as shown below

Click on the link shown here and you will download an HBEDV.KEY file which will activate the antivirus for 6 monthes.

So go ahead and enjoy the trouble free protection of Avira Home Premium Antivirus

Scribe Fire - An excellent Blogging Tool

I am a die hard fan of Firefox. This is my favorite browser. Well why not something else; because not only it is safe, secure and fast but also it provides innumerable option to customize with plugins, themes and add-ons.
Well the post is not about Firefox but about ScribeFire yet another excellent addon for Firefox. This add-on is a offline as well as online blog posting tool, similar to Windows Live Writer or so.
Next question comes to mind, whats different from Windows Live writer. I have listed few features which I find as the key points for this addon:-

1. Not a separate software: This is not a separate software. It works direclty from Firefox, no installation issues, not .NET framework requirement and so on
2. Light Weight: This add on is extremely light weight both on browser as well as whole PC
3. OS independent: IT will run in Linux, Windows, Mac or any other OS. No problems if you use some obscure OS which self brewed by you. If firefox works for you, it will also work
4. Multi-tab windows: you are allowed to open multiple tabs and write different blog entries for different blog.
5. Support host of blog services:  Few of the major supported blog services are WordPress,Movable Type, Drupal, Blogger  and many more.
6. Enable Pinging: option to enable Pinging to various blog linking services, Technorati and so on.
7. Save draft: Allows to save multiple dafts of post for future posting.
   
8. Editing Old post: You can also edit old posts published, option to edit categories and many others. 

This may be sufficient to justify ScribeFire as an excellent Blog Posting software. Just go ahead and try it. You can get it here.

Enjoy and Happy Blogging

New Year Resolution

Yet a new year has come and we are in 2009, aged one year more gracefully and looking forward to yet another lively year. Well I don't know about others but every year I make some resolutions and always try to adhere to them but it is a matter of few weeks that all the resolutions disappear as puff of smoke. But its always better to make resolution and try to follow them rather not having a single resolution at all.
So what are my resolutions? Well there are few which I am sharing here:-

1. I will blog regularly. I know my quality of post at best will be poor. But then if I don't write what is the use of having a blog. I will try to post atleast one post per week. So that I can keep a touch with the things and hone my blogging skills.
2. I will quit playing Pocket Tanks. This game is really addictive simple game and whenever I am in front of computer I play is as frequently as possible.
3. I will try to spend some time for studying. This is really tricky as after getting a job usually we lost the interest for studying, but better try then to repent.

Anyways, I feel these 3 resolutions are sufficient for me if I can adhere to them and follow them with all my heart.
Wish me good luck...
BTW whats your resolution