Month: July 2009

Still waiting for a chance to test out my sister's MR2 …

Saw on a magazine cover that Ferrari are looking to put KERS in a road car – tis similar to one of the aspects of Toyota's system. Curious 🙂

I've driven quite a few different cars adn for sheer fun you cannot beat the MX5. In that little car you really are connected to the road (let's face it your bottom is mere inches above it!).

I thought the new Prius looked interesting but not enough to interest me.

Hmm … I'd quite happily do the deed with a desktop PC, they tend to be fairly standard with all the bits they have inside them.

Laptops on the other hand, I've made the mistake of trying to change an OS on them before and came unstuck in painful and embarassing ways … They're just a bit too much Black Box to think about changing the fundamentals of how they work.

This current lappy is picking up the quirks as well sadly, I get the feeling that MS do Weird Things with service packs that don't do much for the continued stability of what they go on …

Must be getting sensible in my dotage …

Spotted one of those adverts that Toyota are doing about their optimal drive thing, which got my Inner Engineer Geek (think Inner Child but with more expensive toys) curious. Wasn’t too bothered by the Optimal Drive thing, which doesn’t actually seem too different to what we’ve seen before powering cars. Bit more efficient, bit cleaner but nothing actually new.

I then spent over an hour peeking through all the info on their new Prius. Which really did get that Inner Geek Engineer going …

I seem to cycle with my cars, one that’s sporty, one that’s soft n fluffy :

1st one doesn’t count, it was a Fiesta 950cc which was only really good for knowing the basics of cars. Especially cars that are reluctant to go but when they do fire up, they’re good for a new driver cos they’re not fast enough to really let get you into trouble.

Next car was the Buggy 🙂 A Mk1 Astra 1.6. Enough power to keep an 18 year old interested but still old n feeble enough to hit the Fluffy tag. Cars of that age (made 1982, had it from 93 to 97) tend to need to stay in the cotton wool cos things might drop off. Like front bodywork under the bumper that was so rusty you could call it an ill-kempt scabrous beard.

Oh – it was fun to find out that the Buggy had a fitting end – it died in a Pillar Of Flame 🙂 And nearly took someone’s house with it too … It was the bloke we’d sold it to, doing a bit of welding on it. He’d left the windows open and a welding spark flew in and onto the seats … WHOOOMMFFF ! Byebye car. No one hurt in the incident but I get the feeling Mr Welder got a few slapsies 🙂

Third car was a Belmont SRi, which I took over from my mum cos it was pulling her arms out of their sockets. My arms weren’t much better either cos I’d dislocated my shoulder the year before but it was an excellent car to take me through my first year of work. 1.8 litre, 130bhp, 43mpg (just got made before catalytic convertors wrecked fuel economy) and sporty suspension worked very well for me doing over 20,000 miles a year.

Back to Fluffy … And on to a Rover 420 GSi Executive Limited Edition. Niiiice. Especially when left out with the seats in the full glare of the sun. This car taught me that Leather Seats = Scorched Arse. Lol 🙂 Honestly, not a bad car but terrible reliability. The mechanical failures went on and on and it did a few showstoppers on me.

Zoomzoomzoom – Puma 🙂 Probably my most favourite car so far, although the Astra will always keep the sentimental Buggy crown. 130bhp again and in a very effective package. When sitting behind the wheel, you feel connected to what the car’s doing in a rather special way. It drove like a Road Legal Go Kart, you could predict exactly what it would do and what mad stuff it would let you get away with. It also felt like it would be cheering you on to the next Crazy Stunt (usually with a white knuckled passenger too). And on top of the sportiness, it was highly effective as a day to day workhorse too. Did 60,000+ miles in that car 🙂

But – I think it’s given me a few unfortunate expectations from my latest car, which is another Sporty job in the form of a Focus ST170. You’d have thought that 170bhp, traction control, 6 gears, electronic stability gubbins and other assorted toys would hold the interest but honestly … yawn. It’s not as connected as the Puma, feeling as if the driver is a lot more insulated from what’s going on. The electric squirbly widgets get in the way of the driver thinking they’re the one keeping the car straight.

The Prius sounds rather interesting though. It would have nowhere near the potential performance levels of the Focus with a 0 to 60 of 10.4 secs compared to about 7 for the Focus but the motors give a handy bit of Surge power. There’s a 100bhp engine in there that is supplemented by 82hp of electric motor, which is actually more power than the Focus … Interesting …

So – lots of toys under the bonnet to give the Inner Geek Engineer something to play with (my drive to work would fit right in with the Hybrid Stuff) and toys in the car to satisfy the Cushy aspect. They’re a bit expensive at £18k, so I’d need to wait a couple of years before going for one. I’ll be waiting a few years anyway cos the 3 year loan for my Focus has 2x years to run. And I’ll probably change my mind again before then too 🙂

Last thought – bit disappointing to see that Toyota aren’t saying anything about the MR2 on their site any more 🙁 The world needs Bad Boy cars which emphasise Fun in driving and convertibles like the MR2 are only good for one thing – driving quick with the top down.

… looks outside – sees dark dismal and rain – thinks “DOH!” …

Need bigga house, garage and Kit Car 🙂

Hmm – thinking Prius, greenie stuff, thoughts of trying for 100mpg. I better do something stooopid before people think I’m getting sensible in my old age 🙂

I thought about using the pre-release of Windows 7 on my Vista laptop….but too new a computer for me to take risks messing it up. As it is, my Dell XPS M1530 (only 7 months or so old) has its share of quarks. My other laptop is XP…and that would be a more complex upgrade.

Getting very curious about Windows 7 as well … Although the £50 pre-order version doesn't come with the XP Mode, that's actually not too much of a handicap. I've gotten used to having 2 hard discs in my desktop, swapping between them for games & email. Could still do that with Windows 7, using the second hard disc for XP apps as before 🙂

And the RC is something I could test drive on the trashed apps drive after the climate model finishes (130ish hours to go)

Don't buy a Mac, its way to expensive, and not worth it. Your paying extra for the brand, that's it.

Wait for Windows 7, as is pretty bug free. Been running the release candidate for months now and its the most stable OS I have used in a long time.

Being able to test drive an OS, and get a feel for it would be a great idea though.

With Linux, you get the Live CD's, where you can run the OS on a CD to see if you like it, without touching your hard drive or changing anything on your computer.

With Windows, at least for now, you could get the release candidate of Windows 7, and give it a try. Not ideal, as you have to have a PC spare to try it.

I do wonder if VM is a option though? I know from the VMware site you can download images of pre-setup environments for example.

Perhaps you could get a virtual image of Windows 7, and a virtual image of Mac OS, and run them through VM Player on your current machine to see how you like both the coming operating systems.

Not ideal, but as there are no Live CD's for Windows, or Mac OS its the only other way I can think of, for test driving a OS without installing it.

Having a few dangerous thoughts at the moment …

When it comes to buying a car, it’s an unfamiliar piece of machinery, different from everything else you’ve driven. So you get a test drive and give it a good try out before you part with any cash. How come that doesn’t seem to be possible with certain computers ?

There’s 3 major domestic computer operating systems out there at the moment : Windows, Linux and Apple’s MacOS. Windows and Linux are what almost all PCs will use, with Apple’s MacOS being for proprietary (but now mostly Intel based) Mac hardware. Windows is a well known quantity, Linux can be tried out for free under the Gnu Public Licence (it’s the package distributions that cost you money). Apple’s MacOS is something you’ll only be able to properly evaluate if you actually own a Mac.

The trouble is though, that the proprietary Mac hardware costs double (literally) what it would to acquire a well specced PC. Let’s take a look at that :

Macbook – basic one would cost me £750. And that’s for something with just a 13.3inch screen (size does matter). Everyone who knows Macs says they’re wonderful, however one thing I do know is that they barely have any games available for them (which in a laptop for me might not be such a big issue)

Windows laptop – this one cost me £369, has a 17″ screen and I can play games on it. Not that I do play many games on my laptop but it’s nice to have the option :-). However, a 17″ MacBook Pro would cost me £1,849 minimum. I could buy 5 of my laptop for the same price.

So you’re paying a huge amount of money for something that involves a Leap Of Faith.

Hang on – where does that “YARR Me Hearties !” come in to all of this ? Well, there is a way you can test drive what it’s like to run the Mac Operating System. It’s called doing a Hackintosh and it begins a few years ago, when Apple made the Big Decision to move away from the Motorola 680×0 series and IBM’s PowerPC and towards the Intel processors that everybody else uses. So what’s inside a Mac is now very close to what’s in a Windows PC.

Yuk – geektalk creepin’ in there and this is the wrong one of my blogs for that. 🙂

Right – this Hackintosh thing involves downloading a tweaked copy of the Macintosh system and then installing it on to standard PC hardware. The tweaks allow it to run with subtly different hardware to the expected Apple stuff. I’ve read a few things on how it works and I reckon I could do it. However, there are a few barriers :

It would mean downloading a piece of copyrighted software. Which is illegal … And highly risky as well as all the muppets who believe you have a right to download stuff “Cos It’s There” have meant that traffic monitoring is coming in much more.

It breaks the Apple licence agreement – “this software must only be installed on Apple hardware”.

The IP address gets tagged as one using peer to peer filesharing software. This is the biggie … There’s a performance hit from other P2P pirates trying to get stuff from your machine, even after you stop the software. That’s cos the other P2P people know you’re out there, they go asking your machine for stuff and your machine has to deal with that. Performance hit.
(I do have a wayz n meanz to stop this happening but I’m not too interested in implementing it)

So the dangerous “let’s have a test drive” thoughts come up against the legality behind the issue and the high likelihood that you’ll leave tracks while effectively stealing your software.

On the one hand, you have the supposedly wonderful computer that costs 5x what the competition costs. On the other you have the Rational Mind saying “is it worth it ?” And one thing to answer the “is it worth it?” question would be a test drive. And I’m not talking about poking the machine in the shop and cooing at the pretty lights and the awfully nice screensaver (that I’d disable), I mean :

Sitting on the sofa in front of the telly with laptop on lap while :
Drafting up a blog post
Seeing the emails coming in
Keeping an eye on Facebook
Nattering over Windows Live Messenger
Listening to the music play over the network in iTunes
And maybe a few more things too

That’s what I mean by a test drive. It’s not something that’s going to happen over 10 minutes in the shop, it needs the software running on a machine over a weekend. Bit like some of the deals car people were offering, where you could have a 24 or 48 hour test drive – see what it’s like doing the shopping, going into car parks, fitting in the garage, behaviour in traffic. Things like that.

A Hackintosh conversion would allow you to do that test drive, albeit with a little less of the stability you’d expect from a bought machine. I’m keeping the dangerous thoughts at bay at the moment, I’ll resist the temptation of downloading the Hackintosh conversion software. I like my internet connection and cable tv (same pipe), I don’t want to lose it by getting caught downloading and installing illegal software …

So how about it Apple ?

Possible customer here, wants a test drive. Won’t buy your hardware until I know precisely how it may or may not meet my needs. Doesn’t have to be a permanent thing, a 30 day trial would be fine.

I’m sure there’s plenty more potential Mac owners out there who are wary about the Big MacOS Change who don’t want to risk the extra money.

PS Linux isn’t really being an option. I’d like to move away from Windows (too many quirky bugs) but I’ve seen Linux before. Even though it’s effectively free, my Inner Geek is just going “Meh”.

Thanks for the visit 🙂

Gotta admit, I have weird feelings every time I see your Mithali Raj batting in the floppy hat … but that's from me getting whacked on the head a couple of years ago.

Looking forward to seeing more of the girls on the telly 🙂 Kicking myself for missing out on the chance to see them at Worcester on my week off last week.

Great post…thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I watched the latest England-Australia series (yes, it was beamed even to India!) and was truly impressed by the high standards of these women.

I think its time women's cricket enjoyed greater television airtime and less empty stands.