New puppy in the house: VTR1-25SAT3-128G

I bought another SSD it's a VTR1-25SAT3-128G, so far so good, here's are Crystaldiskmark results:

The results are lower than what I can find on the internet, but I think that is because my fairly old chipset (880G/SB850)..

SSD Secure Erase Performance gain - is it a myth?

I was reading some articles about secure erase and it improves the performance of the SSD's.. so I tried it.
I made a backup with clonezilla of my system SSD mentioned in the previous post and I reran Crystaldiskmark, here are the results:

The only difference between the two runs regarding the SSD was that this time I had more free space because I moved some stuff to my new SSD.

So... read is practically is the same Write is better but maybe because the more free space.. strangely the 4K write/read was better before.
What do you think?

OCZ Agility 4 64G review after 1 year

I bought this SSD (AGT4-25SAT3-64G) 1 year (+2 days) ago, It's functioning OK, which means I had 0 BSODs or failures..

I'm not much of a benchmark guy and I use this ssd as the system drive so I'm not sure how relevant this benchmark will be, but I made the same benchmark for my "storage" hdd too which is a ST3250820AS.

OCZ SSD: 

Seagate HDD:

SSD Boot video #1: clean user: no startup programs

SSD Boot video #2: normal user: many startup programs

Here's a tutorial which I followed when I bought the SSD: THE SSD OPTIMIZATION GUIDE REDESIGNED

mplayer2 on opensuse from source quick guide

sudo zypper in python3 make gcc autoconf automake libtool yasm freetype2-devel fribidi-devel fontconfig-devel libXv-devel mesa-devel libpulse-devel

cd /tmp && mkdir build && cd build

git clone git://git.mplayer2.org/mplayer2-build.git

cd mplayer2-build

./init

make -j`nproc`

cp ./mplayer/mplayer ~/bin/

Summer cleaning

Being in Macedonia in that hot temps doesn't do any good to my R600 laptop, since I have it (6/xx/09) I didn't clean it.. I mean inside.. The temperature reaching 40°C, makes the CPU and of course the whole thing real hot, in the hotel rooms we have AC but, still I felt that something is wrong because the CPU temp reached 70°C. Currently I'm home and made some time to clean in the inside, honestly I surprised of the lack of dust inside, only the ventilator had some dust inside, but as it turned out that wasn't the main problem, the problem was the bad contact between the cooler and the CPU and the strange contact patch rubber thing between the CPU and cooler, so I bought some thermal paste + removed that rubber thing and we'll see what the sensors will tell when I go back to Macedonia, now it's ~40°C idle.. ~60°C playing a video for ~10 minutes. To the touch is much much better and here at home I don't have AC. Here are some pictures of the inside:

Growin' Up

Since I had my first computer I was a linux user too, mainly because it was too bad for playing games, of course that doesn't meant that I wasn't playing games even if it meant I had to play on low FPS, with time going by games became more and more resource hungry, so I basically switched to linux(opensolaris) mode, with the hope that sometime I (we) will able to play decent games on linux. When I got my new computer it was straightforward what OS to install so I could play the games the most I like and try new ones, but I stuck with Valve games and occasionally some NFS. Strangely with Steam coming to linux I don't feel the urge to install linux.. I'm trying to figure out why that is.. (to be cont.)

Samsung Galaxy Ace Plus first impressions

I finally bought my first android device.. It's an ace plus. I choose this phone because of many reasons:
  - price
  - size
  - software

Price: I could have waited a few days and buy a "better" (i.e. Bigger, s advance) phone but i really currently this size is perfect for me, also if i had the money for the s advance i probably would had the urge to wait for more money to get an s2, because I had both in my hands at the same time and they are like Stan and Pan. I just need to wait for that Jelly Bean update.